Author: mjkisner

Blog Milestone

Hello Loyal Readers!

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.

Blog Entries 1_500 marykisnerDownload

Please email me if you’d like me to write about or try something new! maryjkisner@gmail.com

Thanks.

Mary

Making Chicken Tortellini Soup

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

Garden Update September 19, 2026

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.

Having Fun with Yard Sale Signs

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!

Please email me directly if you have comments or questions: maryjkisner@gmail.com

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!

Making Italian Sausage Soup with Tortellini

I’d like to share a recipe that makes a delicious, hearty soup! I needed to find an alternate soup to make for our Yard Sale/Bake Sale next weekend (Sept. 11 & 12). If you are local, come join us at the Boalsburg Fire Hall Friday (9-2) and Saturday (9-1).

In the past we had offered a Chicken Corn Noodle Soup and it just didn’t seem as popular as in the past. So, I decided to try this Italian Sausage Soup with Tortellini instead. This recipe is from https://allrecipes.com.

This first batch was just for us to see if it would even work. I’ll triple the recipe if the tortellini holds together. I needed something that could simmer for 3-4 hours and still look like tortellini. Usually, noodles worked well, but I knew fresh tortellini just got HUGE and then fell apart if simmered too long. I had corkscrew pasta ready, but I thought I’d try dried tortellini first.

Here is the recipe:

We started with 1-pound of sweet Italian sausage…loose like a package of hamburger. Bert cooked it and drained it in a bowl lined with paper towels. (Sorry…I didn’t catch a picture of the frying pan!)

While Bert was cooking, I chopped up celery, carrots and onions. We decided to skip the zucchini. We didn’t think it would be sturdy enough to simmer for 3-4 hours.

I measured out the minced garlic, basil, parsley and oregano:

I got the Beef Broth and cooked tomatoes out of the pantry:

Bert donated a bottle of red wine (we needed 1/2 cup!). If this works, we’ll save the rest for the triple batch of soup next week (at least another cup and a half!)

This all got assembled in our 5-quart pan and was brought to a boil.

When the vegetables were soft, we dumped in an 8-oz bag of dried tortellini.

Once stirred up, we let it simmer for another 15 minutes or so. Wow…it made a huge pile of soup!

This soup needed no additional seasoning, but it could have used more liquid…or less tortellini. It really sucked up the juice.

Finally, we let the soup simmer for several hours, just like it will at the Bake sale. It still tasted great. The best thing…the tortellini held together! I’ll take an extra box of broth to add if necessary after simmering for 2-3 hours, just in case!

We now have a great recipe to make soup for a crowd…or at least a hearty soup for us this winter! Enjoy!

If you have comments or questions, please email me directly at maryjkisner@gmail.com.

Garden Update August 25, 2026

The canner is put away! The few tomatoes and cucumbers left are on the kitchen counter! The air is feeling like fall is coming. We’ve had over 6″ of rain this month so far and the lovely petunias were just beat down. It was time to get some of the garden cleaned up!

Here’s what is left in the garden. On the patio, I still have the planter filled with beets. I’ll leave them for a little longer to see if they will actually make beets! The spinach is doing well too. I’ve been adding a few leaves to my salads!

The petunias and mint have been dispatched! Here is BEFORE the rain:

After 2-3″ of rain, they were a mess (sorry, no picture…too depressing). As Bert picks the pumpkins, he’ll line them up here:

The geraniums continue to bloom if I can keep up with trimming the dead flowers!

In the beds just off the patio, the second planting of carrots are looking good. Not sure how big they are, but we’ll pull a few soon just to check.

The asparagus continues to wave in the breeze! We’re hoping next spring we’ll actually have a little asparagus to eat!

The pumpkins are now visible through the greenery!

Up in the garden on the hill, a few tomato plants still have green tomatoes. The plants look pretty sad!

The beans are all in jars in the pantry! Bert will rototill the garden before fall.

The carrots are finally noticeable! Bert accidently pulled one up when he was weeding and it was over 6″ long! It tasted great!

The cucumbers are done. They were very prolific but I was ready to be done trying to pick them! We have Bread & Butter pickles and pickle relish on the shelf that we’ll use all winter!

And of course, the echinacea is dropping seeds. The heavy rainstorms really beat them down.

On the one hand it’s kind of sad to see the garden season end, but it does feel good to see how productive our small garden plots can be! For another week or so we still have fresh yummy tomatoes and cucumbers on the counter! Time to move on to fall activities! Enjoy!

Please email me directly if you have comments or questions: maryjkisner@gmail.com

Canning Chili

The garden this year has been VERY productive! We don’t grow a huge variety of things but we focus on produce we will use. For vegetables that we want now and then, the Farmer’s Markets and the grocery store are adequate. Now that we are faced with an abundance of tomatoes, it was time to consider other ways to use them. We both like chili, but with limitations. Bert doesn’t care for sweet peppers and could do without beans. Our chili has to have lots of meat! I would like some kind of bean, so we agreed to use chick peas instead. So basically, we make a meat-heavy tomato sauce with chick peas. With the price of beef rising, it was a great way to keep beef in our diet without worrying that the price will continue to go up. We’ll have jars of chili on the shelf when we need a quick meal. Each jar can be stretched with additional fresh tomatoes (or a can of kidney beans…as long as Bert isn’t eating it!)

Many recipes include seasonings like chili powder, but when canning we cook the meat and onions with salt and pepper, and we add chili powder when we reheat it. It tastes much fresher.

Making Chili

We started with about 7+ pounds of ground beef (85/15) at almost $10/pound! Bert cooked it with two large onions (in several batches).

The cooked meat went into the refrigerator overnight. The next day I started on a pile of tomatoes…washing, cutting off tops, scoring the bottom with an X, boiling for 1 minute to loosen the skins, dropping into cold water and then peeling and cutting up the tomatoes. Long process, but necessary to remove skins…they are tough this time of the season.

The pile…

Tops cut off and the bottom scored with an X…

…dipped in boiling water for 1 minute…

Pulled out of ice water ready for peeling…

Tomatoes cooked until soft…

Cooked tomatoes run through the food processor, ready to assemble chili…

Assembling the chili…

Chili was packed into pint jars and pressure canned…1 hour 15 minutes at 10 pounds pressure!

We ended up with 17 jars of chili!

Each jar is a meal for the two of us! We often add extra fresh tomatoes and spices. I occasionally add kidney beans. So pretty!

Without the garden, I could have purchased tomatoes and onions at the Farmer’s Market. Gardens around the area are also abundant! Make use of what you have! Enjoy!

Please email me directly if you have comments or questions: maryjkisner@gmail.com

Garden Update August 10, 2026

The garden is changing as August arrives. We can now anticipate when we need to set aside time to pick and can produce. By August, it’s just too hot to keep up with radishes. The lettuce just gives up and gets bitter. The cucumbers have outdone themselves and the tomatoes ripening quickly. I’m now down to just one box of pint jars and Bert is going to pick up two more boxes so we can finish the season.

Just as I’m thinking we’re almost done…my neighbor brought me two large bags of commercially-frozen strawberries. I was just thinking they could be made into Jam! I have lots of ½ pint jars; I have several boxes of Sure-jell. Why not!

At the moment, we’re focused on using our latest picking of tomatoes. We’ll get a bunch of hamburger and onions and make a big pot of chili. We will pressure can the jars and have easy meals all winter! I’ve already made pizza sauce and just plain canned tomatoes so I don’t need those this year. Here’s the latest pile of tomatoes…with more to come! Yesterday we canned 12 pints of pickle relish and we still picked more cucumbers! Crazy!

So, let’s tour the garden today.

The petunias are going strong but after the rain storms, they look beat down.

The spearmint is growing tall but we haven’t seen any flowers at all.

In the planter on the patio, I’ve planted some old beet seeds. I wasn’t sure what would happen! We’ll wait and watch to see if they actually make beets!

The planter that held lettuce and radishes now has beets and spinach…also old seeds. I can start adding a few leaves of spinach to my salads! The center section had lettuce that I cut off. We did not pull the roots and it continued to grow! However, the lettuce is very bitter so we’ll save it for a friend who has rabbits.

In the bed off the patio, the row of carrots is looking good. Always a waiting game to see if carrots will develop properly.

The asparagus continues to just be there. It’s hard to get a picture of them because their green tops blend into the hillside behind them.

The pumpkin patch is looking impressive. We’ll wait to see how many pumpkins survive roving critters, but so far the fence has kept the groundhogs out.

Of course, there are one or two that insist on growing outside the fence!

Up on the hill, the tomato plants look like they’ve had it. However, the tomatoes are ripening quickly.

This row had beans. We’ll leave it empty now. Actually, the extra space makes it easier to pick tomatoes!

Here is the second planting of beans. They grow fast in this hot, wet weather!

I’m not optimistic that the carrots will produce much! Luckily, we have that section down by the patio that seems to be doing well!

The cucumbers have outdone themselves! I have a few just to eat and that’s fine. The wandering voles have managed to take little bites out of most of them and at this point I don’t care!

And finally, the echinacea is still pretty, but the seeds are falling and the seed heads are turning black. Let’s us know fall is on the way!

We’ve had plenty of rain this summer and no serious plant diseases to worry about. I marvel at how fast the summer is going. If I get depressed about it, I can just check out my pantry and admire all the beautiful jars!

If you have comments or questions, please email me directly at maryjkisner@gmail.com. Thanks!

Canning Pickles and Green Beans

When my kitchen counter starts to look like this, I know it’s time to consider pulling out the canner!

About the only thing I do with cucumbers is eat them! This year Bert suggested we try Bread & Butter pickles. The cucumbers are still producing, so next week I think I’ll make a batch of pickle relish…that we will use!

Bread & Butter Pickles

I found a recipe in my canning book:

Then we found packets of the seasoning in my supplies. We followed the recipe above and used the packets for the spices.

First, we chose some of the smaller cucumbers so we could slice them into rounds 1/4″ thick.

Bert chopped the onion.

We sprinkled the pickling salt over the chopped pieces and put lots of ice on top. We let it sit for about 2 hours.

The vinegar, sugar and spices were added to a large pot and brought to a boil. The cucumbers and onions were rinsed and drained several times and added to the pot.

Once this boiled, the mixture was spooned into hot jars, topped with hot vinegar mixture and sealed with a lid and ring.

The jars were placed in our big canner and covered with boiling water. They boiled for 10 minutes.

Within minutes of being removed from the canner, the jars all sealed. We have no idea how they will taste…they have to ‘cure’ for about 4-6 weeks on the shelf!

This is our canner set up. The canner is too big to put on our ceramic-top stove and is larger than the burner. We had to find another way to heat up the canner out in the garage. So…we have a canning party while things need to be monitored! (Actually, Bert monitors the canner while I clean up the kitchen!)

Canning Green Beans

Once we start the canning process it’s just easier to spend several days in a row canning what’s ready. While we’ve had quite a haul of green and yellow beans from the garden, the green beans did not do well. So, I went to the Amish Farmer’s Market nearby and picked up a box of green beans that weighed about 10 pounds for $20. (The green beans were selling for $2.25/pound, so I got a good deal!) The best thing was they were all about the same size and very blemish-free! All I had to do was ‘snap’ them…that took half a day!

I separated the snapped beans into 3 bowls and washed them well. Then they went into a big pot (one batch at a time) with water to boil for 5 minutes. That really made them easier to handle and they fit better into the jars.

I got the jars ready and put 1/2 tsp of pickling salt into each jar. The canner holds 19 pint jars.

Each filled jar was topped with hot water and sealed. They were put into the canner (with the appropriate amount of water for pressure canning) and processed for 20 minutes at 10 pounds pressure.

The 19 jars are beautiful and ready for the pantry shelf! They will be tasty in the winter!

Of course, the cucumbers continue to produce so I expect I’ll be grinding up a bunch to make pickle relish next week. We’ll also have a new batch of beans from the second planting. My back is grateful for a rest from bending over to pick them! And so…the 2026 garden continues!

If you have comments or questions, please contact me directly at maryjkisner@gmail.com

Switching Gears from Bracelets to Belly Bands for Greyhounds

Sorry for the blog silence for more than a week! Cleaning up from the festival was just one activity this week. Then the garden started producing and suddenly I needed to make decisions about the tomatoes, green beans and cucumbers! Then I found out Nittany Greyhounds needed belly bands and coats (more about that in a minute). In the middle of all that, we took a few hours to drive north to have lunch with my brother and his wife!

Cleaning up from the Festival

It seems like when I move from one major activity to another a whole lot of other stuff needs to be addressed. After putting away my bins of bracelets and beads, I needed to reassess and redesign my booth for future shows. I’ve decided I’ll stick with indoor craft shows of 1-2 days. I’m now signed up for a 1-day show at the Ferguson Township Lions Club on November 14. That means my table and display elements needed to be redesigned. Without a tent background my gridwall won’t work. My signs can’t be hung on the wall behind my tables. My bracelets needed a better display. I quickly did some research on how other vendors display similar items. I ended up getting several new pieces. I needed to find a way to display my bracelets and still keep most of them in their packaging. Here are the three different racks.

For my individual packets of specialty bracelets, I purchased two of these table top racks that rotate:

For my smaller packages, these simple racks can display bracelets by size and the tags that extend outside the package can be seen. They have the size, the stone names and a short phrase about the meaning of the stones. I bought three racks…one for each size:

Finally, this display rack will handle the key chains and aromatherapy bracelets that just have their tag but don’t need to be in a plastic bag.

I’ve now disassembled all the racks and will store them until November!

Garden Produce

In the last week we’ve continued to pick tomatoes, picked yellow beans twice and discovered the cucumbers are going nuts! Thank goodness I have a few friends that don’t mind taking some off my hands! This is how many we picked today!

Lunch with my brother

We also finally made time to drive up to Salladasburg to have lunch with my brother and his wife. We’ve been talking about that for weeks and finally found a day with no medical appointments for all of us!

Mark and Mary

Mary and Lita

Making Belly Bands for Greyhounds

One of the benefits of writing this blog is the wealth of information I’ve saved that I can refer to when I want to make something again. Most of my posts involve pictures of how I did something and often I’m reminded how the pattern needed to be changed. Nittany Greyhounds needed belly bands, so I located the post I did about making them…#137… https://marykisner.com/belly-bands-for-greyhounds/  You can check out the whole article, but I’ll quote the first two paragraphs that I wrote about them:

“What is a belly band? A new fashion statement for our beloved greyhounds? Haha…no! Picture this…you have just adopted a 2 yr. old male greyhound from your nearby adoption kennel. You are ready to make him comfortable in your home and take him off his leash. He wanders around the living room…the kitchen…your bedroom. You show him his kennel or cozy bed in the corner. You let him explore on his own while you take off your coat and put things away. Very quickly you realize that he is lifting his leg and marking the corners of the furniture and table legs. This is a natural response to a new environment, especially if you had other dogs in the house previously. AHHHH…now what?

Luckily, the adoption group predicted this might happen and had sent you home with a belly band, just in case. You had wondered what it was for. This simple denim band wraps around their abdominal region and gently keeps his private parts from being used until you can get him outside. Over the next few days as he gets more comfortable in your home you can train him that if he’s in the house he should not have to mark his territory. When you take him outside and remove the band THEN is the time to explore and mark his territory. The hope is that he won’t need the belly band for very long, but that depends on the dog.”

The belly band fits snug around the dog like this:

I use lots of Velcro so it can be adjusted for many different sizes of dogs. Of course, I had a memory that I should cut the denim to 27” long, so today I cut out enough to make 25 belly bands. THEN I checked my post from 2022 and saw that I had mentioned I should cut them 29”!! Yikes!

Note to self: read the instructions BEFORE cutting things out! I will make one first and try it on a dog before I go to the trouble to add 2” to each band!

So, that’s what I’ve been doing the last week and a half. I’ve now ordered enough fleece to make 16 coats, so you’ll know what I’m doing next! Have a good rest of your summer!

Please contact me directly if you have comments or questions: maryjkisner@gmail.com