I Made a Delicious Salad

I'm trying to make my weight shift, in any direction. Down is my preferred direction, but not any change has occured since I came home from the hospital with Scott. That's been long enough that I should see SOMETHING. So anyway, it's salad time!

I made a really delightful salad the other day, then made another even more delightful one the next day. Here is the "recipe:"

1 big huge handful of "Spring Mix" greens
2 T. craisins
2 T. slivered almonds
1 T. feta cheese, crumbled up
5 stuffed green olives
2 T. roasted red pepper vinaigrette dressing

Mix it all up in a serving bowl. Eat the whole thing yourself for lunch. It comes out to about 295 calories and leaves you wanting MORE! And that's saying a lot, for me, for a salad. It would also be good with other kinds of greens, plus croutons would be good in there but would add calories and not nutrition.

I dub this salad the "Wib." As in, "would you like the House Salad, the Caesar, or the Wib?"

I Stuffed a Pumpkin Full of Hush Puppies

The hush puppies were left over from last week's Taste of Cherry Creek ward activity. I made Carolina BBQ as my ethnic dish. A week out, I didn't think they were worth keeping.

The pumpkin I grew in my garden last summer. I had the pumpkins in the boys' bedroom window because I don't have a root cellar. It's a little sunnier in the boys' window than in a root cellar, so some of the pumpkins didn't make it. This pumpkin was dry and tender. You try to pull it off the window sill by the stem and the stem flops right off, creating a perfect little Pup-hole. So I stuffed all the outdated hushpuppies into the pumpkin, en route to the compost heap out back. It was fun to stuff them in. I'd do it again in an instant.

Block O' the Month

By lucky chance I went to a quilt shop just days before they were starting this year's "Last Saturday Sampler" also known as The Five Dollar Quilt. You pay five bucks. They give you a little kit to make a quilt block, including fabric and pattern. You come to the meeting on the Last Saturday of each month of the year. If you bring last month's finished block with you, you get the next month's kit for free. So at the end of the year, you've been able to make a quilt for five bucks. Plus there are prizes and drawings. At the meeting they just tell you what's going on at the shop and show you new products.

This is the finished block for January. I've done this once before, at a quilt shop in Sandy, Utah. Just last fall I put those blocks together into a quilt for my baby Scotty and it was good I already had them done, nine years ago, or else Scott might not have gotten a good baby quilt from me.