The theme for this year’s handmade for the holidays gifts was ‘using the stash’. With the exception of some necessary new items, every handmade gift was made with something from my stash or sourced from the local creative reuse place, The Scrappy Elephant.
I turned 54 yesterday. Birthdays seem like the perfect time to take stock of your life, for no matter when they fall in the year, they are the start of your personal new year. It’s a time to stop and celebrate being you. Only this year, I didn’t much feel like celebrating me. I’ve spent most of the last year spinning in a mid-life crisis, not at all sure what my place in the world is anymore. I’ve had a huge lapse in my self-confidence, the likes of which I’m pretty sure I haven’t gone through since high school and my teen angst days. It’s unnerving to say the least. It’s not *just* this empty nesting and menopause business that’s had me spinning, although they are both still factors. It’s been three years since Edie girl went off to college. You’d think I’d have figured out by now what I want to do with myself now that I don’t have to focus on being a mom all the time and yet here I am.
It started last fall when I got the itch to overhaul my wardrobe. I wanted to find a few basic patterns that I could use repeatedly for a uniform of sorts. This resulted in my spending quite a bit of time perusing patterns online, both the big four (McCall’s, Vogue, Butterick and Simplicity) and indie patterns (so many indie patterns!). I didn’t want a lot of components in the pattern as I’m a lazy seamstress – I’m in awe of you who do these complicated, beautiful garments, but I much prefer something I can make in an afternoon. And so, after a lot of internet surfing and falling down some hashtag rabbit holes on Instagram, I ordered myself Lotta Jansdotter’s Everyday Style.
It’s been a weird gardening year. Winter was so non-existent that I went ahead and started putting my spring peas and lettuces in the ground in early February. Then after a warm, dry March and April, May was so cool that my summer garden went in late, with my cucumbers not going in until mid-June. I didn’t fully transition my spring to summer garden until the last week of July, as I finally ripped out the last of the kale and planted field peas. And since I was out there planting, I went ahead and put some seeds in for a fall garden because, why not? If it’s going to be all topsy turvy, might as well go for broke, right?
Confession: I put my go-to recipes here so that I can always pull them up on my phone when I need them. That way, instead of having a bazillion bookmarks, I have one, with all my favorite links here. Genius, right? I think so too.
Which is what leads me to this post. Really, it’s just a bunch of links with my notes on how I make them, because as we all know, I’m a lazy food blogger. Which also means I have zero photos of any of these. I also don’t necessarily want to take credit for the origin of these recipes nor do I really feel like writing several different posts blathering on about well, whatever it is real food bloggers talk about. And so, with no further ado, here’s a few of my current favorite dishes that are on rotation as we move from winter to spring produce. You might notice there’s a lot of greens involved because yes, we’ve gotten to the point of the year where Greens, it’s what’s for dinner. I’ve got a slew of kale, collards and arugula in the garden currently, some planted earlier this year that are ready to land on the table and some that over-wintered and are still going strong.
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It’s been over a year since we started empty nesting. I have spent the better part of that year resisting the urge to ‘blow it all up’ – I’m not really even sure what I mean by that to be honest. It just seemed that if menopause was going to kick into high gear as our one and only child went off to college, shifting the dynamic of everything at home, in the midst of a global pandemic that
has reshuffled numerous norms in the world, why not change as many things as I possibly could?
The squirrels are beating us to the tomatoes this year – Daisy hasn’t yet found her voice to scare them away as well as Betsy beagle did, but considering how far she’s come in every other way, we’ll overlook it. Without a beagle chasing unwanted visitors off, it’s become wildlife central out there, with rabbits keeping the sweet potato greens from running outside of their raised bed and an entire charm of hummingbirds fluttering about all day, stopping to rest on top of the cages around the pepper plants. The hummingbirds are next to impossible to capture with a camera but of course that doesn’t stop me from trying. All of the animals seem to be getting quite comfortable with us out there, which I suppose has its pluses and minuses.
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This little box has sat in the back of my nightstand drawer for years. My friend Candy gave it to me one year for Christmas back when we were in college, telling me I needed a pretty little something on my coffee table. I’m not sure when it got relegated to the drawer in my night stand – while I clearly didn’t use it anymore, I never could quite bring myself to get rid of it because it felt like getting rid of a piece of my youth. A pretty piece of it.
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When we brought Daisy home so quickly after losing Betsy beagle, we did not want Daisy to be seen as a replacement dog. After all, Betsy was the unofficial mayor of the neighborhood and there’s no replacing a dog like that. Besides, Daisy’s personality is not nearly as big as Betsy’s was. We knew she’d figure out a way to make herself known–little did we know that she would do so in a front-page manner, nor quite so quickly.
Continue readingIt’s been six weeks since we brought Daisy home. I’d love to write a glowing essay about how well she’s settling in, but the truth is, there have been a lot of stops and starts. Progress is made but for every step forward, there’s several back. We know this is par for the course with rescue dogs, that with time, patience and love, she’ll come out of her shell, but in the meantime, it’s like having a newborn.
Chicken Wire & Paper Flowers 