Nearly February, and Life Trucks Along

 Just thought I'd take a few minutes to write a catch-up post, although there really isn't much going on out of the ordinary. But life is what you make it, and we try to have fun any way we can, within legal boundaries of course, lol.

The weather here in North Florida has been pretty good all in all. We have our cold snaps that last a few days, and our rainy days which also usually last a day or 2 but otherwise mostly sunny and high's in the low 70's. In other words pretty darn nice. We get some nice sunrises around here, and some spectacular ones, especially during the cold snaps.

I'd relegate this to the "nice" category but even so..
very peaceful & a pretty good way to start the day.

Since we don't get that much cold weather and since we've gotten fairly lazy we decided to nix the whole wood-burning aspect of our great room fireplace and go with an inexpensive electric fireplace insert. Mainly for ambience but also for that little bit of heat when we want it. In our house, gas logs are not an option, but I have to say, for $160 @ Walmart, we're pretty happy with the results. We really got spoiled with our electric fireplace in Rocky and thought we'd try to replicate it at home.

All in all, not too shabby and after staring at a gaping black maw
for so long this is a very pleasant change. And to think, I used to
be the resident pyromaniac, fire-starter around here!

I've spent a fair amount of time in the craft room, working on my puff quilt and doing some beadwork. (Gratuitous selfie goes here).

But with the play-offs, I've been "triveting" too - (is that a word?) Hey, it's fun, they look pretty and are quite useful too.

Can you tell that blues are my favorite? You should see my closet, lol.
The bottom one is a work in progress that should be finished
by the time all the play-off are over today.

These are my remaining trivets. I keep them
stored like this so I can enjoy them.

My next door neighbor just had a 90th birthday and her daughters threw a very nice party for her which even included her daughter and grown grandson over from their home in Germany. She took a few trivets home to share with her family/friends. (Wow, they're global baby! HAHA 😁) I think everybody needs some pretty in their lives. I used to sell them when we lived onboard Dreamtime down in the Caribbean, but now I just gift them to friends. Here's a link here if you want to see more. TRIVETS.

In the kitchen, about a week or so ago I was organizing the freezer and almost threw away the frozen overripe bananas I had stashed in there (so tired of "tripping" over them, they're not exactly stackable!! grrr! 😖) but cooler heads prevailed and I instead made banana bread. So good - recipe on the Dreamtime site here just scroll down til you find it.

I do get out and thrift during a grocery run once in a while, and look what I found for $3 - a gorgeous, blue Pyrex deep dish pie pan! Well, I guess there must be a pot pie in the offing, right? 😀

What a score!! Hey, it's blue - cool!

Beef pot pie - for the first time I tried using an
egg wash and look how glossy!

Even with egg prices so high, we still have them nearly every day, and one morning while making breakfast they looked amusing - like cats-eye glasses, cross-eyed. 

Haha - couldn't resist the picture.

That's about it for this update, but I have more on tap, so check back in a while. If you feel so inclined leave a comment - I love hearing from y'all. Have a great day!
 

Food, Fabric Fun and Football

 It's been a busy few weeks around here. Lots of food fixing & freezing, plus a renewed interest in creating a few trivets. When we are watching football I like to keep my hands busy, and making trivets is akin to knitting in that way.

Football is ramping up with post-season games and miraculously the Jags not only won their division but won the Wild Card game against the Chargers! Go Jags!! 

Photo coutesy o Club Continental in Orange Park, FL

In the food department I've been having fun with Boston butt roasts, on sale, and very freezable. I usually take the pan drippings, stir in a 1/3 C or so of water, then freeze that in an ice cube tray. When reheating, drop a couple of the cubes in the covered pot with the pork and warm it up slowly. Keeps the meat very moist, gives you the prospect of gravy should you want it, and is super flavorful.

5.5 lbs and has a nice bit of "bark". I roast @ 450°
for 15 minutes, then drop the temp to 275° for the
remainder of the cooktime.

Another cooking project was a different kind of stuffed pepper. Walmart had these large, beautiful, 4-lobed bell peppers on sale, perfect for stuffing. I couldn't resist. Normally, I use ground beef, black beans, rice, cilantro and tex/mex spices. This time I had some ground turkey I had stocked up on (on sale @ Aldi), and I decided to make more of a turkey alfredo style pepper using sautéed mushrooms, cubed zucchini and onions, plus brown rice and alfredo sauce as the binder. Topped them with shredded parm and buttered panko bread crumbs. Wow, they turned out really good (I was kind of surprised since I was just winging it).

Baked @325° for 30 minutes, then under the broiler briefly
to brown the bread crumbs. Tasty, and 2 pairs to freeze.

One of the projects that I had really been putting off was re-organizing the upstairs linen closet/medicine cabinet. When you have a health plan that gives you a quarterly stipend for OTC drugs and supplies, you use it. Hence extras of bandaids, pain relievers, first aid creams and the like. It had been piling up and needed to be organized in the worst kind of way. Took me most of one morning. Here's the after shot, forgot to take a before (kind of glad about that, lol).

So much better now, but can we keep it that way

I went thrifting the other day and scored a nice, adjustable rolling tray table. It's perfect for my various craft projects and I can roll it aside when not working on it. That leaves my larger work table in the craft room open for bigger projects.

Rolling tray table has my newest trivet on it.

And speaking of trivets, here's a collage that shows the 3 trivets I sent over to our daughter's house, and the 2 newest ones. It's fun again, for which I'm grateful.

And last but not least, we had our 48th anniversary last week and celebrated with a wonderful steak dinner and some decadent desserts. FYI - If you have an Aldi near you, check to see if they have these there. Kind of spendy but worth it for a special occasion Absolutely fantastic!! 😊

The Lava cakes are imported from France and
the chocolate mouse cups from Belgium.

I think that about wraps it up for this post, thanks for stopping by.