If you want your home to smell like Christmas...

...you must bake this!  This is Crustless Cranberry Pie.  Wow.  This dessert is 50 minutes from start to cooling on your counter.  Just add, mix, pour and bake.  Enjoy, enjoy.  This is possibly the best Cranberry treat I've tasted.

Crustless Cranberry Pie
1 cp flour
1 cp sugar
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp+ cinnamon
1/2 tsp+ cloves
2 cups whole fresh or frozen cranberries
1/2 cp chopped walnuts
1/2 cp melted butter
2 eggs
1 tsp almond extract

1]Set oven to 350 degrees and grease 9'' pie plate.
2]Mix together flour, sugar, salt, cinnamon & cloves.
3]Stir in cranberries & walnuts til coated.  Then add butter, eggs & almond extract. Mix well. (Batter is thick!)
4]Pour into pie plate.
5]Bake 40 min or until tooth pick comes out clean.

Great warm or chilled... excellent with coffee... and even yummier with vanilla bean ice cream.

My Pomegranate Tree

There is a lovely, fenced in, neighborhood park about a mile and a half up from our place on Citrus Drive.  I walk Taiga there on days I don't feel like socializing at the dog park.  Monday was one of those days. 

I noticed the bushy tree on the left (above tiny Taiga in the park picture) was bulging with some large, reddish-pink orbs.

 I inspected a bit closer, getting my shoes muddy (we had had some rain).

 This fruit looked familiar, but then again, there are so many sphere-fruit producing trees in southern California, that I thought this was just another "ornamental" fruit tree.

 But my curiosity got the best of me, and I picked it.

 Then I pulled off part of the skin shell.

Pomegranates!!  What?!  At my little neighborhood park?!

 I tasted the seeds.  

 Mmm.  Pomegranate sweetness.

 I am pretty unfamiliar with the pomegranate fruit.  But after sampling this one at the park, it's almost like corn kernels. Inside the pomegranate kernel, is the juice and a tiny white pit, which you have to spit out.  

It's a good fruit for park eating.  Lots of places to spit pits.

Then, on the walk home, I noticed these over the wall by the side walk.

Where do I live, the Garden of Eden?!?!? 

Dad's 50th Birthday

Photos from Dad's Surprise 50th Birthday party:

*Photos courtesy of Austin Kelley & Cathy Thompson

Yosemite

Yesterday I was thoroughly disappointed when I realized, about 4 hours into our trek to Yosemite National Park, that I LEFT MY CAMERA!  Major bummer.  Then, while dropping the guys off to climb El Cap this morning, I remembered my new space phone has a decent camera feature on it... so I was totally "that girl" and taking pics with my iPhone.  Lame.  HOWEVER, I dropped the guys off at 6am, then watched the sunrise in the Valley.  It was a gorgeous morning indeed.