Category: Food and dining

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It’s Artichoke Time

It’s that time of year again. Time for artichokes! I get excited every year when artichokes are in season. I love to eat them with just melted butter to dip the tender leaves in.

I always buy a big bag full when they go on sale. I eat enough of them for an army every year. There really is nothing like a freshly steamed artichoke. My grandma introduced me to a mayonnaise-based dip. I never thought to try dipping them in anything other than butter. But boy was she right… they sure do taste delicious with a dollop of zesty mayonnaise dip.

I haven’t ever tried stuffing artichokes because I love to eat them one leaf at a time. I might venture out and try something different this year though. I bet they taste fantastic and I’ve been missing out all of these years.

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Time To Clean Up the Grill

The weather is getting warmer and we’ve been using our patio a lot more often. We’ve enjoyed some lovely breakfasts and lunches outdoors. However, we haven’t had the chance to enjoy dinner on the patio. The main reason for this is because well the grill needs to be cleaned.

Neither my husband nor I like to do it.  It’s a dirty job yes, but it has do be done. We normally do an ok job after each time we use it, but it’s been soo long since it’s last use that everything is sort of caked on. To clean it up this year I’ve decided that I’m going to take out the grates and lay them on newspaper. Then, I’ll spray them with an oven cleaner and let it sit for about an hour. The oven cleaner should hopefully take all of the extra elbow grease out of the tough job. I can’t wait to enjoy the grill on the patio and eat some tasty grilled food again with my family.

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More Tomatoes Please

The tomato plants we have having from the patio, by the garden, are growing nicely.  I can’t wait to taste the plump and juicy tomatoes that these plants are going to produce.  I was looking through a couple of my magazine and found a few recipes that I wanted to try them out in.  There was a sweet and sour tomato salad that looked absolutely delicious. There was also a very tasty sounding pasta sauce that I’d love to try and maybe even can.

I’ve been collecting recipes to try and the pile keeps growing.  It’s kind of ironic that at first I went looking for recipes to the tomatoes in because I thought I was going to have too many.  Now, with the size of this tomato recipe collection, I think I’m not going to have enough.  Either way, I know I’m going to love eating the hard work from our garden.

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Afternoon in the Garden

This afternoon I spent time assembling the upside down hanging planters that I got at the really great price.  I let the kids help put the soil and the plants in each planter.  I let them use some of the toy gardening tools that I found for them at the toy store.  First, they carefully put the baby plants in each planter. They both had smiles on their faces as they heaved small shovel fulls of soil into the planters.  They carefully put the baby plants in each planter.  We had one for peppers, one for tomatoes, and another for strawberries. Once all of them had enough soil they sprinkled on some plant food and topped them off with water from the toy watering cans.

I labeled each of the planters with pictures of each type of fruit that the girls colored for me.  Their favorite one was the planter with the strawberries.  This didn’t surprise me in the least.  The strawberries always go first when ever we have fruit.  I’m excited to watch the planters produce some yummy food and the girls are excited to eat it.

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A Day Filled with Hearts

Because Valentine’s Day falls on a Thursday this year, my husband and I decided that we would celebrate it together this weekend. Tonight we will have fun and do something special with the kids.

I decided to a bit overboard and decorated the entire house last night before I went to bed. When the girls got up this morning they were surprised by all if the heart balloons in the living room and play room. I also scattered hearts in a variety of sizes throughout the rest of the house. There were window clings on the bathroom mirrors and the sliding glass door that leads to the back yard.  I had laid out a few heart shaped pages for the girls to paint later in the playroom too.

To make the day even more memorable for the girls, I made them heart shaped pancakes with little heart shaped banana slices. I used a teeny tiny cookie cutter I got from the craft store to cut out the bananas. And even though it’s not really healthy I sprinkled a few heart sprinkles on top of their pancakes to make them extra special. We enjoyed watching the girls light up this morning. I can’t wait to see their faces when they see what we have planned for them tonight.

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Time for the Girl Scout Cookies

samoas
I ordered my Girl Scout cookies a long time ago. I’m pretty sure they said I would have my cookies delivered around Valentine’s Day. I’m really looking forward to getting the cookies. This year I ordered by Thin Mints and Samoas. I actually found a recipe online for a similar Samoa cookie. If my cookies don’t come soon I might be tempted to make up a batch of the copycat Samoa cookies.

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Breakfast with the Family on the Patio

Breakfast with the family is one of my favorite times of the day. Yesterday we had breakfast outside on the patio. I made blueberry scones, scrambled cheesy eggs, and a fresh fruit salad. My husband and I sipped our coffee as the kids gobbled up their breakfast. The scones turned out great. It was a new recipe that I got from a gal at work. It’s definitely a keeper.

When the kids finished eating they played in the back and we kept an eye on them from the patio.  The girls ran around in the grass and kicked a soccer around. I noticed the lawn needed to be mowed and politely mentioned it to my husband. He promised to mow it before lunch and made good on that promise with a smile on his face.  I told him I would pick up a few planters for some peppers and tomatoes as a thank you the nex time I went to the garden center.

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How I Plan to Save Money This Year

This year I really need to work on saving some money.   I started using a new website to track all of my spending.  It shows me exactly where all of our money is going.  I was a little shocked to see how much money we really spend going out to eat or on fast food.  I’m setting a budget for everything.  I know we can’t cut everything off cold turkey so I’m going to have us do a step down method for our spending habits.

Right now we spend about $500 a month of groceries.  I would like to get that down closer to $300 or less but I know we need to work towards that.  To start I’m setting  a budget of $400 a month or roughly $100 a week on groceries.  I think we can manage to cut back by $25 a week to start with easily, especially if I really work to use up what we have in our pantry.  The following month I’ll move it to $75 a week.  If we do really well with that I might even be able to move it down a little further but I’m not going to go crazy.

We’re taking a closer look at television and cable services along with movie rentals.  We purchased a few pay per view movies on demand this month.  This is really silly considering we pay almost $20 a month for Netflix, we just need to send back our current DVD  to get the next one on our list.  My husband and I are thinking about turning off our cable television because just about everything we watch is available online and we do have Netflix.  We pay about $100 a month for cable so that’s more money we could save every month.

I know groceries and entertainment aren’t the only way we can save but at least it’s a start.  I was able to easily identify these ways to save and will do some digging into other ways to save that I might not be soo obvious to me.

 

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Clearance on Snowflake Chocolate

Hello, my name is Suzi, and I’m a chocoholic!  Chocolate is one of my weaknesses.   I can’t help myself when I see chocolate, I just have to have it.

I was walking through the aisles of my grocery store and came to the clearance section.  On the table was a huge stack of dark chocolate morsels in the shape of snowflakes.  They were marked down more than 50% just because they were deemed “holiday.”  I have no problem buying and eating chocolate in any shape, as long as it tastes good.

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Extra Five Pounds

Between my injured leg and all of the  holiday goodies I had over the past two months I’ve put on a good five extra pounds.   I usually exercise more self control with all of the goodies.  This year I just couldn’t help myself.  I baked ten different types of cookies myself.  This doesn’t even include the twenty five different types of cookies we had present at our new annual cookie exchange.

I know tons  of people put on extra weight during this time of year.  Most of them make a new years resolution to lose weight.   I will of course loose the weight but I’m thinking maybe next year I’ll see if I can drop a few extra pounds before Halloween. That way Once the holidays are over with I’ll be right back where I started. Haha!  I know it’s probably not the best way to look at it but it’s still a bit funny to think about.