Life at a "Swell's" pace

This past weekend we decided not to hit the waves, but clean out a lot of forgotten spaces in our house. One space being the pantry. We are good at rotating foods in our pantry, but every once in awhile we find out we have more of one item than we think. This weekend it was peanut butter. Six jars later we realize that we are pretty set on having enough for awhile. I tried to think of ways to use it and there is so many possibilities. After sorting through all of the options, we agreed on making peanut butter cookies and played around with some of the chocolate candies we picked up at the local food co-op here. We love these chocolate candies and they are similar to M&M's, but are made with Fair Trade chocolate and dyed with better ingredients. Since changing our eating habits to better quality, it's amazing how many things that once tasted "good" now taste off. One of the main products I've noticed the change in taste is chocolate and peanut butter. I used to love Hershey's, especially Hershey Kisses, but now, nope. I can't eat them without feeling like I'm eating chocolate-flavored wax. These chocolate rainbow drops can be purchased online here, if you wanted to use them like we did in this recipe. Here's how we made our peanut butter cookies.

Ingredients:

1 cup organic peanut butter, 1 cup organic sugar

1 large organic egg, ½ cup organic flour

Chocolate candies

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix the peanut butter, sugar, egg in a mixer and add flour on low speed until well combined. Don't over mix, just enough to combine everything and make a wet/oily dough base.

Roll into balls, or create your own pattern of cookie. Pressing a fork into the tops of the cookies creates the lines on the top of the cookies shown here. Add the chocolate candies anywhere on the cookies that you chose. Bake for 15-20 minutes, or until the tops of the cookies start to brown a bit.

These cookies are great when they are still slightly warm.

Hello.

Over the past weekend, Labor Day weekend we made our first batch of homemade salsa. There are a few things we would change in future batches, but overall it was a great time. We are thinking of making Labor Day salsa making a yearly tradition. I've been looking into simple ways of canning certain foods we enjoy, just so we can have them on hand when we need them. We also hit the beach again this week. Finally able to enjoy all of us having boards to surf on, with Jeff using a bodyboard. His shoulder has been hurting him lately, so the bodyboard was perfect for him on this trip. The amount of people on the beaches here during Labor Day weekend was the most I've seen in a long time on the Oregon coast. We kept our distance from everyone, though, because most people were not wearing masks, or social distancing. The swells were pretty high, almost 10-14 feet at times and hitting every three-four seconds, so it was quite a workout for us all. We were all pretty sore the next day, but it was totally worth it. Overall it was a good Labor Day weekend and a nice week overall. Here are five things this week.

1. These Lights.

Up on top of the highest mountain in our area and this was the view of the city at midnight. Seems a lot bigger than it is.

2. This Salsa.

Our Labor Day salsa was a solid plan this year and will will definitely be continuing it in the future.

3. This Surf.

And, it was perfect!

4. This Package.

Won a Twitter contest this week and received all of this great Forager products from the company. We loved everything, especially the queso cheese and the probiotic drinks. All of the coupons shown there are for free products, too. It was definitely a score!

5. This MightyFix.