Z is for Zucchini

 I'm going for the obvious today-zucchini. 

I'm always surprised when I hear that someone has had no luck growing zucchini. We must have the right climate for it around here because in July and August it's shows up everywhere. We have had many bags secretly placed on our doorstep in the middle of the night. We were happy with these gifts, but I'm not sure that everyone felt the same way. The other thing about zucchini is how big it can grow. The perfect size is 8-10 inches but we have grown more than one zucchini over 2 feet long. They were seedy, but otherwise good. However, our big zucchini paled in comparison to the Guinness Book of World Records world record holder of 8 feet, 3.3 inches long. 

In case you have an abundance of zucchini this summer, below is a previous post about different ways to prepare it. 

_____________________

Our zucchini with tomato for comparison

A Week of Zucchini Dishes

or The Vegetable That Keeps Giving and Giving 

or Today's Equivalent of the Loaves and Fishes--Zucchini

Recently, Aunt Martha gave us a zucchini from her garden. It was one of those that somehow got hidden and grew to almost the size of a baseball bat before it was found and harvested. Our goal last week was to eat it until it was gone. We knew it was big, but didn't think that we would be able to cook it in five different dishes before we saw the last of it. But we did. Below are our results with links to the recipes we used.

 
Day One: Zucchini Patties
We were having salmon cakes this day so it seemed like a natural accompaniment.  The cakes were basically pan fried shredded zucchini and bread crumbs. Everyone liked the taste, but Theo and I weren't crazy about the texture. I thought they were a little gooey from too many bread crumbs, and Theo didn't like the stringiness of the shredded zucchini. I got a tip for this recipe from the Frugal Girl.  


Day Two: Zucchini and Cheese Casserole
This has been a favorite recipe in our family for many years and is a favorite of guests.  It is a baked casserole containing zucchini chunks, eggs, cottage and shredded cheese topped with bread crumbs. I usually add another vegetable like broccoli or asparagus to give it more flavor. This recipe comes from Jane Brody's Good Food Book.


Day Three: Hearty Tuna Casserole
This recipe was given to us a few years ago from a friend when were trying to find new ways to cook zucchini. We make other tuna casseroles, but this is my favorite. The dish contains the standards for a tuna casserole including noodles, tuna, sour cream, and shredded cheese. However, there are layers of zucchini slices in it as well as diced tomatoes on the top. We leave out the mustard and green onions as a favor to Ward and still find it very tasty. A word of warning: the zucchini and celery take far longer to cook than the 30 minutes allotted for the casserole. We cook them a little before we add them to the dish so it doesn't take forever to bake.


Day Four: Oatmeal Zucchini Bread
For years, I have been carrying around this recipe for zucchini bread that included cooked oatmeal. Last week, I finally made it. The bread was very good but was dense and gooey. This may have been because the recipe called for three eggs and I only had two. I read somewhere on the internet that you can substitute milk for an egg and you will never know the difference. Well, I think we knew the difference. However, the four loaves disappeared in less than 24 hours.


Day Five: Continental Zucchini
 As we were brain storming about what we were going to do with the last of the zucchini, Ward remembered a dish he had as a child-- continental zucchini. This dish is stir fried zucchini and garlic with corn and pimentos added. The whole thing is topped with melted mozzarella cheese. When we made it, we also added some yellow squash that we had. Everyone liked this dish. However, Ward thought it could use black pepper. Also, this dish would lend itself well to the addition of sweet or hot peppers We may try that next time.

Zucchini dishes from last week.

A Week of Zucchini Dishes

or The Vegetable That Keeps Giving and Giving 

or Today's Equivalent of the Loaves and Fishes--Zucchini

Our zucchini with tomato for comparison

Recently, Aunt Martha gave us a zucchini from her garden. It was one of those that somehow got hidden and grew to almost the size of a baseball bat before it was found and harvested. Our goal last week was to eat it until it was gone. We knew it was big, but didn't think that we would be able to cook it in five different dishes before we saw the last of it. But we did. Below are our results with links to the recipes we used.

 
Day One: Zucchini Patties
We were having salmon cakes this day so it seemed like a natural accompaniment.  The cakes were basically pan fried shredded zucchini and bread crumbs. Everyone liked the taste, but Theo and I weren't crazy about the texture. I thought they were a little gooey from too many bread crumbs, and Theo didn't like the stringiness of the shredded zucchini. I got a tip for this recipe from the Frugal Girl.  



Day Two: Zucchini and Cheese Casserole
This has been a favorite recipe in our family for many years and is a favorite of guests.  It is a baked casserole containing zucchini chunks, eggs, cottage and shredded cheese topped with bread crumbs. I usually add another vegetable like broccoli or asparagus to give it more flavor. This recipe comes from Jane Brody's Good Food Book.


Day Three: Hearty Tuna Casserole
This recipe was given to us a few years ago from a friend when were trying to find new ways to cook zucchini. We make other tuna casseroles, but this is my favorite. The dish contains the standards for a tuna casserole including noodles, tuna, sour cream, and shredded cheese. However, there are layers of zucchini slices in it as well as diced tomatoes on the top. We leave out the mustard and green onions as a favor to Ward and still find it very tasty. A word of warning: the zucchini and celery take far longer to cook than the 30 minutes allotted for the casserole. We cook them a little before we add them to the dish so it doesn't take forever to bake.



Day Four: Oatmeal Zucchini Bread
For years, I have been carrying around this recipe for zucchini bread that included cooked oatmeal. Last week, I finally made it. The bread was very good but was dense and gooey. This may have been because the recipe called for three eggs and I only had two. I read somewhere on the internet that you can substitute milk for an egg and you will never know the difference. Well, I think we knew the difference. However, the four loaves disappeared in less than 24 hours.


Day Five: Continental Zucchini
 As we were brain storming about what we were going to do with the last of the zucchini, Ward remembered a dish he had as a child-- continental zucchini. This dish is stir fried zucchini and garlic with corn and pimentos added. The whole thing is topped with melted mozzarella cheese. When we made it, we also added some yellow squash that we had. Everyone liked this dish. However, Ward thought it could use black pepper. Also, this dish would lend itself well to the addition of sweet or hot peppers We may try that next time.

Zucchini dishes from last week.

Food Waste Friday and True Food Confessions--May 10, 2013

It's time for Food Waste Friday, when the Frugalgirl encourages us to post pictures from the previous week of wasted food from our household. This accountability hopefully will help us to be more careful with our food and maybe save some money. Also, I am using this public forum to encourage us to eat out less which includes better meal planning. You can follow how we are doing in this endeavor by reading True Food Confessions.

This Week's Food Waste

1/2 glass of milk

Wally found a glass of milk that had been sitting out overnight. He poured it out and then told me about it so I could include it with Food Waste Friday findings. Milk waste is a rare occurrence in this house because the Carnivores in the family also love their dairy. Until I see a trend, I'm not going to worry about this.

This Week's True Food Confessions

You may remember last week, I felt a call coming for take out pizza. Well, I made that call the next night. Ward made that call again Wednesday night while I was out, and he and Wally were quite happy with the supper they "fixed" . (Have I mentioned that we love pizza at our house? Wally had pizza every day for lunch when he was in first grade.) Also, last weekend we went out to celebrate Ward's birthday. Let's just say that the Carnivores were happy once again. (Actually, I was too. I had a very nice apple, walnut salad.)

We ate the rest of our meals at home. Some of the things we had were stir fry, pot stickers, baked chicken, sloppy joes, and zucchini-mushroom casserole. These dishes provided us with adequate leftovers for a couple of meals.

Also, this week I tried a new recipe for Mushroom-Zucchini Casserole--a recipe of my own creation. I started out to make a tuna casserole and it quickly morphed into something entirely different. I'm not sure how that happens, but it seems to happen a lot when I get in the kitchen. Basically, it is  a casserole made of mushrooms, zucchini, cheese, pasta, and greek yogurt. I think it turned out pretty well. The others said they really liked it without any prompting and had 2-3 servings each. However, when formally asked about the dish, Ward said that he would add more cheese, Wally would add more mushrooms, and I would use yogurt with more fat in it. However, once again, it was a big hit. Below is the recipe as I made it. Be creative with it. Maybe it will turn into tuna casserole. :)

Happy Eating In or Out. Until next time...
 
Mushroom Zucchini Casserole

Ingredients:
1 cup macaroni, cooked al dente 
8 oz. sliced mushrooms
2 small zucchini cut into 1/2" cubes
1 stalk celery, sliced
1 cup nonfat Greek yogurt
1 cup Parmesan cheese
1 teaspoon Italian seasoning
Salt to taste. (I used about 1/2 teaspoon.)

Preheat oven to 350° F
-Cook macaroni according to directions
-Cook vegetables until crisp tender. (I did mine in a skillet with a little oil. I like my mushrooms this way.)
-Mix yogurt, cheese, and spices together in large bowl.
-Add pasta and vegetables to yogurt mixture.
-Put mixture into medium size oven dish and bake covered for 30 min. or until bubbling.
-Remove from oven and if desired, sprinkle cheese on top of casserole and let melt before serving. (We do this after it comes out of the oven because Theo doesn't like the texture of baked cheese.)

Food Waste Friday and True Food Confessions--Oct. 5, 2012

It's time for Food Waste Friday, when the Frugalgirl encourages us to post pictures from the previous week of wasted food from our household. This accountability hopefully will help us to be more careful with our food and maybe save some money. Also, I am using this public forum to encourage us to eat out less which includes better meal planning. You can follow how we are doing in this endeavor by reading True Food Confessions.

 This Week's Food Waste

Basil that has seen better days.

We didn't have a rotten tomato this week, yea! However, we had more waste than usual. We had basil and parsley that went bad before it was all used as well as a few grapes and some cracker dip. Nothing was horrible, but more vigilance may have prevented some of this waste. However, I have a theory about why we had more waste than usual--we cooked more than usual. See True Food Confessions for more details.

This Week's True Food Confessions

Look how much we cooked this week!

This week we actually planned and shopped ahead. A first in several weeks and guess what? When you have a plan, things go more smoothly. Among our dishes were pasta salad, enchilada casserole, potato soup, sloppy joes, meat loaf, spicy noodles with meat and green beans, green salad with cottage cheese, vegetable soup, and zucchini bread. Because we had more groceries in the house, we had more waste this week, but I'll take it. One thing at a time and now I vote for more cooking at home.

However I confirmed that if I do very much cooking, I get annoyed with all of time it is taking. Take Saturday as an example when I tried to catch up with a few things I had been meaning to do. First, I made a pot of chicken vegetable soup with leftover vegetables from a vegetable tray. Not a very hard thing since the vegetables were already cleaned and just had to be chopped. Same for the chicken. It just had to be zapped and cut up. So far, so good. Next I decided to make some yeast bread. Well, I have a bread machine for this, so it was relatively easy with no kneading. I hadn't used the machine in a while, so it took a little review of the instructions, but no big deal. Next, I made ice tea for the fridge since I have been wanting to have a better alternative to soda. And you know what? I had an ice tea machine to help with this also. However, Theo and I spent a while trying to get the right ratio of tea bags to water and tea to sweetner.

To top it all off, I made chocolate zucchini bread. I had a zucchini in my vegetable drawer that was living on borrowed time and needed to be cooked before it showed up in next week's food waste. I got the food processor out to shred it. However, by the time I was done, there seemed to shredded zucchini everywhere. Nevertheless, I had enough for the recipe I liked and enough to put into the freezer for a couple more batches.

So let's evaluate the day. I made vegetable soup, bread, tea, and zucchini bread all with the aid of appliances. It doesn't sound like much, in fact just a simple meal. However, by the time I was done, I was done. Done with the kitchen for a while. So I've confirmed what I already knew. If we are going to be successful with cooking at home, we have to keep it simple.

Note: Everyone else in the family likes being in the kitchen less than I do.

Food Talk--Chicken Parmesan and Togetherness

Inspired by Ward's sister, Ward and I are tying to be more conscious about ETHOOLing. One way we want to do this is to spend more time together. We've come up with several different things we want to do and one of them is cooking. To begin with, we decided that we will cook together at least one meal every week and hopefully turn cooking from a chore into a fun time.

To start the process, I brought an interesting cookbook home from the library, Sheet Pan Suppers by Molly Gilbert. The book basically puts together meals that are baked on a sheet pan. Ward picked out the first dish from there that we were going to make--Chicken Parmesan. As luck would have it, Theo was visiting for the afternoon and joined us.

After reading through the ingredients and instructions, we all went to the kitchen to start the fun. Ward set to work preparing the chicken and Theo began preparing the dipping and dregging mixtures for it. I pitched in here and there where needed. When we were about done coating the chicken, Theo had an idea. He said that we should put the left over coatings on some of the zucchini in the fridge and it would be like Eggplant Parmesan. Great idea, especially coming from one of the carnivores. And before you knew it, we were sitting down to a hearty meal of chicken and zucchini parmesan served with steamed broccoli and a salad.

So how did it all turn out? The food was very good--especially the Zucchini Parmesan. Something to remember as we are about to enter the overflowing zucchini season. We worked well together and enjoyed eating together when it was all done.

Were we able to turn a chore into something fun? Well, we're not quite there yet, but we were able to make a chore more pleasant. Also, Ward and I and Theo got to spend time together. That part was great. And when it really gets down to it, we can't ask for anything more.

Food Waste Friday and True Food Confessions-March 21, 2014

It's time for Food Waste Friday, when the Frugalgirl encourages us to post pictures from the previous week of wasted food from our household. This accountability hopefully will help us to be more careful with our food and maybe save some money. Also, I am using this public forum to encourage us to eat out less which includes better meal planning. You can follow how we are doing in this endeavor by reading True Food Confessions. (Thanks to Jo from Simply Being Mum for sponsoring FWF this week.)

This Week's Food Waste

 None

 It was touch and go for a while with a bag of lettuce, but I managed to eat it all before it went the way of slime.

This Week's True Food Confessions

I know the weather is getting to be an old theme on this blog, but here it goes again. Last week when I was shopping, a package of zucchini caught my eye and I had to have it. Why? Because it reminded me of summer when there is always a boundless zucchini crop. Sort of the "think it and it will come" idea. Combined with broccoli, it made a delicious casserole that served us for two dinners and two lunches. This has been a favorite recipe in our family for many years.  It contains zucchini chunks, eggs, cottage and shredded cheese topped with bread crumbs. I usually add another vegetable like broccoli or asparagus to give it more flavor. This recipe comes from Jane Brody's Good Food Book. Here's a link.   Zucchini and Cheese Casserole

Thankful Sunday--July 22, 2018

I am thankful for zucchini season.

Our current favorite way to fix them is grilling.

'Tis the season that zucchinis abound. Little ones to huge ones are everywhere. They are in the garden and they are in bags that mysteriously show up in front of the garage. Zucchinis are a versatile vegetable that can be used for many things. For this abundance of zucchini, I am thankful.

And some ideas for cooking zucchini from a previous post.
A Week of Zucchini Dishes

Speed Blogging Check-in

 As I often do, I am doing my morning check-in of email, fitness app, Wordle, and blogs. And sometimes, I squeeze in time to write a post. And that's what I'm doing this morning - squeezing in a post by speed blogging with a timer. My timer happens to be set at 12 minutes. So here it goes. Twelve minutes of stream of consciousness. 

We recently celebrated my FIL's 91st birthday.
Ward's family likes to play music at family gatherings.

You may (or may not) remember back in January, we started a project of going through our house room by room and decluttering. It took a couple of weeks, but we successfully touched everything in our bedroom and bathroom, reorganized, and purged what was no longer needed. Next, we moved onto the office and started with all the paperwork. And I am thrilled to report that we finally finished last week. Yay!! Double Yay! We haven't worked steadily on it for the last few months, but I was determined to finish. We shredded several big bags of paper during the process. But papers are like dishes and laundry; there are always more being generated. 

We do many things online that we used to do with paper, but paper still abounds. Someday, when I'm feeling ambitious, I will tackle all of the files on my computer, including pictures and email. But next up are the rest of the things in the office. 

However, at this time of year, the outdoors are calling. We planted more pots this week, including four big ones for our porches. My attempts at making planters have never been that successful in the past. If I make a decent-looking one, it never holds up. The plants grow at different rates, and the whole thing looks lopsided in no time. However, this time, the people at the nursery showed me groupings that you just plop into a pot and water. It helped that there were examples they had been growing for a while that looked quite good. It was cheaper buying this grouping than buying individual plants. We'll see how they do.

This was my attempt to take a picture of the first tomatoes that are forming. They are hard to see, but if you squint, you can see one above the bloom on the right.

I also planted zucchini and basil this week. None of the basil came up from last year, so I bought some plants. The zucchini was hard to find. Lots of yellow squash out there, but not zucchini. I found two scraggly plants at Walmart after visiting several stores. I really have to get coordinated next year to start it from seeds. However, the beans are up from the seeds I saved from last year. 

I harvested the last of the spinach yesterday, and the peas are ready to be picked. I hope Ward will pick peas while I'm at work today.

There goes my timer. Time to get ready for work. I have to leave early today because I am feeding my sister's cat while she's on vacation.

Hope everyone has a wonderful weekend and gets a chance to feel the sunshine.

Until next time...

It Happened So Fast

We have two raised bed garden areas that are small enough to keep up with but big enough to give a decent harvest. When I checked the garden yesterday, I saw a dramatic change from a couple of days before. The last time I looked, the radishes were maturing nicely. We had already harvested some, and I was waiting until we were ready to pull more. Now they were going to seed and getting woody. When I last checked on the beans, they were just starting to bloom. Now I was able to pick enough for supper. And the zucchini. Well, you know zucchini, whose main goal in life is to become the size of baseball bats. Well, several reached that status in a blink of an eye.

We roasted the radishes, which tasted good but were a bit chewy. (BTW, I've tried preparing the radish greens in different ways, but no one here likes them.) The beans are cleaned and ready to cook tonight with some leftover corn. I have frozen some of the zucchini, roasted some in the oven for supper, and made a cake with one for tonight's book club. I hope to put more in the freezer tomorrow before I go to work. Or maybe I will get up in the wee hours of the morning and leave them on the neighbors' doorsteps. Because there's a whole other crop of baseball bats forming. I know I should have been harvesting them sooner, but it all happened fast. :)

Until next time...

Food Waste Friday and True Food Confessions-August 3, 2012

It's time for Food Waste Friday, when the Frugalgirl encourages us to post pictures from the previous week of wasted food from our household. This accountability hopefully will help us to be more careful with our food and maybe save some money.

Also, I am using this public forum to encourage us to eat out less which includes better meal planning.

This Week's Food Waste

One of the buns that didn't go bad

 A couple things went bad on us this week--a tomato and some buns. I think both of these were victims of being on the counter for too long. One day, they were good and the next day they were growing mold. Oh well, better luck next week, I hope.

This Week's True Food Confessions

If we're really going to have true confessions, here they go. 

First the negative: We bit off more than we can chew with this project. (Pun intended.) We still don't like to cook and now we're making a big mess to clean up while we're doing it. We haven't coordinated our shopping to go with our menus and we're looking for excuses to eat out. Yesterday, it was that Theo was sick and didn't feel like what we had planned. I think the bottom line for our discontent is that we are trying to do it all-or-nothing. We are not allowing ourselves flexibility.

Next the positive: Now that I've gotten that off my chest, here is how the week actually went. We finished up our zucchini week  with Zucchini Continental. We also had roast chicken, spinach lasagna, shepherd's pie, pulled beef sandwiches, and hamburgers on the grill. We finished the week out with Subway sandwiches and several drive through lunches. Despite my complaining, it was really a pretty good week. The Subway sandwiches in the middle of the week helped. Also, we are getting better at cleaning up as we go, so the kitchen does not look like explosion went off after we're done cooking. We are ready to give it another go next week.

Food Waste Friday & True Food Confessions-Jul. 25, 2014

It's time for Food Waste Friday, when the Frugalgirl encourages us to post pictures from the previous week of wasted food from our household. This accountability hopefully will help us to be more careful with our food and maybe save some money. Also, I am using this public forum to encourage us to eat out less which includes better meal planning. You can follow how we are doing in this endeavor by reading True Food Confessions. Occasionally, if our eating is going okay, I'll talk about some other food topic.

This Week's Food Waste

NONE

I had my eye on the prize this week, so I had no food waste. I plan to keep this vigilance up for next week. Wish me luck.

This Week's True Food Confessions

The meals this week were focused on preventing food waste as mentioned above. First, we had some left-over chicken and some yellow zucchini to use. This turned into a zucchini casserole with chicken and a salad. The salad had cherry tomatoes in it that were just starting to shrivel. The zuchinni-chicken meal lasted us for two nights. 

Next, I had some hamburger buns and pizza crust languishing in the fridge. The pizza crust came from an almost disaster a few days before. As I was taking a pizza out of the oven, it started to slide off the pan. I managed to catch it before it hit the floor, but about a quarter of it lost it's toppings during the save. So I retopped it with jar sauce and some fresh tomatoes and mushrooms that needed to be used. I also added cheddar and feta cheese for a really tasty result. I did the same thing with the hamburger buns after toasting them. 

Now I had a jar of open tomato sauce, so we had this over spaghetti the next night. I added some fresh tomatoes and basil to fix it up a bit and to use them up before they started to go bad. I also made a fruit salad to add to this meal from some ripe peaches and blueberries. And speaking of fruit, we also had some very good yellow water melon from Uncle Billy's garden. 

It was good week. I realize that some of you cook like this three meals a day, but not me. My interests and time usually lie elsewhere, so I'm gonna have to say that I am very pleased with this effort on both the Food Waste and Food Confessions fronts. :)

Until next time... 


 

2020 My in Review According to My Blog, part two

Note: In preparation for writing today's post, I just reread yesterday's. I want to thank to all of you who read it despite all of the typos and bad grammar it contained. My excuse is that I was interrupted several times while writing it and it was getting late and I wanted to publish it. I hope that I will do better in the future, but no guarantees in that area. :)

July 2020, I did four posts this month.

This month saw me returning to work in the library. At that time, we thought we would have customers back in the building by the time school started. We're still waiting on that one. I celebrated my birthday by paying a tribute to my mother. I was not an easy baby and she was a saint for sticking it out with me. The first nasty comments showed up on my blog after many years of G rating remarks. Luckily, they stopped, although I know they can come back at any time. But my main focus for the month was outside - citing unusually hot weather with no rain. Despite that, I found many flowers blooming in our yard along with zucchini in our garden.

You can see a yellow zucchini developing among the leaves drooping from the heat.

August 2020, I did seven posts this month.

August was a month during which our country was in upheaval to which I obliquely referred to in a post that wondered where all of the calm, rational thinking had gone. Otherwise I found positive things to focus on such as the tomatoes and brussel sprouts we were harvesting along with copious amounts of pears. I spent a long afternoon at the DMV and was thankful for the workers who day after day have to put up with unhappy customers. For one of my walk around the yard posts, I featured insects, but perhaps the most fun of the month was the discovery of a linear park in a nearby town.

We visited the linear park again recently when we saw a boat display.

September 2020, I did five posts this month.

September found me acknowledging that I was cranky. I didn't go into it on the blog, but pandemic fatigue was definitely taking its toll.  It was a good thing that we had already scheduled a week away in WV at Miss Landers' cabin. I documented our trip which included hiking through beautiful scenery as well as visiting historic sites. Also, the end of September marked a first for me - going to a drive-in movie. Ward and I had a good time until our car wouldn't start to go home. The staff were great with their help in finally getting it started.

Spruce Knob, the highest point in WV. This is one of the places we visited.

October 2020, I did seven posts this month.

I started the month with a reoccurring theme on this blog over the years--posting fatigue. That's when I feel like I don't have anything to say and writing a blog post is a chore. As part of a plan forward, I said that I would be featuring posts from the past. True to my word, I reran a post featuring a recipe for a potato soup that Wally made and the differences between rutabagas and turnips. I also reran one of my favorite stories about Sarah and taking time to experience the beauty of the day. The other posts were my standard fare picturing flowers and vegetables (radishes, turnips, and tomatoes) from our yard.

Wally's potato soup recipe was an early post when I was featuring cooking.
I was very proud of myself when I figured out how to put in a link to a printable recipe.

November 2020, I did six posts this month.

In November, I had a mask lapse when I forgot to wear my mask into a grocery store and didn't discover it until I got some sideway looks. I was horrified, but learned that I'm not alone in having a lapse like this. The rest of the month presented posts of things of not much consequence. Pretty normal for this blog. I did a post of lists that included what we had for Thanksgiving dinner (turkey and two kinds of stuffing) as well as the countries I have visited outside the US (Belgium and Japan among others). I mentioned that we got a new furnace and continued to harvest carrots and turnips from the garden. Ward and I took hikes in the nearby mountains and in a bird sanctuary. The month finished up with me reporting on the neighborhood Halloween costume parade.

These late season carrots were the sweetest of the year.

December 2020, I did seventeen posts this month.

The holiday season and the uncertainties of how it was going to be celebrated because of COVID had me feeling restless. In my crazy mind, I thought posting every day for two weeks would be a good distraction. Not one of my clearer moments, but I did accomplish my goal. Three of the seventeen total posts were blasts from the past when I reviewed some of my Christmas memories and how animal crackers figured into the decorations of the season. I also reran a post on different kinds of tree bark. I liked looking at the stark profiles of the trees in the winter and remembered I had done a post featuring that previously. 

In addition, I tried to look for positives in the long dark nights, but mainly the posts revolved around Christmas. I showed you the decorations on my mantel and told you the significance of each. I featured some things we were making for gifts including a wooden matching game, terrariums, and wooden boxes handcrafted by Ward. I had my first ever guest author when Kris told us about disappointments from past Christmases. She has since also written about her COVID 19 vaccine experience. I would be happy if her contributions became a regular thing. But the post that makes me smile the most is the one where I described rejuvenated behavior in my elderly cats with the excitement of Christmas.

Annie, after she had gotten done with dumping out the candy basket of peppermints.
That's still a daily occurrence.

So there you have it, 2020 in review according to my blogs. Did I learn anything from doing this? Maybe. This review confirmed that my favorite kind of posts involve something outdoors whether it involves plants or animals. Also, I can see that I use this blog to try to put myself in a better frame of mind sometimes by doing thankful and positive posts. 

When I first considered doing a blog, my kids told me that I needed to pick a theme or it would just be an online diary. I think they were right, but since I have no goals here except to put some thoughts down in writing, that's okay. Little did they know that maybe having a simple blog about not much more than  my thoughts and happenings may have been the best way to make new friends. A wonderful, unexpected consequence.  And to quote myself, "And for that I am thankful."

I Spy Brown

Can You Find:

1. A favorite album from my youth and today

2. A mask Ward brought back from a trip to Kenya

3. A nutty snack I have most days

4. One of the first fallen leaves from the oak tree in our front yard.

5. A twisting honeysuckle vine

6. Ward's yard shoes

7. Chocolate zucchini bread made from the last zucchini of this season

8. Sweaters that I am wearing more frequently as we move into autumn

9. A peanut butter sandwich

10. A basket of pine cones that sits on our fireplace

11. Lucy, our calico cat

12. French toast that we had for breakfast last Sunday

Food Waste Friday and True Food Confessions--July 27, 2012

It's time for Food Waste Friday, when the Frugalgirl encourages us to post pictures from the previous week of wasted food from our household. This accountability hopefully will help us to be more careful with our food and maybe save some money.

Also, I am using this public forum to encourage us to eat out less which includes better meal planning.

This Week's Food Waste

Apparently, this sour cream wasn't done souring or growing mold for that matter. There was only a little left, but I had plans for it--big plans. But it had plans of its own--growing mold, so away it went.

This Week's True Food Confessions

Look, we cooked!

Despite the fact that this week contained National Drive Thru Day, we had a pretty good week. We only ate out one time as a family and that was for a special occasion. Wally and Theodore just visited their favorite drive thru three times--a big improvement.

Since we didn't eat out much, that means that we did eat at home. Zucchini was the ingredient of the week, and we had it in four different dishes. (A post is coming about our zucchini cooking when we finally finish it all.) Also, we had a family meeting to establish a better schedule for meals at home. We're hoping that will help.

Next week, we still need our menu plan which will probably come from the freezer because it's getting a little messy in there. That's my favorite kind of planning-creating with what is on hand. I'll let you know how it goes.

Surpise!

It's not a big surprise, like we won the lottery, but enjoyable all the same. Yesterday, I saw my first bloom on a spider lily plant that a friend gave me last year. She brought them with her when she moved from California and decided that she had too many. They spent the winter in our garage because these lilies are not hearty in our cold weather. They've been outside for months now and I've been waiting and wondering when or if they were going to bloom. And yesterday, I turned around and there it was. The first interesting, delicate, beautiful bloom. When I went outside this morning to show Ward, there was another. All blooms are interesting, but it's fun to be surprised by a new-to-me one. And when I read up on them, they said they were deer resistant. A big plus.

And speaking of deer resistant plants, tomatoes do not qualify. For a while now, deer have been eating the top off of our tomato plants and have now included the tomatoes. You know, if they would just pick a couple of tomatoes and eat the whole thing, I wouldn't mind. It's the take one big bite out of several tomatoes that I don't like. Same goes for the zucchini and sunflowers. Oh, well. It's all part of the balance of nature, I guess.

Despite the fact that the deer enjoyed the tomatoes, we were able to harvest several. I spent yesterday afternoon working with them and plan to make sauce out of them today to freeze. Also, we've finally used up the last of the zucchini. We'll see if we get some more when the deer will hopefully decide they are tired of them. The cucumbers are slowly coming on, but we've been lucky that Uncle Billy has been sharing his abundant crop. We've also been blueberry picking in his patch a couple of times that have yielded some for the freezer and some for snacking. I love this time of year with fresh vegetables and fruits to be found in abundance.

Computer time is up, so until next time...

Well, that's annoying.

 My life is good. I know that. I have lived through enough stressful times in the past to fully realize when times are good. But that doesn't mean that I don't get annoyed sometimes. It's just part of being human. Can you tell, I'm working up to some complaining?

Here it goes. My email wasn't working for about a week despite the fact that all of the settings were identical to my husband's. Most of my communication happens through email, so it was a problem. One that I could awkwardly work around, but annoying all the same. I am happy to report after many hours of trouble shooting, my email is working again. However, now Ward's has stopped working. Hopefully the fix we found for mine will work for his.

And even more annoying is the bill pay feature with my bank has stopped working. Every time we try to go in, it takes us back to the sign in screen. We were on the phone with their tech support for an hour the other night before they said they would have to escalate the case because they don't know what's going on. This is a problem. Some of our bills go straight to the site. Almost all of our bills get payed through here. Bills are due and I can't get to them. We do have an ipad mini that we could use, but it's old enough that the bank software doesn't work on it any more. Anyway, I'm gonna have to start figuring out other ways to pay things. Doable, but tedious--and annoying.

And another thing that annoyed me, even though it was partly my fault. We get our cat food delivered through Chewy (prescription food, good price), and usually they put it on our front porch. Well, on Friday, two cases of it got dropped off at the end of our driveway right in the middle. So while leaving to go feed Miss Lander's cat, I ran over it. I didn't see it in the backup camera or the mirrors. Anyway, what a mess! It took about an hour to clean it all up and to see if any of the cans were still usable. I managed to salvage a few and called Chewy. They were able to file a complaint with UPS for me and sent me a new order. I offered to pay for it because it wasn't their problem, but they said no. Chewy has the best customer service in the world and I'm not complaining about that.

And finally, this is not annoying, just disturbing, even though it was totally natural. I checked one of our bird boxes last week to see if the house wren eggs had hatched. Inside, I found a rat snake eating the babies, next to a dead mother. I know that its all part of nature and all of God's creatures have to eat, but I don't want to see it up close and personal. Ward kindly volunteered to clean out the box.

Neighborhood flowers

So as not to end with the bird image, here's some good news. The little girl who lives behind us, periodically has a flower stand where she sells flowers from her yard and her grandmother's yard. They are raising money to put a Little Free Library in the neighborhood. Ward and I bought three arrangements to support the cause. They were also giving away yellow squash. We have more zucchini that we can easily process, so we politely said no thanks.

Until next time...

This and That

Time seems to fly by without me getting around to a blog update, so I'm going to make it happen this morning. I think I'll do it mostly in pictures because we all know they're worth 1,000 words. 😀

Ward is back from the cruise he took with one of our line dance groups to the Bahamas. He had a great time. Too bad that I'm so prone to motion sickness, or I would have gone along. He was on the smaller ship.

The deer have enjoyed munching on various things.
They really liked this big pot of parsley.

The crows seem to prefer flowers. These were full of blooms until the crows had a meal.

I guess all of God's critters gotta eat, but Ward has built a fence around our garden to hopefully direct them elsewhere.  I have great plans for this enclosed space next year. And maybe this year, the deer won't eat all of our tomatoes. 

I'm hoping this little guy is eating some of the mosquitoes in the yard.

And speaking of the garden, it's zucchini time. Last night I tried some in the air fryer with a little seasoning and Parmesan cheese. It was delicious.

We had several days with temperatures of 100°F or more.
 Finally, we had a storm and rain that broke the heat. Yay!

The heat has kept me mostly inside, so I'm on a decluttering kick. I've gone through everything in the family room, starting with these shelves. Books are hard to get rid of, but we did manage to donate some. Now, I'm working in the office. Decluttering is never a fun job, and Ward hates it, but I will say he is cooperating nicely. 

Well, that's all the exciting news for today.

Until next time...

Food Waste Friday and True Food Confessions-July 4, 2014

It's time for Food Waste Friday, when the Frugalgirl encourages us to post pictures from the previous week of wasted food from our household. This accountability hopefully will help us to be more careful with our food and maybe save some money. Also, I am using this public forum to encourage us to eat out less which includes better meal planning. You can follow how we are doing in this endeavor by reading True Food Confessions. Occasionally, if our eating is going okay, I'll talk about some other food topic.

This Week's Food Waste

NONE

We've been doing pretty well preventing food waste recently. Today to continue with this vigilance, we will have to plan our meal around the refrigerator vegetable drawer. The only thing that we know for sure that we're having for today's 4th of July cookout are hamburgers. After a look in the fridge, those will need to be supplemented with grilled zucchini, mushrooms, and onions along with a green salad. Also, Theo wants to saute some radishes. I've never had anything but raw radishes, so I'm interested in how those will turn out. Anyway, I think the fridge will get pretty clean with the above menu and hopefully next week I can also report no food waste.

True Food Confessions

When we haven't been having takeout Chinese or Subway sandwiches, here are a few things we've been eating. We have been enjoying greens from the garden for both salads and cooking. Also, we resurrected the ever-favorite foil meal and experimented with Portobella mushrooms that we found on sale. Add in a couple of casseroles, and all in all, it's been pretty good eating around here.

 As some of you may have noticed, I've stopped posting every week about our eating. There have been a couple of reasons for this, the biggest one being that I got distracted by other things and got out of the habit of taking food pictures. However overall, I'd say that we've been doing pretty well. With just two of us here most of the time, a little cooking goes a long way. Thank goodness we like leftovers. However, we are slipping more and more into takeout for dinner, so it's time to get back on track. Next week that is. Now it's time to head to the beach. :)

Speed blogging. It rained!

My timer is on 13 minutes today from whatever I was timing previously. Let's see where my stream of consciousness takes me for the next 13 minutes. 

Not from my yard but from our early morning walk in Frederick last week.
The coneflowers in our yard are being eaten by some hungry insects as soon as they bloom.

It's a quiet Sunday morning. Ward is still sleeping, and I miss having fussy cats yelling about their breakfast being late - no matter what time it is. A peek out the window reveals puddles in the driveway. Glorious puddles! We finally had real rain last night - over an inch. Hurray! The thunder started to rumble at bedtime, but I didn't mind because along with it came a real downpour. With the heat and no rain, we've been watering, trying to help the plants cope. For the first time ever, we emptied our entire rain barrel. Now, they have gotten the deep drink they deserve.

Also, from our walk. Our Black-eyed Susans haven't bloomed yet.

More storms are predicted for the afternoon. I think it will be a good day to focus on things inside. We've been using early mornings to work in the yard. We're making good progress on the two-page list we have. Trees have been trimmed, flowers planted, beds edged, bushes trimmed, beds mulched, and plants watered. Despite attention, some plants, including the grass, look pretty stressed from the heat. The heat has turned much of it brown, and the twice-a-week mowing has turned into no mowing. That's one reason we have had time for some of the other yard chores. I have a feeling that last night's rain will change that. 

Another picture from our walk.

In the garden, I have pulled the broccoli and peas. Ward built a nice frame around the broccoli to keep the cabbage butterflies out. Didn't work. They found their way in anyway. Luckily, we got good heads off the plants before the caterpillars started feasting. The side shoots were not so lucky. Oh, well. It was getting too hot for the broccoli anyway. 

I also pulled the pea vines. We got a good crop of peas this year with a couple of meals, and I froze some. We have small zucchini forming and many green tomatoes. And true to form, the deer found the tomatoes and carefully pruned the top 1/3 of all the plants. If that's all they do, that's okay. I'm willing to share. Like I have a choice. :)

Well, there goes my timer.

Until next time...