The Five of Us Wouldn't Survive

If we had to depend on our gardening skilz for food. Last summer I had two tomatoes total. Not last summer but the summer before we planted a Key lime tree and a Satsuma tree(think Clementines). Last Autumn my Key lime tree was covered in Key limes, then we had a hard freeze and I didn't believe in that whole "oh Lordy it's going to freeze let's put quilts on our plants" and well the Key lime tree died, it's made a comeback, the leaves smell all limeyish but not one single lime or bloom. The Satsuma, all our hopes were in the Satsuma until the then 12 year old crashed into it while making a seriously awesome catch of the football. The Satsuma split, we tied it together with either bread ties or zippy ties, I can't remember and it's a pseudo-hurricane at the moment outside so take my word for it we tied this Satsuma branch together and while she didn't flourish she did produce a single Satsuma. Here's the citrus grove, a.k.a. our front yard.

Here's our harvest.


Here's the farmer and I use the word "farmer" very loosely.


And here's the crop. What should we do? Juice it, make an orange cake? Uh no.

We decided to cut her in half and eat her in wedges and she was mighty tasty. Yes she was. While our crop wasn't big on quantity it was one good quality Satsuma. We didn't even have to bring in the stunt orange and yeah, I had one ready to go because I could just see cutting into this baby and her being dry. Completely, utterly dried out on the inside but she wasn't. And we feasted. So our orange crop lasted from harvest to plate for about oh, five minutes and that's because we couldn't find a knife to cut her open with as I was in the middle of Thanksgiving cooking and every utensil in the kitchen was in need of a washing.

Thankfully we had chocolate chip pie and pumpkin pie to fill the lack of homegrown Satsuma void. And it was good.

And because doesn't everyone love seeing a nekkid Tom turkey here's mine, weighing in at just under 22 lbs ready to be tucked into a nice warm oven. Yep, that's a stick of pure butter poking out of his belly and globs of butter stuck under his skin. Butter is good, very, very good when it comes to turkey baking, almost as important as Tom turkey himself.

I hope everyone had a blessed and bountiful Thanksgiving and if you don't celebrate the U.S. holiday I hope that your fourth Thursday in November was good one.

By the Dawn's Early Light

I have rediscovered my love of 28ct lugana. I know, it's not fine linen, but it was my first foray into over 2 stitching, my first step out of the aida comfort zone. It was soft and silky and it was so luxurious compared to my good old Charles Craft 14ct and 18ct aida. I spent hours in my LNS, it was either Creative Critters or the name had changed to Crown Thistle Needlework, it was within walking distance of my house in North Little Rock and I'd put the kid in the stroller, we just had one kid at the time, and walk to the LNS. The shopowner promised me if I'd just give evenweave or linen a try I'd never go back to aida. I bought a piece of 28ct ivory lugana and Sheepish Designs(I am 99% sure that's the designer) Virtuous Heart Sampler(and I'm less than 20% sure that is the correct name of the sampler) and I don't have it handy because it needs to be reframed after one brother slamming another brother against the wall in a WWF moment(back when it was the WWF not the WWE) but they could have been impersonating a lion attacking a gazelle so that would fit with the WWF(World Wildlife Federation).

Yes, the DMC is wrapped around a wooden spool. How precious is that?

The spool was in a baggie with some others that my Mamaw gave me years ago for some project out of a Leisure Arts Spirit of Christmas book which apparently I never got around to actually making. I have maybe five or six and these were my great grandmother's wooden spools so I'm careful with them. But I've been stalking eBay and thrift stores hoping to score a mess of these old wooden spools for not so much money. I've developed a love for embroidery over the last couple of years, thank you Jenny Hart! And want to keep my embroidery floss separate from my cross stitch floss and I think these wooden spools are kind of funky cool for that purpose.(Dork alert! I get it)

But you ask, "If you want to keep your embroidery floss separate from your cross stitch floss why do you have floss you are obviously cross stitching with on a spool?" Well I thought it'd be different and I had the spool right there and the cardboard bobbins were in the shoebox in another room and the cross stitch only uses one color. So I thought I'd just be wild and crazy and spool it. "Spoolin' on a Wednesday afternoon". That should be a song.

The design is one that was run through Patternmaker(Thank you Pam for your technological help, ok for doing it for me because I am so incompetent) and makes me very happy. I have a companion piece already charted and it makes me even more happy! Happier than this even:

Sue Hillis Designs: Pirate's Creed - cross stitch pattern and even this:

Sue Hillis Cross-Stitch Designs Blog » Final version: “Women who behave…” (although I believe the real quote is "Well behaved women seldom make history" Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

With any luck I'll have a finished project to show tomorrow.

No, that's not coffee in my cup but Adagio's Earl Grey Bravo. I feel really contintental when I drink hot tea.

Is everyone in full speed ahead holiday mode? Yesterday I cleaned out my kitchen pantry. I had a lot, A LOT of expired canned goods. I discovered maybe two years ago that canned goods actually had expiration dates. I'm pretty sure growing up my mom would occaisonally open a ten year old can of Campbells soup and not think twice about it, or maybe Dinty Moore Beef Stew. I thought canned goods were supposed to last forever, you know you fill up your 1950s bomb shelter with Mother Campbells and you can survive any catastrophe.

I'm now working out what I need to buy for Thanksgiving dinner. I've learned over the years that keeping it simple is the best thing for my family. The husband will eat anything these days, even onions as long as he doesn't know they are in the food he's consuming. For years he told me he was allergic to onions, only to find out years later he's a big fat onion hating liar! The 14 year old won't eat anything but turkey and mashed potatoes and the two older sons will eat pretty much anything, the middle son prefers pumpkin pie only but now that he's 18 if he wants pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving dinner more power to him.

Tentative Thanksgiving menu:

Turkey

Dressing(really bad dressing because I do not have my Mamaw's dressing making gene, my dressing sucks, major big time suckage)

Green Bean casserole(I'm southern, it's got cream of mushroom soup and french fried onions on top, it's what we eat ok?)

Swiss Vegetable Medley (great casserole, probably my all time favorite)

I may or may not make a squash casserole, maybe to spruce up the leftovers on Friday night. I use this recipe only I add a can or two of diced green chiles. It's mighty tasty:

Yelllow Squash Casserole - 14522 - Recipezaar

Mashed potatoes

I want to make a sweet potato casserole but I'm the only one that eats it so like the squash casserole I might make this over the weekend to freshen up the leftovers.

Dessert:

Pumpkin Pie(recipe straight off the Libby's label)

Chocolate Chip Pie - 83750 - Recipezaar (very 1970s dessert)

I've been reading a few books and articles about survivial preparedness. I've sufficiently scared the ever lovin' pee out of myself and I think I don't want to read about that stuff so much any more. I think my goal is to keep a well stocked pantry, enough food for five for a couple of weeks and hope by then any national crisis will have worked itself out. Oh and a well stocked project pantry because the best thing to take the edge of the world as we know it ending are a few projects. I remember a time on RCTN when something bad happened and someone suggested why don't we stitch blocks for this or that and someone said, "Do you think cross stitch makes everything better, don't you think there's something better you could do for these people?" Well I didn't step into that, but trust me when I tell you when my world is crashing down around me, some needlework in hand at least makes me feel better so yeah, for me a project of some kind does make me feel better. A bit of control in the chaos around me. It's such a small, small thing but offers so much comfort.

Bad Food

Do you get homesick and start missing those "tastes of home"? But then when you make that oh so familiar whatever it's not quite as tasty as you remember it, it's actually pretty awful? I did that this week.

I've been kind of homesick for several reasons, some more important than others but I was browsing a blog, ran across this recipe:

No-Bake Chocolate, Peanut Butter & Oatmeal Cookies (aka PMS Wranglers) Ezra

My mother made these all the time. Her mother made them all the time. They were never my favorite thing to eat but I read the blog, saw the recipe and decided that all my problems would be resolved if I'd just make a batch of these cookies.

No--that didn't happen, they were just as awful as I remembered them being. The first two satisfied the need for "home" any after that made me want to hurl. I remembered my mom making them as the last resort sweet treat(we always had oatmeal, cocoa and peanut butter in the pantry) and being thankful when I was a kid but I could never eat more than two. That's my limit. I remembered her mother making them for my uncle and how much he loved to eat them hot before they set up. I also remembered that I hated going to visit this grandmother because they were in the boondocks, had one tv channel and the reception was poor on a good day and this set of grandparents were more often grumpy than happy. There were other things going on but do I really want to air that family business here, no, I'll leave you to your imaginations.

But after this taste of home experiment I was reminded not of the good food I had growing up but some of the really bad meals my brother and I were forced to choke down when we were kids and why it's so important to me that food be good.

People tend to write about their happy food memories and those are the best kind. But what about the nastiest meal your mother or father ever prepared? Come on spill it?

My dad was a firefighter. That means 24 hours on, 24 hours off, for three shifts and then four days off. My mom worked your regular 8-5 which was really 6:30a.m. to 6:30p.m. when you added in drive time.

My parents had an understanding that when my dad was home he cooked dinner. My brother and I had an understanding with my mother---based on her sharp kicks to our shins under the table--that we would not complain about any meal my dad made or dinner prep would be our problem. My dad unfortunately would get tired of cooking and instead of just saying, "Ok I don't want to cook we'll have bologna sandwiches for supper" he would try very hard to make us utter one complaint about his meal by making the grossest possible meal imaginable.

His go to recipe, sure to make one of us wrinkle our nose or actually gag at the table--and let me stress under normal circumstances my dad was a great cook--but whenever he said he was making gumbo we knew that it was going to be a long, long supper.

His gumbo recipe was something like this:

Canned shrimp

Canned crab

canned mixed vegetables

a jar of pickled okra

a can of tomato juice

a can of tomatoes

and whatever other offensive items he might think of.

You're probably thinking oh that's not too bad, except for maybe the pickled okra. I don't know how many of you are familar with canned shrimp and crab but it's supposed to rinsed and picked over and back in the day they might have even been packed in oil. My dad would just dump them into the soup pot. I am not kidding.

His gumbo smelled like gumbo but when you looked down into that pot all you would see was a lake of grease on top of a light pink soupy mess.

My brother and I had to eat a whole bowl and my mother tried to force us to ask for seconds but we always refused. I had bruises on my shins for two weeks from that meal.

Another of his famous meals was an interesting vegetable soup he came up with. He took every can of whatever was in the cabinet, dumped them all in the same pot, we're talking canned vegetables, canned soups, maybe even cubed up SPAM, threw in some browned ground beef and called that homemade soup. I can't remember who, me or my brother, made a comment about it just being nasty. My dad got up from the table, threw his bowl in the sink and said, "That's it, I'm not cooking one more meal." My mother grounded both of us and we had to cook supper for a couple of weeks until my dad got over his PMS.

My mom's quick meal solution was to open a can of sauerkraut dump it in a pot and start cutting up hot dogs and tossing them in. She'd heat it through and viola working woman gourmet. My brother and I would pick out hot dogs and brush the sauerkraut off with our fingers.

Also in my house a serving of fruit was fruit cocktail.

My dad passed away in May of last year and as horrible as it sounds I've smiled remembering his fits because he would never ever say "I don't want to cook" he would just very quietly make the most unedible meal imaginable and let us dig our own grave and then feel justified in his declaration of "I will never cook for you again". The saddest part was that my dad was a better cook than my mom 98% of the time. Momma has her specialities but my dad had a feel for cooking. He could make anything, but when he got tired of cooking we learned to really appreciate those extra tasty meals and make sure that we told him all the time what a great cook he was so that he would not be tempted to cook up one of his, "No one appreciates me meals."

So did this happen in anyone else's house or am I the only kid in America that has a few inedible family suppers to write about?

A Scattering of Projects

This post is completely random. Here is the beginnings of Jane Atkinson:


Here is a skirt I made over the summer, the waist band was a quickie so I could wear it out one night to hang out with some friends who were in town. Note to self--remember to always add a few inches to the back because babe you got one big butt. The hike up factor was a pain. I have a long way to go before I should actually consider wearing something I've made. But it worked out ok and my top covered the unfinished waistband. I am wishing now I had bought the patchwork fabric I saw at JoAnn's in August, would have made a great fall skirt in this simple pattern. Even my big butt would have been cute in it.

Here's my attempt at the buttonhole stitch in Blackbird Designs Beneath the Sunlit Sky. It's not properly executed and we all know what Nina Garcia says about execution but honestly, I was over the stupid stitch and just made it up.

Here are some strips for a completely winged table runner. The fabric was purchased at a yard sale, the yellow I'm pretty sure was at one time a sheet, the green some kind of decorator fabric. Kind of funky but hey so am I:

New kitchen bling:

Scored three of these skillets at TJ Maxx. I was in desperate need of new cookware and these were just too fun not to buy and they were cheap too!

A few years ago, the middle DS was whining about being bored. I told him to find something to do, he was obviously hungry too and created this painting of a pizza on a Pizza Hut pizza box. I love it and want to frame it.

What does one do when her feet are cold? Unravel the Sophie bag and crochet some slippers. I lost the pattern to the Sophie bag and it's no longer online as far as I can tell. It was a freebie I think.

And the current candy addiction, why Hershey's Hot Cocoa Kisses:

Sunday Morning

A while back Jane at yarnstorm wrote a post about Krispy Kreme-yarnstorm: hole food.
It got me thinking about my early Krispy Kreme experiences. A Krispy Kreme experience you're asking yourself? Yes, when we first moved to Ft Walton Beach, FL from Little Rock, AR we spent quite a few late weekend nights with the kids at the Krispy Kreme in Destin. Nothing better than the late night donut run. Yes, we should have known sharing a couple dozen hot donuts with young kids at midnight was a mistake, but we were younger then and it was family time. If it was dark you would be able to see the "glowing orb of happiness" as DS#1's friend David called the "Hot Donuts" light at the Krispy Kreme. Bright sun kind of takes away the effect.

Here are the donuts moving along the conveyor belt after passing through.....

the sugar falls as seen above.

After passing through sugar falls and riding on a conveyor belt, the donuts end up in my hands in the box above. Box o' joy, oh yeah.

Dozen hot, life is good!

Two adults, one dozen hot, could not eat one more bite.

Did you know that Krispy Kreme now has 100% whole wheat donuts? We passed. That is not what the donut experience is all about. It's not about health. It's about hot, gooey dough melting like butter in your mouth. It's about a soft sugar coating covering your tongue. It is not about vitamins and minerals and what's good for you. It's just about "GOOD".

Tomorrow, Slim-fast, today Donut World a.k.a. Krispy Kreme, the happiest place on earth.