This & That

Lemon Sugar Cookie Bars

This is the dessert we had for Easter when we had everyone here for dinner, and I wanted something that was a little spring-ish, but not overly involved. I found the recipe here, and having it labeled "Big Batch" was enough to convince me. I think "big batch" anything almost automatically goes into the Mom Food lexicon. Added to that, I made the bar part early in the week and froze it until Easter morning, when I set it on the counter to thaw, then frosted it. Not having to cram something more complicated into the day was a bonus. 

Lemon Sugar Cookie Bars

BARS:

1 cup butter, softened

1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese, softened

1 1/2 cups sugar

1 egg

1 Tablespoon lemon zest (loosely packed--I just used the zest of 1 good-sized lemon)

1 teaspoon lemon juice

2 1/2 cups flour

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

 

FROSTING:

1/2 cup butter, softened

4 ounces cream cheese, softened

3 1/2 cups powdered sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 teaspoon milk

4 drops food coloring

dash salt

2 Tablespoons lemon juice

 

 

Preheat oven to 350°.

For the bars, combine the butter, softened cream cheese, and sugar. Cream together for 2 minutes. Add the egg and beat for an additional minute. Add the lemon zest and lemon juice. Mix to combine.

In a separate bowl mix together flour,  baking soda, baking powder and salt. Mix well. The batter will be thick and sticky. Spray a large sheet pan (the one I used was 11"x17") with cooking spray and scoop the dough onto it. With floured hands, spread the batter evenly in the pan. (The original recipe says to spray a rubber spatula with cooking spray to spread it, but that didn't work well for me.)

Bake for 20 minutes, or until the center is cooked through. You don't want them to get too dark, or they will be dry, so watch them carefully. Remove from the oven and allow to cool completely.

To make the frosting combine butter, cream cheese,  powdered sugar, vanilla, milk, yellow food coloring, salt, and lemon juice into your and mix until combined and smooth. Add more powdered sugar if it's too thin. Top the bars with the frosting and smooth it out. Add some sprinkles if you want.

 

2 is NOT Terrible

We have a birthday today involving this sweet little guy. 

Our Levi is 2 years old today! How is that possible that he's gone from brand-new, to 2 in the blink of an eye??

He has the best little grin.

He likes Lightening McQueen, animals of all kinds, and almost always would rather look at Ollie or Gus when we Face Time.

Love this little one! Happy birthday, Levi!

Around Here This Week

Again we have a Friday edition of AHTW, because tomorrow is a special day. So around here this week....

Things have been heating up a bit, which makes me tremble in fear. This was yesterday's afternoon temperature, which is about as warm as I like it to get. Today we're supposed to be in the mid-80's, which will have me reaching for the AC switch.

A lot of our activities this week have revolved around the garden. First off, I'm going to apologize to my son, Evan, for the really great shot of his rear, but last Saturday we were in the garden with the grandkids planting potatoes, beets, onions and lettuce.

My boys were back on Monday and we put in the first planting of peas, and even some tomatoes. It's technically a little early to have these outside in the dirt. Our average last frost date is the middle of May, but we decided to see if we could push them a little and put these walls o' water on them to protect them from any cold temperatures that might happen. We'll take them off soon if it looks like we're going to finally stay warm. The best possible outcome is that we might be eating BLT's a little earlier than normal.

We put a few more onions in, and they are the "Candy" variety we like. We got the starts at D&B, for you local folks.

Our tomatoes. We'll plant more, but this will get us started. The red wire things are the trellises for the peas. We'll put in another planting of those, in a couple weeks.

The rhubarb is coming along well. In about 3 weeks I'm hoping we can start using it.

My husband and Bryce are in the midwest this weekend chasing turkeys. This came the day he left. Kind of an eclectic, interesting mix. As usual, there was a "Please Water Me Daily!" tag attached. Bryce will be home for the summer, taking the second half of the Chemistry class from hell at the local community college. He'll head back down to Utah in the fall. Maybe I will get some help with the puppy, on occasion.

Speaking of Gus, here's a picture I took of him yesterday. He's growing quickly and the housebreaking training is very slowly getting better. We're not quite friends yet, and I'm still not really happy about the whole thing, but at least more of the poop is going outside rather than inside. With my husband gone, I don't even get a break from poop duty in the evenings. It's like having a newborn, only newborns can wear diapers. He's cute, but labor intensive.

I triumphantly finished off the last small house block and have pulled out the packet of supplies to finish the quilt. It's going to be a process, but with no hubby to derail my plan this weekend, I'm hoping to get the next step started.

First I have to dye the blocks so all the background fabrics match a little better. That's step 1......check.

Here's last week's Project Life app pages, documenting what went on.

And sent to me from the kids and grandkids this week there was......well, nothing.

 

#savethepeaches

I mentioned last weekend that we've had weather cold enough to threaten our precious peach crop. This tree, and the exact variety is unknown to us....we just know it's tasty, seems to have an every-other-year bearing pattern. We get a large crop one year and a small one the next. This year is an "on" year, so we really want to be able to maximize the production, but when we saw it was going to get down to 28° one night last week, we had to initiate "Save the Peaches" protocol. 

A couple of years ago, Evan's family gave us some non-LED Christmas lights as a Christmas present.....not for putting on a pine tree, but for putting on a fruit tree in just this type of emergency. And it is an emergency in the Allan family. We take our peaches very seriously. My husband considers peach season second only to hunting season, and several of my boys are right behind him. Keep in mind that it was Collin who brought the baby tree home one day, carefully planted it and left me with strict instructions not to let it die.  Anyway, non-LED lights generate a little bit of heat, so the first order of business was to find the lights and string them on the peach tree. Evan came over to help that happen.

It's a bit of a process, because the blossoms are very fragile. Just draping the lights on the branches knocked several off onto the ground.

When my husband got home from work, we covered the whole tree with a big tarp and tried to secure it the best we could. 

How did my hubby secure it? With straw string, of course, because at our house, it's either that or duct tape.

Now as an aside, here is the dang plum tree. I've discussed before how I'm bitter about this plum tree. Years ago, I was assured by the happy little plum tree seller that this tree would yield the lovely red-fleshed plums I wanted. Liar. 5 years into growing the dang thing I get my first crop only to find that the plums are just normal, everyday yellow-innard plums. I'm still angry. Every stinking spring this tree erupts into a froth of literally thousands of white blossoms that cannot be killed no matter how cold it gets. But hope springs eternal and I'm really hoping that the 28° night did it's job and I can have my revenge. No Christmas lights for you!

We turned on the lights....

...and they glowed beautifully. We're really hoping they did the job. 

The only snag we ran into was that the wind really howled the next day and the flapping tarp beat off a bunch more blossoms. We still have a lot, but we mourn the loss of those we couldn't save. Only time will tell if our experiment worked. We're crossing our fingers.

Broccoli Cheddar Soup

As far as dinners went this week, it was concert week with the community chorale I sing with, so there were several nights I was out singing. I really wanted to use up/repurpose some of the leftovers in the fridge without having to do something really involved. I made some Alfredo sauce which I put over some noodles I had floating around in the cupboard. 

I had mozzarella cheese, a little bit of Italian sausage and some cooked chicken in the fridge, and tomato pizza sauce in the freezer, so I put together a couple of pizzas.

One was Italian sausage,

and one was chicken alfredo. They both worked well and there were leftovers that came in handy.

As the weather warms up, soup appears less and less on my table, and stir fry, sandwiches, and dinner salads take its place...anything that involves less heat to the house. I love soup, mostly because you throw everything into a pot and you get something that tastes wonderful in the end, that warms you inside and out. (Hello, Mom Food.) I found this recipe in a food magazine I found at Target (LOVE Target), put out by Allrecipes. It touts itself as a copycat of Panera's version of this soup, but I've never eaten at Panera, so I can't say if it is or it isn't. It makes me sad to see soup season leave.

Broccoli Cheddar Soup

• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1/2 onion, chopped
• 1/4 cup melted butter
• 1/4 cup flour
• 2 cups milk
• 2 cups chicken stock
• 1 1/2 cups coarsely chopped broccoli florets
• 1 cup matchstick-cut carrots
• 1 stalk celery, thinly sliced
• 2 1/2 cups shredded sharp Cheddar cheese
• salt and ground black pepper to taste

Melt 1 tablespoon butter in a skillet over medium-high heat. Saute onion in hot butter until translucent, about 5 minutes. Decrease the heat to medium low and melt the rest of the butter in the pan. Add the flour and cook, whisking constantly, 3 minutes. 

Gradually pour milk and chicken broth into flour mixture while whisking constantly. Bring to a boil over medium high heat. Reduce heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, 20 minutes.  Add vegetables and simmer until vegetables are tender, about 20 minutes.

Reduce heat to low, then stir Cheddar cheese into vegetable mixture until cheese melts. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Around Here This Week

So around here this week....

The weather has been a little bipolar, to put it mildly. This was the temperature last Sunday afternoon.

And this was what happened on Monday. 

Didn't seem to bother the poop-filled puppy in the least.

But as I've said many times, this is just spring in Idaho. You all know I'm a fan of cold weather, but even this is just slightly ridiculous in the middle of April. That said, I've seen it happen in June so I can't guarantee we're out of the woods yet. 

It did cause us to embark upon a "Save the Peaches" project, which I'll tell you about on another day.

After the wild mood swings, the weather settled into something like this, which is totally in my comfort zone. I've had the window open 24/7.

The spring flowers are liking it.

The rock cress is going nuts.

And it must positively be spring, because the ritual pot of pansies has been planted.

There was, however, something in the spring air that wreaked havoc with my husband's eyes. We have absolutely no idea what set him off, but this was....unpleasant. Fortunately, after a couple of days things were pretty much back to normal.

My mom loves to grow Amaryllis bulbs. When I was at her house this week I had to take a picture of this one. It had 11 blooms on it, which is the most either of us have ever seen from 1 bulb.

This week's Project Life app pages....

....documenting stuff we've already talked about.

Sent to me from the kids and grandkids this week, I got this picture of Caroline helping Ephraim get some chow. He's doing really well on solids.

....and there was this picture of Emmett enjoying the spring weather. Everyone needs some dinosaur bubbles on a nice spring day.

That Kind of a Week

It was a card making week last week.

I'd run really low on masculine birthday cards and needed to replenish the supply, so I dug out an older Simon Says Stamp card kit that had paper I thought would work and just went to town. I got a total of 16 cards done, making multiples of a few different designs, and have some small floral papers still to work with.

I started with this design, which was done with a recent My Favorite Things card sketch.

Then moved on to this design, also done with a My Favorite Things sketch.

This one was similar to a card on the kit's instruction sheet by Jennifer McGuire.

By now the patterned paper chunks were getting a little smaller. The shaped paper cam in the kit.

I like to do a little something on the envelopes, too.

There's a part of me that gets a little OCD when it comes to making the papers stretch as far as they can go.

I may have gotten just a little carried away.

Moving away from those manly cards, I did several with a new stamp set I wanted to try out. It got a work out, starting with this one done for a My Favorite Things color challenge. Definitely not a color scheme I would have tried on my own, so I guess it was one of those stretching, growing experiences.

I bought the stamp set because of a card I'd seen on this blog, and if you go there, you can see it's almost a direct lift of hers.

I used it for this card, which I did for a birthday card challenge. 

Another one almost directly lifted from the I'm in Haven blog. She has a very clean style that really appeals to me. That and the fact that I don't have a lot of crafting time available since most of my life these days is spent babysitting Gus, but the stamp set got a workout. 

This one was done for another site's color scheme challenge. Love these colors together. So yes, it was a card making week. I was hoping that this week was going to be a sewing week, but it's not starting out in a very optimistic way.

Stuff I Know #21--The Fallacy of Winning

I feel obligated to put the disclaimer out there with each one of these posts, just so everyone knows where I'm coming from...

--It's my blog

--They're my thoughts

--They're for my family

--Take them or leave them

--You're welcome, or....that's just too darn bad

Which brings me to Stuff I Know #21, which is......You're not always right.

I realize that this may come as a huge shock to certain members of my family. A revelatory moment, if you will. But I might as well just put it out there and burst the bubble now rather than have you live in some kind of fantasy land, despite how much you might like it there. Nope, you're not always right. And do you know how I know this startling fact? Because we're all human, none of us are perfect, and therefore we don't know everything. 

You might really, really want to be right....all the time. In fact, you might be so convinced of your perpetual rightness that you will use all your amazing logic and your ability to spin that logic to present your way of thinking over, and over, and over again until anyone who dares think differently is mentally exhausted and rolls over like a possum playing dead. It becomes a competition instead of a collaboration, and you mentally high-five yourself and think, "I WIN!!!!" But do you really? 

I'll tell you a little story. Many years ago, I was in a discussion with a few family members concerning something about which they felt strongly. I presented another viewpoint and one of them looked at me like I'd grown 2 heads and said, and these were the exact words, "Well, that's a stupid idea." Now how do you think this affected my relationship with this person? And why do you think I've remembered that moment with such crystal clarity over many, many years? Who wins in these situations?

You can feel right all you want. You can be so right all the time that people will actually avoid discussing things with you. Why? Because you make them feel less than. You make them feel like they're not entitled to their own thoughts and feelings, because they might be different from yours. You make them feel stupid. You make them feel like they are always the ones who need to change to be acceptable to you, because...you're right. You do what you want to do, because you're right.

So, if you're right all the time, how do you think that affects the people in your closest relationships? Do they feel like they can be heard? Do they feel like they can contribute? Do they feel valued? Do they feel equal? Do they feel loved? 

So I guess the questions you might want to ask yourself as you ponder these thoughts is.....Does your need to be right overwhelm your consideration for others and their feelings? Do you need to win more than you need to make someone feel like they matter more than the point being made? And conversely, can you stand up for someone who's on the receiving end of "rightness" even if you agree with the one administering the "rightness," because your relationship is more important then what's being discussed?

I have no hard and fast answers, mostly because I think we all want to be right. It's human nature. What I do know is that no one wants to be wrong all the time so that you can be right all the time.

Funeral Potatoes

I know you've been wondering when I'd get around to posting this, right? Just counting the days, marking them off on your calendar, looking at your watch multiple times a day. Oh wait....I'm the only one who wears a watch any more.  

Before that, though, this happened. My husband felt the need for some chocolate chip cookies, so I indulged him. I can never make this recipe without cranking out a triple batch, because I have those recipe quantities memorized, and really if you're going to make the mess, you might as well make enough to freeze some.  So, funeral potatoes....

Funeral potatoes are nothing more than a type of potato casserole. They're called such because they're an LDS staple and are very often served, along with ham and various salads, by ward members to families after a funeral service. Everyone has their own variation on the theme, but this is the one I've settled on over the years. I found it in an old freezer cooking cookbook and it does, indeed, freeze very well. I will often make a full recipe, then split it into 2 8x8 pans and cook one to serve and freeze the other. I recently tried a new, and admittedly more time-consuming recipe for these on Easter using regular, not frozen potatoes. It was really good IMHO, but several family members missed the regular recipe. Remember what I said about holiday meals being written in stone? I'll keep the other recipe for other occasions, but will probably use the standard one for holidays. You can stir some ham into these potatoes and serve them with a salad for a good leftover meal.

Funeral Potatoes (Serves 6-8)

• 28-32 oz. frozen, shredded hash browns
• 1/4 cup chopped onion
• 16 oz. sour cream
• 1 can cream of whatever soup (or use 1 1/2 cups white sauce, which is what I do)
• 1 1/2 cups shredded cheddar or Swiss cheese (for Easter we usually do Swiss)

Optional fancy topping:

• 2 cups corn flakes, crushed
• 1/3 cup melted butter

Thaw potatoes slightly and break the big chunks apart. Combine in a large bowl with onion, sour cream, soup OR white sauce, and cheese. Spread in a greased 9x13 pan and bake at 350° for about an hour. 

If you're feeling extra fancy, you can mix the corn flakes and butter, and sprinkle them over the potatoes before baking for a crunchy topping.

If desired, you can put the potatoes in the pan and freeze them, unbaked, for a later time. They can also be split between 2 smaller pans and frozen as well. Thaw before baking.

Around Here This Week

So around here this week....

We've nearly been blown away by the wind, which is fairly typical of this time of year. Spring in Idaho is nothing if not unpredictable. It was cold Thursday night, and I'm a little worried about my peach tree which is just getting ready to bud out.

We had a couple of family days this past week. It was Frederick's baptism last Saturday. In the LDS church, children are generally baptized when they're 8 years old. By this age, they usually know the difference between a good choice and a bad one.

These are family moments at their best, and I'm grateful for every, single one of them.

My mother was able to be there, so we got a 4 generation picture.

We handed the camera off to a non-family member to take a picture of all of us together, but not one of them was in focus, so we take what we can get. This is all the in-town family right now.

Sunday was Caroline's birthday, so we convened for Sunday dinner and a family party. My daughter-in-law, Elisa, made the cake, which is a facsimile of Maui's hook from the movie, "Moana."

Caroline's just a bit obsessed with that particular character.

This picture is for my friend, Heidi, who loves to see the faces Caroline makes in our family pictures. Let's move on to a Gus update, shall we?

Yeah.....you can see that not much has changed in that department. I know I've posted a similar picture but trust me, this is a different episode.

The desk chaos this week. I've been working on some cards, which I will post in coming days.

These are last week's  Project Life app pages.

Still finding this the easiest way to document life right now.

Sent to me from the kids and grandkids this week....Here's the update on Collin's wrist. He saw a hand specialist this past week, who casted him and says 8 weeks should do it. That's better than the 3 months he was told initially. Note that he gets his elbow for the whole process, which I'm trying not to be bitter about. I want him to have it....I just think it's not fair that I didn't get mine.

From Marc's family, Levi demonstrating his cool factor.

And where Isaac fell asleep this week. He was on his way home from school, he was even unbuckled to come into the house, awake but obviously drowsy, and when his mama checked on him this is where he was.

I also got this picture from Marc with the caption, "I love spring in Idaho...." He'd better get used to it, because it looks like he'll be headed back our direction when he finishes his residency. :) That will put another family in town, which makes us all happy.

And lastly, the BYU Men's Chorus sang in this week's campus devotional, so I tuned in to the BYU cable channel to catch it. Last time they did this, Bryce got a couple of dandy close-ups, but this time around this was the best I got. You can click on the link to see his face a few minutes into the broadcast, right after the opening prayer. Granted, it's not a close up of his face, but it's his nonetheless.