Adventures in Spaghetti

I might have gone a little bit nuts at the farmers' market in Tower Grove Park this morning.  Okay, maybe I went a LOT nuts...whatever.  Since James is on call all weekend, I figured I'd spend a little time in the kitchen working on my spaghetti sauce recipe.  Over the past 10 years or so, I've used a spaghetti sauce recipe that starts with a commercially jarred sauce, simply adding fresh ingredients to that base.  But I thought it would taste even better if everything in the sauce was fresh, so today I decided to experiment.

Here's the lineup...onions, tomatoes, red peppers, garlic, carrots, olive oil, wine, garlic powder, onion powder, san marzano tomatoes, and fresh herbs.














A really huge cast iron pot...

...an even bigger cutting board...

...lots of fresh herbs on the back deck...

Unfortunately, I had to buy the tomatoes, since the local wildlife have already enjoyed ALL of mine on my behalf.  Stupid squirrels.

So here's what I did.  I chopped up the onions.

...and the carrots...

I made the carrots really small, so they'd soften quickly, and I tossed them (along with the onions) into the pot with olive oil to soften up for about 8 minutes. 

Meanwhile, I peeled and grated the garlic.  Yes, I grate my garlic rather than chopping it.  Just call me Rachael Ray.

The next step is where things went awry.  I thought that I would make the tomato puree by pulsing some canned San Marzano tomatoes in the food processor.  They are supposed to taste great, because they grow in the fertile soil at the base of Mount Vesuvius in Italy, and they're really famous.  Well, let me tell you that I didn't really like the taste.  SO....I made two batches - one with the SM tomatoes pureed, and one with some tomatoes from the farmers' market pureed.  I liked the fresh stuff much better.  Lesson learned.

Then, I chopped up some (like a LOT of) tomatoes and threw them in the pot. 

For some extra tomato goodness, I put in some tomato paste.

Then I picked some basil and oregano from the garden, chopped it, and tossed it in.

Then I added salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, a little sugar, and about a fourth of a bottle of chianti.  I let that simmer for about an hour, and it was fabulous!!

The stuff with the fresh tomatoes was much tastier than the stuff with the canned ones, although they were both much better than what you buy in the spaghetti sauce section of the grocery store.  Why not try to make your own?  It's actually not hard, and it's delicious!!

House Cleaning

Ella's hanging out in her high chair eating lunch, chowing down on hotdogs, black beans, spanish rice, and wheat bread.  Someday, she'll realize that those things aren't meant to be eaten together, but for now, she thinks I'm the next Paula Dean, so I'm going to go with it.  Besides, I'm having brain freeze.

Why, you ask? 

Well, I'll tell you.  I just cleared over 3000 emails out of my inbox.  I had to sort them through, rather than just deleting the whole inbox, because there were some things in there that had to be saved.  It's mind-numbing, which is why I haven't done it in probably 2 years.  I'm so glad that's done.  I really need to do my other email address's inbox, too, but I'll save that for another day. 

In other news, we're back home from Saratoga, and we had a BLAST.  I'll do some blog posts about it soon, so that you can see what we did.  I've unpacked the suitcases, straightened up the house, and now I need to go to the grocery store. 

Okay, Ella's done with lunch and wants to get down, so I'd better go.  Bye!

Backyard Fun!

By now, I'm sure everyone has heard about the mythical "heat dome" that is trapping a horrible weather system over the midwestern United States, causing record high temperatures for weeks this summer.  And if you haven't heard about it, I want to know where you live, so that I can live there, too. 

But anyway.

After six straight weeks of telling Ella that she couldn't play outside because it was too hot, James and I realized that we needed a new strategy.  Our little girl has breathing problems, and they get worse (like scary worse) when she gets overheated, so I couldn't just let her run around in the yard.  Then, we went to the seminary's summer picnic, where they had kiddie pools set up outside, along with a slip and slide (blast from the past!) for the kids to cool off from the heat.  (The Dean of Students also climbed into the pool and took several runs down the slip and slide, too.  That's why we love him.)  That gave us an idea...we needed to buy our own pool!

So the next day, we went to Target and got a fun little blow-up pool, and Ella thought it was the greatest thing ever.  Here's how it works.  Ella wakes up, and we do our usual morning and afternoon routine.  Then, around the time that James usually comes home from work, she starts making periodic trips to the front door to look out at the street and see if daddy is home yet.  I eventually get her a little popsicle to combat the heat, and we go out to sit on the front porch and wait.  Before too long, she sees his car pull up, and he gets out.  She squeals, "DADDY!!!!" as he walks up, and she starts to jump around and run into the house.  Before he even gets his shoes off or puts his keys down, she starts trying to pull him towards the back door.  After a few minutes, he humors her, and she leads him to the garage, where they pull out the swimming pool, as I head upstairs to get swimsuits for both of them. 

It's adorable.  Seriously. 















You might notice all of the letters and numbers floating around in the water...those are her bath toys.  She loves to bring them downstairs and put them in the pool.

Ella doesn't seem to think the pool is nearly as much fun if James doesn't get into it and splash with her.  She's such a sweetheart.

CinderElla

Ella has discovered Disney animated movies this month, and she seems particularly taken with one in particular...Cinderella.  (This is probably because they keep saying "Ella" in the movie.)  She always loves the scenes where the mice are singing and dancing as they do their work.  Apparently, this has inspired her to start doing some work of her own....

 However, that broom is a bit big for such a little person...
  

But don't worry.  She's pretty sure she can handle it.

See?

Pink Slippers

It's amazing to watch a kid learn to love something.  To see them go from a sleepy, tiny infant to an actual kid who has ideas and opinions.  Lately, Ella has developed quite a fancy for shoes.  Any kid of shoes.  Large ones, small ones, in between ones, red ones, black ones, shiny ones, ones with heels, ones that you run in, ones that you dance in, and other ones.  She'll raid my closet at any time of day she can reach it.  Pretty much every morning when I am busy making the bed, she comes in to join me for a shoe session.  She'll throw James's red tie around her neck out of his closet, slip on my high heels, and prance around until people start to admire her.  She LOVES the ones with heels.

But her pink slippers are her special shoes.

I think that she feels like a princess in these slippers.  She hunts them up every day, puts her tiny toes into them, and then gives you the "...okay, now I feel SO pretty" look. 

Of course, her favorite thing to do is dance in them...after all, isn't that what slippers are meant for?

Booster Seat

Well, I didn't post much this month.  You might have noticed, ha, ha!  July has just been a month where things went crazy at work, and now I'm just starting to get a handle on things again.  In any case, I will probably start doing some short little posts for awhile, so that I can post more often.  I've been struggling with wanting to write, and then realizing that I don't have time to write all that I want to say, so I don't end up writing anything.  I'm just going to do some short posts for awhile, and see how that goes.

Lately, Ella has started sitting in a "big girl" chair at lunch and dinner, with a booster seat to help her little 27" frame reach the food on the table.  She's so proud of herself, and she often goes around the dining room table, climbing up on each chair to try it out and see what the view looks like from each spot.  I finally got her to stop climbing up onto the table...at least for now. 

Fortunately, this seems to be helping us to solve the problems we were having at restaurants, too.  She used to always insist on standing up in her high chair, so we would have a wrestling match every time we went out to dinner.  Now, she doesn't do that because she likes sitting at the table with us and joining in the conversation.

Now if she could just get her daddy to let her drink out of his cup and eat off his plate, life would be awesome!

Changes

Well, friends, I've got a sad announcement to make.  After much careful consideration for several months, we have decided that we can't keep our dog Max, and we took him back to the Humane Society today.  (You might note that the title of the blog has changed, and it will change again when I figure out what I want to call it now.) 

This was a really hard decision for us (it involved some tears), but we truly feel that he needs a lot more space than we can give him, and we owed it to him to allow him to find a new family.  He's been a good friend, and we will miss him, but this was really the right thing for us to do.  Thanks for everyone who called or emailed to let us know how sorry they were about this - we appreciate it!

Slide!

I love playing with my little girl.  She is so much fun, and it is such a joy to watch her learn and explore.  Lately, she's been learning how to play on the playground, and she particularly loves to come down the slide.  She's often a little too brave, and she will try to come down a slide that is too high for her.

Here's a cute picture that our friend Mary Martha took a couple of weeks ago on the seminary playground...



















Sweet girl!

Blooming in June

Well, things have been wild lately, so I thought I'd post some pictures of a place of respite...my back yard.  I used to really dislike this time of year, because spring is finished, and the flowers all start to die.  The grass can get a little brown from the heat, and the stuff that was so pretty just a few weeks ago isn't so pretty anymore. Then, I learned to plant stuff that can survive the heat...and I started to like mid-summer!  (I'm still trying to find stuff that can bloom in mid-January, under a foot of snow, so if you are aware of anything for THAT time of year, let me know...)

Well, thus far, the heat has knocked back the roses, and the lilies are pretty much done for the year, but the hot weather flowers are starting to come into their own.  Take a look...

Here are the green beans.  They're SUPPOSED to be bush beans, because I'm tired of dealing with climbers, but they're not acting like bush beans.  Very aggravating.

Here are some squash and cucumber plants...with a huge weed in the background by the bag of garden soil =)

I love these flowers - they look like firecrackers!

Pretty daisies.

This is our purple phlox, which James likes to call the "P-flox allstars."  He's so strange.

Purple puffballs.

Red Don Juan climbing roses.

Last of the yellow lillies.

Pink double knock-out roses.

Last of the pink lillies.

Can't remember what these are called.

Red snap dragons!

Pink climbing roses.

Last of the maroon lilies.

White marigold.

Here are some tomatoes!!!

Here's a shrub rose!

Clematis, climbing on the back gate.

Purple asters.

And my favorite of all the blossoms in the garden...

She's my sweet little under-gardener!

Playing with her daddy's pager and cell phone...

...oh, wait...I'm not supposed to have these?

Sweet little Belle.