Halu-Halo

My Baby Brother...who's 30.

I think I am as much a helicopter sister as I am a helicopter mom. My 30-year-old baby brother is here to visit, and I've had to remind myself more than once that I am no longer his babysitting big sister, and that I should treat him like the grown man that he is (and a military non-commissioned officer, at that). 

But I can't help it. He's still 8 years old to me.

Here are some things I've had to ALLOW for him to do on his own (and completely go against my natural instincts).

1. Cross the street without grabbing for his hand. Admittedly, I reached for it, but he was already across the HELLA BUSY parking lot.  My heart dropped for a split-second, like I'd lost him or something.  

2. Order at the local Korean dive. I did, however, try to steer him to order certain items. To make sure he had a well-rounded lunch, you know? 

3. Drive the shopping cart at the crazy-crowded Asian market. I had to trust, people. I even let him go down a few rows so we could attack the grocery list together. I found him every time, of course. (whew)

4. Pay for his own check. Although, we did have a little verbal scuffle in front of the cashier. I didn't believe that being in the Air Force for 13 years earned him enough money to buy. C'mon, he's only 8! I mean...

5. Work my stove and take over my kitchen. He even sharpened one of my knives. I had to look away; I imagined myself summoning all of my RN skills to stitch him up with my sewing needle and Guterman thread. 

(He made a kick-butt Filipino dish)

6. Teach me how to cook the aformentioned kick-butt Filipino dish. I can't tell you how that totally blew my mind. Like, my little brother knows more than me? How is that even possible? Is that even allowed? 

I can't even talk about it.

7. Make me a drink. An alcoholic one.  I mean, I knew he was a part-time bartender at one point, but in my mind he was playing with kool-aid and plastic cups. Because there is NO WAY he drinks. He's way too young.

8. Teach me how to make the aforementioned alcoholic drink. I HAVE NO WORDS FOR THIS.

 

Tomorrow, I will wake up, and my baby brother will be 8 years old again. That, or I will finally have to face that he has grown up to be such a sensitive, considerate, and good man. 

NoNoNoNoNo...he's eight eight eight.

Head in the clouds... (a photoblog)

...when words just aren't enough...

My feet are now firmly back on the ground after a whirlwind of family time. :)

I hope you have a great week! See you as the dust settles...

 

Party On.

I like holidays. Whether they are real or made up, religious or otherwise.

Bring it, let's party.

And why not? There are many not so good things going on in the world. I don't waste my breath going against something that promotes good will among people. I don't even think twice.

Let's break out the chocolate and share it. Cut out an extra heart to give to a friend. Plan a phone call to someone I haven't spoken to in a while. 

These dates on the calender - they're just reminders. We all know that, right? Christmas, New Years, Birthdays, Thanksgiving, Halloween - each carries its own traditions that you could do at any time during the year, but we try to celebrate them on the day that at one time a group of people had agreed upon.  Each of these celebrations are highly commercialized, don't even get me started on the fiasco called Black Friday after the gratitude of Thanksgiving!

But poor Valentine's Day, the black sheep of all holidays, gets such a bad rap.  Why is that? 

Here's what I'm teaching my kids: We're celebrating it all. We should celebrate it all, because it's all good. I'm going to try to show them that it's all about how you celebrate it. Anyone can go overboard, and we are all guilty of being materialistic on certain holidays.  Heck, I bet some of us can even attest of being materialistic on a normal day. *ducks and cover*

Why blame the holiday? 

My family had its financial struggles growing up in this country when we emigrated in the 80's. Somehow, we still managed to party. Every Valentine's Day, my mother had a big red heart cut out from construction paper on our place setting for breakfast. On it, she wrote, "I love you. Happy Valentine's Day." 

She could have done it any day of the year. But it was Valentine's Day, and in her mind, there was nothing wrong with adding a little extra sugar to an already sweet day. All for a price of a piece of paper.

My lesson from that, which I hope I can pass on to my kids is this: Save your battles for the stuff that really makes the world a bad place to live in. Otherwise, party on. 

Today, I received my flowers from Hubby with great gratitude, and I cherished the handmade cards my kids gave me. In return, I promised to give them as many enormous and humble celebrations in life that I can.

Have a lovely night everyone!

 

 

 

Thanksgiving recovery

Means rest, from the week of planning, the day of cooking, the evening of eating, the night of putting up Christmas decorations, and finally, the aftermath of all of the cleaning.

But it was an awesome holiday for our family.

It was intimate (although loud and noisy), simple (even though I made more 9 dishes in addition to the turkey), and easy (even if we had to bring Baby J in to see a doc for an ear infection).

 

I can never get enough of this holiday, when there is absolutely no expectation but to cook and eat.  And be together with loved ones.  When reflection is really encouraged.  For a busy family such as ours, I welcome all of these things with open arms.

But I do have to brag, folks...in the spirit of Handmade Holidays, I present my first handmade present of the season, finished this weekend.

(It's a stroller sized quilt, started almost 2 years ago! Done as an practice of improv, using only  my scraps, to include the white/cream fabrics. The back is pieced as well, but I already have wrapped it up to be sent the first week of December.)

It's been a work in progress for a long time, until I decided who it needed to belong to, and then it took another 6 months.  I KNOW! (I don't need to hear it, I need lessons in time management).  

I suppose that's also what a couple of days of no expectations can do to a woman, it encourages her to tie up at least once loose end.

I hope that you've had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend!  And here's to officially welcoming the winter holiday season!

I broke it off.

I don't know how to break this to you.

I've never done this be fore.

But we need to talk.

You're too good for me.

This just isn't going to work out.

I love you, but not that way.

I can't do this anymore.

It's not you, it's me.

We can still be friends.

 

Ready to break up with your halloween candy?  Here's where I'm sending mine.

Hope you had a wonderful Friday!

 

Before we run out of it..

I thought I'd post a new recipe.

It seems that the apples we picked last weekend won't last more than another week here. Now with my boys eating like grown men, they are going through our bushels swiftly, eating almost 4 large apples a day EACH alone.  Not to mention the girls and we parents, who are proudly doing our share.    

In fact, aside from the apple pie crisp I made yesterday, I've only cooked up apple butter, and that too is dwindling fast.  I am down to the last cup and a half of a 4 cup batch I made on Tuesday.  

I can definitely say that we were not lacking on fiber this last week.

This apple butter recipe was a result of several apple butter consultations with a couple of my girlfriends who were in the applebuttermakingspirit. From this wonderful recipe, they altered the amount of sugar to their tastes and I was going to follow suite.  Until I couldn't find my vanilla (who loses their bottle of vanilla?), and then in a fit of "oh what the heck," I decided to throw in a few different spices.

But it was a hit!  Hopefully you will like it.

-------------

Slow Cooker Apple Butter

Ingredients:

7-9 chopped apples (peeled)

1/2 cup white suger

1/2 cup brown sugar

2 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp cloves

1/2 tsp allspice

1/4 tsp nutmeg

1/4 tsp salt

 

1. Chop apples and throw it into your slow cooker.  Fill that baby up!

Here is a picture of my little sweetheart.  I've had her forever and as much as I say that I'm going to need to upgrade her, I just can't.  We've come a long way, baby:

2. Mix the rest of the ingredients and pour on top.

3. Set to high and cook 4-5 hours.  At the fourth hour, I helped along the apples and mashed it with my potato masher.  I had children salivating for it, after all.

Spread it on toast, on waffles, pancakes, or simply spoon it up and enjoy, enjoy, enjoy!

Have a wonderful Friday!

 

A different kind of luxury

It's times like these that make me all giddy inside.

It took me a few minutes of arranging them *just so* so that I could snap a picture for you all, so that I could spread a little bit of apple-love.

Aren't they just so pretty?  So simple and pure, nurturing, and literally full-filling.  

How lucky I am to have a house full of apples, pulled right from the tree, touched only by my children's fingers.  Their skins are so thin that my toddler has no problem biting through them.  And they smell just heavenly, their scent greeting me as soon as I walk through my front door.

I think our trip to the orchard last weekend was just what I needed, with green and blue as far as I could see, with nothing to complicate or disrupt it except for the smatterings of the red and yellows of apples.  Where the thought of material, economy, expectation and competition is absent, and instead, replacing it was simply the need to run, to climb, and to just breathe in the air of just.that.moment.

These were easy moments, my children completely in their element, my Hubby relaxed, inspecting his pickings, and me just following behind when it is me usually Pushing, Cajoling, Preparing...parents - you know what I am talking about.  We didn't count our minutes, nor were there time hacks to make.  Ah, to be serenaded by a clear, beautiful day.

Perhaps it was my memories of my Lola's (grandmother's) fruit trees nourishing me on those days we were on her land which brought me some quiet. Or perhaps it might have been the way my children laughed almost the entire afternoon we picked apples which calmed my usual too-type-A personality.  But on this day, I walked away from the orchard bushels heavier.

And a hundred times richer.

Happy Monday everyone.

 

 

 

I didn't mean to do that...

...disappear, that is.  I meant to come back to report on the fabulous meeting we had here at my house for the NOVA Modern Quilt Guild, when I drank a couple of mimosas and talked quilting with some wonderful ladies.  I was so giddy that I didn't take a picture - who does that?

But the minutes ran well ahead of me and before I knew it, we were on our roadtrip vacation to upstate New York, to Lake George.  Where the ice cream ran a-plenty along with the magnificent lake views.  It rained for most of the time we were there, so while we didn't get to hit the beach, we marveled at the glorious mist covered lake and the aura it created.  Magical.

And since Hubby is a historian both by education and interest we, of course, were not lacking in our sightseeing.  I can't recall a trip where the kids haven't climbed on top of a canon, or explored the woods.  Upstate New York didn't disappoint.

And yes, we ate.

 

A lot.

But mostly we played.  

Do you love road trips as much as we do?  We have never had a DVD system in our vehicle, so it is always conversation heaven in our van.  I absolutely am convinced that the kids' vocabularies increase by a hundred fold from all of the reading they do during road trips, in addition to our games of "Name a word that starts with the letter __"

But yes, I am glad to be home, to sleep in my own bed and to cook in my own kitchen.

And to top off such a wonderful week, I was greeted by a package when I got home - a mug rug from Dani, who sent it as part of a swap we are doing at Ravelry.  

She spoiled me!  Thank you *so* much Dani for everything!  I was so thrilled to find out that she, too, is in Virginia!  I'm so tickled to know of another kindred crafty soul.

And this is a peek of the back, what cute fabric.  

I think the mug is my new favorite :)

I hope that you all had a wonderful Memorial Day weekend.  And that you have all sent good vibes, sweet wishes, or thoughtful prayers to all of our service men and women, past and present, for freedom is never free.

Have a great night, dear friends.

 

It's a keeper!

With what seems to me like a third of the library stocked with them, new-to-me cookbooks are always finding themselves in my kitchen.  I covet and drool over the lovely pictures of food that I could potentially make, sometimes totally skipping over all of the verbage to skip to a photo, and therefore a recipe, that calls to me.

But, after I cook recipes after purposely buying the ingredients, I find that many of the recipes just.don't.work.  I usually give a book a couple of tries, and I learn my lesson, not subscribing to the "third time's a charm" rule.  I have a conniption when I end up not using ingredients to its yummiest capacity.

This is why, just by principle, I don't buy cookbooks before I try them.  

While rushing through our weekly library trip last Tuesday, shaking my keys to distract Baby J as she attempted to jump out of our moving stroller, I picked up this up in the New Book Section.  

 

It seems that the same rule applies to libraries as it applies to grocery stores - one mustn't go when one is hungry.  My sweet tooth, apparently, needed to be satiated.

Within a week, I baked 3 batches of biscotti using one of their recipes and snickerdoodles.  But the recipe that won this Halu-Halo family is their chocolate chip cookie.

They disappeared, lickety-split.

Crazy about Cookies is a keeper, even for this recipe alone! I am a believer that everything happens for a reason; now, I am grateful that Baby J attempted to disembark at that exact spot in the New Book section of the library.

Thank you, Krystina, for sharing recipes that are simple and true!

Three good things...

Spring break is here!  And it couldn't have come faster, for this mama is feeling the need to get on a non-schedule.  A little recharge of my batteries, a few more moments in the day when I don't need to herd the children into the van, and, definitely, more opportunities to sew and craft aside from the stolen minutes before we need to get "somewhere."

Do you discuss "the good things/not so good things" with your children/spouse/friends?  When we find ourselves in a lull in our conversation at the dinner table, I ask for each of my kids to mention a good and not so good thing that happened during their day.  

Here are mine for this week:

 

1.

I finally got started on the Robert Kaufman Charm Pack challenge.  As a member of the NOVA Modern Quilt Guild, we were given charm packs by RK to make into a quilt featuring its fabrics and then give them to charity.  The Guild will be providing quilts to Inova Fairfax Hospital NICU.  

The great:  I love charm packs!  If you are new to quilting, these are the perfect solution, as the squares are already pre-cut to 5x5 squares.  

The not so great: The quilt is due at the end of the month!  Which means I must get cracking.  

 

2.

The good: Allende does it again...she wrote what I feel is another piece of art.  She became one of my favorite authors in high school, when she and Gabriel Garcia Marquez literally changed my life and opened my eyes to the magic of the written word.

The not so good: This book was my selection for book club (still a good),but I literally finished it 10 minutes before book club began.   Talk about sweating it...

3.

Onion Focaccia - from my favorite bread book ever. Handmade for last night's book club.

The good: It came out perfectly, the outside crisp and the inside light and fluffy.

The not so good: I ate at least 3 pieces before book club even began.  Maybe I should have focused on reading faster instead of stuffing my face.

 

As a result of the not so goods, today, I will be sewing, reading early for the next book club and then taking a turn on the treadmill.

Care to share your good and not so good?