Loaded

My apple trees are FULL! I knew good things would come from all those gorgeous apple blossoms this spring. Now if we can just keep them from getting wormy . . . See how low the branches are to the ground right now? They might be touching the ground in September!


In the background Lane is watering our newly-planted raspberries. He is tending to them very carefully. They have a few tiny raspberries on them, and one died. Mmmm . . . anticipating some raspberry jam next summer.

Bring on the applesauce! I LOVE to can applesauce. It makes the whole house smell so deliciously autumn-y. AND the great thing about apples is they will last until I get around to canning them, not like tempermental peaches that need to be put up almost immediately.

Loaded - Filled with a great quantity

July 17, 2009

Imitate

All good meals have green onions in them. They are a staple at my house. Can you believe I used this WHOLE bunch on dinner tonight?

All good meals also involve garlic. I almost never use less than 3 cloves in anything, so beware of that if I should ever bring you food. This is the prep for tonight's dinner.

Some of that eventually turned into pico de gallo. Tomatoes, onions, peppers, garlic, salt & pepper . . . Isn't it pretty? I have been know to just eat the pico with a spoon.

My chimis getting ready to go in the oven. This is one of our favorite dinners, and a great way to use up left over chicken.

Imitate - To copy or use the style of.

July 16, 2009

Sometimes I think I'm Cafe Rio. This is my own version of a chicken chimi, pico de gallo and cilantro lime rice. So, so good, and it works for both summer and winter meals.

Chimis

( I don't really measure stuff, so this is my best guess)

Shredded chicken (I just use whatever is left over, about 1 1/2 chicken breasts is about right for our family)

Shredded cheese - I don't know how much, 1/2 c maybe?

Green onion

About 1/2 t dried oregano or 1 t fresh

1 t ground cumin

Salsa - enough to hold it all together

Combine all that and put it in a tortilla. I prefer to use the big flour ones, but since I couldn't find any in my freezer, I used the smaller corn ones. If I have the flour ones, I put the filling in and fold in all the sides like a chimi should be, but since I just had the corn tortillas I just rolled it up enchilada style.

Brush the tortillas with melted butter. And I do mean butter. Margarine has no place here. This will make them all nice and crispy. Bake at 400 for about 25 minutes.

Then for the rice, I just cook my rice on the stovetop, using chicken broth. My no-fail-super-fluffy rice is on another day's blog. I also add some lime zest to the rice while it's cooking. While I wait for that to get done, in a small bowl I combine the juice of 1 lime (see, you really do need that Pampered Chef citrus press - $17.00 and worth every penny), about 1-ish T sugar, and some cilantro. When the rice is done, pour that over the hot rice and mix it together. I also add some green onion, but that's just me.

Add a nice green salad, and it's a quick, easy, delicious dinner.

For those who are not yet aware, Walmart has their school supplies out. I know this because I went to Walmart today to fill Lane's prescription, thinking it was one of those $4 deals, and get more low dose aspirin for Addie. They said it would take about 20 minutes to fill the prescription so I went wandering. That is just never a good thing to do at Walmart. So I found that the school supplies were out. I love when they put them out so I can stock up on EVERYTHING I might use during the course of the year, but I didn't know they would be out so soon and felt overwhelmed and unprepared. I hadn't checked to see what, if anything, we had left over from last year. So I just bought whatever I thought we might need. This includes 25 boxes of crayons. Yes, 25. We go through a lot of crayons and since the kids are forever telling me of a birthday party they were invited to about 30 minutes before the party starts, it's beneficial to have crayons on hand. I got tons of pens - black ink only. I have an aversion to blue. Filler paper, spiral notebooks, composition books, I got it all. They were out of those Bic mechanical pencils that I know Taylor likes, so I'll have to get them on another trip. So all that added up to about $30, which isn't too bad for everything I got, but I wasn't planning on getting anything. So I went back to get the prescription only to find out that it cost $30, it wasn't one of their $4 ones. Bummer. Once I got home I remembered that I had forgotten to get AAA batteries, after stomping around the house last night looking all over the place for some. We have 3 full and 1 part package of AA batteries, but no AAAs. Typical.

Cool

Jack was in charge of dinner today. That means he was supposed to plan the meal, as well as help prepare it. He planned it all right, but then got involved in a big Wii game with 3 of his friends, and I didn't have the heart to make him stop. So I made his dinner. He wanted his favorite, potato casserole. Not exactly summer fare, but we all like it and if there should be any leftovers, they warm up nicely for lunch the next day.





Just as chicken dishes must be served with rice and beef dishes must be served with potatoes, all potato dishes must be served with carrots. Always fresh, never EVER frozen, and steamed in the microwave for about 6 minutes is just right.

Naturally, my pictures are in the wrong order again. This is my potato casserole just before going into the oven. Its a little extra creamy because I had a little extra sour cream, but not enough extra to do anything with so I just threw it in. But isn't that the genius of casseroles - just throwing stuff in?

Just in case you need to know how to make potato casserole:

8 potatoes, baked and cut into chunks.

1 stick of butter. Yes, you heard me. Butter. No margarine, please.

1 can cream of chicken soup

8 oz. sour cream

Grated cheese. I don't know how much. Just till it looks good.

Combine all the above and put in a casserole dish. Sprinkle top of casserole with crushed corn flakes. Bake at 350 for 30 minutes.

Yeah, it's funeral potatoes. But this way it is a meal, not a side dish. No hash browns. Real, Idaho russet potatoes cut into large chunks. It is easily hearty enough for a meal, even with Jack in the house. We usually even have enough left over 1 or 2 single serve lunches. But it has to be real baked potatoes. The hash brown short-cut takes away from the filling-ness of this dish and makes it a side dish, not a meal. And as stated above, carrots must always accompany this meal. If I had more time today I would have also made some cheddar biscuits and I was out of salad. So we had cantaloupe.

Cooling - Giving or suggesting relief from heat.

July 15, 2009

So after spending time in the hot kitchen preparing dinner, I needed a cool drink. This has become a favorite summer time drink at our house. It is just a half of a lime, pressed in my handy-dandy Pampered Chef citrus press (which no home should be without) and ginger ale. I always toss in a cherry just for kicks.

Demolish, almost

Almost - Slightly short of; not quite; nearly.

July 13, 2009

Tomatoes (almost, and tomato) in July! I've never had tomatoes this early! We had to plant our garden in pots due to the back yard demolition (see POD below) and everything is doing so well! Maybe I'll have to stick with the pots. And, as a very important bonus, no weeding! We had a bunch of cinderblocks left over from yet another back yard demolition project, so we leveled out a spot and laid the cinderblocks into a sort of "patio" for the pots. Other than the fact that we have to hand water them since there is no working sprinkler in the area, it is working out very well. Next spring, if not earlier, Lane will get back to his favorite yard project of all: sprinkler moving. Don't let him kid you. He'll say what a pain it is to move sprinklers around, but really it's his favorite thing to do. All winter long he tells me of some new plan or another of how things would be so much better if that one sprinker was moved about 2 feet one direction or another. I have always teased him since we've been home owners that the first sign of spring isn't the robin redbreast, it's Lane digging holes in the yard and shopping for new sprinklers.

Demolish - to tear down or break up

July 14, 2009

Ah, the demolition. My parents hired someone to build this terraced sort of retaining wall. There is 2 levels of it, and it goes 2/3 of the way across the yard. The long way. Perhaps once upon a time it was well constructed, but it has been falling down for about 2 years now. In fact, Lane knocked some of it down with a tiller. So it's coming out. Parts of it will go down with a good, swift kick, and other parts are incredibly tough. He's trying to bring it down with a sledge hammer, so it will be slow going but this is the small section he brought down today before he got too hot and tired of swinging that sledge hammer. We'll get it down eventually, and by we, of course I mean him. So many projects . . .

Tedious, Task

Tedious - Tiresome by reason of length, slowness, or dullness; boring.

July 10, 2009

On top of my desk I have a basket. Into this basket I toss anything to be filed, such as receipts that I have entered into my checkbook register but need to be kept, bills paid neatly marked with the date and method paid, pay stubs, bank receipts, as well as other things that need to be filed away for future reference. Also in this basket goes all the Maceys receipts and box tops to be saved until next school year. Unfortunately, after that it gets very ugly. I have found 3 credit cards for accounts that I no longer have, 2 party invitations for parties that are long past, my long list of user names and passwords for online account access, the birth certificate for a cabbage patch baby I know nothing about owning, the user manual for my old camera, the install disk for a printer I no longer own, instructions on registering Taylor for 9th grade, a box (ok, a half box) of colored pencils, 2 dice and an assistant scoutmaster badge (WTH???). I don't enjoy filing, and so I typically only tackle this basket when it gets so full that it all starts to slide off it's perch on my desk hutch onto my computer keyboard. I think I have about another 2 months before it reaches that point. I hate filing . . . HATE with the white hot passion of a thousand suns, hate.

Task - a function to be performed; an objective.

July 11, 2009

So I used my free time today to get caught up on a few things. I decided to go clean my sewing room (see POD, Procrastinate). Turns out, under that huge pile of stuff was an almost-finished Christmas pillow. I know, I know, Christmas was 6 months ago, but as it turns out, Christmas is also 6 months away. So we'll call it a jump start rather than a lost opportunity. I got the scrapbooks all caught up. By caught up I mean that all the non-photo stuff is now in the books. I do the photos on the computer, which as it turns out is about a year behind. But since that is stored on the computer and not piled on my table, it doesn't count as part of the mess.


Lane and Jack went with Lane's parents down to the cabin for the weekend. This left the girls and I home alone, so I asked my neice Kassie to meet us for a girls-night dinner at Rib City. Yum. Last night to celebrate Lane's birthday he and I went down to Good Wood in Orem. He loves the prime rib there. I'm not big on prime rib, but I got a chicken dinner that was really good and ended up bringing most of it home anyway, the portions there are huge.

Picnic

Picnic - an informal meal eaten out-of-doors.

July 9, 2009

Tammy and her family are leavning in the morning, so we got together for one last picnic at the Discovery Park. Her kids and ours love to play there, and so we've always had a picnic there when Tammy and her family come over from Colorado. We grilled up some hot dogs and Grandma and Tammy brought some salads and watermelon and we all had a good visit while the kids played. Last year all the boys had a sleep over at Grandma's house, and the girls slept here. This year we switched so I have all the boys and they have the girls. The boys are having a good time. They are upstairs playing playstation and/or Wii and I'm downstairs with the door shut. They are being good, really, not making too much noise or anything. My kids always look forward to Tammy's family's annual trip over and it always goes by way too fast.

Panorama

Grandma Wilson, cousin Levi, cousin Joey, Taylor,

cousin Monique and cousin Madison at the

Native American exhibit at Heritage Village.

Addie liked the baby animals at the petting zoo.

Jack and Addie made arrowhead necklaces at the Native American exhibit.



Addie, cousin Quinn, and Jack looking at a buffalo skin
being tanned at the Native American Exhibit.


Panorama - An unbroken view of an entire surrounding area.
July 8, 2009

Since Lane's cousin Tammy and her family are in town, and his sister Michelle is up in the big city from her home in Aurora, we all went together to This Is The Place State Park and Heritage Village. Lane and I took our kids and went about 2 years ago (or was it 3 years??) and it was so fun. They have added quite a lot since the last time we were there. Now there is a nice train that goes around the perimeter, which cuts down on all the walking. The price of admission also incluces up to 3 crafts/rides per person. The kids made rope at the Brigham Young home, arrow head necklaces at the Native American exhibit, stamped leather, decorated canvas bags, and had a pony ride. The weather was really nice, not too hot with a nice little breeze. We had a picnic at the park and everyone had a great time. The park closes at 5 or we would have just kept on going. I highly recommend a trip there for everyone. I'm ready to go back! They have some fun activities throughout the year that would be fun to go back for. A yearly pass is quite reasonably priced, and pays for itsself in only about 2 trips.

So as I was complaining to Lane today on the drive up to SL about the whole playstation mess, he had to confess that he was the one who made the mess. He's better than me - I always blame that kind of stuff on my kids. Considering how hard he works for our family, and the fact that he drove us all up to Heritage Village today on no sleep, I guess I can forgive him for a little mess, which, by the way, is still not cleaned up. Shamefully, I stepped over it, too, to get to the computer. Now I know where everyone gets it.