A Sassy Lifestyle Blog

Halloween 2020 is shaping up to be pretty “special”, first of all, it falls on a Saturday with a full fabulous moon and if that wasn’t exciting enough, the clocks fall back and we gain an extra hour, yup, it’s time to fall back! Oh and we’re also in a global pandemic and everything is basically going to shit, so there’s that.

I think it’s safe to say that there won’t be any big Halloween parties happening this year, but we can still enjoy this time of year in a stay home, smaller groups, kind of way. So let’s spread out out our celebration to the whole week leading up to Oct 31.

Here are a few fun and spooky things to do leading up to Halloween with your bffs, family, or 37 cats; hey I am not here to judge, do you boo!

Scream!

One of the best ways to get into the Halloween spirit is to watch something scary. But if horror movies aren’t your thing, there are lots of other options, chose your level of scariness. Here are a few of my options.

• So I watch the original Halloween movie with Jamie Lee Curtis every year and I highly recommend. It’s a true cult classic, filmed in 1978, I love the 70’s vibe, it’s very retro chic.
  Netflix and Thrill or Amazon Prime and…true crime? Ok, having trouble finding something that rhymes with Amazon Prime, lol. But the point is there are so many options, from family friendly cartoons, to the new season of Unsolved Mysteries, to super scary movies!! Leading up to Halloween, watch one a night, preferably right before going to bed, hey live a little, lol.
• One of my new YouTube favs is called Murder, Mystery and Makeup. It’s kind of like Dateline with a makeup tutorial, lol. My friend Sarah recommended it and it’s addictive. She’s even gotten her husband into watching it with her, so don’t let the makeup part deter you. I usually watch while soaking in the tub. It’s creepy without being scary and you can pick up a few makeup tips.
  

Pumpkin Carving

We usually have a family pumpkin carving and contest after our big Canadian Thanksgiving feast; Canadian Thanksgiving is the second Monday of October for my American friends, so your Columbus Day. But because of Covid this year we were on semi lockdown…again, so we weren’t able to all be together, but the good news is that we are now free to mingle a bit more.

This weekend has been busy, but my nephew Jack, our cousin Nicole and I carved out some time to be a little creative; and I do mean little, we won’t be winning any pumpkin carving awards, but we did had fun. Another activity checked off our Halloween bucket list!

Apple of My Eye

Ok this is going to be my new pre-Halloween tradition, hey traditions have to start somewhere. It involves two of my fav fall things, picking apples and eating.
There are lots of yummy things you can make with your apples, this year I made candy apples for the first time.

Our black poison candy apples were super yummy, but man the candy coating is hard on your teeth!! Next year, we’ll make chocolate covered apples or caramel apples. We used our elementary school skills to make them black, blue, red and yellow food colouring = black.

Local Frightful Fun

I don’t care where you live, there are fun and creepy Halloween themed things to do in your area, if you live in a smaller community, you just might need to work a little harder to find something?

We visited a corn maze, at night, a few weeks ago and it was so much fun. The photos below look a little creepy, ok they look really creepy, but it was a beautiful night. It was the day after the full moon so the sky was glowing; October this year is so special, it has two full moons.

This was at the Green Pig Country Market in Salisbury, they do lots of fun things and their market is top notch.

If you want to kick it up a notch try to find a haunted hay ride or haunted house.

Play Dress Up

I think it’s safe to say that their won’t be any big parties this year, but no need to worry, just call up your bff, make dinner, drink a bit of tequila, crank the tunes and add a bit of makeup…ok, maybe add a lot of makeup.

It’s been my experience that getting ready for a party can sometimes be more fun than the actual party. So this year we just did the getting ready part without having a party to go to. We just dropped in to see a few people, yup dresses like skeletons!! We had so much fun.

Covid has changed so much for all of us, doing « normal » things, maybe a bit challenging so let’s do our best to make things as interesting and fun as possible this last week before Halloween.

Have a safe, healthy and interesting Pre-Halloween week!

And in case you missed my post on celebrating Halloween during Covid, here it is again: https://oui-liette.org/2020/10/10/a-covid-halloween-kid-friendly-ideas/

muah!

Liette

FYI, I’ll be going to St Andrews, NB for Halloween weekend, apparently The Algonquin is haunted, follow me on Instagram at: oui-liette for my Halloween weekend shenanigans!

Let’s Hang Out – An Easy Batty Halloween Party

In this post, I’ll show you how easy it is to throw a super fly Halloween bat themed party. It will work for kids and adults; I did a fun girls cocktail night. I’ll be sharing my invitations, decor, food & drinks and then a few party pics.

Invitation 🦇

I think that party invitations are really important, as they will set the tone for your night. I try to chose a quirky image or theme.

I love puns, so I try to find a theme that will accommodate my punniness. Since it’s a Halloween party, I wanted a theme that was a bit scary and what’s scarier than bats this year? Nothing!! I found these cute little guys and thought they looked like a bunch of mischievous trouble makers; which is perfect for my crew.

My party is a cocktail party and not a full on Halloween party.  I didn’t ask my guests to come dressed up. Some find dressing up stressful, so be mindful of that. I asked my guests to wear all black with red lips, I wanted all of us to be cute for pics and I wanted us to match; I’m a little batty for things that match, lol.

Decor 🦇

I want to show that you don’t need to hire a party planner or decorate your whole bat cave in order to have a fabulous looking party. Yes, I am technicality a party planner, but I’m willing to share my secrets with you, so you won’t need a party planner.

For my bat party, I am going to focus my decor over my dining table and on my dinning side cabinet thingy.

I made a Bat Chandelier Mobile to hang over my dining table, it was pretty easy and cheap! Here are the steps.

Step 1 – buy embroidery rings, you’ll need at least two. I bought mine at Michael’s, they were both under $5. You’ll also need black construction paper, black string or yarn, black paint, a brush, scissors and a hot glue gun or a hole punch; depending on how you want to hang your bats? I used a hole punch.

Step 2 – paint your rings black. I used black latex paint and a sponge brush.

Step 3 – To make my bats, I used these bats below, as my template. For my mobile I used the medium and large bates; put some tunes on and cut out some bats.

Step 4 – String em up!

I hung my big ring first, I attached it to the hook of my hanging light. Then I attached the smaller ring to the larger ring and then I started adding my bats. I went from big bats to smaller bats. My larger bats were hung on the larger ring and smaller bats on the smaller ring. The number of bats will depend on how big your rings are and how full you want your mobile to be; my rule is more is more!

I hung my bat chandelier over my light fixture, but you can hang yours pretty much anywhere.

This is the white cabinet that I pimp out for parties; it sits in the center of my living area and is a great focal point. Please notice my brass giraffe, his name is Jerome, I try to dress him up for all my parties.

This area and my bat chandelier are the only two areas that I themed, but you’ll see that it’s enough. Oh and I do have one other special bat thing that is very cool, keep reading!…please and thank you.

I set up my desserts on my cabinet; create different sections so people aren’t all congested in one area. I had a bar area, my food on my dining table and my sweets here.

It looks a little simple in the pic, but with the lights down low it was really stunning. I started collecting old brass candle holders, I had 9 black candles burning and reflecting in my mirror. And I didn’t forget about Jerome! He kind of looked like a dragon with his bat wings.

Food 🦇

I thought about doing a sit down dinner, but then decided to have a heavy appetizer cocktail party instead; do whatever you have time for, it doesn’t need to be super complicated. I also chose to host my party on a Monday night, which may seem like an odd night? But the weekends leading up to Halloween can get busy with different parties and kid activities; Monday worked for everyone and my friends have no issues with drinking on a Monday night, they are troopers!

Spooky Charcuterie Board

Themes can get cheesy, but this charcuterie board is sophisticated and… ok, well technically it is cheesy, but that’s just because it has awesome cheese on it. I think it turned out looking rich and gothic.

I got my cheeses from a local fromagerie, Les Gourmants, on Main St in Moncton, shop local!!!
I wanted my charcuterie board to have that gothic feast feel, so after placing my board and bowls, I threw cherries and grapes all over the place, so my whole table served as the board. I added a purple cabbage in the center as decor and I added some beet juice to my hummus and used a big cabbage leaf as a bowls for my hummus.

It looked really cool, we ended up having way too much food, I usually send guests home with food, so none of it goes to waste.

Bat Balls

Mmm, not sure that name will catch on? Lol, my friends love my mother’s meat ball recipe; I need to come up with a catchier, less gross, name for them. They are pineapple meatballs and are one of my go to appetizers. You can make them ahead of time, which is great. In order to enjoy your own party, have everything done before your guests arrive.

I also made a Caprese Salad, available in small cups, and my famous clam dip.

Vampire Sangria

When hosting, you don’t need to offer a full bar, but it’s nice to have one drink to offer guests as they arrive. I made a pitcher of Sangria with blackberries, cherries and grapes; it had the same gothic feel as my charcuterie board.

What’s great about this vampire sangria is that you can fill your pitcher and your guests can serve themselves. I created a bar area, which also included ice, glassware and a few assorted soft drinks.

I made blackberry skewers and froze them. They look pretty and they help keep drinks cold.

When hosting, I offer drinks as soon as they walk in, refills are serve yourself. Try to have everything your guests will need in one area, so they can serve themselves.

A few hours before my party, I soaked my berries in a 1/4 of a cup of Brandy and then just before my guests started to arrive I added my red wine to the mix. It was sooo pretty and very gothic!

A few of my bat friends enjoying my Sangria.

A little bite of sugar

This vampire has a sweet tooth, but I’m not the greatest baker, which is no problem at all, since I am really great at ordering things. And lucky for me , one of my bff’s is available for hire; she makes the best cheesecakes! She made a bloody chocolate cherry cheesecake for my party; sooo…I may have just made up that name, but it totally fits!! It was the best cheesecake I’ve ever had and I’ve had lots!

Party Fun 🦇

I thought it would be fun to have a selfie/photo backdrop; I was inspired by those angel wings that people pose in front of, like these below.

But instead of angel wings, I made bat wings!! My sister-in-law drew the first one for me on cardboard and I cut and traced the second one. Once cut, I used the same black paint that I used to paint my rings for my chandelier.

They turned out really well and they were basically free; the cardboard was from a large box that was going to be thrown out. The hardest part was keeping my brother’s cat off the cardboard; I was the cat bouncer lol.

These turned out even cooler than I had hoped. Here are a few of my favorite bad ass bat chicks.

I bought a few cute bat masks for photos too, don’t my friends look pretty!!

I hope this post inspires you to host a batty soirée or afternoon party of your own? This theme would work for teens and kids parties as well; maybe swap the red wine and brandy with grape juice? Just a thought, lol.

Thank you for reading and for all my bat fiends who share all my posts, you guys are awesome!!

Boo!

Liette

Here’s another fun party idea from last Halloween.

https://oui-liette.org/2018/10/07/wickedly-haunted-dinner-party/

Growing up in the 70’s, Halloween was a pretty big deal, for one thing treats weren’t a daily thing, so filling up your plastic pumpkin with free candy was awesome!! I have so many great memories, here are a few of them, let’s see if yours are similar.

Who remembers going to Woolco or Kmart to pick out their costume? They weren’t the fancy costumes they have today, nope, they consisted of plastic one size fits all onesies and a cheap, creepy mask.
My mom wouldn’t even let us wear the mask outside, because you really couldn’t see much with it on and bla, bla, bla, she didn’t want us getting hit by a car.
So all you had left was that plastic onesie, which fit over your snowsuit and ended up ripping in the crotch by the end of the night.
Choices were limited to a few options, their was a clown, a cat, an ugly witch and a devil…and maybe a bear or rabbit? Oh and the elastic on the mask would break before Halloween anyway, usually in a tug of war with your annoying little brother.

I am one year old in the pic above and you can see I have my lovely plastic costume over what looks to be my fuzzy pajamas. I asked my mom to explain my makeup, it looks like a pretty messed up cat. She thinks that I probably did it myself? Apparently I was very independent at a young age, shocking I know!
The following Halloween, I dressed up as; surprise, surprise, a cat! My makeup is slightly better…ish.

One of the best things about Halloween night was dumping your candy on the floor as soon as you got home in order to go through your stash! I wonder if kids still do that these days?
My cousin Ginette and I were pretty inseparable growing up, even our names matched. Side note, have I ever mentioned in any of my past blog posts that my mom’s name is Jeannette? Put them all together and you get Jeannette, Ginette and Liette, lol.
My mom would stay home and give out candy and my dad would take us out trick or treating, he’d carry our pumpkins for us when they got too heavy, he was the best!!

Ginette’s on the left and I’m on the right for both pics, above and below. In addition to matching names, we must have had the same hairdresser; we always had matching hairdos! The one below is the classic 70’s bowl cut! Every kid had this cut, EVERY!!!! Boys and girls, it was unisex, this cut also led to me getting mistaken for a little boy many times.

The pic above is Ginette and I post trick or treating. I have no idea what we dressed up as this year? But I am thinking I may have done my own makeup again? The blue eyeshadow and crazy lipstick is very, “cheap floozy after a hard night of partying”. If my costume was a hooker, then I nailed it!!! Lol

1974 was an eventful year, my nanny made me a pink furry rabbit costume for a majorette concert and I wore it for Halloween!! Oh and I got a little brother that year too, but I am pretty sure that I was more excited for the pink rabbit costume. This may have been the beginning of my love of the colour pink?
I’m digging my dad’s plaid pants, in the pic below, with his yellow hat and hockey jersey; it’s def a killer 70’s vibe!

As we got older, our trick or treating posse grew to include more cousins and neighborhood kids. My dad and Joyce, our backyard neighbor, would take all the kids on our street out trick or treating; it became their regular annual thing. It’s funny how back in the day, if one adult was willing to take their kids out, all the other parents were more than happy to pawn their trick or treating duties off.

These were pre- helicopter parent days; we traveled in large packs, high on sugar, running from house to house, racing to be the one to ring the doorbell. Yes, there was some…ok a lot of pushing and shoving and yes, someone always ended up getting hurt. You fell or got pushed, you cried and then you were back in the race.
Your night would end with a runny nose, rosy cheeks and enough candy to last you a few weeks.
Those are some of my best childhood memories.

I spent the last few Halloweens in Las Vegas and man those kids have it easy! Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to trick or treat without needing your winter jacket or skidoo suit? They have no idea of the struggle of Canadian children.
One year, I was probably 6 or 7, I got a Barbie costume, which was a white plastic gown with the word Barbie on the chest and a mask that looked nothing like Barbie. Turns out the white plastic gown didn’t fit over my skidoo suit and it was a super cold night, so my mom made me wear it underneath!! This was such a traumatic event!! I still don’t think I’m completely over it. Thankfully, I have no pics of that Halloween.

Halloween Contest

I love seeing retro childhood pictures, they’re so cool. I’ve showed you mine, now I want to see yours! (Childhood Halloween pics, only!)
Go to my Facebook page: Oui-Liette and post a retro Halloween pic from your childhood for a chance to win one of my blog sweatshirts. Each person who posts a pic on my page will be entered to win. The winner will be able to pick your shirt colour with one of the three sayings: Oui, muah! or ah phoque.

Thanks for reading! I have lots of fun content for October!! Follow me on Instagram at: Oui-Liette for additional fun photos!

muah!

Liette

Apparently I still like dressing up as a cat, thankfully my makeup skills have improved!!

Taco Any Day! Entertaining Tips.

Why should Tuesday’s have all the taco fun? With most of us working from home and kids going back to school…ish, I feel that we need to take advantage of any excuse to spend time with friends…and tacos!

Let me start by saying that our region of Atlantic Canada is one of the safest places on earth at the moment, we’re allowed to meet friends in restaurants, sans mask, and gather at home with friends; no rules were broken in the making of this post.

I blog a lot about entertaining and how it’s more important to get out and spend time with loved ones than it is to be the perfect host, with the perfect menu for your perfect friends. My friends are awesome, but they are far from perfect, thank goodness, how boring would that be?

Taco Night Out

For my Taco night out, I was joined by Kenda and Stacey; two of us have been working from home alone and two of us have been grounded and unable to do our normal jobs of flying all over the place. I felt we needed some girl time…and tacos. I thought about hosting a taco dinner at my place, but to be honest, I am getting so sick of being in my condo!!

So why not host a small intimate dinner party at our local Mexican restaurant? Where we just needed to show up and have someone serve us tacos and daiquiris, it really was a no brainer.

To make it a bit more fun, I brought a bunch of flower clips and headbands, why? Why the hell not? It annoys one of my friends that I theme, pretty much everything, but I honestly don’t care. She’s a fairly good sport, most of the time.

Our Taco Any Day night was on Monday, it was an awesome way to kick off our week! We bought a few items and shared and stayed out until 9pm!! Just a bunch of wild woman out on a Monday!! Lol

Taco Any Day, at home

You don’t have to go out for Mexican, you can make it at home apparently, lol. My cousin Nicole, yes another cousin, I wasn’t exaggerating when I said I have a lot of them, treated us to a Saturday night Mexican feast.

We’ve unintentionally started a monthly Saturday night group dinner, where we take turns hosting. We help each other prepare the meal, so we’re learning how to make new recipes and then we get to share a meal together, it’s awesome!

This week we helped make Mexican street corn and shrimp tacos with homemade pico de galo; it was delish!!!

Fresh jalapeños!!!

We got fresh supplies from The Green Pig Country Market in Salisbury; everything tastes better with fresh locally grown products.

This was my very first Mexican Street Corn, it was so easy to make and so yummy! It’s sour cream, mayo, cheese, cilantro and a few different spices.

The trick to making delish shrimp tacos, or any kind of tacos, is to buy corn tortillas and fry them in a pan with a good two cups of peanut oil, until they are crunchy. Take them out of the oil and place on a plate with paper towels in order to soak up the excess oils. Omg they were sooooooo good!!

I am pretty confident that my cousin Nicole is the best Acadian taco maker…in Moncton…who is related to me!

Halloween Taco Party!

With Halloween right around the corner, why not have a Day of the Dead celebration with a full out taco bar?

The Day of the Dead is officially on Nov 2; it sounds like it would be a sad event, but it’s a way to celebrate the lives of those who have passed. It’s a day where families welcome the souls of their deceased relatives for a brief celebration of food and drinks.

Being in Mexico for the Day of the Dead is one of the items on my bucket list. It sounds and looks like such a beautiful celebration. With that in mind, it’s a perfect way to spend the evening with friends and family to toast and celebrate those we love who have passed and while you are at it, you should make it a dress up night, obvs. Suggest your guests come with a painted sugar skull face.

The decor would be easy, a black tablecloth with lots of sculls and big fat red roses!

Here is my homage to a sugar skull makeup, below, not sure I did it justice, but did my best. Imagine everyone showing up with their version of a sugar skull for a feast and celebration!!

In closing, if you need an excuse or a theme in order to meet your friends on a Monday night, or to invite people over to your place for a home cooked meal, or even a reason to celebrate in and around Halloween; TACOS!!!

Thank you for reading!!

And since travel is limited now, here’s another little taste of Mexico, that I posted a few years back.

https://oui-liette.org/2019/05/05/cinco-de-mayo/

muah!
Liette

Scary Shit! Old Abandoned Houses! A Fall Must.

I loovvvve fall! I love that the air changes and becomes cooler, but the sun stays hot. I love wearing sweaters and the crunchy sound that the leaves make when you walk on them.

Late September and early October are made for drives in the country and New Brunswick is one of the best places to admire all of the fall foliage. It’s also the perfect time to admire old abandoned, and who are we kidding, probably haunted houses! Ok they probably aren’t haunted, but for the purpose of this post, let’s say that they could be? And some of these old houses are scary as shit so…yeah they’re absolutely, probably, haunted lol.

I’m fascinated by these old houses, they’re beautiful and sad at the same time. This fall, don’t just drive by them, stop and admire them a bit. Don’t go in, they aren’t safe, but peek inside if you dare?

My friend Stacey and I stopped to take a look at this old house near Waterborough, NB. It still had curtains hanging in the windows and the front door was open, as if it was inviting us inside, that’s creepy right?

We aren’t those crazy white people in horror movies, you know the dumb kind, that go inside to “check things out”….mmm, but we did stop and walk a bit closer to “check things out”, oh crap! Maybe we are those people??

As we walked closer, I saw movement in the house through one of the windows. My heart skipped a beat, I looked closer, squinting, because I wasn’t wearing my glasses. OMG!! I saw a figure moving in the house!!!

Was it a freaky mutant or a scary ghost? Well, I don’t think that scary mutants have brightly coloured and freshly cut blonde bobs? At least they don’t in the movies. This old abandoned house still had a mirror hanging on the wall; I was seeing my own reflection from outside, even though I was pretty far away. I’m convinced it was the house trying time lure us inside.

Did we go even closer to peek into the window? Hell no! We weren’t falling for that trap. We got back in our car and drove until we found an ice cream place; ice cream helps calm your nerves after a good scare…it’s pretty much a proven fact.

This next story took place a few years ago and it’s super spooky, it’s not an abandoned house, but it’s 100% legit haunted. It takes place in The Keillor House in Dorchester, NB.

Keillor House is now a museum and I should add that it’s located next to a maximum security penitentiary, which is an old stone building built in 1880. So right out of the gate it’s a spooky area!

Every Halloween they turn the museum into a haunted house for visitors, it’s one of their major fundraisers.

For some reason, on a cold and windy night in October, I ended up at the Keillor House helping to decorate the carriage house for their haunted tours. For the record, that place is automatically scary at night without any decorations!

I took a bunch of pics throughout the night. There were three of us on the decorating committee, I made sure I was pretty much glued to one of them at all times. Did I mention it was a cold and windy night??

When I got home that night, I was looking at my pics. The pic below is a perfect example of how creepy this place is at night; those hatchets and stuff on the wall aren’t props, they’re real. And yes that’s a bloody baby on the bottom right of the pic, that’s a prop, obvs.

I took the pic above, then moved a bit closer to the bloody baby and took another shot. For the shot above, my flash didn’t go off, even though it was on automatic and it was clearly dark so it should have gone off.

For this shot above, my flash did go off, both pics were taken seconds apart. 

Did you notice the ghostly blur? I added an arrow to point it out. Sooo WTF is that?? It’s obviously some sort of ghost, it’s just floating there!!! 

That’s creepy right? I haven’t volunteered to help decorate since that night and meh… I’ll probably be too busy again this year? Lol. If covid doesn’t completely derail Halloween, you need to visit their haunted tour, if you’re brave enough?

Also in Dorchester, they’ve converted the old jailhouse into a hotel, yup, you can sleep in an actual jail. Adding it to my list of things to do, but I’ll have to check and see how many stars this hotel has? I am a bit of a hotel snob, lol, kidding…ish. The town of Dorchester should really market themselves as a Halloween town, maybe I should talk to their mayor? 

This next creepy house is an old farmhouse that sits on land owned by a friend; he’ll eventually tear it down as he is building a new house on the property.
It caught fire and was abandoned decades ago, sadly it’s beyond repair. I don’t have any scary stories, it’s just an abandoned farmhouse with lots of character…and probably a ghost or two?? Who knows really? Lol

Thanks for reading, I hope you look at old abandoned houses a bit differently, they can be beautiful. I wish they could all be saved and restored!

muah!

Liette

Here’s one of my past scary adventures, if you have every watched Ghost Adventures on TV, you’ll enjoy or if you just enjoy me when freaked out? Lol 

https://wordpress.com/block-editor/post/oui-liette.org/178 

 

Behind the Scene

If you’re wondering about my feature image, I haven’t gotten extensions, it’s from my Covid birthday in April. This was going to be my party outfit for my girls trip to Palm Spring for my big birthday and since no one got to see it, I am recycling it for this blog post!! Unrelated side note, I miss my long hair, currently growing it out.

Happy Fall Eve! Top 5 activities to do before October.

Well we survived spring and summer 2020! I am not sure about you, but I struggled a bit and had a few challenging moments; talk about having all your plans go to shit all at once. But we made it and now it’s almost fall; Happy Fall Eve!

Fall Eve is the perfect time to get back into a more “normal” routine. And it’s the perfect time to focus on our health and happiness, which I feel is even more important these days.

So let’s make a fall list, you know how much I love lists!! And I’ve heard feedback that people like reading my lists because it gives them ideas of things to do; shall we begin? You know that’s rhetorical, I’m going to begin regardless, lol.

Sunflower Selfie!

This was on my list last year, but there were no sunflower fields to be found in Las Vegas; so I took full advantage this year. You may think that taking selfies with sunflowers is silly or superficial, but it’s more about getting outside and enjoying yourself.

If you haven’t walked in fields of sunflowers yet, you’d better hurry, the season is almost over. Get out there with your family or friends and take lots of pics!! It’s really magical.

Fall Colour Drive

I am so exciting to be back in the Maritimes for fall, after four years away. I’ve already warned people that I‘ll be spamming social media with beautiful, multi coloured, fall foliage images.

And guess what? The leaves are starting to turn!!!!

This fall, I want you to jump in your car, alone or with someone, whatevs, crank up the tunes and go for a drive and enjoy the scenery. There’s something about a sunny fall drive that is just good for your soul. It always helps to clear my mind of clutter, I’ve come up with some really awesome ideas during autumn drives.

Support Farmers Market

If Covid has taught us anything, it’s that farming isn’t for the faint of heart. Lots of you tried your hand at gardening this year with varying levels of success.

I love and support all the new gardeners out there and I hope that you’ll keep at it next year with lessons learned. Sadly none of my friends and family will survive the winter on what they’ve successfully grown in their gardens, lol.

My brother grew exactly 6 ears of corn, my bff harvested enough mini potatoes for a few potato salads, by a few, I mean two, lol. Another friend lost everything she planted, except for cherry tomatoes, she had lots of those.

Lucky for all of us, there are tons of farmers markets nearby. What a great opportunity to support local farmers and to buy fresh, local products.

While you’re out there driving with your tunes blaring, make a stop at your local farmers market and buy lots and lots of fresh goodies. There is absolutely no down side to shopping local!!!

Fall Food With Friends

During the summer it’s all about BBQING, but when the days get a bit cooler, it just makes me want to cook and bake.

We visited two markets this weekend, we bought fresh corn and potatoes at one and apples at the other. I just hosted an impromptu fall harvest dinner party and it was delish!

On the menu; corn chowder, fresh biscuits and apple pop tarts. I made the chowder before hand and it was the best corn chowder I’ve ever tasted! BTW, my guests helped me make the biscuits and pop tarts and we had a beautiful evening, chatting, laughing and cooking together. Full disclosure, there may have been too much chatting? My first batch of biscuits didn’t rise, turns out I forgot to add two of the ingredients, lol. Did it ruin our meal? Nope, it only made us laugh more, but we’re not quitters, we whipped up a second batch in a jiffy and we nailed it!

Look up a fancy pumpkin recipe and call a few friends over and bake up a storm!! Make awesome memories while making yummy, healthy food!

Fresh Fall Air!

You can already feel the days getting shorter, it’s more important than ever to get out there and enjoy the sunshine before the weather turns colder.

Lucky for us that there are so many fun, fall things to do this time of year.
I am looking forward to picking apples this year, then making an apple crisp, then eating it with vanilla ice cream. Verger Belliveau Orchard, in Memramcook, will be open for picking as of September 9th.

The Green Pig Country Market’s giant corn maze is now open, as is their Pumpkin Blaster, which is super fun!!

There are also lots of open farm days, where you can tour local farms and visit with the animals, this time of year. Look up what activities are happening in your area and get out and participate!!!

I love this pic of my dad and my nephew Jack walking hand in hand at The Green Pig corn maze. We just dropped Jack off at University and my dad passed away a year ago. This is a perfect example of why you need to take lots of pics and make memories!!

Thanks for reading, I have so many fun and funny posts coming in October, well I think they’re funny. 😬

muah!

Liette

Here’s 2019 Falling for Fall list, yes, there are a few similarities, but you should give it a read anyway! https://oui-liette.org/2019/09/02/falling-for-fall-2/