In the meantime

Zucchinni Skillet...reminds me of home :)  Believe it or not, these coconut cookies are actually Gluten, Grain, Dairy, and {kinda} refined sugar free.  They're pretty addicting!  Everyone tells me that I'll be flooded with baby blankets...buuuut...I couldn't resist trying out making a baby blanket.  Afterall, if I ever have an excuse to try quilting something, now is the time, right?   Annnd...it's been 4 years now with this handsome guy.  Happy Father's Day! 

All my life, I’ve never liked granola bars—they were much too crunchy, nutty, fruity, and healthy  for me.  By nature, I am much more of a junk-food person than a health-nut…I could eat hamburgers and fries and pizza every day.  Soooo, I really only ate granola bars when I was desperate…and even then, not very often.  But since last summer, I’ve been working to change my diet.  Cutting out grains, dairy, and unhealthy sweets also cut out alot of the snacky-type things that I like.  And one can only eat so much fruit and plain nuts.  Oh, what can I snack on?? These homemade granola bars have become my latest and favoritest snack.  They’re full of chopped seeds, nuts, coconut, and some dried fruit (and I like to add some chocolate too!)  And they’re so YUMMY! Oh yeah, there’s the chocolate and coconut. (Did I mention that I also used to not like coconut?) What holds it to...

Because we knew we wouldn’t be travelling a lot this summer, we decided to do a little gardening.  Most of our plants are still pretty small (our garden kind of got a late start) but it has been such fun to go out each day and see how much everything has grown!  If everything grows and produces well, we’re going to have a lot of fresh veggies and fruit to use up, as we planted  lettuce, cilantro, cucumbers, squash, sugar peas, tomatoes, green peppers, watermelon, canteloupe, zucchini, and arugula. I know the squash and zucchini will grow like they’re on steroids. Duh. (And Isaac broke the #1 zucchini rule: never plant more than 1 seed.  Yep, he planted a whole row of zucchini.  Help!!)  If you have some killer ways to fix zucchini & summer squash, please send them this way!  What I’m really hoping for is a good crop of tomatoes and green peppers.  Mmmm…  Because they’re so pricey in the...

I finally finished up our last bountiful basket so it was time to get another one.  It looks like this basket is going to make us eat our salads and fruits!  There are several kinds of fruit this time: apples, watermelon, cantaloupe, mangoes, pears, kiwis, and also some kind of orange/tangerine thing. For vegetables, there are cucumbers, zucchini, romaine lettuce, cherry tomatoes, and something that reminds me of the Veggie Tales’ story of Daniel.  Can’t you just see Daniel’s enemies dancing around as they plot and sing of Daniel’s coming demise?    Any idea what these green, leafy things are and how to eat them?  They look like lettuce, but have a thicker texture than lettuce—they almost have the same plastic feeling that cabbage has. At the same time, their stems resemble celery. Maybe they are in the collard greens family. I haven’t tasted it yet, but my guess is that they are pretty mild-flavo...

Despite my {sarcastic} rant against quinoa and EVOO in a previous note, I really have been working on eating healthier.  The main way that has been happening has been by ordering a Bountiful Basket (a $20 box filled with 3-5 different fruits and 3-5 different kinds of vegetables)! All said, it is probably a good 10-15 pounds of produce that needs to be consumed in some way! The last two baskets have filled our refrigerator with apples, pears, oranges, a pineapple, green, yellow, red, and orange peppers, squash, zucchini, onions, tomatoes—cherry and regular, 2 avocados, 3 heads of lettuce, celery, beets, 2 cabbages, radishes, carrots, and asparagus. (And I feel like there were a couple other things, but I can't remember what they would be.) Because it is a lot of fresh produce for the two of us to eat, the key to making sure we’re not wasting our money is to make sure that we don’t let it rot in the refrigerator… Sooo, the responsibility...

I just wanted to try some recipes with quinoa, a protein-rich food that seems to be becoming quite popular. But I didn’t have any recipes for it. So I started searching online.  And then I ran into “EVOO.”  It appeared as an ingredient in more than one recipe.  Never before had I heard of such a thing until then.  And then, in a simple search for recipes using quinoa, almost every single recipe called for EVOO.  “What in the world is EVOO?!?” I thought as I scanned through the recipes.    “Oh well, it’s probably some kind of exotic seasoning that you have to get at the health-food store and I don’t want to spend big bucks on it anyway, so I’ll just omit it… After all, one little ingredient can’t make that much difference in a recipe, can it?”  Finally, after coming across probably five or six recipes that called for EVOO, I committed the deed that confirmed my absolute ignorance to the existence of the ingredient....