This & That

How Did That Happen??

Another birthday today. My baby is 20. Holy COW!!!! When we were group video chatting yesterday with the family, Eric said, "Wow Mom, you've run out of teenagers!!" We figured out that I've had a teenager since 1994. It's the end of an era.

She checked in this week with a few pictures....which was awesome. This one was especially for my mother, who made her the cheetah blanket and sent it to her for Christmas. By the way, her birthday box arrived intact. She said she wasn't going to open any of the presents until today, but she did open the box and found the collection of pictures on top. And I quote, "I did open the box and found all the pictures. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA I laughed for like 20 minutes rolling on the ground. Thank you so much. It was my favorite." I achieved my goal of making her laugh. And she sent me this picture:

So maybe I'm never going to see another expression on her face for the rest of her mission.

She and her companion went to an Asian market, which her companion thought was totally amazing. My daughter said she kept wandering around from place to place saying, "I feel so Asian!" The Girl made a new friend while she was there.

And also found an interesting oriental fruit, which is apparently outlawed in some countries because when it's cut open, it smells like rotting flesh. Yum. Just what I'd want in a fruit salad. So Happy Birthday to my girl. I miss her like crazy, but recognize the tender mercies of being able to see her face almost every week in the pictures she sends, and the messages I get from those who are near her, who let me know she's doing great. Love her....miss her.

Baked Strawberry Buttermilk Donuts

I've had a couple of these donut pans for a while now and hadn't gotten around to using them. Last weekend I had these pans, I had buttermilk and I had strawberries. The stars were aligned, so I made these for breakfast. What I discovered is that baked donuts are essentially muffins baked in a different shape. A tip for getting these out of the pans and onto the wire rack to cool, is to use a skinny rubber scraper to pry them out. It worked better than a fork. I found the recipe here.

 Baked Strawberry Buttermilk Donuts

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• ½ cup sugar + 2 tablespoons sugar, divided
• 1½ teaspoon baking powder
• ½ teaspoon salt
• ¾ cup buttermilk
• 2 large eggs
• ¼ cup honey
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• 1½ cups strawberries, diced and divided
• 1 cup confectioner's sugar

Preheat oven to 425 degrees and lightly coat a donut pan with cooking spray.
For the donuts, combine flour, ½ cup sugar, baking powder and salt in a bowl and stir until combined.
In another bowl, combine buttermilk, eggs, honey, butter and vanilla stirring well with a whisk.
With a rubber spatula, slowly add wet ingredients into dry ingredients stirring until mixture is just combined. Add 1 cup strawberries and slowly mix in until just combined.
Pipe mixture into donut pan, filling ⅔ of the way full. (Yeah....I don't "pipe." I spooned it in and they were actually pretty full when all was said and done.)
Bake for 8 minutes or until a toothpick is inserted and comes out clean.
Let cool on a wire rack for 5 minutes, and then dip in glaze and return to wire rack. Makes 12 donuts

To make the glaze, combine the ½ cup diced strawberries with 2 tablespoons sugar. Stir and mash with fork, letting sit at room temperature until strawberry juice is produced.
Add 2-3 tablespoons of this strawberry juice mixture to confectioners sugar and mix well. If glaze seems to runny or to thick, add more strawberry juice or confectioners sugar. (I ended up having to add a little milk to get the glaze to the right consistency.)

Around Here This Week

Around here this week someone has a birthday today. Someone very special who happens to be my husband. Love him lots.

We spent some time last weekend finishing the garden up for planting.

Here is my honey working hard. I can tell you that we both had some sore muscles when we were done. It's been Spring Break this week for Bryce, so we have actually been traipsing around a little. I'm sure there will be a post or two about our rambles. As soon as we get back, I'll be putting peas, lettuce, spinach and potatoes in the ground.

The rhubarb is already starting to show, which makes the Birthday Boy really happy.

The only thing done with paper was a layout with pictures unearthed on my desk during the huge clean out. Frederick was just a baby here. These are some of my all-time favorite papers. They are old, but I still love them. The design is a fairly large tweak of a Tia Bennett layout found in an old CK magazine. It can be made a little bigger by clicking on it, if you want.

As I said, we have been rambling around this week. We spent some time at the cabin and also in Utah visiting my husband's parents. I have received quite a few very cute grandchildren pictures, which I will inundate you with like vacation slides next week. 

You're Invited...

...to a daffodil party.

 

The hyacinths will be coming, too, so you might as well come along and say hello to everyone.

Even the flowering almond is making an appearance.

 

The Face

I mentioned recently that my daughter's birthday is coming up. I have spent a fairly good portion of time getting things together in a box to send out to the midwest for the occasion, things like her special-order granola. My favorite thing, though, is a collection of photos that the whole family helped put together.

We noticed early on that in the "selfies" she sent home to us, she always had the same expression, shown in the picture above.

And here....

Oh, and here, too...and in lots of others. We decided (ok, I decided), that it might give her a laugh if we all sent a group of photos with each of us making that same expression. So, scroll on down and see how they all came out, starting with my eldest's son's family and moving through the ranks:

The objective is to make her laugh. I'm thinking it will. 

 

Toffee Chocolate Bars

I had this recipe pinned on my "Desserts" Pinterest board. Something I noticed scrolling through the board the other day was that I have an overwhelming collection of chocolate-y things in there. The other thing I noticed was that my food pictures never look as amazing as the ones on the sites I pin from. I wonder if that affects what I pin and what I don't. I think all these women must live in perfectly-decorated, magazine-perfect homes with amazingly sunny kitchens. The pin goes back to this site.

Toffee Chocolate Bars

Base:

• 3/4 cup butter, softened
• 3/4 cup packed brown sugar
• 1 1/2 cups flour

Topping:

• 10 oz. can sweetened condensed milk
• 2 Tablespoons butter
• 1 3/4 cups milk chocolate chips
• 1 1/3 c toffee bits (I probably wouldn't use quite this much again)

To Make Base:

Cream together butter, brown sugar and flour until well blended and mixture sticks together. Press into 9x13 pan. Bake at 350° for 20-25 min or until light golden. Cool while preparing filling.

For Filling:
Heat sweetened condensed milk and butter in heavy pan, stirring constantly over medium heat for 5-10 min or until thickened. (I did this step in a large glass measuring cup in the microwave, stirring after every minute. When I felt like it was getting close, I went to every 30 seconds.) Spread over cooled base. Bake at 350° for 12-15 minutes or until golden. Sprinkle chocolate chips evenly over the top. Bake for 2 minutes longer or until chocolate is shiny and soft. Remove from oven. Spread chocolate evenly. Sprinkle toffee bits on top, pressing lightly into chocolate. Cool completely and cut into bars. This keeps well.

Around Here This Week

Around here this past week, we celebrated Pi Day with College Boy Quiche, which we ate on a day other than Pi Day itself, due to scheduling issues.

Is it OK to eat pie on a non-pi day?? 

I have been playing around with a new Project Life system. I came to the realization that if I documented a photo a day for years and years, my walls would consist of nothing but very large, very cumbersome 12x12 albums. I realized that I needed something that would work to document family history, but would be more manageable size-wise, so I'm going to a monthly recap, using a hybrid method...digital templates that I break apart and put back together with some scrapbook-y stuff.

The templates I'm using are by Cathy Zielske. I took a hybrid scrapbooking (hybrid=part digital stuff, part regular scrapbooking stuff) class from her 2 years ago and went back and reviewed so I could make it work. It's not a perfect system, but something had to give and this will enable me to document without getting bogged down.

I can happily report that I am officially totally caught up on my daughter's mission album. This is only because  she hasn't sent as many pictures this month as she usually does, so I was able to get everything previously sent all tucked away. Bit of a double-edged sword....not as many opportunities to see her face, but caught up. (Picture me weighing these options in my hands and tipping like a scale.) Taking a big cleansing breath with that (and carefully ignoring that I haven't quite finished her day-by-day senior album....lalalalala).

She has a birthday coming up pretty soon, and specifically requested that I make some granola for her. She orders hers special with no nuts and no chewy, sticky fruit. I'm also wondering how it is that my baby can possibly be turning 20. Laws, where does the time go?

The baby Forsythia I planted last year is blooming its little head off. This whole thing doesn't stand higher than 6 or 7 inches off the ground, but it was determined to give us as much of a show as it could possibly manage.

I worked a little more on Christmas cards, this time breaking open a Simon Says Stamp kit.  While I loved the colors of the papers in the kit, the patterns themselves were not what I would usually pick. 

I turned some into thank you cards specifically for Christmas gifts. I did this last year and it was something I really enjoyed. All the designs were from the project sheet included in the kit, or Lucy Abrams and Shari Carroll's websites.

I had a couple that were my favorites. This one was a tweak of one of the cards on the project sheet. I used some new "shine" embossing powder on the snowy background. I also used it on the far right thank you card. The effect is subtle, but really pretty. The green embossing powder for the tree also has some gold flecks in it that make it a little sparkly.

This one is a pretty direct lift from Lucy Abrams. Silver embossing powder and silver thread rolled behind the tree. The hardest part was figuring out how I was going to get the thread to stay put. 

As far as grandkids go, I showed you the photos Eric sent of the girls learning about electricity, but the only other picture that came this week was this one of James. Holy cow, he looks so much bigger than when I saw him 2 months ago. He's started eating some rice cereal. Collin Face Timed us this week to show him eating it. I think some of it got inside his tummy. 

Actually, I did get some pictures of Evan's boys, but they are for a project I'm working on and I will document that maybe next week. 

Electric Company

My son Eric emailed me these pictures of his girls the other day. 

What are they doing, you might ask? 

In Eric's words, "The girls were fiddling around with the outlets on Friday, so I decided we'd learn a little about electricity and safety. I got out some of my old electronics from college physics and showed them how to make circuits to power lights and a fan. They had a good time with it, and Gwen actually figured things out surprisingly well. After that, I talked with them about how much more electricity could come out of the wall and "get them" if they weren't careful. I said that "lightning could come out of there and burn your hand and kill you."

First off, I can't believe Eric still has stuff like this kicking around from college. On second thought, maybe I can. He is his father's son, and I think we still have a file drawer with some of my husband's college notes in it, circa 1980.

 Now if it was me, and once upon a time it was, I would just tell the boys to leave the outlets alone and then threaten them with dire consequences. 

It's always good when your kids do it better than you did. 

Volunteers

I have documented our early spring here already.

 We are ahead of schedule and the blooming things include a small army of volunteers along my front walk. These little violas have returned for the past couple of years. In fact, the biggest clump here, never seemed to really die all winter, maybe because they're fairly close to the house, or maybe they're just that hardy.

Our volunteers this spring even include a lone pansy.

I'm actually not sure what to do with them, whether to let them grow or whether to start pulling them. On the one hand, I just love their little faces so early in the season. On the other, I may end up with viola ground cover eventually, which may not be such a bad thing.

You can see that I have rocks where they are coming up. Maybe this should be a "Stuff I Know" post, but it just struck me looking at all these little purple flowers coming up in that rocky spot, that they've just made the best of where they are...blooming where they're "planted," so to speak. Probably a lesson we can all take to heart. Almost anyone can make it work when they're planted in wonderful, well-fertilized potting soil. It's the few hardy souls that can bloom in the rocks. 

 

Creamy Chicken Enchilada Soup

There are still enough cool days that soup can be tolerated. This isn't too spicy, which you can adjust according to taste with the red pepper flakes.  I found the recipe here. 

Creamy Chicken Enchilada Soup

• ½ large yellow onion
• 1 Tablespoon vegetable oil
• 2 chicken breasts
• 5-6 cups of water
• 1 whole bay leaf
• little bit of salt

 

• 3 large tomatoes (skin peeled off)
• 1 tbs vegetable oil
• ½ large yellow onion (from above, in stock)
• 2 shredded chicken breasts (from above)
• 2½ cups of stock (from above)
• ¼ cup heavy cream
• ¼ tsp red pepper flakes (you can adjust to taste)
• ¼ tsp cumin
• 1 tsp minced fresh cilantro (I left this out. I'm not a fan.)
• Grated Monterrey Jack cheese
• Sour Cream 
• Tortilla chips

In a large pot, preheat the vegetable oil and add sliced onions. Saute for a couple of minutes, until fragrant. Add water and chicken breasts. Bring to boil and add the bay leaf and salt. Lower the heat to medium-low and cook the stock for about 1½ hours. 
Take out the chicken breast, shred it using two forks and set aside. Pour the stock into a separate container and set aside. Discard the bay leaf.

Dipping the tomatoes in really hot/boiling water will help the skins to slip off. Return the pot to the medium heat and add 1 tbs of vegetable oil.

Dice the peeled tomatoes and add them to the pot. Salt the tomatoes a little, so they give out juice faster. Saute for a couple of minutes and add the shredded chicken.
Add the 2½ cups of stock and the onions to the pot and stir well. (You can freeze the remaining stock in an air-tight container and use it in cooking or a quick soup.)
Add red pepper flakes and cumin. Taste to see if you need to add more salt. Cook on medium heat for about 15 minutes.
Add the heavy cream and freshly minced cilantro. Cook for a couple more minutes and serve.
Top off with some tortilla chips, cheese and sour cream before serving.