First week of the New Year

Once again we have crossed over the threshold of a new year, and finishing up the tail end of a quarter-century. Lots of water under the bridge.

We had to start the New Year with the "good luck" meal of course. Here's a look at our black-eyed peas, (we make a big batch), and our prep method which ensures a tasty batch. We sauté chopped bell pepper, the more colorful the better, plus plenty of onions. Then after softening, add chopped ham bits, minced garlic and continue cooking until they get a little color on them. Add 2 cans partially drained black-eyes, a cup or so of chicken stock, 1T of chipotle sauce and an envelope of onion soup mix. Add a few herbs of your choice and let simmer an hour or so adding additional stock or water if they are looking dry.

Wonderful black-eyed peas, a little on the "wet" side.

We like them a little wet, over rice or cornbread. So good! We had a delicious mid-afternoon meal of smoked pork chops, collards, black-eyed peas/rice and cornbread with some cabernet sauvignon.

Here's the Boss in one of his new tee's
 getting ready to enjoy the meal.

I'm signed up for a craft fair in early February, so I've spent some time making a few more dazzlers and something new - puff trivets. I've been enjoying looking at my puff quilt lately and my brain came up with this idea. They are a good size for a bowl/plate or casserole dish, would  pretty-up the table, and also, unique I think. Any thoughts?

Puff trivets, about 12"x12". Some ppl
might not like my "twirly" trivets.

Bobby-Dazzlers anyone? I stock a few repeats
of the most popular items but hold them back in reserve.

Still getting the good sunrises on those cold, crisp mornings. Here's today's after overnight low's around 37°. 

Not a stunner like some, but still a pleasant surprise.

The Boss got the Colorado Pontoon boat commissioned the other day and while he was taking his test paddle, he got a shot of the swans having a "bottom's-up" feed. Pretty day too.

That's about it for this post. I stopped making New Year's resolutions a long time ago, however, I am planning on doing more stretching, squatting and "body-groove" style dancing to keep my joints limbered and loose. Oh, and I'm planning on laying-off the Christmas cookies one of these days too, lol. 😉😊 Thanks for stopping by and see you next time.

A lot of cooking and not much else

 It's that "cozy" time of year where we're starting to have some serious cold snaps and that means we're hibernating, or let's say nesting.  We are doing stuff around the house, but unless necessary, we're just hanging out and pursuing our own interests.

For me that means cooking and baking, plus organizing and cleaning, studying at the University of YouTube and puzzling. For the Boss that means reading various news and OpEd sources to help suss-out the shape of things to come, plus getting his walks in, watching football and relishing the food around here. He is very good about appreciating my efforts and that civilized behavior keeps smiles on people's faces. That, and his doing the dishes, lol. 😄

More of the gingersnap cookies and then creamy, traditional Chicken Pot Pie. Oh boy and yum.

Gingersnaps with candied ginger and pecans

Moist and flavorful chicken pot pie

On a side note, I discovered a new "baggie" the other day at Walmart - a half-gallon bag. It's nice to have an option that is not so wasteful for when something is too wide for a quart-sized bag but too short for a full gallon-sized bag. Like this half of a papaya. Or a half rack of ribs, you know?

Papaya in a Great Value half-gallon bag

We've had a few really pretty sunrises - lots of pinks during the winter. Unfortunately my phone camera doesn't do it justice, and I have to tweak the saturation in Picasa a bit, but here goes.

Morning sunrise

Another "lazy days" thing I baked was a pan of the breakfast casserole with sausage, peppers & onions, tomatoes and cut up pre-baked french fries. I've been working on perfecting this recipe ever since an Instacart order was misdelivered a couple of months ago. Here's how it went.  

Ed was in the garage with the door open. The driver asked him if he was John, and he said no. She then looked at the house number again and just said "here" and handed him the bags. He didn't know if I had ordered it so he took it and brought it in and set it on the counter. I looked at it and thought WTH!?! The order contained a bunch of frozen stuff; 2 - huge 5# bags of french fries, 2 - family-sized salisbury steak dinners, 2 - family-sized packs of breakfast sausages, a box of hash brown patties and a bunch of other stuff - yipes! After trying to figure out how to rectify the situation (and basically being told "finders keepers, we can't take it back"), I promptly took half of it over to my neighbor. 

What a story - and what a windfall! 😊😊 Now I just say, "Thank you Lord for my blessings" 🙏😇🙏

Anyway, I've been trying to use up the fries, so baking them up nice & crispy, cooling and chopping up into 1" pieces, then combining them with pre-cooked sausage crumbles, bell peppers, onions and tomatoes, then pouring a standard egg mixture over it all and topping with cheese and salsa verde dollops and baking has turned out to be quite good. YAY!

Portioning up french fry breakfast casserole

And we've been enjoying the NFL play-off games, which we record and watch at a more convenient time (and without commercials). The Jags couldn't get out of their own way and therefore didn't make it into the play-offs but there are plenty of good teams and good offense (my favorite) to enjoy watching. We watch them in order, and it's tough to avoid plot-spoilers on the games we haven't watched yet, but we try to be careful with which websites we visit during the interim.  We usually start a game around 6pm to coincide with dinner. Last night we watched the Ravens/Texans game and had meatballs in a broccoli alfredo sauce w/garlic toast and kalamata olives.

Meatballs in Broccoli Alfredo sauce & kalamata's

Well, I'm sorry this post isn't full of travel pics and other excitement, just our (comfortable) lives, for which we are truly grateful.

Thanks for stopping by, and I hope your day is bright and happy.

Typical Fall doings, cooking, fabric fun, and football

 We've been home now for a few weeks and have been getting back into the groove around here by doing some cleaning and shopping, plus having some good chit-chats with my neighbors.

I have also been adding to my trivet "tubie" stash, as if I needed to - on the way back home I occupied myself in the passenger's seat by stuffing polyfill into empty "tubies". Boy, did I end up with a pile, in fact, I actually bought more polyfill during the trip, lol! The Boss likes to handle the driving and I think he found that having my hands occupied shut me up quite nicely - win/win. 😂

Getting plenty of supplies ready for football season.

I'm also restocking the freezer with easy meals & sides, plus all my "timesavers"; sauces, salsas, stock, raw chopped veggies like onions, peppers plus sauteed mushrooms. I keep my buttermilk frozen in 1 cup batches, it thaws easily and works great for cornbread. I save a lot of time and money by storing this stuff in the freezer instead of letting it moulder in the fridge.

One of the first things I did was prepare and fry up a ton of meatballs, like maybe 75?!  One of the most well-liked meals around here is spaghetti & meatballs, probably the Boss's favorite, so I wanted to get a big batch of that made up. When I portion it up for the freezer I put 12 meatballs and an adequate amount of sauce into each container. This gives us 2 meals of 3 meatballs each, hey, 2 no-brainer meals, I love it! 😏 Here's what the ingredients look like before final prep.

Now that's going to be a *bunch* of sauce!

Meanwhile, the Boss has been getting the pontoon boat parts out and prepped for assembly. He's looking forward to getting some lazy rowing in on the lake.

A few more bits and bobs and it'll be ready to launch.

We had one of our stunner sunrises this morning. These really strut their stuff during the cooler fall/winter weather. They don't last long - maybe 10 minutes max, but boy, what a show.

This started out deep reddish-pink, but had progressed
to yellow as the sun is just getting ready to poke up.

Last night I made pizza to enjoy during the (recorded) Tennessee - Alabama game - Roll Tide! A bit of a slow start but they got it done. It's a deluxe with pepperoni, italian sausage, mushrooms, onions, bell pepper, black olives, capers and 2 kinds of cheese. The shot was taken before the top layer of cheese was added. YUM!

One dinner and a couple of lunches for sure.

Storage for my trivets can be a problem. I like to look at them before they get sold and go away, so putting them in a box just doesn't work for me. I set up a mounting system on one of my craft room walls. I used an aluminum flat tie with 3 rows of chain and shower curtain hooks and it works great. I'll show you.

Well, that's about it for now. Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you have a great day! See you next time. 😎

Fall fun and food passions

 As I write this, fall has been in full swing in many of the other parts of the country, not to mention up in Canada. Leaf peepers have seen the glory of the fall colors and now many trees are past peak. Not so much fall weather here yet. We've had a total of maybe a week or 10 days of cooler temps and crystal blue skies. Sleeping with the windows open and smelling that crisp air is so wonderful, I want more!

One of my wonderful neighbors gifted us with a stellar loaf of Iced Pumpkin Bread, how cool is that. It is delicious, especially after dinner with a cup of hot tea. Generous and thoughtful 💖 She gets the "good neighbor" award for sure.

So good, so moist and the spices are on point too.

For me, this is the food time of year. I can have fun making many of our favorite dishes and stock the freezer as well.  On the docket this week was the Ree Drummond King Ranch Chicken Casserole recipe, which is pretty labor intensive the way I make it, but hearty and oh-so-good. I do a lot of the prep work a day or 2 in advance to pace myself - (sounds so dramatic, huh?). Here's what it looks like at assembly time.

Top left, corn tortillas & chipotle sauce, well-simmered and
seasoned pinto beans, cheddar cheese shreds, a bowl of
sauteed mushrooms, onions and red & green bell peppers,
and a bag with the whole, torn up rotisserie chicken.

Let the layering begin! Out of the picture is a big pot of Tex-Mex seasoned "gravy" which gets ladled on after each layer. It's much like making lasagna; sauce, then torn-up tortillas, chicken, pintos, the mushroom mixture, shredded cheese then the magic gravy.. Repeat.

The first layer in process, with mushroom mixture just going on.
When you think about 2 layers like that you can tell just
 how hearty it will end up being.

Finally topped up and ready for the oven. After baking, I refrigerate it overnight to not only let the flavors develop but also to make it easier to divvy-up for the freezer.

I got 8 generous (can you say lunch leftovers?)
2-person servings out of this batch. Not bad.

There is always some yard work needed after we get home from the Rockies. The palm tree beds, on the dock level, are full of weeds and the silk flower arrangements are tired after being out in the summer sun. Time to put all that in order. Ship-shape and Bristol finish, haha, we try. 😊

Yep, this is pretty overgrown and awful.

I pull all the weeds and tidy up the lava rocks etc, and
the Boss gets the shop-vac after all the mess that's left behind,
This year our biggest queen palm had a couple of big seed pods
and the seeds were a mess, but we got 'em.

The after shot, taken from the deck, looks so much better.  Here's a shot of one of my silk floral arrangements that I made last year. 

It just dresses up the bulkhead wall and looks pretty.

The other day was the Air Show up at the Naval Air Station. We didn't go, but had hopes that we might get a good fly-by from the Blue Angels (like we did last year). Nope, we saw them from afar but they didn't pass overhead here.  Here's a shot courtesy of the Ft. Lauderdale Air Show.

Love the precision of their formations.

One last shot of a beautiful morning sunrise, so pretty.

Morning sunrise over the lake.

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great day!

Homeward bound

 Sorry this blog is long overdue, but we got very busy at the end of Sept and we're still playing catch-up.  And so it went, the buttoning up of Rocky, our summer abode, and then on the road heading back to Florida and our forever home, where the cleaning, unpacking and organizing is still in progress.  The trip is about 1900 miles and usually requires 4 overnights. We take the 1st night in Fort Collins because by the time every little thing is done, all we want to do is drive down the canyon (45 miles of twisty, slow-going road), shower, eat and crash.  This year we took an extra night so that we only had a short 3-4 hour final leg before rolling into town. This gave us a few hours to work on opening the house up, get the water & fridge turned on, the place aired out, do a small shop and get squared away throughout the afternoon and evening.

The last week out west was pretty busy, and most especially the last couple of days before leaving. We had several boxes with canned/boxed foodstuffs that couldn't go into the car until the last minute for fear of bear activity, so our other "bring-backs" got piled up here and there inside the rig. In our down time, we watched the turkeys enjoy themselves around the park and up on the fence next door to us.

These turkey's got to where they liked sitting up on the fence and preening.
They would come into our park to browse for bugs, then fly up and preen,
then jump down to the property next door which is largely undeveloped.

One day while up at the laundry room I was sitting outside on the phone talking to my sister and I watched this squirrel stock up on pinecones. He'd race across the driveway and up the pine tree, pick out a likely pinecone, and with it in his teeth, race back to the shed and into his entry hole to stash it. I guess his eyes were bigger than his entry point! These cones got stuck and he couldn't get them inside, lol.

Not the best shot but here he is.

And so it began, the long drive back home, first through the diminishing hills of Colorado, and into the huge stretch of agricultural land in the mid-west.

I often wonder exactly what is being grown, sometimes
it's pretty obvious but other times it keeps me guessing.

 As we made our way through the Missouri/Tenn territories we found a few roads with light traffic - what a treat! Driving through big cities, even on the bypasses really taxes the patience of my DH.

Made it home in one piece, and a couple days afterwards, started the big cooking projects, which is fun for me!! 😀  A visit to my handy Publix for a ready-made pizza crust, got a pie made up for supper one night. I always keep on hand the fixings for pizza, it's an easy fix up.

Before the stint in the oven.

One of my first priorities is always to make up some of the dishes that I haven't made over the summer and get them stashed in the freezer for easy, delicious meals on those days I'm not feeling it. The ground beef, black beans and rice filling for stuffed peppers and burritos is a bit time-consuming, (the meat is fully cooked), but so worthwhile. I add plenty of onions, mushrooms and corn plus all the taco-type seasonings that "Tex-Mex" it up, Hatch chilies too. They aren't super spicy, just flavorful. Here's what I ended up with; 3 sets of stuffed peppers, (we ate one set), and 6 burritos. Yum in advance.

With a few tortilla chips these are a favorite. They freeze well
and reheat easily in a covered frying pan, a low oven or the microwave.

I pop these into a covered frying pan, nestled in a "dirty rice"
mixture, pour on some salsa and sharp cheddar, cover them and
let them heat over a low burner for a half hour or so, again more chips.

One of the veggies I love, LOVE most is collards, and you can get a big bunch, cook them and end up with some for the freezer. This time I used a big bunch of turnip greens and a big bunch of collards. Add a ham hock, sauteed onions & garlic, some chipotle sauce and homemade stock and you've got greens to die for, for days! I got 6, 4-serving batches, 5 of which went into the freezer. 😋

Still mopping, polishing and doing laundry, not to mention clearing up our overgrown, weed-infested palm tree beds, but early morning sunrises like this are truly something to be enjoyed with your sweetie and a cup of coffee.

Thanks for checking in, see you the next time.