Easters Away

A few years ago after Tess was born Matt and I sort - kinda agreed that holidays were to be spent at home. We both recounted past childhood holidays spent with close family and mostly often than not centered around the family dining table and in my family the table and the dreaded TV. Not a lot of frills or fancy trappings just good food and being surrounded by our nearest and dearest. We both concluded that we would put our old ways of "yeah it's a holiday lets get outta this town" aside and retire our flight bags to the garage. What were we thinking.
This Easter was our third major holiday this year spend away from home and we spent it in the Texas Hill Country. We managed to skirt town for Thanksgiving (San Antonio) and Christmas (North Carolina) as well.  
It's not that I mind cooking and decking out the house in holiday fare, I like doing all of that. It's just that I am sooooooo in love with family time. And as family oriented as holidays are it just seems like that's when folks end up spending the least amount of time together. So when the opportunity for 3 or 4 days off from work and school arrises I want to escape somewhere where I don't have to cook, clean, tell my children wait until mommies done or I can't now because I have this or that chore to accomplish. I want to spend every moment immersed in their world with them. I want to see out of their eyes, do what they do, give them and get from them undivided attention. It's just my bliss.

Green Thumbs

Every year we try and plant just a few things. Usually we don't end up with more than a few tomatoes, peppers and herbs - it's really more about letting the kids experience the wonder and excitement of planting and growing from seeds. Last year Texas had an unusually hot and dry summer, the state suffered some of the worst every wildfires. Crops and lawns everywhere dried up to nothing. There were water shortages and watering bans that made growing a garden in this harsh heat even more difficult than usual. Thankfully, this year we have gotten some much needed rain and I am determined to plant some crops that might even yield us a meal or two. I have been wanting a raised garden bed since we move into the house but we are planning a renovation so I have held off building anything permanent. Earlier this year I started researching semi - permanent planting solutions and found this cool mini greenhouse call the Grow Camp. It manages to solve not only my space issue but it also boasts a nice screen which helps to block out 40% of the sun so my plants won't scorch in this heat. The screen also acts as an insect barrier so that you can grow your vegetables completely organic and without the use of insecticides. Pretty cool. When I purchased the Grow Camp I also bought a small soaker hose and a timer so that I could make a watering system to use within the greenhouse - so far it seems to be working perfectly. Here are the pictures of the set up with the watering hoses. Summer is not the best for vegetable gardening in Houston so I went with only the most heat tolerant crops. We ended up planting eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, various peppers, leeks, celery, arugula, summer radish, lots of herbs, and sowed some carrots directly into the ground. Most of the plants Tess started from seed indoors in those jiffy grow peat pots and we moved them outside now that they were big enough.

Big Changes

It's been a long time since our last post. We have been working around some big changes around here and free time for writing has been something that's been hard to find. A few months ago me and the both of the kiddos had Iga testing done for food sensitivity issues and the results came back showing that we were all highly allergic to gluten,soy, egg and dairy. Since both of my kids had severe colic as infants and nothing except me going on a very strict elimination diet worked these results were something that we had already suspected. But none the less it has shaken up our pantries and resulted in a complete food and mental overhaul for us. First steps was to clear out all the "bad" foods from our diets and we are slowing learning how to replace our favorite foods with options that we can tolerate. It's been a learning curve to try and find work around and meals take a bit longer to plan and cook but I am getting better. One of the first essential purchases was a bread maker - what can I say we are a carb loving house. Over the next few months I will be posting our "food" successes and failures, I have had a few of both. I will also try and post reviews of some of the GF and allergy cookbooks that are starting to pile up around here.  Here is our first successful first attempt at allergy free eats. The cupcakes are from the amazing cookbook The Allergen-Free Baker's Handbook by Cybele Pascal. I used her Vanilla Cupcake recipe and the Icing recipe was the Chocolate Buttercream recipe from Vegan Cupcakes take Over the World. The cupcake recipe can be found on Cybele Site

City Mouse Big Cheese

We has a little tug of war this year with costumes. T was set out from the get go to be a ghost but Mommy had other plans. I had 1/2 started this mouse costume a while back and had planned to give it as a birthday present but never got it completed. The week before and the week of Halloween I was not feeling well (just found out I have bronchitis) and so I decided to revisit this little mouse and use stuff I had around the house to put together something simple for Theo. I whipped this up in two hazy congested miserable nights, but it was so worth it.

The mouse costume consisted of a tail and ears made from stretch velour and a grey tulle tutu. Theo's cheese head was a piece of latex foam that I cut with scissors and sprayed with yellow spray paint. We used an on hand onsie that I dyed and printed out an iron on decal that said aged one year (yes he just turned one the week before). We got to use the costume several times once for a party and then again at Halloween and my guess is that she will want to wear this a dozen or so times before we re purpose the parts for something else. Halloween was so magical this year. T had such a great time, we created a bunch of creepy crafts and she became completely obsessed with all things slightly spooky. Theo, well he wasn't so sure about it all and even though he looks miserable in the photo he warmed up to his costume and was our perfect stinky lil cheese. Oh and I went as a black cat...with a few grey whiskers.

Birthday Boy

Hard to believe that my little guy just turned one. Brings tears to my eyes just thinking about how quickly this past year has flown by. I'm reminiscing now about all the precious moments and sweet infant glances that I wish I could have bottled up to relive again and again. I'm always in such quandary about whether I should be capturing (i.e with a camera) or be mindfully living the moment. I go back and forth and most of the times I think I choose to just let the experience be what is it and then just lament later that I didn't get the shots. I guess I am sorting venting here because I really didn't get the best pictures of the big guys birthday. Lighting was bad, he had a big poop in his diaper that I didn't know about and it was the end of a very very busy day so I guess I should be glad I got what I did. It really was a special day. Dad played hookie, Theo's buddies at little gym all sang to him, we had lunch out after an outing at the toy store (where he scored big time) and finished it day off with a cake I made in the nick of time the night before. I have a funny story about this cake that I won't go into but Dad and I were in tears laughing at 1:30am and will never forget this ONE.

Macro Greenhouse

After 3 years the terrarium that Tess and I constructed in our earlier post had to be put to rest. The plants had gotten leggy and it was no longer the small sweet green world on my dinner table it was more like the big green monster. I transplanted all the plants outdoors into a bigger pot and since the container has just been sitting in the garage waiting for me to make another. I've been either too busy or lazy to clean it so I decided to use another vessel and make a smaller slightly less planty version of a terrarium. I had a some left over moss from an orchid repot and a great glass globe I had purchased at West Elm that had been calling out to be used. I went scouring my junk box for some cool things that might work together thinking I wanted to make something greeny and easy enough for Tess to help with. I chose some quartz crystals, miniature model figurines and a piece of pyrite that was collecting dust on Matt's shelf. The project took us about 15 minutes to put together but a good hour and a half to talk about all the items. Tess was completely fascinated by the figurines and played with them forever asking all kinds of bizzaro questions. She was also enamored by the pyrite and crystal shapes, we had a mini lesson in rock formations and even took a trip to the back yard to get additional rocks to examine. I love this age, even the smallest simplest little projects turn into opportunities for learning something new.

Vegetable Basics

Ha so much for more frequent postings. I actually had such good intentions, Tess and I have been working on a lot of great projects and I've even managed to capture some of them with the camera but... I had some computer problems. I guess you could call it user error. My computer just stopped recognizing my camera and download images. Immediately I went online lurking around tech sites to see if I could figure out what the problem. I tried like every thing. Nothing worked. Finally after a week I had to admit defeat and call Matt in to fix my buggy camera but moments before I was about give up I noticed that the camera wasn't even connected to the port. It was only half way plugged in but looked like it was connected. I felt like such a dunce...arghh and the time wasted troubleshooting. So again I am committing to more frequent posts... wonder what shenanigans will come up this time.

In the mean time I wanted to post some images from a cookbook I've been using all week. It's called Vegetable Basics - 84 Recipes Illustrated by Jody Vassalo. The recipes indeed are pretty basic but what I love is the design and layout of the pages. This is by far the easiest to follow visual cookbook that I have ever used. You barely need read the instructions to be able to follow along...exact what I need since most of my cooking is done darting into the other room checking on a toddler or trying to juggle dinner with a baby in arms or clinging to my left leg. If you are in the need of a basic veg cookbook that will inspire you to make great simple tasty food this is a good one to check out.