it's our birthday month! a lot of fish, food and some prepping tips when you don't have a lot of space!

it's been incredibly mild for the month of october and november looks good too!



it's our birthday month - mine is on the 9th and jam's is on the 17th. 7 days apart. years ago we stopped buying each other gifts, and instead, bought stuff for our old house in the city, and now, we save up to buy a big purchase item and it is our birthday gift to each other. here is our gift to each other:

woohoo baby! a red kitchen aid pro mixer for the kitchen! we have always made all of our bread, rolls and pizza dough by hand so we know how to do it. but this little baby makes bread making a breeze. i love it! so does jam! we also got 2 old Penn 716Z reels from ebay as back-ups for trout fishing. and jam also got a big-*ssed surf-casting rod and real from cabelas. this rod is for catching bass and mackeral in the ocean. we now have everything we need in order to fish for the rest of our lives in any body of water.

here's some delicious zuchhini and pattypan squash puree that we made during season and then canned. i added some small bits of cauliflower, a tiny bit of cream, some broccoli leaves, cayenne, cumin and turmeric. we love home-made soup on a grey day.

these nachos were supposed to be a snack for watching a movie, but there was no way we could hold them on our laps, eat them and watch the movie! because we made them out of baked potatoes straight from the ground! so you understand that we would have made a mess! so we scarfed those plates down at the kitchen table - yummeh!

here's a beautiful sunset:

just so that you don't think we're too fancy - rice and beans baby!

spiced with garlic, cayenne, cumin, turmeric, chili powder and salt and pepper. throw on some mozzarella and a fresh tomatoe taken right off the vine. the greenhouse is working out amazingly as we still have tomatoes coming in - woohoo! in november???? can you even believe that???

here's my hunk going to the halloween dance which we had a blast at!

no pic of me because my pic came out horribly. i was a woodland faery dressed in a green dress with wings. i gathered moss from the yard and put it all throughout my hair. i wish the pic had have turned out as it was a cute outfit.

remember when all of our pepper plants became aphid infested and we almost killed them spraying them with soapy water 5 times a day and fried them? live and learn eh? well jamie sprayed the aphids off every day with the hose and because the greenhouse extends our season, we actually got some hungarian hot wax peppers off of a few sad little plants.

there aren't a ton, next year we'll do a lot better but i am glad that we got as many as we did. jamie loves hot pickled peppers and i was able to at least make one jar for him. it's pretty good considering we thought the plants wouldn't produce anything at all!

i will also be harvesting my thai chili peppers, monets and alma paprikas this week to make a bunch of hot sauce for him!

here's a delicious everything in the fridge salad with nasturtium and borage flowers. i make an antibiotic dressing using EVOO, apple cider vinegar (with the mother), garlic, ginger, lemon and honey. it's super good for you!

you know what else is super good for you? a man that goes down to the beach to get seaweed, rocks and gravel and comes home with this:



that's a striped bass from the north atlantic ocean! jam is also really good at filleting fish!

oh ya baby - bass fried in butter with a bean and pepper salad with some local apples. man it was good!

and ya know what else he got me?

a big giant plate of mussels fresh out of the ocean. he likes mussels but i LOOOOOOOVE them. he dips his in butter but i am a purest when it comes to shellfish - plain!!!!

we took the rest of that striped bass the next day and made fish and chips baby!

anyway - on to storing your preps when you don't have a big house and trust me, this house is tiny!!! you have to think up some nifty ways to store your preps. i've already shown you the hidey-hole that jambaloney found behind some sheetrock in our water heater closet. i removed the majority of our 5 gallon buckets in order to show you how he used the studs to make shelves on the left, and on the right is a coffee table that we brought here that took up our whole living room. so this was a great place to put it. you can see how many 5 gallon buckets can be stacked up here! and it's room we didn't know we even had!



this is my end table on my side of the couch.



remove the lamp and tray and the box it sits on opens. it's a great place to store spices. (i took a bunch of spices out just for the pic.) it is normally stuffed right to the top.

this is an ottoman with 2 little end table thingys. the ottoman top comes off.

and inside you can store all kinds of goodies! (again i took a bunch of stuff out just so that you could get an idea.

we keep long term food in the hidey-hole and take food from the hidey- hole and put it here. that's how we rotate out our preps.

i just wanted to share some ideas for anyone who doesn't have much storage space for preps. when choosing new furniture, or as jam does, when building new furniture, always look for something that can be of use to store preps. we have several other pieces of furniture that hide some of our preps and jam will keep building additional stuff and finaggling more places to keep adding to our preps.

it's another mild day temperature-wise but it is windy as oh heck!!! good day for inside jobs. oh ya - we're having more fish and chips for supper - woohoo!