Her name is Butter Bean.

I Have a New Kitten

That's right! A brand new kitten! She is tiny and pale orange. I want to name her Butter Bean, but Boyfriend doesn't like it. We are going to build her a sweet-ass indoor cat tree this weekend. I will post pictures soon. Bruno Copperpot, good dog extraordinaire, seems mostly to ignore the kitten, but the kitten obsesses over him. She watches his every move.

A Weekend of Fishing But Not Catching Any Fish

I got to use my new pink fishing pole this weekend! It was great to be outside in the sunshine. But I didn't catch any fish. On Saturday we went to the Amelia Wildlife Management Area, near the border between Powhatan and Goochland counties, which has a lovely lake with a nice fishing pier. We had the pier to ourselves for an hour or so. After Boyfriend replaces the wheels on his john boat trailer (after our Swiss adventure), we'd like to boat around the lake. Fishing from the pier wasn't too exciting. I wanted to find a trail to walk around the lake or find the Appomattox River which is supposed to be in the Wildlife Management Area, but I couldn't find a trail that wasn't grown up with tall, probably tick-infected grass.

On Sunday we drove out to Maiden's Landing on the James River in Goochland. The landing was pretty empty because we arrived just after a storm passed. It was nice to stand with my feet in the muddy river, but I didn't catch any fish. The search for an excellent secret fishing spot continues.

The James River from Maidens Landing

Strawberry Cobbler

My mom has a mean recipe for fruit cobbler, which was passed down to her from her mother. Like me, my mother has never been much of a baker. We didn't have cakes or cookies often when I was growing up, unless they were purchased from Food Lion. She did make cobblers though, and we had blueberry cobbler, blackberry cobbler, peach cobbler, and apple cobbler. All were delicious. But for some reason, we never had strawberry cobbler.

I got experimental last night and baked up a strawberry cobbler using my mom's easy and delicious cobbler recipe. It was a success! I love strawberry cobbler! Here's what it looked like (sorry I forgot to take the picture BEFORE we ate some of it).

 

I didn't have self-rising flour, so I added salt and baking powder to all purpose flour and it ended up making the cobbler very salty. I guess the butter was also salted. It still was a success though. I topped the cobbler with vanilla ice cream (a necessity). Here's the easy, old fashioned recipe:

1 cup self-rising flour

1 stick of butter (1/2 cup), melted

1 cup of sugar (separated)

3/4 cup milk

1 tbsp cornstarch

1 pint(ish) fresh or frozen strawberries

Preheat the oven to 350.

In a saucepan over a stove, heat the strawberries and 1/4 cup sugar over medium heat. Stir regularly. When the strawberries are bubbly and syrupy, add cornstarch and turn heat to low, continuing to stir regularly. 

In a casserole or baking dish, mix up the flour, melted butter, milk, and 3/4 cup sugar. Stir out the lumps. Spread the mixture over the bottom of the pan. Then pour the delicious strawberry stuff on top of the dough mixture and stick it in the oven. I'm not sure how long my cobbler cooked (about an hour I think), but keep an eye on it until it's done. 

Top the servings of warm cobbler with a scoop or two of vanilla ice cream. Mmm, mmm!

Grayson Highlands State Park

No exciting adventures are happening in my life right now. I'm still thoroughly stressed over budgeting and saving for the trip to Switzerland. I really need to stop letting the money get in the way of the general excitement of going there. I already booked the damn trip. I may as well get used to the idea of being broke. Even though money is tight, I think I could still afford a camping trip in the Outer Banks over Labor Day weekend (which also happens to fall on Boyfriend's birthday weekend). Boyfriend only gets 5 vacation days a year, and he says we don't have enough money, and he doesn't want to go. I am resentful.

Anyway, I'm going to share a few pictures from a trip to Southwest Virginia and Grayson Highlands State Park, where we visited last year during a long Labor Day weekend. We had planned to go to the beach, but a hurricane came, so we ran to the mountains instead. It was a really nice trip, and Grayson Highlands is a great park. We camped in a National Forest campground called Hurricane Campground, in the Mt. Rogers recreation area, about an hour away from Grayson Highlands.

Grayson Highlands has lots of excellent hiking. Overnight hikers park here and then do their overnight backpacking thing, which is not comfortable enough for me. During our day there, we did a short hike through the woods to see a few small waterfalls, and then we hiked up into the highlands to see the strange landscape and adorable wild ponies.

 

Much of the park is set on these mountaintop "balds." There are wild ponies there which help keep the vegetation down. The landscape is like nothing I've seen in Virginia. There were wild blueberry bushes along the beginning of the trail. I picked and ate a few.

My pictures really can't do the mountain views justice. The elevation is high here, compared to what everyone is used to in Virginia. It just sort of feels different. Can you see how blue the sky is? And then there are the little wild ponies. They are super cute and kind of grumpy.

If you're a mountain lover like me, I definitely recommend a trip to the Grayson Highlands. You'll experience a different kind of mountain landscape from much of what you've seen in lush Appalachia. I didn't pay much attention to the campground in the state park (I much prefer quiet national park campgrounds to the busier and more modern Virginia State Parks), but it seemed nice and not too crowded even on Labor Day weekend. The Hurricane Campground was a great central spot for us to expore the Mt. Rogers area, and we had a nice time hiking, driving through the countryside, fishing in the New River, and visiting the Grayson Highlands. It was a super relaxing weekend, and I hope we can go back soon.