Macaroni and Cheese.

With sauteed onions....

Mozzarella cheese....
and baby spinach.....
put under the broiler...
and served...
And eaten. Yum.

Thirsty?

Today was a HOT one. Too hot, too humid, too sticky. Not really a big eating day, needless to say. I was uninspired by tap water and not relishing the thought of drinking 2 gallons of it, neither. So I made up some good (non-alcoholic, unfortch. And still wondering why?), cold drinks to accompany on my evening alone while I pray that it rains.

First, we have a blackberry-catnip-mint iced tea with honey. All plucked from my yard (of course), except the honey (of course. If you know anything about my fear of flying stingy insects, you'll understand). Lovely, fruity, sweet, cool and fresh tasting. Yum. Drank most of that already.

Next, inspired by an idea my friend had, I made some juice-cicles (poured white grape juice halfway up the ice cube trays, froze, then poured strawberry-banana juice over the frozen grape juice and froze again), and added club soda. It's pretty, simple, crisp, and cold, which club soda must be (I hate it with ice cubes because at the end it's just, well, flat-tasting water, and I hate it with no ice because when club soda is warm, well, EW. Perfect solution to THAT problem, thanks hon! :) )
Dontcha just wanna dive in?

Berry Monster.

Well, today's berry-using capabilities have been thwarted by one Cute-And-Irresistable-Baby-Dude:

Oh, well. I'll go get more this afternoon, or tomorrow morning. I hope he enjoyed them.

Bath time.

Morning Harvest to Simple Salad.

The rest, herbs. Washed, and hung upside down to dry for teas (plus saving a bit of the catnip for my mom's cat. He really is a good cat), or stored in the refridgerator (basil, mostly, and the rest of the berries) to be used in later cooking adventures.

Disaster Mainly Averted -or- How to Make a Lovely Cup of Mint Tea

Did you ever have a day where you felt bad, so you ate bad? Evil, processed things that shouldn't ever pass your lips... and then they do anyways, just because you went to the grocery store hungry in the morning and it was all downhill from there?

I am having one of those days.

Tomorrow, I will start the day off right, bake some bread, make a lovely breakfast, and prepare wonderful, simple foods. And simple usually means healthy. And healthy means beautiful. And beautiful food will mean pictures for my blog. :)

For now, I will go make some tea with the mint from my garden and pray I don't get an awful stomach ache from all of the garbage I just tossed down my system.

How I will make said tea from above leaves, picked fresh just before sunset:

First, mash it up until it's glisteny and your kitchen smells heavenly.

Then, happen upon a miniature colander because you've lost your tea-ball. Place the mint (yes, that's mint, not anything that may be considerably more happifying and/or illegal, I'm a momma now people) and some dried lavender, also from the garden, into said miniature colander.

Place contraption now containing tea leaves into your birthday teacup on your birthday saucer, with your birthday cookbook just behind as a lovely backdrop.







Pour hot-but-not-boiling water from your birthday teapot over leaves, careful not to overflow and scatter crushed mint leaves inside of your birthday teacup.

Take a quaint picture of all of your birthday food-and-drink related presents of yesteryear and enjoy your lovely spring-green cup of tea (also take in the fact that when you buy mint tea bags from the store, the tea is brown). Add some honey if you'd like. Read your birthday cookbook (which you've recently become obsessed with all over again), or write a blog post about how to make a cup of tea.

My stomach feels better already.

Wild Blackberry Jam

My first experiment with my abundant wild berry crop. It's like eating liquid gemstone... deep amethyst and garnet. So very lovely, and fulfilling. Nothing like having toasted bread you made yourself (that's another post altogether, though...) with jelly which is chock-full of berries you picked yourself in your own backyard.

JOY, indeed.

Simple Supper.

Chicken sauteed in milk and cheese (from the cookbook Apples for Jam, highly recommended), fresh zucchini and summer squash, and creamy herbed red potatoes (with herbs just picked from the garden, hooray!).

My 10 month old gives it two thumbs up and a big YAY hand-clap every time he took a bite.

(As an aside, I probably should go ahead and look for the instruction manual to my digital camera. My photography isn't what it should be.)

Versatility.

Sautee some beef with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Add in chopped veg of your choice.

For lunch today, I am having steak and veg sautee over penne with (just a little!) parmesan-butter sauce.

For lunch tomorrow, I am having the same mixture, but over brown rice, with teriyaki sauce.

And all it took was 10 minutes of my time. Funny, that... doesn't it look like quite a bit more than that?

Explanation.

So, I'm good with food. Most foods, I can do something pretty good with, if not freaking fantastic. I can bake (although I don't particularly CARE for baking. Too much measuring. But I'll do it for the sake of deliciousness), I can make a mean roast, I can do a whole damn party spread from scratch. And people are always like, You should do this! You could do catering! Why don't you think about that? You should TOTALLY sell the cakes you make... make a portfolio!

Well, the thing is, I'm no chef. I've never taken a cooking class. Not once. I'm a stay at home mother who in addition to cooking sews, crafts, draws, makes lists and concocts laundry detergent.

I wouldn't know how to do anything with food professionally if it would save my life, probably.

So I decided, with some gentle arm-twisting from a friend, to start this food blog, to hash out some ideas, to have an online portfolio of sorts, to talk about my favorite hobby: food.

I think it'll be fun, and hey, if no one else reads it, I'll just use it as a journal.

So, there you have it. Let the games begin!

It all started with a big bang...

... (now now, let's not debate religion, it was just a clever twist on the theme) and then there were DINOSAURS!


This lovely dinosaur cake was made by the momma, by herself. Pumpkin cake, vanilla frosting, colored chocolate tree with sugar cone bark, dark and white chocolate chips ground up for "gravel" on the volcano, blue-raspberry jello for the lake with Swedish fish swimming about inside.

I would've taken pictures of the rest of the food at the party, but it was eaten so crazy-fast that I didn't get a shot of any of it. Oh well, maybe next time....

Yay, my first food blog post! :)