Happy Birthday, Baby!

This is a sort of reverse ag.gray.gate post wherein I created a cake pop collage for the blog, forgot to post it here, and this past week posted it to Pinterest instead! Sacrilege, I know. What can I say? Pinterest has swept me away...for the moment at least!

For Jack's birthday we made Ice Cream Cake Pops as per his request. They turned out fantastic and were really simple. The poppets were thrilled!

A little about the pops...
-The pics don't show us mixing the buttercream icing into the crumbled cake. The texture should be that of raw cookie dough. Roll and chill.
-Having access to american style Almond candy bark makes all the difference in the world. Anything else will ruin your day. Trust me.
-Melt the bark in a double boiler. Dip cones and place on chilled balls. Chill again before final coating.
-I was lucky enough to find mini cones with flat bottoms, which meant I didn't have to fashion or find some sort of mini ice cream cone holder.
-Sophie Wong took the gorgeous inset photo. Mad skillz, that woman.

Ta da. Birthday magic.

A Poultry Life…

My family and I are part of a growing trend. We have backyard chickens. It all started as a good idea last spring as we took part in Rossland’s 2^nd annual ‘Chicken Crawl’. At every house along the Walk chicken owners professed how easy and inexpensive constructing coops and runs with found goods could be. They all built their structures in a weekend. The Poppets really dug the hens and I was surprised just how much Mike seemed to like the idea as well.

Then a girlfriend called with actual chicks to give and suddenly there was a very real deadline looming in front of us. We began to gather ‘inexpensive found material’. Insert reality check #1 here. Not cheap. Even with a free metal roof and free siding.

We had ourselves a good old-fashioned Amish style barn building. Check #2 - it took more way more than a weekend to finish. Family came in from Ontario one week. We sent them out to the yard and didn’t let them in till the ground was cleared, foundation level, run framed in and a roof went up. Jack’s God Parents visited the next week and together we stained, sided, and put up the hardware cloth. It really looked like a real chicken coop now! In fact so much so, that we had never seen a raccoon in our yard before and that night two came to inspect the coop that now resembled a coop! Smart little buggars. The bandits found it empty though as chicks were still inside our house. Whew!

Then there was Velma. Who quickly decided, despite her Terrier-ness, she was the mamma. Thank goodness, I thought for sure she was going to eat the little yellow fluff balls.

Last, but not least, Mike’s dad dropped by and gave the coop a once over…and a few more cross supports. Then it was time for the chick–e–boos to move on in!

They love their coop! All it needs is a chandelier  :)

The Truth About Peas and Carrots

I make a lot of food from scratch for this little family. For lots of different reasons - mostly because I want my kids to adore my cooking above all others enjoy healthy food. But there are also times when I crumple under the pressure of requests for "Cheesy Noodles", a catchall phrase used in my house to describe any pasta with cheese. This phrase saves me in restaurants where a variation might be offered. They mean macaroni and cheese. 

Recently I have found a shortcut. A way to make Cheesy Noodles a little healthier, and give already great food a little boost. Frozen peas and carrots. In everything. Instead of ice in hot soup I throw in a handful of the frozen veg. In the final minutes of boiling pasta I throw a cup or two into the pot. When I make hearty fall and winter dishes, like stews and pot pies and I have slaved over a handmade crust the ease of carrots and peas thrills me!

The perfect crime. They are organic, inexpensive, washed, cut, raw, and FULL of all things good.

 

Appalachian Mojito

This is the first time I have ever blogged from the iPad. Michael took the Mac to Vancouver out of necessity so I am left to be judged by autocorrect. Sometimes super helpful but most of the time not. I also find myself sans streaming video and switching to the web version of everything. I am too much of a luddite to store my photos offsite so this will be a pretty bland week in terms of delicious photos. Perhaps I will cheat and add them later :)


Anyhoo, I recently came across an article in my April 2011 subscription of Style at Home magazine with a mouthwatering recipe that I immediately tore out and instructed the husband to make for me. Fast forward a few days to when we had the actual ingredients and make it he did! Soooooo delicious! A little bourbon, mint, Limonata, sugar and crushed ice felt like heaven after the week we had and it has turned my thoughts to spring. 


The drink itself had some blasé name that I cannot remember and when I dig out the recipe I'll add it along with pics so we have dubbed it the "Appalachian Mojito". Much better. I think I'll go have one now and try to forget how lackluster this post is versus how offing long it took to write. 


Pucker Up from Style at Home : 
Crushed ice, 1 1/2 oz Bourbon, 
1tsp granulated sugar (I also used simple syrup), 
2tsp Freshly Squeezed Lemon Juice, 
2 Sprigs Fresh Mint, Pinch Orange Zest, 
3oz San Pellegrino Limonata 
Half fill a tall glass with crushed ice. Pour in bourbon, sugar and lemon juice; add mint and orange zest. Use a muddled or a honey dripper to mash ingredients together to blend. Fill the glass with more crushed ice and top with Limonata. Stir gently before serving.

Happy Birthday

Today is my Mom's birthday! Happy Birthday Woman!!!!! I wanted to take this time to share just how incredibly blessed I am to have this wonderful woman in my life. My mother is strong beyond compare, hysterically funny, humble, gorgeous, amazingly personable, spicy, selfless and brilliant.
Now as many things as I could say I found the following quotes, all of which made me a little verkelpt,  to be so accurate and succinct I could do no better. These excerpts are so true about my Mom I think they really must have been written as an homage to her alone.

The moment a child is born, the mother is also born.  She never existed before.  The woman existed, but the mother, never.  A mother is something absolutely new.  ~Rajneesh  


A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts.  ~Washington Irving 



One good mother is worth a hundred schoolmasters.  ~George Herbert


Who fed me from her gentle breast
And hushed me in her arms to rest,
And on my cheek sweet kisses prest?
My Mother.
~Anne Taylor


A daughter is a mother's gender partner, her closest ally in the family confederacy, an extension of her self.  And mothers are their daughters' role model, their biological and emotional road map, the arbiter of all their relationships.  ~Victoria Secunda


A mom reads you like a book, and wherever she goes, people read you like a glowing book review.  ~Robert Brault


Most of all the other beautiful things in life come by twos and threes, by dozens and hundreds.  Plenty of roses, stars, sunsets, rainbows, brothers and sisters, aunts and cousins, comrades and friends - but only one mother in the whole world.  ~Kate Douglas Wiggin
I love you Mom - Happy Birthday xoxo.

Wordless Wednesday - Heaven

Home Exchange

One of the many HomeExchange sites.

I first heard about Home Exchange a few years ago and thought that it sounded like an incredibly fabulous idea! At the time though, we were living in Burnaby. Still Vancouver, but no one on the exchange boards was exactly chomping at the bit to head into the burbs. Or so I thought. In retrospect it might have been the exact place someone wanted and needed to be for a visit to the Lower Mainland for all kinds of reasons. I should not have put our little townhouse in a box.

Anyhoo. The time is here. I finally finished making a photo tour of our home and we are going to take the plunge into an international home exchange site. I have no idea which one. I am thinking the ones that you have to pay for are best after overhearing a girlfriend talking about her online dating experience. She described paying as being an incentive not to dick people around. Good advice.

One of the many reasons we love this little town is that living here affords us the ability to travel. We want to travel once a year. And, bonus, Rossland is the kind of place that other people will come around the globe to visit. I meet them on our streets everyday! What with worldclass skiing in the winter and being the mountain biking capitol of Canada in the summer, amongst other things. Huzzah :)

There are some pretty incredible destinations available in the exchange and it cuts the cost of travelling in half. Great, because we have two tiny bums that get charged full price for plane/train seats everywhere we go. Rossland is two hours from the Spokane airport and or we would drive to Vancouver to find the best - read cheapest - flights (leaving one car for the exchange family). Now enrolling does not mean we will find a match immediately but many of the sites do guarantee that you find an exchange within the first year, or the next years listing is free. Sounds good to me.

Have you tried a home exchange? Which one?