This & That

Butter Cream Chicken

I tried this recipe earlier this week. It was good....so good. So good, in fact, that you'll notice there is no picture of it. That's because we were snarfing it down like we'd never get another meal. You'll also note that the protein here is chicken. What???? Don't you own the exotic meat-o-rama freezers where the deer and the antelope play?? Why yes....yes I do. But because I was raised a city girl, every once in a while I just have to eat something domesticated, much to my husband's dismay. That said, he inhaled 3 or 4 pieces of this chicken. (A word usually said with great scorn and disdain by the men in my house.) I found the recipe here and you'll have to go there to actually see a picture of the finished product.

Butter Cream Chicken

• 4 chicken breasts (I used a combination of chicken breast for me and boneless chicken thighs to soften the blow for the guys)
• 1 1/2 sleeves Ritz Cracker, ground into crumbs
• Olive Oil
• 1 C chicken broth
• 4 T butter
• 1 C  + 2 T half and half, divided
• 1/2 t thyme, dried 
• 2 T cornstarch
• salt and pepper

Cut the chicken breasts into 3 or 4 pieces, depending on their size. I cut the thighs in half. Place chicken pieces in a gallon ziploc bag and pound them out to flatten them a little. You want them to be about the same thickness so they'll cook evenly.

Smash up the crackers into very fine crumbs. You can do this in a food processor or, since I was feeling a little aggressive, I used a rolling pin and bashed them. Dip the chicken into the crumbs, coating both sides well. 

Heat a skillet over medium to medium-high heat and put about 3 Tablespoons olive oil in. Brown the chicken on one side, 3-4 minutes and then turn and brown on the other side until the chicken is cooked through. You may have to do this in 2 batches so you don't crowd the skillet too much.

Remove chicken to a plate and keep warm. Deglaze the pan with the butter and chicken broth, scraping the bottom to get the good bits left in the pan. Add the 1 cup 1/2 & 1/2 and thyme. Stir and allow to come to a boil. 

In the meantime, mix the cornstarch and the 2 Tablespoons 1/2 & 1/2. Pour this into the pan, stirring well while you pour. If you don't do this, the mixture will coagulate in a sheet on the bottom of the pan and won't dissolve and thicken your sauce correctly. (Ask me how I know this.....)

Serve chicken with sauce. Serves 6 and takes 30-45 minutes to put together.

Around Here This Week

Around here this week, there was a little catch up from the holiday weekend.

 There was apparently a monsoon  here in town that I missed while we were at the cabin and the carpet in the basement got damp so we had to pull it up to dry things out. In reality, though, our little rain shower doesn't hold a candle to what my son in Oklahoma and his family have been dealing with. Roger puts in an appearance at the end of this:

 

They've had something like 27" of rain this month...close to their yearly total.

I've been doing various things for camp. I'm introducing a new song this Sunday. Awesome, awesome song for camp. It has a great beat and you can dance to it....name that show. And now you have the visual of me actually dancing around the kitchen as I listen to it.  You can listen to it and watch an accompanying video here.

I've also been trying to pick my way through figuring out how to get camp shirts in the works. I have this design idea, but need to get it translated to something computerized so the t-shirt printing place can actually work with it. This is my next big hurdle now that porta-potties are a go. ETA: My amazing DIL, Jan, took this design and not only made into something the t-shirt place can use, but turned it into something truly beautiful. I'll save the unveiling for closer to camp, but I was just blown away by what she did.

My daughter checked in with this picture. Her Korean companion finished her mission and has gone home. This new gal came out with my daughter in her MTC group. They are buddies and as an added extra bonus, they wear the same size, so they have effectively doubled their wardrobes. Oh, happy day! That's my daughter's blouse her companion is wearing and I don't recognize the one my daughter is wearing. :) Oh, it was raining when they took this picture. They weren't just randomly dancing around with umbrellas.

From my kids and grandkids this week....

Eric made himself some cheese. Yes....cheese. One of the things he asked for for his birthday was a cheese making book. This is spread on some toast with a little salt and pepper and some pepper jelly. The excitement is building because he and his family will be coming to visit us next week.

 

James is apparently pulling himself up on things. Here he has discovered the dishwasher and I'm thinking he's pretty proud of himself.

Marc sent me this picture of Isaac with this message, "This is what happens when you throw a kicking and screaming tantrum for about an hour." I feel for my son and DIL, but Isaac's still pretty cute.

And in closing for this week, I was having a pretty crappy day when I saw this. It was a tender mercy that reminded me I have many things to be thankful for, especially when things aren't working out quite the way I'd like.

Planning Right Down to the Ground

Since the girl's camp I'm in charge of this summer will be taking place on our cabin property, my husband and I took some time to wander and plan.

We are trying to scope out places for the various events to take place...wondering how close we want things to be to the river.

And how to keep girls out of the river when we want them to be. I mean, late July and this is going to look awfully tempting. 

We were looking for places to set up tents and I started to notice things close to the ground that were kind of interesting. There was this wavy, purple-y grass.

And these yucky fungus things. They will probably be gone in July as well, since things will dry out pretty well by then.

The wild strawberries are blooming. I have no idea if they actually get berries on them. I've never seen any, but that may be because the wildlife is so efficient.

There may be some visitors in camp.

My guess is that these will also be gone in July and we will have a whole new set of wildflowers to look at.

Cabin-ing

We spent Memorial Day weekend at the cabin.

It was a bit of a working weekend. We'd work early and then the guys would go look for bears in the evenings. My husband cut down some diseased pine trees near the place. Not beetles this time, something else that is making its way up and down the valley. Crimeny, you think you have one thing under control and something else starts in. I think the blaze orange chaps are an especially nice touch.

We started the day with a good breakfast...

...and then did things like tilting the solar panel to summer position. This was very necessary. I changed all the bed linens and did a spring cleaning laundry. The washing machine really uses up the solar power. It's times like this when we miss all the slave boys.

We have a big burning pile at the cabin. You can see the height of it here but the breadth is pretty astonishing. We had hopes of burning it while we were there, but it was just too wet.

We took my mother with us. She loves Ollie, just like everyone else in the family. Since the guys were out looking for bears after dinner, the evening movies were pretty much chick flick-o-rama. 

In between bouts of spring cleaning laundry, I did just a little stitching. The weather was gorgeous while we were there, alternating between sun and the occasional rain shower. I set out The Obelisk of Nectar (and you have to say it in that booming Charlton Heston 10 Commandments God voice) and we had a couple of little visitors:

 

 

 

James Visits the Cabin...and Hunts Bears

We had a short stay at the cabin while James was here. He and his mama and my husband went up early the day before they left to go home. Bryce had to sing with his college choir that night, so I drove up with him later in the evening. 

From all appearances, James was pretty excited to go bear hunting.

But when they got up to the sitting spot, it started to rain.

My husband, being the ever-resourceful Eagle Scout/outdoorsy man that he is, built a lean-to out of a tarp, a blanket and some telescoping shooting sticks. 

They stayed warm and dry, as long as James wasn't trying to grab the tarp and send some rain showers inside. They sat there for an hour and a half, but no bears were out tonight.

Still, the view was pretty good from their vantage point.

The next morning was misty and cool....just perfect for me.

I'm not sure you can see it that easily, but there is a deer in the middle of this picture, just to the right of the main tree trunk you can see here. There were two of them wandering around in the willows by the cabin in the early morning.

Didn't want to let this boy go home.

And he didn't want to leave Ollie.

Adventures in Crawling

James is already crawling around. He can get just about anywhere. I love this series of photos. He sees the camera and sets off after it, only to be disappointed when Gramma doesn't let him have it:

The camera wasn't the only thing he went after:

 

This Boy...

This boy has a birthday today.

 He's 29...and really doesn't look too happy about it here.

His one-and-only sister would tell him, "You're so OLD!" but she's gone right now, so I feel duty bound to carry out the tradition in her place. "You're so OLD!!" (And we will not discuss how old that makes me...)

He is having a great time being a dad to James and I love watching their interactions. 

He works very hard at the Air Force JAG thing, and it's still hard for me to wrap my head around people saluting him. My husband had that same experience when he stopped in for a visit last month.

Love this boy and his little family....Happy Birthday to my Collin! I love you!!

Around Here This Week

Around here this week we did get the rest of the garden in.

And we had our first harvest of lettuce and spinach. One of the bags is lettuce and the other is spinach. I think I will earnestly try get a fall crop in this year. I thought about it last year, but it usually comes in the middle of canning and I just can't seem to get the energy or desire to start over again. We'll see.

We also pulled some rhubarb. The plant is enormous now. Look how big it is! It looks big enough to eat Bryce whole, and this was after we'd pulled several stalks. I'm going to freeze some, but will also make my husband's grandmother's recipe for rhubarb "cobbler"...essentially rhubarb with white cake on top. He will be very happy. I have a couple of other rhubarb recipes I want to try out. I'm not a huge fan, but my husband loves the stuff....with enough sugar, of course.

The guys took care of the burning pile in the pasture. You might remember that this was how it looked.

And how it ended up.

My daughter checked in with this picture of shirts given to them. Her Korean companion is going home this week. I'm anticipating that she'll stay in Kansas another 6 weeks and then probably head to the Independence, MO, visitor's center for the remaining time of her mission.

There was also this picture. She's holding a rat. Snakes, rats....what's next??

Ollie has been on the lookout for rock chucks in the pasture. We're not fond of them because they eat the pasture grass meant for the horses. Ollie loves to chase them around and had one cornered in the wood pile. Unfortunately, he couldn't get any closer since the darn thing was hiding out in there somewhere.

I was able to play with some paper this week. I got caught up with my daughter's mission album, chronicling her adventures with Ninja Turtle shirts and rats. I also made a few graduation cards for kids I know in the ward.

And a set of 4 Christmas cards. This is a tweaked take on a card from Kristina Werner's 2014 Holiday Card Series. Her card had rows and rows and rows of hearts stamped in, um, non-traditional Christmas colors. I decided to forgo the endless stamping and the non-traditional Christmas colors and simplify.

On the grandchild front, I got this picture from my DIL on her way home from their visit here. She was having some chocolate ice cream and gave James a couple of small bites. This was what happened when she decided he'd had enough.

Isaac has decided he's a very big boy and wants to eat like his parents do. So he now sits at the big table with no high chair try and must have a fork to eat with, although Marc tells me that he'll get food on the fork, then take it off with his hand and eat it. 

James Meets Ollie

James is at just the right age to be totally fascinated by Ollie.

Both of them approached each other cautiously.

James thought he might want to kiss Ollie. He's all about those open-mouthed fish kisses right now.

But he wasn't impressed with that initially.

He thought about it a bit.

And then decided Ollie wasn't such a bad guy and maybe he'd like to get to know him better.

James

Just a few random pictures of James while he was here. 

I have oh-so-many more that will be coming in the days ahead, but these were just cute. 

He loves his Uncle Bryce. (Note to self...work on the backgrounds of the photos I take. Hard to do in a room full of dead things, but still.)

And Uncle Bryce loves him right back. 

He loves to try to balance on his very tippy toes.

 Usually that doesn't work out too well yet.

He's just pretty cute.