A Fabulous Fourth

We all had a wonderful time on Saturday over at our neighbors. We didn't manage to get the water slide. Cheryl told me that she was only on a waiting list for one and the company didn't call so we knew they wouldn't be bringing it. We had a slip n slide for the kids instead and water balloons. They still had a fun time..... and the best part - we saved $270! ;-)

Here's a few pics as promised.... first, my 'flag cake'. This was really easy to make, just pound cake, jello and fruit, topped with cool whip and then strawberries and blueberries on top.

We did a 'hot dog station' and made cards to place on the table letting everyone know how to assemble certain dogs. There was the Chili Cheese Dog, the Steam Whistle Dog (cheese, bacon and pickle relish), the Texas Dog (bbq sauce and coleslaw) and a Nacho Dog (cheese sauce, onions and crushed chips on top).

These are the flowers I took to our 'hosts' Cheryl & Steve...

Me in my matching 'dessert' t-shirt. . .

me and Cheryl. . .

Kristen and Emily. . .

I tried taking a few pics of the fireworks we had, and this was one of the better ones. . . .


I hope you all had as wonderful a day as we did.

Getting ready to celebrate....

I didn't make more pesto yesterday, the day just slipped away (you know how that goes). I did get to the gym again though, which I'm happy about. That's something I think I've been forgetting to mention. Since my surgery and my sister's visit, it was over 7 weeks since I'd been there! Last week I started back with a vengeance. I went 4 days in a row, a few of those times was with my neighbor Cheryl. Now that school is out though it's harder for me to get to the gym in the mornings. I could take Kristen with me and put her in the child care, but it's often very busy and has been known to even have a waiting list! What I usually do now is wait til Jason comes home from work, and go at the weekends too. So far it's working this way for me.

So for the 4th of July we are going next door to our neighbors. She is having some other friends and neighbors over and we've hired an inflatable water slide :-) The temps are due to be over 100 again, so it should help to keep the kids cool while they play out in the back yard. I told Cheryl I would take hotdogs and the 'fixins' for chili cheese dogs. I think she was going to make tacos? but then she decided it would be better to just go 'All American' and do dogs and burgers. We thought it might be fun to do a hot dog station where you can do different fixins. I might try to make some signs that tell the name of the hotdog and how to 'fix it'. For instance Kraftfoods.com has a recipe for 'Steamwhistle Hotdog', it even shows you how to fix it in a video (I love their website). Also from their site, I'm going to try and make this. . . .

It's called a 'Flag Cake', but it's not actually a cake, I'd say it's more like a trifle because it has the jello mixed with the pound cake and fruit, then just the cool whip on top with the fruit to resemble the flag. What's funny is I was looking for a t-shirt in Target yesterday, something I could wear on the 4th and I found one with this exact pattern on! Yes, it had strawberries and blueberries on it in the shape of the flag. I hope to take lots of pics tomorrow to share with you all after the weekend.

I'm taking Kristen to play with a couple of her school friends at their community pool this morning, then I'll be home making potato salad and this cake ready for tomorrow.

*******Have a happy and safe 4th July*******

From my garden....

I took these pictures a few weeks ago and just realized I never shared them on here! This was back at the beginning of June. My basil as you can see was doing well so I decided to make my own pesto :-)

The recipe called for basil (of course) and a little Italian flat leaf parsley....

I had some parsley in my herb garden too, but the plant was still small, I just say managed to get the amount needed... then you add pine nuts....

actually you have to toast the pine nuts first, they have a much nicer taste that way too....


blend all together with olive oil until you get this.....


then boil the pasta of your choice and mix together.... and 'Hey Pesto'! (ha ha, get it)....

you have dinner :-) My basil is going wild again so I think I will make this again today (need to buy more pine nuts) and have it on top of grilled chicken (I'm cutting the carbs out this week, til I lose those 10lbs remember!) I'll try to post the recipe later, it's in a magazine I have and I can't remember which one right now! I need to go look for it.

Hump Day

Susan asked about the recipe for the cheese-stuffed chili peppers. We got it from allrecipes.com.

Here is the LINK to that page. If it doesn't work just visit Allrecipes.com and search for cheese-stuffed jalapenos. The recipe is for 16, but you can half that amount if you need to. The site allows you to change the amount of servings and automatically recalculates the recipe for you.

I woke up this morning to overcast skies. The high will only be 94 today and there's hope of rain and a possible thunder storm. Bring it on I say..... I'd love a little cooler weather for a day or so right now.

Kristen and I will be off to piano lesson at 9.30am this morning. Her lesson is at 10am. It's already 8.41am as I type this! I get so used to lazy mornings where we just potter around in our pj's til well after 10am that I'm not liking this 'having to get ready and get out' feeling! I'll pop in to the store on the way home, we need some coffee, dog food and coffee creamer. That's all I'm buying too, I have plenty of groceries in the cupboard so I need to use them up first before I go buy more.

That's about all we have on the agenda today. Once we're back home we can enjoy 'pottering around' again. No doubt Connor will come over to play. I don't know what Kristen will do after Sunday.... Connor leaves then with his brother to go stay with his Dad in Atlanta for 3 weeks! :-o

Have a great day everyone.

blogging.....

I know I haven't been the greatest blogger over the past few months. Like many others Facebook was what seemed to keep me occupied the most and it was nice just adding little 'status reports' instead of having to think of something longer to post about. But I go through phases, as do we all, and I'm now starting to blog again more. Mainly because my sister (who just visited) isn't on Facebook and she loves reading my blog :-) but also because I've made a lot of bloggy friends out there and I don't want to lose touch with them.

Darylynn mentioned the other day (her post dated June 25th) that she would hate to see a demise in blogging. There's no denying Facebook is fun, that's why I still use it, but I agree with D when she says , "there is just not the creativity or the depth of getting to know people on those sites that there is with blogging"

I remember too how excited I was when I first started blogging, getting to make new friends and over the years, becoming very close to some of them. I would smile every time I had a new comment even if it was from someone I'd never met in blogland before. I would eagerly return the visit to their blog and say hi. This week I decided I needed to get back to visiting my 'bloggy friends' and I went through my reads list in my right hand menu. I have added those reads to my 'blogfeed' on blogger. It automatically tells me when you have updated. Some were old links and I will have to search around to get the new url's I think (if indeed they are still blogging?). The 3 names you still see under 'blogging friends' over to the right are the blogs that won't let me add them to blogger. I don't' want to lose touch with you gals, so I left your names there so I can click on them every day to see if you've updated your blogs :-)

I honestly think there is a demise in blogging right now, but who am I to comment when I've been so lax in updating in the past few months. I've always said too that you should never feel like you 'HAVE' to blog if you don't feel like it. There are certainly lots of other blogs out there for the reading, and there are many more new friends to make in bloggyland.

Today though I just want to say, if you've been reading my blog for some time now, I consider you a very dear friend. Thank you for 'not losing touch with me' even when I didn't blog often. And if you are new to reading my blog, then leave me a comment - say "hi" and let me know if you have a blog I can come visit too :-)

Have a blessed day.

A busy (but fun) weekend

After picking our 'harvest' on Saturday Jason and I spent a fair bit of time in the kitchen trying to cook things and 'experiment' with our zucchini and spaghetti squash! I was right about the squash, it was rather under-ripe and quite hard to cut in to it, but we did manage. I set about cooking it the usual way, by cutting it in half, placing on a baking sheet and baking it in the oven til soft. Then you are supposed to just scrape out the flesh and it comes out all stringy. Not so the case with ours.... I baked one half just upside down on the sheet (that one was mine), Jason wanted his wrapped in foil and loaded with butter, salt and pepper. Here they are below (Jason's has the stalk still on and I wrapped it in foil after taking the pic).

I cooked them for over an hour and here they are out of the oven....

That's my half you can see on the sheet pan, Jason's is still wrapped in foil. I think because it wasn't ripe is why it didn't come out stringy. All in all it tasted good but didn't have the stringy consistency, instead it was just soft squash, almost as if you'd mashed it.

Here's Jason's half after I took off the foil, you can see it's filled with the melted butter inside (not my idea of healthy eating!).

We also tried cooking our chili peppers. Jason found a recipe for stuffed jalapenos so used that recipe even though our peppers were a different variety.


We stuffed them with cream cheese, cheddar cheese and a dash of Worcester sauce like the recipe said, then you added crumbled crispy bacon on top. These turned out ok but we boiled the peppers first (as the recipe said) and found the peppers weren't spicy at all afterward. They were also a little too soft for my liking, but the cheese filling was yummy :-)

On Sunday Kristen and I went to church, and Jason stayed home and 'played' in his Farm! When we came back I made a yummy spinach salad for lunch then later went up to the gym with my neighbor Cheryl. What a difference having a friend with you makes. I did 30 minutes on the elliptical and then Cheryl and I did some upper body weights. It was so motivational having someone stand next to you, counting along with you. I feel like I have a personal trainer again and hope to get up to the gym with Cheryl more often.

Today is forecast to be hot again, so after I've done some housework I'll be taking Kristen around to the pool for an hour.

Daily Harvest

Warning: if gardening news bores you, please click your back button and go read another blog!

Just kidding :-) I know most of you who read this like to see what's going on in our little back yard. So this morning we went out to the Farm and harvested some stuff. Right now we get green beans and zucchini on a daily basis, but today we also decided we would harvest one of the spaghetti squash that seems to have finally turned from green to yellow. We aren't totally sure if it's completely ripe but we thought we'd give it a try because it seems to have been in this state for over a week now and not changing much at all. There is another squash on this plant so we'll let that one go a little longer. So here's our bounty from this morning. . . . .

We have 2 zucchini, and to the right of those two is one pickling cucumber, then we have some chili peppers, and a serving of green beans. You can also see the spaghetti squash (the big yellow thing) and to the left of that above the basket is another 'green' zucchini that I found this morning - yet another one that has been hiding itself from me. I doubt he'll taste very good at that size but we may try to get seeds from it for next year?

Thought I'd also share a before and after picture of our sunflower. I never got to post this picture last week (actually it's less than a week, I took this first picture just on Monday before my sister left). Here's Jason standing next to the one sunflower we have out there. (and the reason there's only one is because he noticed this tiny little plant weeks ago and figured it was a sunflower growing from seed from some he had planted the year before when our garden didn't do so well). Well this one was doing well. . . .

He has a metal pole in the middle of it now helping to keep it up. If you click on the picture you will see the metal pole sticking out of the top. And Jason is indicating the top of the flower with his hand.

Here's the sunflower this morning- just 6 days later. . . .

and again Jason is pointing to the top of the flower. Amazing isn't it. It's growing so fast. Right now there is a little flower bud atop all those leaves, and we can't wait to see it get bigger and open. And that thing really does follower the Sun. In the morning it's head is tilted toward our house, and by evening he's tipped his head the other way and is watching the sun as it sets on the horizon.

Other news - on our agenda today, I'm taking Kristen to a pool birthday party at 12 (til 2) then I might try to go up to the gym later this afternoon, or not! I am aching just a little from my stint from yesterday and I want to go again tomorrow afternoon with my neighbor, so I don't know if I should just take a rest day today? I'll decide later, depending on how I feel. Jason will no doubt be working in his home office until 8pm, when he'll be out in the garden again as the sun is setting. It's too hot to be out there before that. Hope you all have a lovely Saturday (and sorry this post got so long)!