Renewing my blog page...

As the title announces, I am renewing my dedication to my blog page.  I haven't forgotten you all, although that may be difficult for you to believe since it's been ages and ages since my last post!  And for anyone that actually read my posts, I thank you for your loyalty and I hope that you will continue to visit my little blog from time to time because I really do enjoy sharing the things that go on in my little neck of the prairie with all my friends and family!

My good life is still very good!  And very busy!  But also very normal and perhaps to many, not so terribly exciting.  But it'a a good life and I am enjoying it very much.  As some of you know, my son and his family live in Alaska and my daughter and her husband live in KS.  They all are doing very well and recently had the opportunity to visit with each other.  My Baby-girl and her hubby went to Alaska for a week and went sightseeing with her older brother, Dilly-girl and grand babies  and spent a fun time with them all!  And I would normally add a photo of this event but I can't seem to figure out how to do that.  Not sure if it's my computer or if it has to do with the (ever better) Blogger.  But I do have lovely photo's of all of them together for the first time since a few christmas's ago!

In June our Son, Dilly-girl and grand-babies will visit us here!  (I hope to have figured out this photo upload by then).   And it will be so much fun!  They will be here in time to be in the Springfield Days Children's Parade, which I am leading again this year!  And we'll do all the fun things like going to the Omaha Zoo, and Laurenzen Garden, Soaring Wings Winery, and so on and so forth.  Then Son and Dilly-girl will go to K.C. and spend a weekend with Baby-girl and Son-in-law and Granddaddy and I will get to spend the whole weekend with our little Grand babies!  YAY!!!!!

Then...... at the end of July my Honey and I will go to Alaska and see more sights and do lots more exploring AND we'll get to be there for our grandsons 3rd birthday!  We are SO excited for all the fun to begin.  But in the mean time...  We will be working on getting our garden up and running again.  We've had some late snow fall and freezes so we haven't done much of anything in our garden and flower beds other than clean it up and till the soil in the garden bed.  We thought about planting rows of greens, but decided not to and now we are ever so glad we waited since that night we had a deluge of rain and it's been stormy off and on for the past week!  But, if all goes well, we hope to get those seeds in by next week.  And the serious gardening will not begin until after the 1st of May, which is not unusual for these parts!

I have been doing some knitting still.  I am currently working on another sock for myself.  It's a long slow process since I tend to work on it rather sporadically.  I have also started a Knitting Ministry in our church.  We knit together every other week for now and we have three organizations that we knit for.  The three projects are each for a different skill level which makes it very easy for anyone to join us.  And then, I recently purchased an antique spinning wheel.  It's a Canadian Production Wheel and it's designed to make lace weight and sock weight yarns.  Which is exactly the types of yarns I enjoy working with.  But, to make them is a whole other story!!!  I've been a bit frustrated with the learning process, but I keep telling myself that when these wheel's were made, little children were learning how to spin on just this type of wheel!  And if they could do it, then by golly, I can do it!  I'm beginning to believe, those children were MUCH brighter than me!  So, when ever I become too frustrated, I fall back on working with my drop spindle, just so I feel like I am being somewhat productive.  I've made one ball of single ply yarn and am working on another and hope to be able to ply the two together soon so I'll have a ball of working yarn to make mittens with (eventually).  My goal is to make thrummed mittens with my drop spindle yarn.  Perhaps you all can help me stay dedicated to that goal by asking me about it from time to time!  You know, to keep my on track.  ;-)  And my second goal is to make a ball of spinning wheel yarn by the end of the summer!

So, I will leave you all now to digest this first blog of this year.  I hope it wasn't too terribly boring and I hope to figure out the photo issues so that I will be able to post photo's in my next blog post.

I hope you all are doing well and I will write again next week!  Thank you all!

Have a wonderful day!

Some pictures y'all have missed...

Hello everyone!

Here I am again!  I've been gone SO long that I have TONS of things I want to share with you all!  My goodness, just yesterday I posted TWICE!!!

Today I'm going to post some pictures of our grand babies!!!  I missed out posting about our grandbabies there when I was absent from the blog.  So, here are just a few snippets of photo's that I would have posted had I not been a cranky computer owner!  (My main problem was a computer that didn't want to do what I wanted it to do AND having far too many things to get done in a day.)  

Mar. 2011

This was his "cheese" face.
2011

This is him in Aug. 2012

And here is little Aliza Grace Minori.

Born in Nov. 2011

I can't remember if I had blogged about the quilt.  I actually made that baby quilt and finished quilting it while I was in Seattle waiting for her to be born!  Nothing like sewing 'till the last minute!

And this is her in July 2012

         This is her walking, she is 9 months.

This is them in Jul. 2012

And there it is.  A very small snippet of what I would have posted had I not had a little tiff with my computer.  I would post pictures of them EVERYDAY if I thought I could get away with it (and if Dilly-girl would send me pictures everyday)!   But, I won't do that to you all.

Now all is good and I'm back to playing friendly with my computer so you can expect to find me blogging away every week!  You lucky people!  ;-)

Have a fabulous day!

Knitting!

Hello everyone!

Just a short little post about this!

I actually knitted this sweater in three weeks!  To me that is paramount to performing a miracle!   It's a pattern I had gotten when she was first born back in Federal Way, WA.  Unfortunately, the shop I purchased it from has since closed down.   And that is SO sad because those ladies were SO friendly and helpful and didn't ever make a novice like myself, feel bad about my lack of experience!  I knitted it with Mochi Plus by Crystal Palace Yarns in # 684 color way.  This was THE easiest pattern to follow and I LOVE the yarn!  So easy to work with!!!  Little Aliza wears it beautifully!  And the shirt is a K-State shirt that Baby Girl got her!  Now she's all set.

Oh, and Jess...  See, we only got one dressed too!  ;-)

Have a great day everyone!  

Busy, busy!

Hello everyone!  So, I feel like I had this whole, long, playfully relaxing vacation and then came home and it was go, go, GO!  There were Dr.'s appointments, check-ups, then the catching up of all the household things that didn't get done, (not because my honey did nothing, but because it's just one of those things where I like things done... okay, "my way").   Anyhow......  I've got the house sorta kinda caught up and then there is the yard.  I came back to a yard that looked pretty rough.  This drought is really messing with my grass and plants!  Not to mention all the poor farmers and cattle people around here!!!  Our water bill last month was KILLER!  And I've been dumping more water on the yard since I've been home.  We planted two trees last year and they are still a bit tender and need that extra bit of attention with the H2O.

On Saturday my neighbor and I got together to do some canning.  I had done some canning a few years ago but nothing since.  And my neighbor had never done any canning so she came over to see how it's done.  NOT, that I'm any kind of expert, or anything.  But I have done a bit more than she has.  So, we canned 8 jars of Adobo, 12 jars of Pickled Jalapeno, 9 sliced and 3 whole.  That took nearly the whole day.

  

Today I made pickled banana peppers. 

And once we get more red jalapeños, I'll make more Adobo!  My pantry looks so cool with all the jars I'm getting stacked up!  We have gotten LOTS of cherry tomatoes, but I've been freezing those.  I'm nervous about canning those.  The instructions on all the canned tomato recipes all talk about the hazards of canning tomatoes!  It freaks me out!!!  And I planted some shelling beans, black and pinto but I don't think I'll get enough to really do much with them.  I had a LOT of trouble getting any of my beans to grow.  We only had three green bean plants come up out of 16 planted.  And same with my peas (12 planted 0 came up) and I only had one Sugar Snap pea plant come up out of 12 planted!  Three black bean plants came up and two pinto plants.  Sad, so sad.  I had visions of little burlap bags full of black and pinto beans.  Oh well, maybe next year.

This past Monday, my honey and I went for a little ride out to Winterset, Iowa.  We took our cameras and Ricky,  to check out Madison County's covered bridges.  It was a beautiful day for taking photo's  and we had a lovely time.  It's been a while since we had gone out just the two of us and made a day of it.  It was really nice!  I believe we'll be doing more of that in the future for sure!

And here is little Ricky along for the ride.  He's really a very good traveller!  

So, that was our weekend.  Sort of.  There are always things  that need doing, as you all know,  but sometimes you just need to get up and do something fun!    Now, let me see what else I can 'can' this week!  ;-)

Have a wonderful week!

Can you believe it?....

Hello everyone!  It has been SO long!!!  So much has changed since my last post.  So, this will be a short post just to say, hi!  And to fill in the gap (highlights only) from my last post to this one!  And honestly, I will TRY to keep it short.  Those of you who know me, I tend to get a bit long winded when I'm trying to explain things!  ;-)

Here goes.....

I went to Seattle to visit with my son and daughter-in-law (aka dilly-girl) when she was pretty near to giving birth to their second child.  I spent a month with them and was with her when their daughter, Aliza Grace Minori, was born!!!  What a beautiful day that was!

I spent  nearly three weeks with that little girl and her brother.  Had the bestest time EVER!  And Granddaddy was able to visit for a week too!

Then the holidays arrived and with that, news that our son would be transferred to Alaska and then immediately be off to Afghanistan.  Plans were made for dilly-girl and kids to come stay with us and then the military put the kabbosh on that!  Rules and regulations.... Long story short, (see, I am capable of telling a short story...)  Dilly-girl and kids moved to Alaska in January of 2012 and our First Born stayed in rear detachment instead of going to Afghanistan!  YAY!  As much as we would have LOVED having the grandbabies and Dilly-girl living with us, we much preferred that they be able to be a family together!

Thennnnn, Dilly-girl had the opportunity to come back to the lower 48 funded by her wonderful Big sister,  Heather!  Dilly-girl and the kids went to where her sister lives and they were able to go visiting with family.  And we were included in that visit.  A surprise birthday visit for my Honey!  Heather baked a cake just for my Honey's birthday and Dilly-girl and the kids drove it to K.C. (the half-way point for them and us).  Baby Girl and Darling Drew were able to go to K.C. as well and they helped to facilitate the "lie" to get my Honey to go to K.C. without suspicion!

Big Sister

Happiest of Granddaddies!

I wish y'all could have seen the look on his face when he first realized that it was Dilly-girl and the kids at the hotel!  Priceless I tell you!

Baby-Girl finally met her Goddaughter

As did Darling Drew.   

We had a wonderful weekend with them and Baby-Girl and her hubby and our wonderful In-Law family John, Paula and Krista!  Truly a fabulous weekend!

And then, at the end of July I went to Anchorage to visit  with Our First Born and his family for 31 days!!!!  I took my Ricky along as well (he's such a seasoned traveller now).  I played and played with the kids and saw a bear out roaming around the housing area! I knitted a sweater for little Aliza and shopped and went sightseeing.  Oh and I saw a Moose too!  I ate Caraboo burgers and Reindeer Sausage and Moose Sausage and Fresh Wild caught Salmon!  Yummy, yummy, yummy!

All in all had the best time ever!  Of course there were tons of things that went on in between what I've described and today.  But, I did promise to keep it short, so......  ;-)

I will be back to blogging again on a more regular basis.  I've got loads of things I want to share with you all and lot's of new projects to make and do!  I have a special knitting project that I would like to get started on  as a remmemberance of my time spent in Alaska!  And lot's & lot's of other fun things!

So, stay tuned and I hope you enjoy a wonderful day!  ;-)

Chrysanthemums & bread machines

Hello everyone! I do believe Fall has arrived! The trees are losing their leaves, the chrysanthemums are blooming and the bread machine is back on the counter!

And to kick off this wonderfully cool weather, last night we had Beef & Barley stew and home made whole wheat bread!! Yup, the ice cream maker has been put away and the bread machine brought out. That is my way of saying, Fall is here and it's time for comforting warm foods for cold nights!

The beef & barley stew was just one of those made up things. You just sort of take stock of what you have and then chop, slice and use up. You really can't go wrong when you just wing it for stews and soups. And the thing I really like about making soups and stews is that you can let it simmer for hours and hours and it only makes it better at the end of the day!

But the best thing about Fall is the bread! I ADORE fresh baked bread! Straight out of the oven, sliced, buttered and oh my goodness! The bread crust is crunchy/chewy and the center of the bread is warm and buttery and slides down your throat! Oh my! Just thinking about it makes me want to go and cut another slice off and toast it and add a dab of jam on it!

Anyhowwwww. I have an old Sunbeam, 2lb. Expressbake bread machine. My honey got it for me way back in 1996 or maybe 97'. I didn't use it much back then. I wasn't a real big fan of bread machine bread. I didn't care for the way it looked when you took it out of the machine. And the texture always seemed to be off. But then I discovered the dough setting. That setting has totally changed my life! I now use that setting exclusively. Although I do have a Kitchen Aide mixer, I don't use it for making pizza crusts or bread doughs any longer. The bread machine kneads the bread and takes care of the first rise process with no hassles. And then I take out the dough and shape it and let it rise again and then bake it off. And it comes out perfect EVERY TIME!

Yesterday I made a whole wheat bread using a recipe that I had never tried before. I got it out of my "Bread Machine how to prepare and bake the perfect loaf" by Jennie Shapter, that Baby Girl gave me years ago! I followed the recipe, Light Whole-Wheat Bread, and then set it on the dough setting. When it was done, I took it out, shaped it and set it in the bread pan and let it raise again. Then I baked it at 400 degrees for 35 minutes.

For those of you who would like to make this bread here is the recipe. I'm not sure how you would go about adjusting it, if at all, for those who will not be using a bread machine. But if you are interested in making this bread here is the recipe.

Light Whole-Wheat Bread

1 3/4 cups water

3 cups whole-wheat bread flour

1 1/3 cups white bread flour

2 tsp. salt

2 Tbsp. granulated sugar

2 Tbsp. butter

1 1/2 tsp. rapid-rise active dry yeast

1 Pour the water into the bread machine pan. If the instructions for your bread machine specify that the yeast is to be placed in the pan first, rexerse the order in which you add the liquid and dry ingredients to the pan.

2 Sprinkle each type of flour over in turn, ensuring that the water is covered. Add the sal, sugar and butter in separate corners of the bread pan. Make a shallow indentation in the center of the flour and add the yeast.

3 Set the bread machine to the basic/normal setting, medium crust. Press Start.

*OR*

*Set the machine to dough setting at this point if you'd like to shape your own bread.*

At the end of the dough cycle. Turn out the dough and shape as you like it. Then set it aside in a warm place until dough doubles in size. At which time you may then place your bread in a pre-heated oven set at 400 degrees and bake for 30-35 minutes or until done.

For those of you who have a bread machine, do you use your bread machines for the whole bread or just the dough setting?

Hope everyone is planning on a great weekend! Thanks for stopping by! ;-)

Babka and....

Hello everyone!

I have been a busy, busy girl! I'm in the middle of three major projects! (Major for me) I have been knitting baby girl things, I found a lovely and simple baby sweater that I only made three mistakes on! (sheesh) working on the baby bonnet made from silk hankies (not finished because I also worked on a baby quilt and quilt finger and silk hankies don't work well together.) I am currently working on the baby quilt for my granddaughter who will arrive in November (Yay!) AND.... I am working on a new vanity bench that I got off Craigslist a while ago! Phew!

So, I have no new pictures of the baby quilt I made for my niece. She did send me a picture of it but you can't really see anything of the quilt, just her adorable baby girl named Naomi! And I don't have pictures of my granddaughters quilt, sweater, bonnet or booties because I have absolutely NO natural light today. Just cloudiness and I didn't take any pictures of them when we did have nice, beautiful natural light all last week! ;-)

But, what I am going to do today is post the Babka recipe here instead. I had a couple of requests for said recipe and you know I'm all about being receptive to requests.... ;-)

So, here you go. And I hope that someday you will remember this recipe and make it because it is seriously delicious!

Chocolate Babka

Makes 3 loaves

1 1/2 cups warm milk, 110 degrees

2 (1/4 ounce each) packages active dry yeast

1 3/4 cups plus a pinch of sugar

3 whole large eggs, room temperature

2 large egg yolks, room temperature

6 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for work surface

1 teaspoon salt

1 3/4 cups (3 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, cut into 1-inch pieces, room temperature plus more for bowl and loaf pans

2 1/4 pounds semisweet chocolate, very finely chopped*

2 1/2 tablespoons ground cinnamon

1 tablespoon heavy cream

Streusel topping (see below)

Pour warm milk into a small bowl. Sprinkle yeast and pinch of sugar over milk; let stand until foamy, about 5 minutes.

In a bowl, whisk together 3/4 cup sugar, 2 eggs, and egg yolks. Add egg mixture to yeast mixture, and whisk to combine.

In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine flour and salt. Add egg mixture, and beat on low speed until almost all the flour is incorporated, about 30 seconds. Change to the dough hook. Add 2 sticks butter, and beat until flour mixture and butter are completely incorporated, and a smooth, soft dough that’s slightly sticky when squeezed is formed, about 10 minutes.

Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead a few turns until smooth. Butter a large bowl. Place dough in bowl, and turn to coat. Cover tightly with plastic wrap. Set aside in a warm place to rise until doubled in bulk, about 1 hour.

Place chocolate, remaining cup sugar, and cinnamon in a large bowl, and stir to combine. Using two knives or a pastry cutter, cut in remaining 1 1/2 sticks butter until well combined, set filling aside.

Generously butter three 9-by-5-by-2 3/4-inch loaf pans; line them with parchment paper.

Beat remaining egg with 1 tablespoon cream; set egg wash aside.

Punch back the dough, and transfer to a clean surface. Let rest 5 minutes. Cut into 3 equal pieces. Keep 2 pieces covered with plastic wrap while working with the remaining piece.

On a generously floured surface, roll dough out into a 16-inch square; it should be 1/8 inch thick.

Brush edges with reserved egg wash. Crumble 1/3 of the reserved chocolate filling evenly over dough, leaving a 1/4-inch border. Refresh egg wash if needed. Roll dough up tightly like a jelly roll. Pinch ends together to seal. Twist 5 or 6 turns. Brush top of roll with egg wash. Carefully crumble 2 tablespoons filling over the left half of the roll, being careful not to let mixture slide off. Fold right half of the roll over onto the coated left half. Fold ends under, and pinch to seal. Twist roll 2 turns, and fit into prepared pan. Repeat with the remaining 2 pieces of dough and remaining filling. (When shaping the babka, twist dough evenly throughout the length of the roll a full 5 to 6 turns.)

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Brush the top of each loaf with egg wash. Crumble 1/3 of streusel topping over each loaf. Loosely cover each pan with plastic wrap, and let stand in a warm place 20 to 30 minutes. (The babka can be prepared up to step 8 and frozen for up to a month before baking. When ready to bake, remove from freezer; let stand at room temperature for about 5 hours, and bake.)

Bake loaves, rotating halfway through, until golden, about 55 minutes. Lower oven temperature to 325 degrees and bake until babkas are deep golden, 15 to 20 minutes more. Remove from oven, and transfer to wire racks until cool. Remove from pans; serve.

Babkas freeze well for up to 1 month.

* After chopping the chocolate into moderately sized chunks, I used the food processor to pulse the rest of the chocolate in two batches to small bits. It saved a lot of time!

Streusel Topping

Makes 3 3/4 cups

1 2/3 cups confectioners’ sugar

1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour

12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature

In a large bowl, combine sugar, flour, and butter. Using a fork, stir until fully combined with clumps ranging in size from crumbs to 1 inch.

And there you have it. This is a Martha Stewart recipe and it is absolutely, dangerously delicious! I do hope you all will find a time to make it!