My sister sent me with the directive to get all of Grandma’s good recipes, especially the fruit cake which is actually pretty amazing. (I found out because it has brandy in it. Can’t believe my grandma would go to a liquor store! She said she would go in and pray no one from church would see her!)

There were years that my grandma’s baking paid the bills – she is especially famous for her whole wheat bread. It’s quite delicious hot out of the oven with lots of butter. There would always be fresh bread waiting at Grandma’s house whenever anyone went to visit. The bread is a recipe I grew up on, and when I have time, I still make it. (I foresee a day of baking in the future to stock up on bread for the busier fall/winter season.)

This is a recipe that I don’t ever remember Grandma making, but I ate it for breakfast every day I was there – topped with whipped cream (for the calcium, you know.)

Grandma’s Healthy Jello
4 packages gelatin (I would use kosher)
4 cups fruit juice
1 can fruit cocktail (the kind in juice not heavy syrup)
3 bananas sliced
1/2 cup chopped pecans

Sprinkle the gelatin over 1 cup of juice and set aside. Meanwhile, bring the remaining 3 cups if juice to a boil. Add boiling juice to the gelatin mixture and stir until the gelatin is dissolved. Pour into an 8×8 baking dish and stir in drained fruit cocktail. Leave setting out until cooled and add nuts and bananas. Refrigerate until set.

More recipes to come.

•A Chow Life I bookmark every single recipe and I love the stories that accompany the recipes.

• My new quilt. I feel like such an adult having all matching bedding for the first time ever.

• Bittersweet on it’s way to me.

• The twinzies wearing baby legs.

and being cute in general.

• Honor eating a jaw breaker.

My mom and I went on a trip last week to visit my sister and then my grandma and she bought the kids giant jaw breakers for the trip. As kids, my sister and I enjoyed a few giant jaw breakers on trips to see grandma so it seemed appropriate.

• The kids traveling. (They were angels.)

• A new swimming suit on it’s way to me that will hopefully, actually fit the girls.

When I was a kid we would have epic 4th of Julys. Our whole block would get together and have a huge block party with games and a parade for the kids, lots of food and combined fireworks. As an adult, I always strive to make my independence parties as epic as my childhood. But as much as I try making the holiday special, it just never seems to live up. Sometimes it’s hard to make things as amazing as you want them when you’re dealing with broken families and unwilling participants.

This year was not epic, but it did end up being pretty fun. We spent the evening hanging out with Jim’s mom, sister and niece. The menu was delicious if I do say so myself. Carne asada, homemade refried beans, aunt ann rice, chips, salsa, guac, jarritos and homemade ice-cream. Jim and Honor picked out a pretty amazing array of fireworks and Jim had us rolling with his jokes as he lit each one off in the alley. I told him that it was possibly the funniest he has ever been.

Afterwards, the kids and I raced to the baseball field to see my friend, Carrington, perform with her 1940’s singing group. The city had a pretty cool fireworks display this year, but I forgot that we were to be subject to the onslaught of patriotic country music. I kept thinking how much more powerful the fireworks would have been if we could have watched them in the dark, quiet, alone with our thoughts – that would have been an amazing end to the evening.

Finished picnic quilt

Plastic bagel – new edition to main street

Tag sale find

Amy Butler’s new yarn and patterns

My new hat

Aka puppy boy
Aka dextario
Aka little turd
Aka jingle turd
Aka J.T.
Aka dextina

*Even though I swore I’d never hand quilt, this weekend found me doing just that. I whipped up a simple picnic quilt – just four giant squares pieced together for the top and backed with Anna Maria laminated cotton. I had orginally planned to hand tie the blanket but decided that was going to be way too fussy for me and decided that hand quilting with embroidery floss and giant stitches would be better.

*My moms cherry tree had another bumper crop, so I spent the weekend preserving cherries. I dehydrated a huge batch and froze a bunch (I like to freeze cherries in a cookie sheet in a single layer and then transfer them to containers for long term freezing. This is just a tiny bit more work, but ensures the cherries aren’t stuck together) and packaged them with my new seal-a-meal. I bought it several months ago on clearance in anticipation for the summer veggies.
Today I’m pitting the rest of the cherries to make jam and maraschino cherries. I’m especially excited about the maraschino cherries and hope they turn out.

*Honor said to Dexter the other day, “Dexter, life is hard…. Life is hard Dexter.” And I thought, someday life really will be hard for Honor. And while part of me wants to fiercely protect him for that, the other part knows that the hard parts of life are what will make him and are what can bring him the greatest joy. But until then, I’ll be happy to watch him live his life where the hardest thing he faces is folding the socks and cleaning his room.

I’ve been planning yummy salads every week in my menu, something I can make up and we can eat on for the whole week. Jim is not a huge fan of these salads, but the kids and I love them and we usually take them to our Wednesdays at the lake and I pack them for my lunches when I’m at work.

Since Jim was playing a show out of town last night, this was dinner.

1-2 cans Cannellini beans (I used 1 but would have preferred two.)
1 package turkey pepperoni
1/2 jar pepperoccinis
1 red bell pepper, chopped
1/2 red onion thinly sliced
1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley
1 pint cherry tomatoes
olive oil and balsamic vinegar and pepper to taste

After over a year of working on my crochet blanket, it’s finally finished. This monster took two MILES of peaches and creme yarn! I don’t normally recommend peaches and creme for anything but dish cloths, but I felt comfortable with the shrinking and fading aspects of the yarn for this blanket.

Since July is blanket month at Tangle, I’m onto the next blanket – a loose knit throw out of brushed alpaca.

My friend Rickelle, who lives right behind me, is an amazing therapist. I’m always in awe of the way her brain works and how in-tune she is with people. Having her as a friend has opened me up to so much of myself that I never knew about. She is always so good to tend to her heart and to the hearts of those around her. She has a way of holding a mirror to your face that I have never experienced with any other person. There is so much to say about her, but for now I’ll just say, it was no accident that she and her husband moved in right behind us. I think about Rickelle living in my back yard and I know that God loves me.

Last year she started a tradition of making Dream Boards. One night Rickelle, Carrie, Amy and I got together in a flurry of magazine clippings, glitter and glue. We made posterboards filled with magazine clippings that inspired us. The next week we gathered to share what each image on our board meant to us. Last year I was in a rough place and struggled to find the perfect words and pictures to define myself and my dream board ended up with a lot of white space.

This year dream boarding involved lots of indulgences (hello Peach Margaritas) and took us a little longer to make. But last night Amy, Rickelle and I were able to get together to share. I found it so much easier now that I’m in a really good place to fill a dream board. So much easier to say what inspires me. The theme of my board was “The Art in Everyday” – a little quote I found in an Anthropologie magazine. I think that speaks to my insatiable need to create everyday and definitely defines this point of my life.

It isn’t an amazing work of art that I’d frame and hang on my wall, but each year I will keep each one, and look back and remember who I was back then and remember the girls that I share my life with. The girls that speak life to me everyday. The girls who love my beautiful mess of a life and who love being my friend as much as I love being theirs. And I will remember how thankful I am to have them and how blessed I am and how loved.

About a month ago we raised the bed of my garden. It took two truckfulls of soil, a little bit of wood and a few metal brackets. I planted my garden a little bit later than I had planned, but got it in and it’s started to grow nicely. My problem with gardening is that I’m not very good at remembering to water it.

So over the past week Jim has been digging trenches and glueing little plastic pipes together to make an automatic watering system for the garden. He had to tap into our automatic sprinkler system for the lawn and figured while he was at it, he would also install a tap for a hose in the backyard which I’ve lusted after for the entire time we’ve lived here. He’s my hero.

My plan is to take progress pictures over the summer to see how well the garden does. I anticipate it will be much better than last year because it will actually get watered every single day. Here’s the pics from yesterday.

And here is a picture of the garden before.