This post is number 500! My first entry was January 18, 2021 so it’s been over 5 years since I started this adventure. I thought at the time it would just be a boring journal that a few friends might enjoy. I’ve discovered I now have readers around the world…from the U.S. to China to Andorra! Amazing. I hope the PDF document on the Welcome page is helpful to see the variety of things I post about. I’m sorry I had to turn off the “comments” link…I was having to screen hundreds of spam comments every day just so I didn’t miss a comment from a real person! I do read my email and if you send me a comment I’ll be sure to see it. (maryjkisner@gmail.com)
I probably could combine all the recipes into a cookbook, or all the things I’ve made or sewn or produced into a How-to manual of some kind, but not all of my posts are polished enough to consider them ready for publication. I have to remember why I started writing this blog in the first place! I needed to write! It helps me keep track of the stuff I’m doing and forces me to write out the instructions to go with the pictures I’m taking. If they are interesting to you, that’s great. If they are not, wait until the next post…it might be more interesting. I am trying to be careful to not post too many pictures of people who might not want their faces out there on the internet. My garden vegetables and loaves of bread don’t seem to complain!
Check out the updated PDF on the Welcome page of all 500 posts. The link is also here. You can download it to your computer and then click on the hot links in the right column to go directly to the post.
Two weeks ago, our Ladies Auxiliary to the Boalsburg Fire Company had a very successful Yard and Bake Sale for the community. My huge pot of Sweet Italian Sausage Soup with Tortellini was very popular and we sold it down to the last drop! You can read about the recipe at https://marykisner.com/making-italian-sausage-soup-with-tortellini and try making it yourself! For the sale I tripled the recipe, so it was quite a pot of soup!
Today, Bert and I made a single batch of Chicken Tortellini Soup, hoping to see if it would be acceptable as an additional soup for the second day of the sale. This time, instead of Italian sausage, I bought a rotisserie chicken. I picked off all the meat and cut it all into bite-size pieces. I put the cut chicken (4 cups) into a quart-size zip bag and put it in the freezer. It was easy to just take it out of the freezer and dump it into the pot today.
Of course, the left-over chicken carcass is always tricky to dispose of…since we’ve learned we can’t put smelly stuff like that in the garbage cans outside until the morning of garbage pickup. (Thanks to roaming animals…like bears…we’ve had to clean up the toppled trash cans and garbage more than once! No problem! I just put the whole mess of skin and bones into a big zip bag and put it in the freezer! We’ll add it to the garbage next Wednesday morning. [Note: If I was in the mood, I could take the chicken carcass and boil it for a few hours and make my own stock…but for now I can let it go.])
Here is the recipe for the Chicken Tortellini Soup:
This soup can all be made in one large pot. Start by sauteing the onion in butter.
While it was warming up, we chopped up all the vegetables and measured out the spices. We decided to add 2 tsp of chicken bouillon for flavor and we didn’t need to add salt to the recipe.
The carrots we dug up from the garden are BEAUTIFUL!
Celery
Garlic, Italian seasoning, Parsley
We wanted a meaty soup, so we used the whole 4 cups of chicken. We had to thaw it out to get the pile out of the zip bag!
Since it was too early for supper, we put the whole soup pot in the refrigerator. When it was time for supper, we heated it up and added the tortellini.
This recipe made a great soup! Give it a try! I think if I triple the recipe, I will feed lots of people at next spring’s bake sale! Enjoy!
If you have comments or questions, please email me directly at maryjkisner@gmail.com
Cleaning up the garden in the fall always feels a little sad. However, all I have to do is open the pantry to see the jars of vegetables we stored away to feel pretty good about the garden season this year.
Check out these pictures from our property today! The Japanese Dogwood trees just look ‘green’ this year. That’s OK but I missed the spectacular flowers in the spring (thanks to a late frost) which meant no flowers and no ‘pumpkin’ seed pods this fall. I included the pictures from last year below.
Spring 2025
Fall 2025
The petunias around the lamppost continue to look great, even as the ones in the back of the house are long gone.
My attempt to grow beets in the raised planters by the patio sort of worked, but I should have started them earlier and thinned them out. Oh well, I’ll cook those few just for fun.
The carrots in the bed off the patio are still going strong. We’ll leave them alone for the next few weeks.
Of course, the asparagus is still there! Bert will trim the tops before winter.
The geraniums looked pretty beat down after all the rain we’ve had. The second picture is after I trimmed all the dead flowers. Much better!
The pumpkin patch is ready to harvest! The wood pile reminds us cold weather isn’t too far away!
Rainfall this summer was quite adequate. We’re ending the growing season with full rain barrels! That doesn’t often happen! Bert tracks the rainfall from March thru November and so far, today, we have had 33+ inches of rain. Normal rainfall for this area is 32″ for March thru November. Better to have water and not need it than to need it and not have it!
Overall, the garden looks ready to rest! The few carrots will be dug up soon, and Bert will cut back the echinacea before winter.
This year I tried something new with the last of the tomatoes. When Bert pulled the tomato plants, I saved the green tomatoes (about 2 dozen) in my basket. I set it in the garage by the kitchen door. I was able to keep an eye on them every day. As they started to change color, I moved them onto the kitchen table. All but the last few managed to finally ripen and they tasted great! Great way to end the season!
The tomatoes make the kitchen look good! I guess it’s time to pick up some fall flowers just to brighten the dining room table! Enjoy! If you have comments or questions, please email me directly at maryjkisner@gmail.com.
Yard sale signs seem to pop up on a regular basis in our area. They are prolific around neighborhoods from early spring through late fall. Luckily, they seem to appear for a week or two before an event and quickly disappear shortly after the event. These signs might be just a hand written piece of paper stapled to a telephone pole or as complex as an electronic message board beside a church or club. The whole point is to inform folks of location, date and time of the sale.
Our Ladies Auxiliary to the Boalsburg Fire Company will hold our fall Yard sale/Bake sale this coming weekend (September 11 & 12) at the Fire Hall. In preparation to attract folks, we have an assortment of large Yard Sale signs ready to go. My task was to post signs along the road that leads to the turn off to get to the Fire Hall. This road borders the local cemetery, so I didn’t have to ask permission from several neighbors to post the signs.
This year, I remembered long ago small signs advertising a shaving cream product…Burma-Shave…that were placed along the highway with a jingle. These signs were spaced far enough apart so we could read the jingle, and even though we really didn’t care about the product we loved reading the rhyme out loud! Now, it didn’t take much to remind people our age what I meant when I said I wanted to make a jingle on ‘Burma-Shave-like’ signs to advertise our yard/bake sale.
From Wikipedia
I took my idea to the local print shop and they knew exactly what I wanted! So, here is my ‘jingle:’
This is the first sign to announce the details:
The 6 smaller signs will follow the edge of the curb behind this sign down to the traffic light where another big sign with an arrow will lead folks to the Fire Hall. More signs from the other direction will also be placed, but they will be like the one above. I tried getting a picture of the whole string of signs, but they were so spread out you couldn’t read them from a distance! I’ll try to get better pictures this week…but there really was no way to stop in the middle of traffic to take pictures. (I need a better camera…or a better photographer!) The last sign has a big arrow telling people where to turn. I did add the date in the middle of the arrow…September 11 & 12.
You can see I had fun doing this, but we’ll see if anyone comments or feels the signs didn’t work. Be careful giving me an assignment…I might get creative! Enjoy!
More about the history of the Burma-Shave Advertisements (from Wikipedia):
“Burma-Shave was an American brand of brushless shaving cream, famous for its advertising gimmick of posting humorous rhyming poems on small sequential highway roadside signs. Typically, six consecutive small signs would be posted along the edge of highways, spaced for sequential reading by passing motorists. The last sign was almost always the name of the product. This use of a series of small signs, each of which bore part of a commercial message, was a successful approach to highway advertising during the early years of highway travel, drawing the attention of passing motorists who were curious to learn the punchline. As the Interstate system expanded in the late 1950s and vehicle speeds increased, it became more difficult to attract motorists’ attention with small signs.”
If you are interested in the complete list of the 600 or so known sets of signs, you can find them here: https://burma-shave.org/jingles. Here are a few that I found funny:
From 1931
Tho tough _ And rough _ From wind and wave _ Your cheek grows sleek _ With _ Burma Shave
From 1938
Henry the Eighth _ Prince of friskers _ Lost five wives _ But kept _ His whiskers _ Burma Shave
From 1947
In Cupid’s little _ Bag of trix _ here’s the one _ That clix _ With chix _ Burma Shave
From 1963
Every day _ We do _ Our part _ To make your face _ A work of art _ Burma Shave
Check out the whole list at the link above! Enjoy!
