Another Quilt Finished On The Handi-Quilter

Advice to self...don't buy 30 pounds of ground beef at one time again.  Ever.  I mean it.

On my way home from the Y, I stopped to get a few items at a locally owned grocer.  They had 85% lean ground beef for $1.50 a pound.  It was only good for another couple days.  So I declared today beef day.  Several of the kids helped me off and on, especially Rachel.

So I fed the freezer with semi-prepared meals...9 batches of Salisbury steak (I grill these on my contact grill, so I just mixed them and formed them into burger shapes), ten pounds of BBQ meatballs (shaped and ready to bake after adding sauce), 6 pounds of porcupine meatballs, and 10 pounds of browned burger for sloppy joes, spaghetti, chili, etc.

Made home-made chicken fried steak (from cube steak), mashed potatoes, and milk gravy for lunch.  It.  was.  perfect.

Susanna pinned her rail fence quilt on the Handi-Quilter frame, and I quilted the whole thing after 4:00, off and on.  I did loops and hearts.  It is adorable.  It's twin-bed size.  She used up all my '30's scraps.  The back is pieced.  I will get some pics later.  My camera died today.  I do mean completely dead.  Just last night my husband asked if I wanted him to buy me a new camera.  I told him I didn't want him to spend the money on me...mine was working just fine.  That was, until it died this AM.  He said my new one should be here in a couple days :)

Going to go read for a little while then collapse.

Will be quilting the Texas Braid soon!!

~Joan

Post #636

There is so much I want to update about that the post number seemed the best way to cover it all...

This has been a great past week or so. I realize now that I didn't take a single picture of all the festivities. It's not that I've been distracted. I can usually manage to...SQUIRREL!! My son, Benjamin, took a picture of this little rascal in our side yard recently. A post w/o a picture is quite boring, so here you go...
If you haven't seen the movie Up, you won't understand that little joke. I have had a million things going on at once this past week getting ready for Thanksgiving, having some very special company, and then recovering.

I hate to admit it, but doing regular exercise has been the best thing I've done in a very long time. It's been over two weeks that I've gone to the Y six days a week. I am sleeping so much better, and can stand for longer periods of time w/o my legs aching. I really put that to the test on Thursday. My husband and 5 of the kids went to GA to celebrate with his dad and extended family. I stayed here with the 2 youngest and had 2 very special young men join us for meals and a cooking extravaganza. I roasted two turkeys, baked a ham, made two batches of home made cookies, two congealed salads, sweet potato casserole, apple pie, pumpkin pie bars, a peanut butter pie, a caramel pecan cheesecake pie, and several gallons of tea. I also made breakfast, lunch, and supper for the 5 of us here. I had dishpan hands all the way up to my elbows!

Emily's boyfriend and his parents arrived here about two the next morning. We had a great day of fellowship with them on Friday then went to hear Messiah performed by Emily's college chorale. Inspiring!!

I have squeezed in some sewing here and there. Steve's mom showed me how to end a line of quilting w/o tying a knot. I have adapted it to starting a row of quilting the same way. I gave it some test tugs, and it really holds. Keep learning!!

I have a few new projects to share. Meanwhile, I'm making table runners for some very special ladies in my life. Will show pictures of those after they are distributed.

Must head off to bed...I've been very consistent at the YMCA, and 5:30 AM comes mighty early.

~Joan

Cooking Ahead

Tomorrow I will be responsible for preparing a meal for 60. I decided on Sue's Stew (a beef/veggie stew), chicken rice soup, and chicken noodle soup. I made 5 gallons of sweet tea and have Saltine crackers to serve with the meal. There are also 5 pans of dessert, 9" x 13" each.

Thursday I cooked a lot of chicken (boneless skinless breasts and skin and bones on thighs). I cut up all the usable meat and froze it in 2-cup portions. I ended up with 20 cups of cooked meat. I think 4 cups per batch of soup will be plenty, if not too much. I saved the broth to reheat tomorrow, add carrots and celery, and then the meat. Divide in half, noodles in one batch, rice in the other. We have a girl in our church who can't eat any wheat products, so I am making rice for her.

Thursday evening I also cooked up 4 pounds of stew meat (after cutting it into playing-dice-sized pieces) to get a jump start on the beef stew. I cooked that overnight in the slow cooker and added potatoes and carrots to cook a couple hours today. Tomorrow I will reheat it, adding green beans and corn.

Cooking larger batches only takes a few more minutes of preparation and you get so much more out of it.

We had 3 bananas that were nearly bad (perfect for banana bread). Instead of just making a batch of banana bread, I also made a batch of pumpkin bread and 12 muffin tops since it would only take about 10 more minutes. What is left by morning will go into the freezer. I have updated my freezer inventory, so I know exactly what is in there.

Doing all this big batch cooking has renewed my desire to have good and fast meals on hand. I don't use my freezer as much as I should. I want to start doing that again. Many times when all my children were very young, I would cook 18-20 meals at one time and put them in the freezer. That's how I kept my sanity at meal times.

Do you cook ahead? What do you make that freezes well? I have found http://www.lifeasmom.com/ to be a handy resource and inspiration for cooking ahead.

As I was doing all this cooking ahead, it made me wish I had this much ambition every day. I think my lack of ambition is really a combination of poor planning and lack of an attitude of service. I used to love to cook...now it is a chore. I need to find my love of cooking again!!

~Joan

Pizzelle Participation, Please

What do you mean, you don't know what a pizzelle is? Well, first of all, you're pronouncing it wrong. Pizzelle rhymes with gazelle. Just starts with a "p"!! There you go.

These are one of our family traditions. We ONLY make them at Christmas. Four of my bunch left this AM to visit family in GA, and I sent a batch of these beauties for them to enjoy. Whilst I was makin', I did some picture takin'.

After mixing the heavily butter- and egg-laden batter, you

1. PLOP (the dough into the pizzelle iron, that is)...

2. FLOP (the lid closed; set the timer...these babies burn in a heartbeat)...

3. POP (the lid back open...the one on the left always sticks to the lid...silly pizzelle iron!)...



4. DROP (them gently onto a cooling rack)...



5. STOP eating them! These are going to Georgia. Haven't you already had 3 or 12?? Oops. Sorry. Thought you were one of my childen.

Christmas on a cooling rack!! The iron is similar to a waffle iron. The pizzelles are traditionally anise (black licorice flavor--blech!), but we make them vanilla. We've used that pizzelle iron for more than 20 years. It is well seasoned, but has never been cleaned (per manufacturer's instructions). Still works perfectly every year. There is a different design on each side, resembling a snowflake or doily.

Enjoy!

~Joan

Valentine Potatoes

This is not a post with a recipe for Valentine potatoes--this is about the potatoes themselves! My youngest son was helping me peel spuds for mashed potatoes for tonight's evening meal. After he peeled the one in the middle, he said, "This must be a Valentine potato. It's heart-shaped." Sure enough, there it was...then we looked in the bag, and the next 3 all were heart-shaped.

Talk about putting a little love in your cooking!

~Joan

New Kitchen Toy

Come on in and take a sniff. Here is a loaf of fresh-from-the-bread-machine cinnamon raisin bread. Or at least what's left of it. We had a couple over two nights ago for dinner. I served some dinner rolls that got lots of compliments. The guests assumed I made them from scratch (because we usually do). The ones I served were Sister Shubert's. They are so good, but they are expensive when feeding 10 regularly as we do. I knew I was going to be preparing the meal myself since my 3 oldest girls were all gone or out of commission. Translated: I needed all the help I could get.

But that meal got me thinking back to when home made dinner rolls were a staple on our dinner table. I went to a local thrift store looking for a small attractive table to use for an end table. We recently switched our living room furniture around, and a little table would be nice to have for beside our sofa. If you're wondering why the last 3 sentences are in the same paragraph, hold on!! While I was looking for a table, I saw a like-new bread machine. It was in pristine condition. Made me wonder if it ever had been used. It was just $10, so I got it. We've had bread machines in the past (4 if memory serves me correctly, which it rarely does). We had been given them all and gave them all away again (except for one I bought for a song on eBay--remember the memory thing...I suffer from short-term memory whatever-it-is).

So last night we made 2 consecutive loaves of cinnamon raisin bread to test drive the machine. Well, in reality, we made the first loaf to test-drive it. Since that loaf all but evaporated off our counter, I had Susanna make a second one. That's before that weird thing happened to her eyes. Her loaf also turned out perfect...and she's hooked on using the bread machine. There is an English muffin loaf in there right now, very near the end.

Must go do some really important stuff.

~Joan