Mama Lindsey's Biscuits

This past weekend I made a trek out to historic New Bern to see my lovely grandmother Mama C. She's one of the sweetest ladies you'll ever meet. She's 4 foot 10 and makes me feel like a giant! (I"m so used to being the shortest one in a room unless the other person is under the age of 10 that it's an odd feeling being so tall). I had never made the trip out to New Bern by myself, but looking back , after my grandfather, Big Daddy (yes, I realize that's a sorta funny name for a grandfather, especially since he was only 6 foot 2 and that's not like THAT tall, but when you're 3 years old, he's HUGE!) passed away nearly 5 years ago, I started wishing I'd spent more time with him. So I've really enjoyed the past years of getting to know both of my remaining grandmothers better. 


Mama C and I had a lovely time. She was this beautiful home where the upstairs is a condo and the downstairs is a street-front shop called "Art of the Wild." She and my grandfather opened it to sell his wood carvings of birds, which, by the way, are incredible! This man probably had more patience that just about anybody to be so attentive to all of those minute details. Here's a bird that he carved for my parents. A good story here: it's so life-like, our cat took a bite out of the tail!

I learned a fun story while I was there, too. Mama C told me that Big Daddy started carving on his way home from the war (that's WW2 for the historically uninclined). He took an old apple crate or something and carved a duck out of it with a knife. He had a good relationship with his sergeant who loved the carving and asked to keep it. Mama C told me that years later, the 2 of them met up with that sergeant and she got to see the original carving, which she says was not very good, hah! Especially compared to how great he got over the years. 


So Mama C and I minded the store for a bit, then took an extended lunch break to eat chili and make Mama Lindsey's Biscuits! I must confess, I told Mama C before I came that I HAD to learn how to make them while I was there. I've been wanting to learn for years. This is a recipe passed down from Big Daddy's mother. I'm not sure if it goes back beyond that, but it's one of our few family recipes that are still family favorites. I've never been a huge fluffy biscuit fan, but these are different. They're smaller and flatter than something like a Bojangles biscuit. (I should've taken a picture when I made them!) These are one of the very few items that I will continue to eat until they're gone... despite how full I may be. 


It was so fun getting the chance to bake with Mama C. She'd already set everything out in little cups and bowls before we started, it was cute. We put together one batch while I was there and they came out so great! Well, they tasted great, the form could've used a little work, but she gave me some tips for better looking biscuits. She boxed the rest of the batter up for me to take home and try again. I made some for Jarrod and me the next day and this time they came out perfectly! They were exactly as I remember Mama C making them all those years growing up and my whole family sitting at the table devouring them! Those are some of my most wonderful memories growing up and I'm so excited that someday I'll be able to make Mama Lindsey's biscuits for my children and pass along the family recipe. 

Like a Ton of Bricks

It just hit me today that my life will never be the same ever again. Between a full-time job, having our own home, living with a puppy and everything else, I will always be "busy." It hit me today when I was thinking it'd been a while since I wrote a blog post and I said to myself, "Well, I've just been so busy." But when I look back over the past week or so, I've been noticeably less busy that I've been for the past several months. So this feeling of being busy just isn't going to go away and it's only going to be compounded from here on out.


So this means my life needs to be much more organized. I said in my monthly goals for this month that I want to come up with a plan to keep the house clean and I've been working on that. It involves breaking chores and/or rooms down to a daily cleaning schedule. This way I'm not forced to have one of those days where I have to clean the house from top to bottom and it'll be fully cleaned every week. It sounds so simple and would actually make my life easier, however, it's been quite difficult to get this thing going. I just feel so unmotivated to jump into cleaning mode, even if it's just a room, right after I get off from work and I've been up since early, early morning. Perhaps it also has to do with the fact that the kitchen is constantly a mess. This comes just from continuous use: cleaning it, cooking in it, cleaning again, cooking again. Since the kitchen needs to be cleaned before using it again, that's always a chore and doing more beyond that seems like a bigger deal. But I suppose it's just going to have to take a little time to get into the groove and make it into a habit.


So as I sit here realizing all of this, I also realize how much I have to do around here, tonight. The kitchen is calling! Busy, busy, busy...

When Life Gets in the Way

Wow, I didn't mean for it to be so long between posts. I guess I've been busier than I thought. A combination of dress fittings, DMV visits, maid of honor duties, football games, engagement parties and doctor's appointments. Yep, I haven't stopped all month, and it's not going to end this week. But that's OK, because I am super excited about everything going on this week.

 

First of all, one of my favorite people to work with is getting married this weekend! Which is super exciting for her, but means lots of work for the rest of us! But also, it means that I get to take over her shift and actually work a normal schedule for a couple of weeks! So for the next 2 weeks I have the opportunity to have dinner with my hubby and go to bed when it's dark outside. It's a welcome change for the time being, although the work day does seem longer when you're not getting off at noon.

 

Beyond that, I picked up my bridesmaid dress this afternoon and it look so great now. I am super stoked about Sarah and Brandon's wedding this weekend! It's going to be exciting. Mani-pedis on Friday before the rehearsal dinner. Then spending the night out with the girls before a yummy bridesmaid brunch the morning of the wedding, plus getting hair and makeup done before the actual event. Sounds like 2 full days of pampering to me! I've said it before, that I've never been a part of wedding that wasn't my own, so I'm really looking forward to all of the wedding party excitement, without all of the attention (aka pressure) being on me. Plus, Jarrod's part of the wedding, too, so that makes it even more fun.

 

And then next weekend will be the first weekend that I can remember in a long while where I have nothing planned! I don't usually get excited about this sorta thing, because I like having plans for the weekend, but this could quite possibly be the first free weekend that I've had since we got engaged back in February. However, Jarrod's now telling me that he thinks he's going to be gone hunting all day Saturday, which puts a little damper on my do-nothing-weekend, but we'll make it work.

 

Then the following weekend is my favorite big sister's engagement party! and Halloween! (arguably one of my favorite holidays!... but that's not really saying much, because I'd probably say that about every holiday. I'm really just a big holiday fan in general) But then I flip my calendar over to November, and it's freakishly empty! I know we're now officially moving into the holiday season, which means things will obviously be busy, but that's a kind of busy I'm good with.

Now, I'm off to make pumpkin chocolate chip cookies. Bring on the Fall fun!

Someone's in the Kitchen with...

I love to cook! I may be obsessed. One of my favorite things to do is find new recipes online and I have a very long list of ones that I want to try. It's especially fun now that I have all of this new stuff for my kitchen, some of which I still haven't gotten a chance to use. However, at this point in my life, I'm not a particularly good cook. Don't get me wrong, I can follow a recipe with the best of 'em and come up with something really yummy, but I'm not good at coming up with stuff myself and putting a bunch of ingredients together and coming up with a great new recipe. But I really want to be one of those people who can do that. I'd really love to someday when I have the time (you know, since life tends to get LESS busy as you go) to take a couple cooking classes and really get into the swing of things.

I like to get involved in moderately complicated recipes that require a lot of ingredients, but I rarely have the opportunity to get into that. For now, I'm somewhat stuck with my real quick, real easy dinners. I know that I could always make a big dinner if I wanted, but since I don't get to have Jarrod, or anyone for that matter, join me, I just can't find the motivation. Spending a lot of time in the kitchen isn't particularly fun by itself, but the reward of having a great meal to share with someone makes it worth it. Making it for myself and leaving left overs for Jarrod just doesn't do it for me. So Friday's tend to be my big cooking days. I get a little rest in the afternoon, since I'll have been up since about 3am, and put something together for when Jarrod comes home that evening. Our weekends have been so busy that Saturday evenings we tend to eat out or with someone else. At least there's usually never time to spend actually cooking. And Sundays are our "do nothing" day of the week, especially since it's a short day for me and I have to be in bed so early. So I'm hoping for the day to come where I can cook meals any day of the week and have someone there to share it with. I'd love so much to be able to have dinner dates during the week! It's amazing the little things in life that you miss once you can't do them.

So last month I set the goal of making something out of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Well I had no idea what I was getting myself into! Most of the recipes really aren't that bad at first glance, but once you start going through them, you realize that several times throughout the recipe, it refers you to another recipe on another page, so suddenly your one simple recipe has turned into about 4 much more complicated recipes. They're really the type of thing that you need a lot of time (and ingredients... and specific cooking accessories) to accomplish, and as I've explained, cooking time is just not in the cards for me right now. But nevertheless, I accomplished this goal (albeit a day late, but who's paying that close attention?) last week by making the Chocolate Almond cake and it is AH-SO-GOOD! I even put my own little twists in it by substituting a couple of ingredients and putting things together a little differently. I figure that's the point of a recipe anyways. It's "more what you'd call guidelines than actual rules" (a great movie reference included!).

But this cake is so rich! I don't think there's anyway that we'll be able to eat the whole thing, because as a normal cake is 8 slices, this one is more like 30 since you have to cut them so small! But I felt very domestic making it. I melted my own chocolate, pulverized my own almonds, and beat together my own icing (over ice!). Plus, I finally got to use the beautiful cake platter I received from the wedding! I look forward to someday having the opportunity to put together great meals for my family. My mom always had great home cooked meals for us everyday after school. I hope I'm in a place someday where I can actually do that. But for now, I'll have to put my desire for dinner parties and cooking clubs aside and look forward to the day where I can slave away in the kitchen with the best of 'em. Ahh the finer things of life...

Yummy!

Happy October!

Funny that I found this picture, because Sarah and I actually put together this exact puzzle once!

I can't believe it's actually October. This past month has gone by so fast. I think I've just been so busy that everything's just flown by. I'm not sure how it happened, but especially the past week or so have been so busy I feel that I haven't had time to breathe. I'm hoping now for some time to relax just a little. I know it's not going to happen today or tomorrow, but maybe after that!

I am very excited to be starting off probably my favorite month of the year with beautiful cooler temperatures and lots of sun: perfect for an early fall day! I just love October! This month makes me think of Pumpkin Spice Lattes, a great color palette of red, orange, yellow and gold, the State Fair (hot dogs and funnel cakes included), light jackets and scarves, and the start of the holiday season. I asked Jarrod yesterday if he'd be OK with getting some bales of hay and pumpkins to put in the yard, and he was totally fine with it! So I'm planning on doing some Autumn decorating this weekend!

I've been disappointed with myself for not completing all that I wanted to do this month. I about had a nervous breakdown the other day because I was so upset at how little I had done. But in the end, I feel that I did a respectable job, especially considering some factors that I had not considered at the beginning of last month. I plan on going through at least a couple of these in a later blog entry, but here we go:

1. Finish writing and send out Thank You notes for the wedding. 

-I did not think I was going to get them done, but I actually did: last night! They're all addressed and just need to be dropped off at the post office, which I plan to do first thing in the morning! 2. Start reading a classic.
3. Attempt to make something from "Mastering the Art of French Cooking"

- So I haven't actually accomplished this yet, but it's OK, because I'm doing it tonight!
4. Start forming a concept for a story. 

-This is my big disappointment for the month, because I didn't start thinking about it at all. After we got Rylie, all of my free time (and all of my "me" time) got thrown out the window.

So after an interesting first month of writing down and keeping track of my goals, we're going to give this a second go!

1. I'm going to get working on the concept! I want to find a way to get myself organized enough to have the time to do that, and not let the rest of life get in the way.

2. Come up with and implement a plan for keeping the house clean. Now that Jarrod and I are finally settling into a normal swing-of-things, I want to be better at keeping the house straightened up. Nothing big here, just getting little things done every day that'll add up to a cleaner environment. 

3. Work with Rylie on some new tricks. You know, beyond just not peeing in the house.

4. Wedding picture organizing. Nancy Ray just told me yesterday that my wedding pictures are ready and should be arriving in the mail soon! I am so excited to not only get to see them, but to start some decorating with them! I've had this plan to put up a picture collage in the living room with some of the wedding and engagement pictures, so I'm ready to get some ordered and put up on the wall!

5. Bridesmaid in wedding So excited to be a bridesmaid in one my best friends' weddings! Bachelorette party this weekend and wedding festivities in 2 weeks!

6. Decorate for fall and Halloween. Can't tell you how excited I am that this is my first time of my life having a home in a neighborhood where we'll actually see some trick-or-treaters! My home growing up was on a mile long dirt road with about 10 houses on it (not ideal for little trick-or-treaters) and other than that I've always lived in apartments. I'm so ready to get the house decorated and get ready for Halloween. Not sure yet if I'll put together a costume, but we'll see. Excited regardless!

7. Start some Christmas shopping. Nothing big here, just want to get a head start so I'm not trying to do it the week leading up to Christmas.


Wow! That's kind of a lot! Especially since I'm new at this whole thing, but we're going to see how it goes. I should stop now before this becomes the longest post ever.