Well Hello There!

Come on in!

I am so glad that you stopped by!

Isn't it a beautiful spring day? Too bad I still have the winter wreath up! The boy and bitty one are having a picnic.

But back to the wreath. Feel like doing some crafting?

OK!

The lovely Yvonne did a gorgeous wreath for spring and was even kind enough to make a tutorial about it. How about it?

Great! Let's get some stuff together.

Yeah, I am only using one wreath. I know she used two. I am going to change up mine a bit. She says to hot glue the flowers on the front.

Wow! Only hot glued myself to it 7 times! That may be a new low for me. Now she glued more to the back. I think I want something greeny though.

So far so good!

Oh yeah, remember to take off the tags!

It's okay. Not as pretty as Yvonne's though. It seems to need something.

Maybe some red ribbon?

Some black and white check might be nice too.

I think that looks better.

All that work made me hungry!

You two?

Let me whip you something up!

How about a Roast beef and cheese hoagie with some leftover chantarelles? I've had the roast slow cooking in the oven at 275 for the last 4 hours. Not even worth making a recipe card for.

Maybe a little homemade Mushroom and Leek soup?

And for something sweet. A little something from someone just as sweet! Yvonne from Stone Gable.

Palmiers! I think I need to roll mine a little tighter next time. I was trying to roll and keep a 3 year old out of the cinnamon sugar at the same time!

I am so glad that you stopped by! You really got me motivated!

Please feel free to stop by any time!

Posted at Embellished Bayou's Easter Linky Party!

Posted at the fantabulouso Cindy's Make it 4 Monday party!

Getting My Irish On....

....for Foodie Friday! I never should of read that Irish cookbook especially while hungry! I think that I have found my niche though. The recipes I have used so far are so easy to make and delicious! I know which ones appealed to me too. I just have to look for the pages that are nibbled.

Anyways.... yesterday I made some seafood dishes that I just have to share.

I was planning on doing this for Friday since it is Lent. When I got home from the grocery store though, I goofed. I had to get dried chanterelles. You need to rehydrate these before using and I did just that. Oops!

First up is Broiled Scallops with Chanterelles in a brown butter sauce. Yummy!

Chanterelles are wild mushrooms. They have a nutty woody taste to them. If you get the dried ones, don't pitch that water!

You can use it as a base for soups. I am planning on making either mushroom soup or stew with it.

Great, now my tummy is growling!

Anyways, you need to peel and seed a tomato. Yeah, never seeded a tomato before. Peeling is easy. Bring a pot of water to boil and plop your tomato in for about 30 seconds.

Plunge it into cold water and peel. Easy peesy! Now the seeding is pretty easy too. Cut the tomato in half in between the two ends of it. Slice down the sides a bit and squeeze.

Gently squeeze. Forgot that part. It was alot easier than I thought. You want to open up those little pockets when cutting down the sides. Before chopping you remove the spot where the stem was attached.

Then chop. Sorry I just wanted to show off my new gadget. My lifter/chopper. I just love this thing!

The traditional way to serve this is to use sea scallops. I couldn't find sea scallops so I had to use bay scallops. Do you know the difference between the two? Personally I like the sea ones better. They seem to have more flavor and they are bigger. Each scallop can be over 2.5 ounces. Bay scallops are small. This dish is meant to be served as a first course. You take a mound of champ and put it on a plate, make a well in the middle of it and add melted butter. Then you arrange 3 sea scallops around the edge with the chanterelles and sauce spooned over the scallops.

Wait, you don't know what Champ is?

Mashed Potatoes with chives. Mmmm.... In the old days they used a wooden tool called a beetle to mash the potatoes. There is even a poem about it.

There was an old lady that lived in a lamp,

She had no room to beetle her champ,

She up'd with her beetle and broke her lamp,

Now she has room to beetle her champ.

Now I am on the hunt for a beetle. Dang cookbook! It's filled with all kinds of interesting stories like this though. I also had Poached Salmon.

I know I could of dressed it up some. I meant to. I had the lemon to garnish it. Had is the key word. Something about a boy and a bitty girl playing with it and 100 lbs of stupidity getting in the middle, grabbing it and running off with it. Yeah. It was definitely hers.

This recipe was great! I don't have a poacher but it told how to do without. How cool is that? I do have to say that a poacher is now on my to get gadget list now though.

Onto how to make a poacher! Take two sheets of tinfoil lay them on top of each other and butter.

Lay the fish on the tinfoil and pull up the sides to make a box.

Pour in the poaching liquid over the fish and crimp the edges together to make a packet. I put it all on a cookie sheet to bake. As much as I love spending the morning with my head stuck in an oven cleaning it, I was not in the mood for run off.

I also served it with a California blend of veggies.

Since Birdseye did a fine job putting the recipe on the back of the package, I won't bother.

I did bother to make dessert though. I mean who wouldn't?

Strawberry Cheesecake with a Chocolate Graham Cracker Crust. I didn't get a pic of the ones that I served with a strawberry garnish and whipped cream. I forgot.

The graham cracker crust was not meant to be chocolate either. I made this at the last minute. I thought I had enough cracker crumbs to make this and I was a 1/2 cup short. No graham crackers either. The boy is hooked on graham crackers with cream cheese. All I had was chocolate teddy grahams. So I switched to a chocolate crust.

Is it okay to have cheesecake for breakfast?

Hmmm....

Mmmm....

Anyways I am hoping to get my big butt out of the house so I can do something for Make it for Monday. In my head it looks great. We'll see what reality is though. Until then....

Much love and best dishes!

Yeah I stole that from Paula, but we are tight. I am sure that she won't mind a bit! If she gets mad I will just bribe her with a stick of butter!

The Recipe Box

If you notice at the top of my side bar, I have just added a recipe box.

Click on the link and it will take you to my personal recipe box on All Recipes.

You can print any recipe on a recipe card.

You can even register and make your very own recipe box!

Makes it so easy to share recipes.

Can you tell that I don't have much of anything for today?

I have run out of excuses to avoid laundry.

The food thing has started to wear thin.

The tribe is noticing that they are wearing dirty underwear.

They are starting to revolt and it is not pretty.

So I have a hot date with a maytag and an iron.

I wonder if I starch their undies if I could get fired from this task?

Hmmm.....

Might be worth a shot!

I Love Gadgets!

They are a secret passion of mine. I got all kinds of gadgets. Some I even have two or three of. Drives my hubby nuts cause I got stuff all over. Gadgets. I may not even have a use for them or know what they are for, but I got them!

Especially kitchen gadgets!

But this is about my new online gadget. I love to cook. I've found this out in the last few years. I have gotten better at it.

My cookbook collection is growing. I love books and reading. I can read a cookbook like a novel. Weird. One thing I am not good at....

....writing recipes down on recipe cards. Or maybe it is my lack of organizational skills. Either way, I end up with a mess on top of the fridge. Recipes I write down, find on the back of packages, printed off the internet, they all go in "The Pile On Top Of The Fridge".

Every 6 months or so though, I do go through and get a bad case of writer's cramp rewriting these all down on recipe cards. Then I start all over with a new pile. I mean, what is a fridge without a messy pile of stuff on it?

Anyways back to the gadget thing. I found at All Recipes a cool tool! I can put my recipes on recipe cards and share them with y'all! So from now on, you can just click on a recipe title and it will take you to my online recipe box and you can print off the recipe if you would like to keep it. No more mess on the fridge! Well.... let's not get too crazy now!

Want to try it out?

Okay....

Here are the recipes that I made yesterday. Yes, I avoided laundry at all costs. But everyone was so fat and happy that they did not care they had to wear dirty underwear again. So here we go....

Irish Soda Bread Super easy to make! No kneading or letting the dough rise. It is a sweet bread. Almost like an Irish version of stohlen. I left out the raisins though since I was serving it with....

Creamy Potato Soup! This soup is incredible! For all you soup lovers you have to try this. Another easy one. This soup was so good, the bitty one asked for it for breakfast! Now if that isn't a compliment, I don't know what is. I think I am going to work on it though and maybe next time make it with applewood bacon and sour cream. Almost like a baked potato soup.

Ah crap, now I am hungry....

Anyways....

The main course. Baked ham with box potatoes and sour cream chive garnish and plain old green beans. I was too tired to do anything special with the green beans at this point. I call the potatoes box potatoes due to the way I cut them. They don't come from a box.

Are ya still hungry?

For dessert there are Oatmeal Bars drizzled with chocolate! I don't know why they are called bars cause they are more like a cake. The kids scarfed them down though so I don't think it mattered much.

Can you tell I was reading my Irish cookbook? All these recipes, except for the main dishes, were from my "Irish Heritage" cookbook. I was looking through there to find a traditional meal for St. Pat's Day dinner which we weren't here for. So I didn't make.

So....what do you think of my new gadget? Handy huh?!

There's No Place Like Home...

It would of been so great to just tap my heels together to get there too!

Yes, we are back! My MIL is out of the hospital and doing fine. Thank you to everyone for your well wishes and prayers.

Our little mini break was GREAT! Me and the kids left an hour after my hubby suggested it. I did realize after 22 hours of driving that I did injure my tailbone. I guess that was just too much girl to be sitting on it for that long! I also realized how different car trips are from when I was younger. Instead of kids fighting out of boredom I had them fighting over which DVD movie was going to be played. They were totally uninterested in the states we were passing through. I also figured out why they are so strict on DUI's. They are probably parents driving long distances with a 3 year old in a car seat. I don't know how many times I heard "Mom! Syrina's feet are touching me!" Yes, she cannot keep her feet in the confines of the car seat. I finally did get there with all 3 children in fact. That is a feat in itself!

Why is it that the last 30 minutes of a car trip is the longest?

Florida was beautiful! 60 degree weather. Sunshine. Crazy thing is that you can tell someone who lives there year round. They are walking around all bundled up. We were in t shirts and shorts. Well not me, I didn't want to blind anyone with that much white showing. When my husband flew in he was talking with 2 older ladies who were saying how cold it was. They were in winter coats, my hubby was in a short sleeved shirt. He told them he thought that weather was great, it was 28 where he just came from. The one lady looked at him totally serious and said "Farenheit?!" Supposedly they do not golf in the winter cause 50 is too cold. We don't golf in the winter cause it is too hard to find the ball in a foot or more of snow.

Go figure!

I do have some pics coming. I left my camera sitting on the counter so I have to pull them off my phone. Right after cleaning. And laundry. And grocery shopping. We did sneak off for a day when my MIL had some friends that came down to visit. We took the kids to the Magic Kingdom. The older kids had been a couple of years ago. It was the bitty ones first time though. You should have seen her eyes light up seeing Cinderella's castle for the first time. She just walked around all day trying to take in everything! She met the princesses and the fairies. She loved Tinkerbell.

It was nice to get home though. I missed all of you! Seems I have alot to catch up on! Y'all have been busy! So for now it is off to make friends with the washer and dryer, clean up a weeks worth of dog hair and try to make something fabulous for dinner. I so missed cooking! Eating out is nice, but I think I have had my fill for quite awhile.

OH! I almost forgot! I won at Daisy Cottage! Woo hoo! I am so looking forward to getting my package in the mail. Thank you so much to Kim for her fabulous giveaway! I can't wait to have a bit of her in the house. Maybe one day I will be lucky enough to have her come and photograph my house. Til then I just dream.....

Conversations

Him: "I've been down here for 3 weeks. Would you and the kids like to come to Fl..."

Me "YES!!!!!!"

One hour later the car was packed and we were heading south.

That's where we are. So if you were wondering if I had been kidnapped by aliens, not this time.

I will be back next week with lots of stories for ya.

See y'all next week!

Still trying to figure out a way to sneak into one of these big beautiful homes to get a peek without bail being involved.....

Flashback

So here is a flashback....

Here is our master bedroom just a year ago. I don't know what I was thinking then, but I liked it. It stayed like this for 2 years.

Here it is today. Hopefully looking a little better.

The girls room with the mind boggling stripes. I was going to color coordinate everything pink for Syrina and purple for Brianna.

Yeesh!

Crazy!!

I also thought that I would post an update on my MIL. She was doing good. Yesterday they transferred her to a private room. They had to do a test on her. They did the test and wheeled her back to her room and she had an anxiety attack. Today, she is back under sedation, on a respirator cause she can't breathe on her own and in ICU. There is no reason why. She is also swollen again and retaining fluid. Hopefully we will have some answers soon.

Good Intentions

I had good intentions yesterday. I was going to get so much accomplished! My new diet was starting to kick in and I had lots of energy. I had on my cleaning jammies. Don't look at me like that. EVERYONE has cleaning jammies don't they?! I got painting jammies too. I just thought that everyone did.....

Anyways, I hitched up my big girl jammies and walked into the girls room like I meant business. I guess I should of been watching where I was walking. I slipped on a book laying on the floor. I know, something out of place and on the floor in a kids room???? GASP! Go ahead pull your shocked eyes out of your butt trunk. I almost recovered. Not very gracefully mind you but maybe a 6 for creativity. Then I met him...

Mr Turtle Scooter. Yes, he is on wheels. Stepped right on him and the next thing I knew I was on my back with my eyes slammed shut so my eyeballs wouldn't pop out with a 3 year old telling me when all the "bad words" were coming out. When I did manage to open my eyes I saw this....

Okay, so this was taken from a standing position, not the writhing on the floor in pain position. Yup, another light that needs to be replaced. I am sure that in the 70's these were all the rage. While I do like the vintage look, I hate these lights. They were all over in here. Whoever redid the house must have gotten a deal on them. So, there is something else to add to the list. Yippee!

Not much got done in here to say the least. You can kinda see the furniture though.

The shelves are in here temporarily til I figure out how many shelves I really do need. I also went through the toy box and gathered a garbage bag full to go down to Grandma's. Now to just sneak it past the bitty one.

Speaking of bitty one...

Doesn't she look cute in her jammies? I love those jammies. See the big ones outfit? She wore that to school today. Nothing wrong with it right? I just sat there and laughed when she left this morning. See, this week is Spirit Week at her school. The theme was "Wacky Day" yesterday. You were supposed to wear your wackiest most mismatched outfit today. I told here that she could basically come down in anything. Usually I have to send her back up cause the outfit she wants to wear is totally off the wall. Pink camoflage pants with a green frilly button up shirt was the newest concoction she had cooked up. Today was the only day that she came down perfectly coordinated. Go figure! I asked her if that was the craziest thing she could come up with and she replied "I'm wearing orange earrings with it!" Oh.... The hat came as an afterthought to match the earrings.

Kids!

My "Masectomy" Gone Wrong!

Yeah, remember yesterday I was going to replace the boob light....

....with this light that has been hanging around for 10 years....

....with the help of Thing 3 and Thing 2....

Needless to say, it did not go as well as planned.

I turned off the electricity.

I brought up the "new" light.

I took down the boob light.

I put up the new one.

And....

....had to put the boob light back up for now since the other hangs down about 2-3' from the top of the bed.

*Note to self - USE A MEASURING TAPE IDJIT!

I got 4 of them and yet not once did I think to measure how big the light actually was. The ceiling is very low in here, just 7-1/2'. So now follow me here. I am thinking that I will replace this....

....with the new light. Take this light into the bedroom and replace the boob light with it. Replace this....

....with the boob light. Replace this light with....

....that the globe came crashing down the stairs in the middle of the night and scared the living c*&p out of me, with this light.

Or.... I could save the new light and put it in the kitchen for when we redo the lighting in there and hang it over the table.

What I have decided on though....

....I don't like the color of the top of the kitchen. Now that I have lived with it it is too dark and dreary. An easy fix but for a later time. I am thinking a lighter cream color. Maybe the same color as the lighter stripes in my room....

For now though....

....I got bigger things to deal with.

Note to self - WHEN THE BITTY ONE IS QUIET, GO SEE WHAT SHE IS UP TO. MORE THAN LIKELY IT IS NO GOOD!

The "GRRRRRRR" Project

That is what I am calling it. It was a real PITA to do and yet seemed so simple! See.... I had this "queen" vintage coverlet that I bought last year when I got my bed. If I had not been so giddy that I got my bed, I would of realized that it was not a queen. It was only $25.00 though and very pretty.

Here it is in all it's glory on my foyer floor. You can't see too well in the pictures but it has a medallion in the center with a flower white on white print on the edge. So now to turn it into a duvet cover.

And matching pillow shams.

And I forgot to take pictures.

So through the wonder of bloggyville....

Here it is with a half naked kid on my bed. Are you beginning to realize what a challenge it is to keep this kid dressed?

Oh.... you want a closer look?

I basically cut out the medallion and sewed it to a queen size sheet that was bigger than my comforter. Then I made strips of the edging and quilt pieced a border. Then I used a king size sheet for the back with an envelope opening. Sounds easy, but there was lots of figuring....

LOTS of taking out what I had just sewn. Lots of throwing it in a corner and telling it I hated it. Then came almost having it done just to run out of bobbin!

You can kinda see the flower pattern on the shams. 3" of sewing left to do on the sham is where I ran out of bobbin. Seeing a grown woman cry is not a pretty thing!

I also moved some furniture around and added my ugly lamp.

The lamp has a funny kinda story. My husband was working out in the garage at our old house. I went out to give him a cup of coffee and he was using this lamp base for light under the truck! A couple days later it "disappeared" and in it's place was 2 worklights. I don't know what happened. The shade was long missing. I had this frame from my dad and had seen a lampshade covered in rose petals in a magazine. I loved it so I copied it and voila!

....the ugly lamp was born! My husband likes the room so far, but was surprised to see the ugly lamp in here. I think I want to redo the shade. Maybe tea stained petals with cabbage roses? It definitely is a bit of the unexpected!

The new freebie dresser that will definitely be getting a makeover in the spring if not sooner. A new color and some silver jewelry and I think she will be gorgeous! The mirror is from the girls room since there is no place for it. It is going to get a new coat of paint. If you look up....

....you will see my "boob" light. As soon as I thought of it like that, I can't keep it in my room. When I was scrounging around in the basement though, I found a treasure! A light fixture that I bought over 10 years ago and have never used. So as soon as that boy of mine gets home from school today, he is helping mom swap out the boob light.

For now, it is back to retackling the girls room. They have been doing a bit of "redecorating", not quite what I had in mind though.....

*****

Thank you everyone for all your well wishes! She seems to be getting better bit by bit. Right now we are dealing with ICU Psychosis. She has been in the ICU too long. Hopefully she will be moved soon to a room though! Yesterday she was begging for food. She asked the nurse if she would call the doctor and ask him if she could have half a sandwich please. Poor thing! She is not too happy with the liquid diet they have started her off on.

Posted at The Shabby Chic Cottage for Transformation Thursday

Posted at Fingerprints on the Fridge

Posted at Cottage Instincts

The Longest Ride

Thank you to everyone for all your prayers and well wishes. It is so great to have such wonderful people like you in our lives! We are hoping that this ride is grinding to a stop now. They found the original bleed. It seems that she has ulcers that she did not know about. I don't know why cause she is the type to get regular physicals and check ups. Anyways, one large one was on her duodenum. They duodenum is a type of valve at the bottom of your stomach that connects the small intestine to it. It controls digested food from going back into your stomach after it has gone into the small intestine. The ulcer had opened an artery and was causing the bleeding. This bleeding had caused the streptococcal not the pnuemonia. The pnuemonia was from her not being able to move around. They repaired it and thought everything was well. She was still passing small amounts of blood but it was residual. Leftover from the bleed. My SIL went down for the weekend so my hubby came home.

By the time he got home, she was back in bleeding again. They went back in and found 4 more bleeds. Now she should be okay. This whole time she felt fine though.

Saturday morning he got the call. She was bleeding so badly that they literally had to invert her bed to keep as much blood flow to her brain. She was leaking as much and as fast as they could put it in. They wanted to transfer her to Tampa General a much larger hospital. The doctors there were ready to take her, the admin would not accept her since they did not have a bed. We were told we had two options. One was to open her up and find all the bleeds and stop them. The danger was that if they opened her up she may in her weakened state just start bleeding from everywhere. The second was to put her on the helivac and send her to Tampa and force them to take her, bed or not. Her bleeding now was sporadic but if she started bleeding in flight there would be nothing they could do and she would bleed out. The helicopter ride was 45 mins away. Both were risky but the lesser of the two was transporting her to Tampa.

She did get to Tampa safely. By the time that they got her into surgery they had gone through 17 pints of blood. Everything seems to be okay right now. Hopefully they said they are going to put her in a room out of ICU today. This is the point where things have gone bad so we are hoping that all goes well.

I do have a couple of little things that I have done to keep my mind off things. So tomorrow, get ready to regular broadcasting. One is a sneak peak of my "Make It 4 Monday" that I didn't get off my lazy but to finish for last week. I'm ready for next week though!

Again, thank you everyone for all your well wishes! They are very much appreciated!

MWAAAAAH!