As I was backing out of the driveway tonight, I saw this squirrel pigging out while sitting on a branch of our little pecan tree. I was caught off guard because I have never seen one there. I don't think. I see squirrels all the time in the cedar elm tree and live oak trees in our backyard, but because the pecan tree is still young (for a pecan tree) it doesn't produce pecans yet. I don't know what it was munching on. Someone told us that we'll hate the squirrels when the tree starts bearing pecans. It's been in for five years or so and supposedly we still have several more years to wait. They are supposed to get huge too.
I just had to grab my camera and capture this image of this content little squirrel having a grand time in our tree. It really put a smile on my face. Click on the photo to see him more closely. Ignore the dead leaves and flowers in the bed. I neglected to plant pansies this winter for the first time in a while. Next year, I won't skip the pansies because I have missed them for winter color and appeal.
I considered myself to be a decent cook and baker. However, candy making had been unchartered territory until I recently cracked the code of a favorite—chewy Texas Pecan Pralines. This culinary epiphany came only days before I left my home sweet home in Austin, Texas, to return to CU Boulder after an epic hiatus to wrap up my bachelor’s degree in journalism. When I was a little girl, I remember tasting heavenly, creamy homemade pralines, bursting with pecans, handcrafted with love by my mom. She only whipped them up a few times, but I just couldn’t get the memory of those buttery, sugary treats out of my head. They were that good. I asked her if she still had the recipe, but I knew it would be hopeless since my mom wasn’t one for keeping track of her down-home style cooking. I married my college sweetheart, a guy with the same first name as me, and began teaching myself to cook. Becoming “Kelly Times Two” was amazing, and I had ...
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