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Of Floppy Pancakes and Chicken

Our breakfast-for-dinner meal turned out pretty good…all except for the pancakes. I am not exactly sure what happened there. I had made them before, and the pancakes were awesome. The recipe came from the Taste and Tell recipes from Sue Gregg’s website. You can buy her whole collection if you want to spend the money, but she also has a sampling of her recipes as well for free. Anyway, her buttermilk pancake recipe was so good the first time I made it. This time, I had made the batter up on Saturday afternoon and put it in the fridge until yesterday evening. Maybe that had something to do with it. The pancakes turned out floppy and dense. I had to lather mine with syrup to make it palatable. I am not giving up on the recipe though. They are excellent if you make them right.

For dinner tonight, we went to Hardees. I hadn’t been there in probably a couple of years. I wasn’t really in the mood for anything too fatty and was looking for something chicken-y. I found two grilled chicken sandwiches and one crispy chicken sandwich. Everything else was beef, beef, and more beef. You know, I think it’s kind of ironic that McDonald’s has gotten so much publicity and flack for their menu items being so unhealthy. Um, hello? Has anyone stepped into a Hardees? Come on, now. They have all these sandwiches loaded with all kinds of good stuff (cheese, bacon, cheese, more bacon, at least two patties of beef, did I mention cheese?) that has no place in your arteries. When it comes to healthy options, I would much rather have McDonald’s. So, at Hardees I ended up getting their BBQ chicken sandwich. The other grilled chicken sandwich option had bacon on it which is good but not what I was interested in. The verdict on the sandwich was…it was great, actually was the best chicken sandwich I’d had in a long time! I like BBQ sauce but don’t fix BBQ’d things very often because David doesn’t like it that much. Maybe that’s why Hardees can get away with fixing such unhealthy things because the quality is so much better, whereas when you go to McDonald’s, you know you’re getting…well…McDonald’s.

In other news, we got our Lumina out of the shop today. Our poor car had to be towed to the repair shop because it wouldn’t start last week. What happened was the ignition switch needed to be replaced. The weird thing was that we had the same problem last year and got it fixed. Thankfully, it was under warranty so didn’t get charged for the labor or parts! We got our air conditioner recharged and that was the only thing we had to pay for. Because I was without a car for almost a week, I wasn’t able to go grocery shopping until today. It had been nearly two weeks since I went grocery shopping so things were running a little low (I usually do my grocery shopping weekly). It was kind of fun, though, to see what I could come up with. I think we probably could have gone another day or two. We were out of some staples like milk (although I do have powdered milk in the pantry but who wants to drink that?). So, I loaded up today on groceries. I’m going to see if I can go another two weeks without shopping. I may have to get some milk as we will probably run out of that before the two weeks are up, though.

I’m going to wrap this up for now. It’s getting late and I went to bed too late last night. I am noticing that I can really ramble on here. I was just starting to write about something else when I realized that I could go on and on. So, until next time, good night!

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Of Housework and School

We just finished lunch and I have some dishes to do, but thought I’d blog first about nothing terribly specific. For lunch, I made some chicken and rice in the crockpot. It is a variation of a dish a friend of mine made for us once, but she did it in the oven. I had no desire to turn my oven on today, not that it’s particularly hot in the house but just a tad humid so I chose the crockpot. I really don’t know what I’d do without my crockpot. It has saved me so many times. My problem comes when I’m unorganized. When I don’t plan ahead and have something ready to go, the evenings get a bit stressful. I get off work at 6pm, sometimes 7 or later, so I need to be organized. It is more of a temptation for us to go out to dinner when I don’t have something ready to go that’s quick. Then, dinner is later, devotions are later, kids get to bed later…it makes for a stressed out mommy.

I make out our menus for the week and then go shopping once a week for all of our meals. I have been really trying to stick with my menu list because it helps me be more organized. For dinner, we’re having breakfast. The kids really like that and I think it’s kind of fun.

I better stop typing. The kids need to finish up their schoolwork. I’m glad it’s almost the end of the year. We will have some free time in the mornings and afternoons, not that kindergarten has really taken a long time during the day though. I’m glad it starts out so easy. The kids have done very well this year and are both reading very well. Math has been okay, but they got bored because it was too easy for them. I hope that first grade math gives them more of a challenge. We’re going to be starting learning a new language in first grade…Latin! I will be learning right along with them. It should be interesting.

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Gardening and Blogging Adventures

This is my third blog today! It’s pretty fun, although I’ve spent quite a bit of time on here already, adding some things here and there. What is it about the internet that just draws you in? I can spend so much time on here (looking up recipes!).

The rain stopped, and I finished weeding my garden. I have yet to tackle my nicely planted weeds in my flower bed, though. Maybe tomorrow or Wednesday I’ll get to that. I was thinning out my radishes and pulled out some that were getting kind of big. The kids and I ate them today and they were SO good! What made them even better is the fact that all that work spent in the garden is paying off! I can’t wait to harvest the other stuff I’m growing. In my weeding adventures, I managed to find my carrots again. There were tons of weeds in that patch. I’m not sure why the weeds thought that would be such a good place to grow. But, I think I got most of them out. In my inexperienced eye, it’s hard to know sometimes what’s a weed and what’s not. In my front flower bed, I had this plant that I was nurturing, hoping to see what it would grow into. My friend came over one day and pointed out to me that it was ahem…a weed…ah! I have a lot to learn still, I guess.

I am going to call it a night, I think. I could ramble on here for quite awhile but would probably stay up way too late.

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Gardening 101

I am attempting my first garden ever this year. It’s proven to be a bit of work but I’ve enjoyed it. What amazes me is how easy it is for weeds to grow. No one has to go out and deliberately plant weeds (although I did that unknowingly; I’ll explain in a minute), but it takes effort to plant and cultivate the good stuff. So far, I’m growing lettuce, spinach, carrots, radishes, kohl rabi, onions, chives, peas, zucchini, jingle bell peppers, and strawberries. I think that’s it. My radishes and kohl rabi are doing great. I had attempted cucumbers but they didn’t make it. Hopefully, I won’t kill anything else off. I’m kind of notorious for that. David can tell you all about that.

Now, as far as planting weeds goes..it is so irritating. I have an area for a flower bed next to our shed and I had gotten this container filled with wildflower seeds to plant in that area. I went ahead and sprinkled a bunch in that area. The flowers definitely started to grow, along with a bunch of clover! My friend told me that in those containers, they mix the seeds sometimes with a mix of other things to include weeds as well. So, I planted weeds into my flower bed. Augh! They seem to be growing pretty well. :o) I was out today trying to weed my garden and the flower bed but then it started to rain. The tornado sirens were going off which kind of freaked me out but apparently the city was just testing them. It kind of surprised me that they were testing them on a day like today. It also wasn’t supposed to rain either…at least I got the lawn mowed before it rained.

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Of Laundry and Motherhood

I have tried to think of some sort of interesting title to my first blog entry on here. It has proven to be a more difficult task than I thought, maybe because I’m not that creative or witty. I really don’t know who all is going to be reading this (except you, David) but maybe I will find something interesting to write about in the future. For now, I have some laundry to fold and some straightening up to do.

I read a funny quote once that said, “Behind every successful mother is a pile of dirty laundry.” I don’t know that I’m necessarily a successful mother, but I will tell you I always have a pile of dirty laundry.