Tennessee Memories - Late Winter Grass

 

I took this photo years ago at Sweetwater, Tenn. one day on a family outing to the well-known dairy there. They make great cheese. :-) 

Refreshing Cucumber Salad

My mom made this salad often during the summer months when the garden produced a lot of fresh vegetables. It is a light, cold, and refreshing salad for summer. These will keep for a good while in the fridge, gradually becoming more pickles than salad. I am guessing that good probiotics will develop, especially if you use raw apple cider vinegar. You may reduce the water to taste.

Cucumber Salad

2 Cucumbers, peeled and sliced
1 small onion, peeled and sliced
1/3 cup apple cider vinegar
1/3 cup water
2 Tbs. sugar

Mix all and refrigerate for about 30 minutes. Serve cold.

The Thousand Word Project - The Spice of Life

Variety is the very spice of life,
That gives it all its flavor.

Excerpt from "The Task"
by William Cowper.

The Thousand Word Project - Bowls Full of Color

Psalms 103:5  Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things...

The Thousand Word Project - Fruitful

Psalms 92:13-15  Those that be planted in the house of the LORD shall flourish in the courts of our God. They shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing;  To shew that the LORD is upright: he is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in him.

Photos taken at Shangri La Botanical Gardens, Orange, Texas.

Food Memories - Mixed Berry Muffins

My husband is a good baker.  Several years ago he was making whole wheat muffins, and instead of the usual frozen blueberries he substituted mixed frozen berries at my request.  They were really delicious!  We shared them at a family breakfast and they were enjoyed by all. Please do try this at home!  :-)

Food Memories - Homegrown Orangeade

Several years ago my Texas sister-in-law had an orange tree in a pot.  It produced a few oranges for them, and she wanted to share them with the family, so she juiced them and made this "orange-ade" for a family breakfast.  It was really good, but it was a once only delight because the tree didn't produce well again and later died.  It is still beautiful to look at, though. :-)

Memories of Great Food - German Pastry

We bought this almond ring in Fredericksburg at a German bakery.  We brought it home to share with my family at a "tea time". :-)  It was exceptional.

The Thousand Word Project - Springtime Deliciousness

A friend of mine actually sent me a box of rhubarb from Michigan one year!  Talk about a kind act. :-)  We can't grow it here.

In Loving Memory of Aunt Helen

 

Psalms 116:15  Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints.

In April of 2014 I posted a memorial to my great-uncle, Dana Mathna.  This past summer his dear wife, Helen Hoover Mathna, went to be with the Lord also.

I told a good deal about Aunt Helen and their family in the previous post, so I will not repeat it all here, but please to take the time to go back and read it if you can.  Uncle Dana was a great blessing also, and I mentioned a good bit about Aunt Helen there as well and various things that affected her life.

Added to the previous information, Aunt Helen was born on January 29, 1925.  She was the sister of my grandfather.  She is the last one on either side of the family from my grandparents’ generation.  Somehow that seems sad to me because we’ve lost a connection with the past that can’t be replaced.  But, this is one of the aspects of time that is unavoidable.

Uncle Dana and Aunt Helen were married in June of 1946 and Aunt Helen wore my grandma’s wedding dress.  I believe they planned their wedding for when my grandparents would be home (see picture at the other post).

Aunt Helen was primarily a homemaker and loved her family very much (you can see more pictures of them all at the post about Uncle Dana). 

She was a sweet Christian and a real prayer warrior.  She was also a member of the Shippensburg First Church of God for 78 years!  She worked in the nursery, taught Sunday School and served as a Deaconess for many years.  After Uncle Dana retired, she helped him with custodial work at the church building.

This is the old building of the Shippensburg First Church of God (Pennsylvania).  It was within walking distance from their house, which was convenient for church meetings as well as the custodial work.  I remember attending services there.

My mother always speaks lovingly of Aunt Helen.  She thought very highly of her.  Mom’s family visited them and Grandpa’s home church in Shippensburg whenever they came home on furlough, and those were happy times to her.

This is how I remember Aunt Helen.  She is the only great-aunt that I knew very well, and I’m very thankful I had that privilege. I remember her as a kind and gentle lady.  She didn’t always talk as much as some of the others when we were all together, but you could tell she enjoyed being with her family and she considered us as part of that.  We stayed with them a couple times that I can remember and it was a pleasure to visit there.  I plowed my way through a collection of her books one summer when we spent a couple of weeks there. :-)  She had one of the sweetest smiles, and my mom has inherited it from her dad and his youngest sister.

This is Aunt Helen with her mother, my Great-grandma Hoover.  Aunt Helen really makes me think of my own mother in this picture!

I love this picture of Aunt Helen having a meal (dinner?) with these ladies.  I know two of them were related to her, and the little girl is her daughter, Janet (wasn’t she a cutie?).  That was her sister beside her and her mother is the first on the left.  Please notice that all the ladies in this picture are wearing aprons!  :-)  I am SO happy we have this picture! (Thanks to my Uncle Jim’s notable efforts at scanning.)

One thing I remember about Aunt Helen’s house was that the food was good.  She was famous in our family for her Chicken Corn Chowder and Pineapple Bake, as they called it.

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I found this recipe from Aunt Helen in my mom’s write-in cook book.

Chicken Corn Chowder

Boil 2 C. water

Add:
1 envelope chicken noodle soup dry mix
1 Tbl. onion
1/4 C. rice

Cook until done.

Add:
2 C. milk
1 8 oz. can cream style corn
15 oz. boned, fully cooked chicken

Heat through and serve.

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I couldn’t find the following recipe in the book, so I looked online and was able to figure out what it should be.

Pineapple Bake

Heat oven to 350F.

Cream:
1 stick butter
1 C. sugar

Beat in:
4 eggs, one at a time

Drain and stir:
1 20 oz. can of crushed pineapple

Fold in:
6 slices day old white bread, cubed

Pour into a greased casserole dish (I think it was 2 qt.) and bake for 50 minutes or till top is golden brown.

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I can’t post many pictures of her from later in her life because they aren’t scanned into the computer, and the ones my parents have would be time consuming to locate.  Perhaps another day (or year) I may add some.  Here is one last shot of her, which I love.  This was taken in their back yard.

Random Thoughts On the End of November

 

So, November is over.  Another Thanksgiving week has come and gone.  Ours was different from any we’ve had before, but I suppose one could say that about many others we’ve had as well. :-)  This one…well, I’m glad it’s past in many respects!

The last week and a half of November certainly had some big challenges for me.  Things I’d been forewarned about that I knew wouldn’t be “nice” along with some surprises that were far from pleasant.  One surprise is a new health issue that I was hoping was a fluke, but apparently it isn’t.  (What is it about being in your 40s – all of the time new things popping up and not wanting to settle back down?)  There were also some trials that I’m not free to discuss, but that were emotionally draining nonetheless.  (At least they didn’t affect our household directly!)  Also, the evening before Thanksgiving the daughter/sister of some friends had a serious health problem which added a real burden to the holiday.  (Thank God she is doing well, all things considered, and is home from the hospital now!  She could have died!)

But, as my dad says, the Lord always balances our experience.  There were some sweet blessings from my Savior just when I needed them most to help me over the hurdles or pick me up on the other side!  I had some sweet emails and messages that were an encouragement.  We enjoyed the Lord’s supper with our church family the weekend before Thanksgiving.  We had visits with family and friends that were a blessing and a help.  There were times for self-examination that, although not pleasant, were useful and hopefully productive.  We had some interesting and busy times as well.  Some things got done.  Some friends joined us for Thanksgiving dinner and we had some food adventures too.  I thought it might be fun to share some of these things with you.

First of all, all three of the working men on the property were off the whole week, which was nice for all the families.  Also, the weather was beautiful most of last week – mostly sunny and warm.  The fall colors were splendid here!  There are oak trees on our property that put on a gorgeous show some or most years.

[Colors may appear brighter than they actually were. :-) ]

One day my brother and sister-in-law loaded up the majority of the metal junk we had sitting around waiting to be sold as scrap and actually took it in.  My husband helped them load the truck and rented trailer they used.  This was a happy thing because it got rid of some real eye sores as well as giving them a little income they needed for housing expenses (unexpected repairs)!  There were 6 defunct appliances sitting behind our well house!  Yeah, you might say we’ve had some lousy experiences with appliances on this property over the last 6 years!  On average, one dud per year!  I won’t try to explain why they sat there as long as they did.  :-)  But, they’re gone!  That’s the main thing. :-)

I also had the pleasure of seeing my husband use my rotary cutter and cutting board for the first time!  (I keep trying to tell him that he would enjoy some aspects of quilting.) :-)

He was cutting little fabric loops to hang some string lights in our bed room.  These lights are not for Christmas, but for ambiance.  They’ll be used all year.  Of course, this is the time of year to buy them and he wanted LED for the lower watts, so we picked some up when we were in Costco one day.

This is how he used the tabs.  The fabric blends quite well with the trim.

For various reasons, not everyone we invited for Thanksgiving joined us, but our friends who recently moved here did as well as my parents.  We were a smallish group of seven.  (I blurred the picture for their privacy.)

They are also all three not supposed to eat gluten, so SURPRISE – we had our first gluten-free Thanksgiving dinner! :-)

Chicken baked with coconut flour, butter and spices.
(This is something I had done before.)

Potatoes baked with coconut oil and herbs.

Tabouli made with quinoa, gluten-free pasta salad and rolls, two kinds of hummus, and watermelon rind pickles (made by me).

I’m sorry to say that I didn’t take a picture of the desserts.  They were mostly store-bought.  There was one pie and cookies and an interesting dessert my mom made with brown rice flour.  (It didn’t turn out the way we expected, but it was good.)

The gluten-free foods that were styled after traditional ones varied in goodness.  I’d say the rolls, tabouli and cookies were the best.  Everything tasted good, but some things had a different texture.  The food also affected my system a little differently than the usual gluten foods do.

Thanksgiving weekend is also my husband’s annual baking holiday.  He loves to bake bread, but he doesn’t do it much because of the time commitment that it requires.  So, he sets this time aside to try to bake at least one bread of some sort.  (Some years he does two!)

This year he made cinnamon rolls!  Yes!  He made them the Saturday after Thanksgiving Day and part of our local family joined us to eat them warm from the oven.  We had more the next morning when some of us ate breakfast/brunch together.

Maybe it’s been too long since I had cinnamon rolls, but even with all respect to my mom, I think these were the best I ever ate!  They were SO good. 

If you have a Kitchenaid stand mixer, he used the recipe in the cookbook that came with it.  He made some slight changes, the most significant being that he used half white whole wheat and half all-purpose flour (plain white).  He also used a different glaze recipe since we didn’t have the ingredients the cookbook called for.  He found one online that was made with butter, powdered sugar, water and a generous amount of vanilla.  It turned out great.  (But, they were more sugary than what we usually eat!)

Even with the extra work of having company (I did start early and pace myself) and all the extra things going on last week, my husband and I were still able to make it to church Sunday night.  (We usually go for the evening service since we drive quite a distance.)  I am very thankful for that since usually I wouldn’t have expected to be up to going!  Then the Lord brought these verses to my specific attention during the preaching of the word - 2 Corinthians 7:5-6  For, when we were come into Macedonia, our flesh had no rest, but we were troubled on every side; without were fightings, within were fears. Nevertheless God, that comforteth those that are cast down, comforted us…

Praise the Lord for His kindness and for the many blessings! 

Biscuit Cinnamon Sticky Buns

 

Some time ago my husband made these cinnamon sticky rolls at my request.  He used his usual biscuit recipe, made them into cinnamon rolls and we put them in a pan that had melted butter, brown sugar and pecans in the bottom to bake.  (We used a 9X9 pan, but a 9X13 would have worked much better.  More below on that.)  We used them for a brunch, but they would be great for breakfast, tea or coffee time.

First he rolled the biscuit dough out in a rectangle.  (I suppose you could do this with canned biscuits too.)

He buttered the top surface, sprinkled it with cinnamon and sugar, rolled it up and cut it into enough biscuits to fit into the pan. 

We put them in a pan which had melted butter, brown sugar and nuts sprinkled in the bottom (which becomes the topping when you take them out of the pan).  You could do some variations on this.  Add some dried fruits of your choice.  Add coconut or use it instead of the nuts.  It might even be possible to use some apple pie filling mixed into the topping!  Yum.

NOTE:  We had them too thick because we used a 9X9 pan.  He should have cut them thinner and we should have put them in a 9X13 pan because the outsides got done before the insides, so we couldn’t get them fully done.

I don’t know how long we baked them as we were having a little trouble getting them done.  When you remove them from the oven invert the pan onto a heat proof plate or platter.

They were delicious!  Sometime we need to try them again in a larger pan. :-)

A Year Ago Today – A Day In Australia

 

Brisbane on another day.  Notice all the solar panels on the roofs in the foreground.

In trying to think of something to post on the blog today it occurred to me that it might be interesting to see what we were doing a year ago today.  A year ago today we were still in Australia visiting my brother and his family near Brisbane.  In some ways it’s hard to believe that was a whole year ago, and yet it seems much longer than a year because so much has happened since then!

At any rate, I got out the journal that I kept of the our time there and looked up September 30th.  That turned out to be the day we all went into Brisbane to the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary!  :-)  We chose to go there, at my sister-in-law’s recommendation, because they had a large collection of Australian animals only.  We figured we could see a regular zoo any time, but seeing as many Aussie animals as possible at once seemed a better use of funds and time.  It turned out to be a very good investment for us.

We rented a wheel chair for our entire time in Australia so that my mom
wouldn’t be so limited in how much she would see.

I’ll give some excerpts followed by some comments in purple from my present perspective.

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Mon., Sept. 30 – Got a slowish and somewhat hectic start to go to the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary. 

[That’s fairly normal for day outings when you have a group of 8 people getting ready in one medium-small house. :-)  We went in two cars as well, a rental and their family car.  The four of us “visitors” were all in the rental together with my husband driving.  Exciting times.]

We got “lost” in Brisbane in our car and had a rather distracting time finding our way back to where we needed to go.  It’s a very confusing city and the map was rather confusing to Daddy at times, as well.  We finally made it, but Dad and I both were rather anxious and I was fighting motion sickness.  Driving in Brisbane is much like riding the “Tilt-a-whirl”. :-P

[Brisbane is very hilly, with twisting roads - and one way streets thrown in to confuse tourists, I think.  We almost ended up in the downtown area, which probably would’ve been quite “interesting”.  Of course, driving on the “wrong side of the road” all the time only compounded our confusion at times.  I can chuckle about it now, but at the time it was rather more excitement that we wanted.  I’m glad my husband, Peter, was able to deal with driving there. :-)  ]

The Koala Sanctuary was quite interesting and almost all Aussie animals, which was nice.  Better than a zoo and less expensive, though not cheap.  Took lots of photos.  Saw quite a few things.

[Quite a few of the animal and bird photos I’ve been sharing over the last year in my “Australian Memories” posts were taken at the LPKS.]

Mom and Dad saw the “Birds of Prey” showing and some of us saw a less-than-satisfactory sheep herding demonstration.

[The sheep were so used to the routine it appeared they could’ve done the demonstration without the dog, who was doing a less than great job at his share of the program.]

The rest of us joined them looking at the birds of prey
after watching most of the sheep dog demonstration.

[We took LOTS of water! :-)  The second photo was taken by my brother on his camera.]

We ate our picnic lunch in the “sanctuary”, then we split up.  Peter and I saw the “roos” and emus and wombats and a few reptiles.  Then I was so done in we rested on some benches in the shade while the others looked at those and headed back and got ice cream.

[This is a bit confusing.  I think I meant that the others looked at those same things that we’d looked at, or at least they mostly did.  We had looked at the monitor lizards and crocodiles, which were outside.  I think I was having a touch of heat sickness as it was a very warm day, so when we went into the snake room I couldn’t handle it and we had to come out.  It was dark in there and just plain creepy with all those live snakes – even if they were behind glass!  We rested because I was feeling overcome by the heat.]

We shopped in the gift shop and got some nice little things to take home for us and as gifts.  The others joined us there and Peter and I also got ice cream.

[Hooray for ice cream on a hot Australian afternoon! :-)  I really enjoyed it that day!  We did take plenty of water, but the sun in Australia is just plain stronger than it is in the U.S.  We don’t appreciate the ozone layer enough here.]

We finished up and headed home.  The return trip was…less trouble than the one in.  We got separated and they actually beat us home, though we’d been leading.

Dan and Clara went out and brought back “fish and chips” for dinner/tea.  Peter and I got some raw items with ours that we didn’t expect to be raw!  Otherwise it was tasty and another good Aussie tradition. :-)

[That was another surprise that day.  We picked out what we wanted from a menu before they went to get the food.  We none of us realized that when it said “fresh shrimp” that it wouldn’t be cooked!  The oysters were not surprising, but we didn’t expect the shrimp to be raw.  I’ve never heard of serving shrimp raw here in the U.S.  We didn’t eat the raw things, but my brother Dan cooked them up the next morning for some of them to eat with their breakfast.  My nephew asked for the shells from the oysters and was happy to be “gifted” those.  I don’t remember if my niece took some of them too or not.  The food was very good, though.]

[Sulphur-crested cockatoo.  Very noisy birds.]

I finished up with some more comments on the sanctuary:

The koalas were surprisingly smelly animals, but really cute too.  The birds and things in cages were hard to photograph, but some were so pretty.  We did get some very nice photos of other creatures.  The wombats were much larger than Peter expected.  We’d been warned that the platypus was quite small, which it was.  They were also very active, and in a dark room/tanks.  The emus and kangaroos were very tame, but I didn’t avail myself of the chance to pet one.  Neither did Peter.

[I’m glad I mentioned the smell of the koalas or I wouldn’t have remembered that.  They were really fun to look at.  We could’ve had our photos taken with one, but at $20 a pop and not being allowed to take our own photos but only to get the one provided by the park, we decided it wasn’t worth it.  I wasn’t sorry later after we saw one koala get angry with another one and “roar” at him/her.  They are not always as docile as they look and can be dangerous animals!

The wombats were surprisingly large, but also sleeping, so we didn’t get any good photos of them as we could only see them through glass in poor light and rather unflattering positions. 

The platypus was in a darkened room and it was posted not to use flashes in take photos, so it wasn’t possible to get much of anything.  I did get a photo of a skeleton display, though, and was surprised that the “beak” is not like a bird’s beak at all, but part of their skeletal system.

Platypus Skeleton

I’m a little sorry I didn’t pet a kangaroo.  They were all in an enclosure where people could walk around and “visit” with them and the emus.  Well, I guess just being there was adventure enough for me that day, and I didn’t want to have to go wash my hands at the exit sinks I suppose. :-)

Overall it was a very interesting experience and if you ever visit Australia and are going to Brisbane, we would recommend the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary.  It was worth it for us.  Be sure to wear hats and carry water!]

Wearing my husband’s hat and smiling after being refreshed by ice cream!

Food Memories – Experiences with Chop Suey

 

Grandpa and Gramma in their yard at Gull Lake.
This was taken a few years before this story starts.

Gramma’s birthday was February 21st, so this seems like an appropriate post for this week.

Experiences with Chop Suey

Back in the "dear dead days" not quite beyond recall, we used to enjoy visits to Gramma's house at Gull Lake a number of times each year. These mostly occurred during good driving weather - spring, summer and fall - with an occasional trip during the winter. (Since Gramma's house was so small, I think we tended to avoid winter visits and she came to us during that season more than we went to her.)

During the years I am referring to we lived exactly 80 miles north of Gramma's house.  (She figured this out herself on one of her trips, though I don't remember which of the two routes she took.) Consequently, our visits to her usually involved at least two meals, a lunch and a supper, or dinner if you will. Of course, it was more if we stayed over night…

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