A Grown up Kind of Birthday Meal

A few months ago Caveson#1 turned 16.  There's something about that 16 year milestone that makes you say to yourself - and out loud for the whole family to hear , "Where did those 16 years go, how did they pass so quickly?  Did I do and teach all of the things the heavens entrusted me to accomplish with this little, now bigger being?"  Take heed my mommy sisters.  Time is fleeting.  Your child will be 16 in a blink.  That's a conversation for another post, though.
     I always give the Cavesons an opportunity to choose a special family birthday meal.  Caveson #1 said he didn't really have a preference so I set out to find the perfect meal to please all the family palates and stomach ailments.  Martha provided me with just the fix.  Yes, Martha of the Stewart variety.  This Nicoise style salad was not only beautiful but plentiful and delicious.

And now for the meat plate.

This meal would be fabulous for vegetarians also, sans the meat of course.  We chose grilled chicken, steak and Mahi Mahi on the meat platter.  

     

The salad platter includes several hard cheeses plus fresh mozzarella, gold and red beats(in a separate bowl to discourage beet juice from contaminating everything), olives, heirloom tomatoes, colorful peppers, boiled eggs, lettuce, watercress, cukes, avocados, and water chestnuts.  If I remember correctly, Martha put one of these together the day after a dinner party to use up her leftover meat and veggies.  I often make my own dressings but quite frankly, this took a while to put together so I opted for store-bought dressings this time. 

     Really, the possibilities are endless for additions to this salad.  Try carrot sticks, boiled red skins, jicama, celery, shredded cabbage or thinly sliced red onion.  MMMmmm!

Our local grocery stores now have these great olive bars with a collection of different types of olives.  There's garlic stuffed, almond stuffed, pimiento stuffed and lots of different types of kalamata olives.  I have never been a big olive fan but, wow, these are delectable!

When it came to birthday cake, Caveboy#3 opted for a birthday pie instead.  This just happens to be a Martha Stewart recipe, as well.  I tweaked it a bit and added cherries so it became an apple cherry slab pie.  I have made this slab pie with only apples and only cherries and it's just plain old good no matter what you put into it.  Feeds a crowd, too.

 Notice the candles.  I didn't have a 1 and a 6 candle but I had three candles that added up to 16.  

Hey, sometimes we have to improvise, don't we?

And there you have it.  I hope you're inspired to create your own whole meal salad.  It's a delicious meal, birthday or not.

     

My First Wordless Wednesday! WooHoo!

Craft Book Review - Hand Printing From Nature

Today, you'll get a look into a great printing book by Laura Bethmann called "Hand Printing From Nature - Create Unique Prints for Fabric, Paper, and Other Surfaces Using Natural and Found Materials."    This 192 page binder style book comes from Storey Publishing.  They publish a lot of Animal Care and  nature inspired books.  In fact, their mission is to "serve customers by publishing practical information that encourages personal independence in harmony with the environment".  Gotta love that.

As you can see I got this at the Tractor Supply for $5.  Great deal for a great book.  Let's take a look inside.

As you can gather from the title and from the photos, this book is all about making stamps from natural elements.  Laura uses fruits and vegetables, feathers, leaves, shells and more.

     The Table of Contents reads like this:

1.  Direct Impressions of LIfe
2.  Collecting Natural Objects
3.  Pigments and Supplies
4.  Printing Methods
5.  Print Projects with Single & Repeated Motifs
6.  Creating Hand-Printed Patterns
7.  Printing Scenes and Flowers

This book is filled with design tips, characteristics of natural objects,  and loads of photos.  Most of us love the visuals.

The author gives us information on fabric, paints, paper, different printing surfaces, printing methods

and best supplies.  That's helpful for those of us who are fairly new to stamping.

Lastly, this manual is filled with projects that you'll love.  You'll find stationery, notebooks, plenty of home accessories, totes, pictures, wall murals and more.

You'll hear me say this a lot, but here we go...I LOVE THIS BOOK!  I love flower pounding(that's an upcoming review) and anything that involves nature and art is right up my alley.  The project possibilities are endless.  I also  like this book because you can do a very simplistic project - great for the kiddos, too - or you can combine elements, medium and colors and make a very involved masterpiece.
    Give this book a try.  I think you'll love it, too!

Why Book Reviews?

If you could dissect my brain you would see a few giant sections labeled "animals", "books"," crafts", "patterns", "garden", "food", "kid activities/teaching", "country music", and "writing".  My passion and energy tends to filter into these topics.  As long as I can remember back, I have been creative and  have loved books and animals.  When I was a kid I had some sort of book club subscription in which I would be sent a book a month.  I still have some of them.  They evoke a wave of warmth and good thoughts when I see their covers.  Among them, the "Harry the Dirt Dog", and "Lyle the Crocodile" series and "Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel" are a few of my favorites.  At the risk of giving away my age I can still hear Captain Kangaroo reading some of these over the TV.  Ah, fond memories, simpler times.
      Snap back to present times.  Point being here is that I simply love books.  I have an extensive library of craft books.  I'm talking bordering on hoarding here folks, as crafting is a huge part of my life.  Although it's so fast to look up recipes on line (that's fodder for another post and obsession), I still have some favorite cook books - "close to" bordering on hoarding - that I refer to.  Then... I still LOVE children's literature.  The teacher and big kid in me adores picture books.  Over the past, oh 30 years, I have read literally hundreds of picture books and countless chapter books to my students and my boys.    We have some favorite chapter book series, too.  I have read to my children since their first day home from the hospital and we still read to our ten year old.  It's a special moment at the end of the day.  When my boys were little I would leave the library with 35- 50 books a week and we would read every last one of them, critiquing each one.  Me thinking, "wow great, witty book".  Or we'd all say  "I can't believe that book got published, we could have written a better book."  Currently, I also volunteer in boy#3's school library.
     Lastly, there's the adult reader in me who can't go to sleep at night without reading at least a page or two of the book de jour.  Although my favorite genre at the moment (ok, big reveal here at the risk of being judged) tends to be in the romance category, with present day cowboy/ranch  and historical early American/follow the Oregon trail/life as it used to be in the 1800's books on the top of the heap.  I think I must have had a past life living in a cabin out on the prairie somewhere.  Guess that's the farm girl in me.  Occasionally, a friend will recommend a read that sneaks into the pile, too.  Sometimes, I devour them, sometimes not so much.  At the end of the day, I simply don't want to have to think.  I just want to be entertained.  Reading at 10:00 or 11:00 is not my best thinking time - period!
     So why all this blabbering on about the types of books I like? Part of  my intention with this blog was to review craft books because I have so many I love and when I find a book (or recipe) I love I want to shout it from my roof top, take out an ad in the  paper, and buy advertising time during the Superbowl just to share it with anyone who will listen.  OK, a little extreme, I know.  But really, it's all about my love for these gems.  However, as the blog grows so has my big picture for it.  I have decided that I'll be reviewing kid books,  a few cook books and big girl books as well, when I find one that makes me want to jump with joy.  Some of these will be older books because information is often timeless OR can be updated in your mind and still have some merit.
    So there you have it.  Get ready to love books right along with me. Happy crafting, happy cooking, happy reading.

Picture of the Week

And what a snowstorm it was!!!  Jan. 2014.  Here are some of our beautiful pine trees dressed in snow.

Keeping the Animals Warm When It's Below Zero

Like so many Americans today, we are dealing with bone chilling temps.  It's -14.  And I'm not talking wind chill.  With the wind chill it's -30.  This is the aftermath of the big snow storm that saddled us with 16.5".  My cousins in Buffalo have a "Blizzard Warning" right now with 2-3 feet of the white stuff expected!  They are used to that, though.
These photos were taken on my deck.

My grill is under there somewhere!

With these cold temperatures I was worried about our goats and chickens.  This is how we kept them warm last night.

The chickens in the small coop got a radiant heater which made it  a toasty 20 degrees in there this morning.  They were pretty happy.  I have some tiny bantams in there that have tiny body masses to match.  In the other coop, we hung a brooder light.  It's not the safest method but I hung it high enough to avoid burning wood shavings and wings.  It was 20 degrees in there, too.  All is well.  'Course it would be "well-er" if it was 80 degrees instead of below zero.

But then there's the issue of the goats.  Here's their goat hut.

How much snow is up there, anyway???

The wind was ferociously blowing yesterday and I became increasingly uneasy about their  overnight safety.  I pulled some fleece PJ's and a sweatshirt out of the "for the Salvation Army" bag and was prepared to make them sweaters for the night.  But when I trudged out to give everyone fresh water I changed my mind on what needed to be done.  Luckily, I had  a very large dog crate that temporarily acted as a chick barn last spring.  I pulled that crate into the garage, filled it with straw, put a blanket underneath and over it and and filled it with two dwarf goats.  They are pretty cozy in there and I was at ease with their overnight lodgings.

Ya gotta do what ya gotta do to survive sometimes.  

How do you keep your livestock warm in freezing temps?

It's Three Things Here

What's up with the weather anyway?  Global warming?  Not here.  It's three things here:  snowy, frigid, icy - OK, 4 things-  arctic-ly (that's a word in my book) cold.  We just survived an ice storm over Christmas and now we are bracing for another winter storm  This one looks like it might deposit enough snow to give the kids a snow day on Monday.  And maybe Tuesday due to below zero temps.  Snow day bookends.  They got the Friday before the Christmas break off too, due to icy roads.  Although is seems just a distant memory now, but we were without power for five days last week.  No power for Christmas.  Yes, it was a bummer but I am thankful for our generator, which has served us well for 10 years.  It doesn't run the whole house but it runs enough to keep us warm, give us some lights, keep our food cold, run the microwave and some electrical plugs.  Hot dang, it doesn't run the stove, though.  That gives me a little reprieve from cooking.  I whipped up some good grub for New Year's Day though which I'll be sharing shortly.
     The weather has been so extreme in the past few years.  What's up with that?  It seems to be getting scary with all the tornadoes and extreme cold.

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Here's a little summer joy to ogle.  May it bring some eye candy to your visual bank account.

And how about a bit of sunshine from heaven to warm your soul.

I have been  all a-flurry(crazy reference to winter) on Pinterest, pinning some good blog advice.  I don't make New Year's resolutions but have decided to make it a goal to build blog/biz  time into my schedule.  I feel that my home and family SHOULD come first but what that equates to is that my life is  all about  cooking, cleaning, running errands, managing too much "stuff" around the house  and I could yammer on about that, which only serves to irritate me.  I'm tired of it.  And truth be told, I don't think I was really put on this earth to be a slave to that %^$&.  So I'm turnin' over a new leaf folks, changing the plan and doin' something that matters to ME, for a change.  The cavemen will survive with less maid power.  I have been readin' up on organizing my life, savvy blogging tips and better biz chutzpah.  Look out 2014.  This is my year!  Come along for the "ride."

What are your big ride plans for the year?