Haiku

Thank you little pig
Oh the smokey, crunchy joy!
Southern perfume smile


Well you can just cross Bacon Haiku off the list. Ode to the best meat product ever!

And by the way...someone submit me their favorite movie. I have it on the list to watch someone's favorite film. Thanks.

One Crazy Summer

It has been a crazy summer. I feel like we have had so much company. First we had William's brother along with my niece and nephew for 2 weeks. That overlapped with our current company of Grand Lucille, who is still with us for another two weeks. Last week, William's cousins from France came with their 3 kids (that was 10 for dinner on a school night, ladies and gentleman). Needless to say, I decided to sew this weekend and give up on the baking frenzy until the company situation quiets down a bit. I find that I can handle everything when it is just us, but the smallest change throws my "routine" (ha ha) into disarray.

So I made the above dress from some clearance fabric I found at Joanne's. I love the 80's feel of the print and the little ships. I am a sucker for a nautical fabric. I have become very fond of piping. Pink piping is even better.

I have a stupid look on my face in this picture, but you can see the dress just fine. This was a Betsey Johnson dress that a friend handed down to me. It was mid-calf length with a high neck and a prissy bow at the neck. Then it keyholed down to the empire waist. So I tore it up and re-did her. I like it. May I say that anyone with small children is a fool to wear silk, but I wasn't wearing it all anyway, so I figure why not?

And these are my precious babies being cute. They sleep on the floor by our bed every night (shock, gasp...STOP JUDGING) until they ultimately crawl into our bed and keep us from any kind of sleep at all (sharper gasp, I SAID STOP JUDGING). But while still on the floor, they have taken to using "sleeping bags" (or all of our pillow cases, as the case may be). I love it that my babies still fit in pillow cases.

Many blessings!

CORN BABY!!!

Here's a lovely picture of Z shucking the corn baby. I am telling you, don't be surprised if we are all wearing overalls and baling hay in my next blog.

Sweet delicious (one and only) corn cob. There were 8 people in my house. I cut the kernals off the cob and we all shared it. It was AWESOME.

I also made a big harvest off of our plum tree. They are still super tiny and very tart, but they grew on OUR tree.

On Friday, I was able to play hookey from work and we took the kids to the waterpark. This was a wonderful place in the Lake Casitas recreation area. The water wasn't more than 18in deep anywhere and the kids had a blast. Unfortunately, I didn't really take any pictures of us having all the fun. Once again, we were having fun and not thinking about taking pictures of the fun. There is something to be said for that.

This week my charge is that you be creative. Do something new. Do something you love.

me

My mantra...I am not overwhelmed

So this weekend we still had the brother-in-law, the niece and the nephew (they are here through the end of this week). And on Sunday, our new charge arrived. The eighteen year-old daughter of some close family friends in France is here for one month to practice her English. Now we really have a house full. To make things more confusing, our new guest is named Lucile (she spells it with one L). So we have taken to calling them Grand Lucile and Petit Lucille. It is a little crazy, but we are making it.

On Friday night, I made some tacquitos for the fam. You basically prepare the filling just like the tvp (or you can use ground beast) sloppy joes, but with different flavoring. I still do the onion and garlic, and add cumin seeds, chili powder and a little bit of ketchup. I also like to add just a bit of cheese. The cheese doesn’t really flavor the filling, but it makes it stick together so it will stay in the tacquitos. Then you roll up the filling in flour tortillas (I use wheat). Place them on an oiled cookie sheet and kind of spread or spray some oil on the tops too. Then bake at 350 degrees until they crisp up. Note: the ends will probably be browned nearer to burnt before the middle gets kind of crisp. I usually pull them out just shy of actually going black. I serve with salsa, guacamole and sour cream.

And on the “I didn’t think you could make it any better than it is” front, I took the chocolate chip cookie recipe and made BARS!

I just made a regular batch of dough, greased up a cookie sheet (including the sides) and put parchment paper on the bottom, then I mushed the dough into a large flat rectangle (it won’t take up a whole cookie sheet or at least it didn’t on mine) and into the oven until golden and heavenly. I waited for them to be mostly cooled before cutting into bars. Note: The dough didn’t start out as big as the pan, but it did spread out some and nearly jumped the edge while cooking, so keep that in mind when choosing your cookie sheet (and make sure you use one with sides aka- a jelly-roll pan).

And I engineered time to sew by completely ignoring my company (including my friend who came over for dinner) and letting them entertain my kids while I frantically sewed. This outfit is a shirt and skirt. The skirt used to be the valance in my bedroom. It is vintage bark cloth and I love it. The fabric was too thick and stiff to gather, so I did pleats all around the skirt. And I made a pleated blouse as well. It was pleats day. I am very happy with all.

We also went to the beach this weekend. It started out lovely and then the foggiest cloud cover ever moved in. It was freezing and we had to scoot. I did, however, take maybe the best picture ever of me in the history of pictures.

What do you think?

Try to stay cool… (and by cool I mean in temperature and your general effervesence of with-it-ness)

Lovely Long Weekend

I had a lovely July 4th weekend. Unfortunately, I took like no pictures of our holiday adventures. So you’ll just have to trust me…we had fun. Fun involved the hubz's brother and the cousins arriving for a 2 week visit, fireworks and homemade ice cream with friends on the 4th and swimming and a BBQ at another friend’s house on Monday. Somehow, I am still tired. I guess that never goes away.

I managed to steal some time to sew while the hubz picked up the family at the airport. I am calling this my woodland creatures dress. I have had this fabric for a long time. I just love it and originally intended to make pillows from it. Now it is wearable instead. First time making a ruffled sleeve. I am very happy with how it turned out.

I just realized in looking at these pictures that I sewed my woodland creatures and trees upside down! Whatever, really short people looking up at me will see it the right way.

Our plums are beginning to ripen on the tree. We each tried one of the ones you see here. I assure they are not ready yet! They haven’t made a word for this kind of sour. And they are sooooo tiny. Our peaches are tiny too. William says we have midget (size-challenged if you are politically correct) fruit trees.

I made some yummy lemon penne on Saturday for lunch. I just heated lemon juice with olive oil, salt, pepper and garlic powder.

I zested some lemons (the ones I used for the juice- clearly this is not in order).

Added the cooked pasta to the lemon juice with a little of the pasta water, along with a couple of blobs of cream cheese, dried basil, the zest and a little more salt, pepper and garlic. VOILA!!! Awesome pasta.

I also made some sugar cookies. I got the recipe out of a cookbook I have at the house, so I need to copy that recipe and type it in. Promise I will later.

Blessings to you!