Sunday, May 15, 2011

Two Princes and a Princess

For Ezzie's second birthday, she got some My Little Ponies and dress-up shoes from Josh and Rebekah. Once she tried them on with her princess dress from Stephanie, the boys wanted some costumes too, so Rebekah made capes for them out of playsilks and a nursing cover, and I just had to get some pictures.

Here are Princess Ezra and Prince Lemuel, but where is Prince Cedar?

Maybe this way?
There he is! Look at the camera, everyone!

There we go!

Thursday, May 5, 2011

Planting day!

Silver and I have never had a garden of our own, and that was a big thing we were looking forward to doing here -- because it's fun and delicious, but also because it's good practice. Our dream -- all of us -- is to have a piece of land one day with some animals and a big, big garden to grow basically all the produce we need. While we can't tackle have some livestock yet (I'm not sure if we're zoned for sheep...), we do have the opportunity to get in some gardening practice.

The men worked really hard turning over the soil, building garden boxes, and incorporating some compost -- and then, finally, on April 21st, we were ready to start planting! It was a beautiful day, and we spent almost all of it outdoors.


Lem and Cedar on the baby playset:

The boxes! Here you can see we've started cordoning them off -- we're doing the square foot method from a book that Josh has:

Me and the Pumpkin -- otherwise known as baby Elspeth:

Cedar peeking through, and Silver supervising while Ezzie climbs...

Rebekah also cleaned up the whole backyard that day -- here Cedar's discovered the turtle sand box that she's pulled out to hose off:

Ezzie and Lem decide to join:

Ezzie bug:


Ezzie and Lem:

Pizza! Not homemade, but the next best thing: Take-out from Lil' Mike's, where they do east-coast style pizza so good it makes you homesick. Well, it does me, anyway.

Homemade Condiments


I think this was the day that Josh made dinner -- a big old potato casserole, with plenty of cheese and broccoli... and I forgot to take pictures. I did manage to get a picture, though, of what I was doing in the meantime. I made some ketchup to go with the potato casserole (I really wish there was a better name for it -- it was improvised wonder), and some mayo so that I could make buttermilk ranch dressing.

And you need almost nothing to make them -- a pot and a can opener for the ketchup, a blender (or food processor) for the mayo, and maybe a knife for the dressing. Here's where I got my recipes: Homemade ketchup, Mayo, Buttermilk Ranch Dressing.

Dinner, 18 April - Waffles!

Forgot to take pictures before we dug in! Here we've got some tasty waffles:

And some broccoli baked with cheese on top (what's left of it, anyway):

Some sausage we cut and fried up in the pan:

And Lemy and Cedar eating some waffles... in monster/dinosaur jammies.

Dinner, 17 April - French Onion Soup




French onion soup with salad and no-knead bread

Saturday, April 30, 2011

Dinner, 16 April - leftover smorgasbord



With two families eating together, we produce relatively small amounts of leftovers. If there's enough, one of the men can take it to work for lunch, but usually it's just a bit of this and that. Our solution has been periodic leftover feasts.

This particular one includes the pizzas and sweet potato fries from the post below, as well as Curried Apple Soup, homemade spaghetti with homemade meatballs, and veggie stir-fry with rice and Easy Peanut Sauce. The curried apple soup was not a favorite -- we all ate it, more or less, but ended up having to get rid of the last of it because it was just sitting around. Everything else, however, was amazing and delicious...

Friday, April 29, 2011

A Backlog of Dinners....

A big motivation for creating this blog was -- I'll be honest -- to post about the dinners we've been making. So I'm working on posting a big backlog of pictures our dinners for the past couple of weeks...



15 April 2011 - Sweet Potato fries (and, okay, the rest of a bag of Ore-Ida frozen curly fries) with Chipotle-Lime Mayo, and three pizzas -- Thai-style (the one with the broccoli and pineapple), "regular" (red-sauce with some caramelized onions), and a Caramelized-Onion pizza.