Friday, July 8, 2011

Anticipation!

Oh I'm soooo excited!  So many fun things to do this weekend!  In Chewelah even!  Who'd a thunk it?  Let's see... where to begin?  Chataqua!  This weekend Chewelah comes alive!  Our annual fair comes to town.  There will be live music all weekend long.  Carnival rides, food galore, all of our talented local artists will bring their beautiful products to be admired and purchased.  I always spend a few hours wandering through the craft booths.  My favorite of course is my friend Donna Talbot who paints so beautifully.  I've shown you my painting before but here it is again :)  in honor of Chataqua.


If you look closely on the porch you can see Lucy, Tank and even Bud the cat.  :)  I always smile when I walk by this painting in my bedroom.  Last winter she painted a beautiful valley scene from somewhere here in Chewelah on a giant saw blade.  It had a pretty barn and was personalized for the owner with their old pick up truck out in the field.  You really have to go see Donna at Chataqua!

My bff Brenda along with delightful husband Dale (really?  Did I just admit that?  :) Someone slap me and nobody tell him!) are coming to stay with us this weekend along with an undetermined number of their girls.  My Aunt Jane and Uncle Jay are visiting us too with their puppies and so we will just have a big ole party!  There will be roasted hot dogs and smores down at the fire pit.  The dogs will tromp through the creek and shake off their wet bodies all over everyone.  It will be great!  Of course we will go into town and hang out at Chataqua.  I might even try a deep fried Twinkie :)  Or NOT!  Or maybe...

On Sunday we will get up early and head for Silverwood.  Yippy!  Always a blast.  It's become an annual event and so much fun!  I mean, where else can you observe so many American Blue Whales in their natural habitat?  :)  Yes, of course I'm including myself!  I'll make the biggest splash of all.  I can't believe it's been a whole year since we last floated the lazy river and spun crazily down the family size 8 person raft water slide.  :)

And then early Tuesday morning I get to fly to S CA to see my brand new grand daughter Kami.  She's one week old today.  Here she is snuggled in Mommy's bed...









And here she is with Mommy and big sister Charlotte...


I know... sorry, blurry pics.  I took a pic of the pics with my phone off of facebook :)  So... horrible picture quality.  But I just wanted you to see her.  Her mommy needs to email or at least text me some pics.  But I will take lots of pics when I go down there next week.

Other tasty things to anticipate from my garden... I say anticipate because they are not ready yet!

 Sugar peas













Zucchinni...


Fennel and green beans

English Cucumbers


Tasty herbs.  Chicken wire is self explanatory!  Stupid chickens!

Super Pumpkins


Tomatoes

This is a new kiwi vine I just planted.  The fruit is small and smooth skinned.  No fuzzies!


Beets...or is that beats?  No... what a dork!

And this is looking down on my tiny sunflowers.  It will be fun to compare this "before" picture with the one I will take when they are in full bloom :)


And finally, here are a couple of the special meals I have been blessed to share with my Aunt Jane and Uncle Jay who are residing in my yard.  I say residing because they rented a PO box in Chewelah a couple of days ago.  I don't have the greatest yard in the world to plug your RV into... but it's gotta be close :)  Not anything I've done mind you!  But my awesome husband has worked very hard on our place and God has blessed us with "world class" scenery.  Any of you who have not been to visit me... this is your invitation!

These are meals prepared at Diamond Dave's Micro Ranch and Orchard :)

This is Kokanee (land locked - lake salmon) that my neighbor Denny gave us.  Unc filleted them which was no small feat.  Well actually, yes it was.  It was a tiny feat :)  Tiny fish.  But they were fabulous seared in the grill pan and topped with his awesome fresh salsa.  This recipe came from a Weight Watchers cookbook.  Some of my very favorite recipes are from my WW cookbooks.  I've got different ones than he does so I'm going enjoy perusing through his.  If you have not picked up one of the more recent Weight Watchers cookbooks I recommend doing it.  The food is amazing!  You just have to limit yourself to ONE portion instead of the three you are going to want to eat.  Also in this pic is a salad I threw together from greens from my garden and a few of the other usual suspects.  Figs and goat cheese make this salad.  I also made a little crustini with oil and balsamic vinegar.  If you stalk my facebook page you will already have seen this but I thought it was very pretty and blog worthy.  A very healthy meal.

















This you have not seen.  It was yesterdays breakfast at Cafe Taylor... aka Aunt & Unc's RV.  Mmmmm!  Huevos rancheros...  almost too pretty to eat.  But I did it anyway :)  He's quite a chef!  (Insert sly grin here)


Well... guess I better get busy!  It's a big day, big weekend, big trip next week.  My future's so bright I gotta wear shades!

Ciao!

Saturday, July 2, 2011

Happy Birthday Kamilla Jeanette!

Life has been so busy lately that I've all but abandoned my blog.  Between the garden, animals, work, mowing, mowing and mowing it's hard to come up with time to obsess about my diet :)   But!  Today is a day for celebrating and worthy of a blog post!  This afternoon my new granddaughter arrived.  Her name is Kamilla Jeanette Muhammad.  Kamilla after her great Granny, my mom whose name is Camilla.  And my middle name is Camille so I claim the name too :)  And Jeanette is her paternal grandmothers name.  So that makes three grandmothers very happy!  We have not had the opportunity to get to know her very well yet through pictures because Mommy is busy recovering from the c-section birth and Daddy is super busy taking care of big sister Charlotte (15 months old).  But I do have one picture of her.  She's all brand new.  Naked as a jay bird!  Certified organic!  I'm a very proud grandmother and feel truly blessed by God as she is my third little granddaughter.  So tiny and adorable!  :)

She was due to be born on July 8th but the Dr. discovered that she was already in marching position.  Feet first and stomping her way out.  They decided they better help her along.  I am sad that I am not there right now.  I'm scheduled to go see her on July 12th.  It will be a long two weeks!  

While I waited for baby Kami to arrive I decided to go visit the Chewelah Farmers Market at lunch time.  Due to being away from home with work and traveling this was my first trip to the market this year.  I'm always excited to go!  I just love market day.  This year our market has a new location.  It is now in Chewelah's beautiful park on Hwy 395.   I think this was a great move!  It's much more visible to people driving by and has attracted more farmers and craftspeople.  My own garden is a bit sluggish getting started this year.  I still have very high hopes though!  Meanwhile, I'm happy to enjoy the wonderful local produce.















I love meeting our local farmers.  Today Andrew and Celeste Engell of Simple Gifts Farm were kind enough to let me take a picture of their market stall.   They have a small 20 acre farm West of Addy, WA - just 10 or so miles north of Chewelah where they raise beautiful produce and one very cute small son.  My favorite market pick today was at their stall.  I found some wonderful purple potatoes that you can see in the pictures above of my produce purchases.  


The sign was not cooperating with us.  It was too busy dancing in the wind but that's ok.  I'll post a link to their blog:  http://engells-simplegiftsfarm.blogspot.com/p/about-us.html
and from there you can get to their farm website.  Thanks so much Andrew and Celeste!  I'll see you again soon.  Perhaps even tomorrow at the Colville market!  :)  They inspired me today to come home and pull a few weeds, water a few plants and be a little less depressed about today's little mini tragedy on my own tiny farm.  

Many of you already know what's coming because I posted this on facebook but for those of you who don't... well... this was just sad!  We've had chicken trouble this year!  I'm actually ashamed of our chickens right now.  I had to buy eggs today!  :(  Anyway....  our chicken coup is in serious need of a tear down and rebuild.  Unfortunately Dave has been working on the railroad all the live long day for way too many days in a row!  It's just not going to happen this year.  Consequently their laying, nesting, sitting is all messed up.  We just need a new chicken plan.  We have not had many chicks this year.  Our second batch consisted of just two chicks who were very adorable and growing very nicely.  Every day I would see them out and about with mama hen.  I was very dismayed when I looked out this morning and saw Bud the kitty, Lucy and Tank the yellow labs and a very unnaturally still little black chick.  Boo hoo!  At first I thought it might have been kitty's doing because he is constantly stalking the chicken coup.  I'm quite sure it was Tank though because when I questioned him he exhibited some seriously guilty behavior!  It took me about an hour to wrap my head around the task of picking up the chick by scooting him with a broom into the car wash tub and then without looking at it, taking it over to the fence and flinging it as far as possible into the tall grass on the other side of the raspberry patch.  What a fool!  What part of Labrador Retriever did I not understand???  When I returned from my trip to the market guess who was back on the porch taking a nap with Tank?  Yep!  Chicky!  It took me another two hours to work up the courage to face the crisis again.  I used the same sweep and scoop technique but the second time I placed it in a Styrofoam take out container and deposited it in the garbage can so TANK couldn't re-retrieve it.  Ugg!  Well.. life goes on - unless you're name is Chicky!  Ok enough sadness!  :)

On the diet front.  Just call me YoYo :)  I was doing pretty well... but then I went to Woodinville for work and had a total train wreck of a food week!  Way too much indulging!  Let's see.  there was the Maltby Cafe where I helped Bobby eat this.. the Maltby Cafe version of French toast.  Insert big sigh here!  


Then there was a night out with my buddy Brenda where we went to the movie theater where you can eat dinner and watch a movie at the same time.  So that was delicious and about a million calories!  The following night we (yes Brenda, whenever there's trouble she in the middle of it with me!) met our good friend James at Arnie's for dinner.  I didn't take a picture of our table.  It was criminal!  :)  And to top it off, I enjoyed BBQ ribs at our company BBQ.  Oh wait!  More topping!  When I got home I had a raging craving for Mexican food so I made Dave take me to get some of these...

And finally on Wednesday night which is ladies bible study night I was puzzling over what to bring since it was my turn to bring snacks.  I came up with this honey nut mix.  It was SO GOOD!  And I ate way too much!  There was obviously walnuts plus, cocoa almonds, slivered almonds, peanuts, dried cherries, chocolate chips all heated up and drizzled with honey.


Fortunately the ladies did me a huge favor by eating it all up so that there were no left overs to devour on the way home!  

But you know... I really can only go so far before I must finally reign myself in - or explode!  So I'm back!  After a week of carbo-loading though I was still jonesing for a little pasta so here's how I salvaged my self respect on that dish.  I realized that the chances of me overeating pasta if I made a bunch of it were - 100% certain so I only cooked a handful.  Literally... small pan, one handful.  I added carrot matchsticks to the water just a couple of minutes before the pasta was done.  Whole grain rotini too mind you!  Then I drained it and added a few bacon crumbles (pork fat rules!  Even a tablespoon at a time!) some sundried tomatoes, a little goat cheese and a lot of fresh raw spinach.  Sprinkle with pine nuts and ta da!  Very satisfying and tasty.  No additional olive oil or butter.  A little butter would have been nice but, well you read my embarrassing confession.  


After all the twists and turns of that culinary action adventure I weighed in at 156.4 and glucose 84.   :)  Now that reminds me of one of my favorite country songs which goes something like this... I was born again and then back slipped, I went on a diet then ate the fridge... I finally started to write that book about all the twists that my life's took, and surprised at what I've overcome!  That's just me on my diet, Day 1.

Ciao!