Good morning! I hope you’ve had a fantastic week. Everett got home yesterday from spending time in Huntsville with his Papaw and Nanny. He was surprised when he arrived that his twin cousins, Lily and Daniel, are here to visit. He has had so much fun! Here is your Sunday Fill Up for the week.
I love to cook intricate and complex foods, and what I love even more is to use convenient ingredients that produce very tasty results. I love this article from an award winning pastry chef who doctors up Jiffy Cornbread Mix. I appreciate food professionals who are willing to acknowledge the usefulness of these type of items. Check it out here.
Our TV/internet situation where we are living is.. I don’t even know how to describe it. I’ve had to get creative with internet, which means our source of TV and internet is a cell phone hot spot in a area that struggles with cell service. Some days it works great and then other weeks, ehh, not so much. This is one of those weeks and to get these posts to publish I drive a few miles north and sit in the parking lot of the grocery store so I have enough service. Hopefully, by the end of the year, we will have a fiber option that will solve this issue. I say all of that to say, The 2020 Olympic in Tokyo are officially underway and I really enjoy watching the Olympics (kinda of hard right now). I love how this article broke down different categories to watch and a little background. I’ll try to catch as much as possible. Read it here.
Garden
I have a love/hate relationship with a vegetable garden. I am in love with gardening and growing things. I am NOT in love with doing something with the extra vegetables grown. I am addicted to buying plants (especially almost dead, on sale plants that I can bring back to life). It’s so easy in the spring to ambitiously over buy vegetable plants. It was probably 15 years ago when I had my first grown up vegetable garden. I proudly showed off plants and the bounty of the harvest.
I had one grandfather (Big Daddy) whose garden was his entire back yard. His set up was impressive and grew every year. He would put up everything he grew for use throughout the year. One of my other grandfathers, Grandaddy, was a farmer by trade and had no interest in a vegetable garden and my grandmother (Gran) wasn’t a fan of yard work or being outside too long. Gran and Grandaddy were visiting and I was showing everything to them. As we were walking through, Grandaddy was asking me questions. “Why do you have 6 okra plants?” “Do you want to eat okra everyday? I don’t” “What are you going to do with all those peppers? Surely, you don’t need more than one per day” It was a broken record of him plainly telling me that I planted too damn much. I quickly learned that I don’t enjoy canning things. I’m willing to can things that we are guaranteed to eat, but I’ve also found short cuts to many of those. Like tomatoes, I simply get the tomatoes ready as you would to can (blanch, peel, and slice) and then I put the into quart size freezer bags and pop them in the freezer. Voila!! Taste amazing as if they were canned. I haven’t grown vegetables in a very long time and I just don’t have the time for the after harvest work that goes into growing vegetables. I find much more joy and reward from growing flowers. I’m now someone who reaps the bounty of other people who are over growing their own gardens. And in the spirit of abundance. I was given some zucchini and this is what I’m going to make with it. Zucchini Butter Spaghetti
We are on the downhill slide of summer and Everett for the first time ever isn’t upset about school starting back!! I had one of his therapists tell me this week that he is the most social kid he has ever worked with after Everett had just screamed across the parking lot to a friend of his. He loves to interact with new people and is constantly asking acquaintances and strangers “What’s your name?” and can keep the conversation going back and forth a few times. Watching his progress is so rewarding, even if it means he calls me Liz, Elizabeth, or Squidward 75% of the time and daily fills my camera roll with hundreds of these types of photos. Happy Sunday!
