CSA Basket

Here is a picture of the basket from our very first CSA pickup.

This is the list of things that was in the basket, we actually got extra too!
Yummy! If anyone wants to know how to get involved in a CSA in your area, check out this website: http://www.localharvest.org/csa/

Gardening by the square foot

We finally finished the garden boxes in the back yard! Here they are! I will post another picture when they are filled with veggies, herbs, and flowers! It was a lot of work, probably 15 hours of total work to put them all together and fill them with dirt. We ended up getting free dirt from the landfill, which saved about $300, so that was definitely great.

Rachael's Dinner Party

For our friend Kathy's birthday, Rachael came up with a great idea to have a dinner party! Here are some pictures from the party.

This is the awesome centerpiece that Rachael had the idea for. I helped with the construction, and it was definitely a two person job.

One of the napkins rings/place settings:

The beautiful table setting...looks fancy, doesn't it?

The menu with appetizers behind it...

The menu was from Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee from The Food Network. Click here if you want to see what we ate! We didn't have the dessert listed there, because Bert brought an almond cake and I made a lemon cheesecake (lemon is Kathy's favorite, as you can tell from the lemon themed meal). We also didn't drink the martini listed there, but we had Italian Wedding Cake Martini's instead.

A good time was had by all!

Easter Candy

Yesterday, several people came over to the house to make Easter candy. We were making chocolate candy using Bert's recipe that she used to make with her mom growing up. It is basically

1/4 lb. butter, softened
8 oz. cream cheese, softened
2 lb. confectioners' sugar
1-1/2 tsp. vanilla
1/2 tsp. salt
12 oz. milk chocolate candy melts, milk chocolate coating chocolate, or milk chocolate chips

To prepare the candy, you just mix the butter and cream cheese together. Add the confectioners' sugar and mix well. Add the vanilla and salt and mix until well-blended. Place the mixture in the refrigerator to chill for an hour or so. Form the peanut butter mixture into egg shapes (or whatever shape suits your fancy), then refrigerate again overnight. Melt the chocolate in a microwave oven or in a double boiler. Using a fork, roll the egg in the melted chocolate. Arrange the chocolate coated eggs on a waxed paper lined tray and allow the chocolate to harden.

You can make a variety of flavors. To make peanut butter, add 1 1/2 c. peanut butter to the wet ingredients. For chocolate (which is extreme chocolate), add 1 c. cocoa powder. Coconut ended up being my favorite flavor. All you add is 15 oz. of bagged shredded coconut.

As if this wasn't enough yummy mess, I have been reading a blog called Bakerella lately and decided to try out some of her crafty treats! Bakerella's Cake Pops are really awesome...mine, not so much! I didn't even take pictures of the bad ones because they were so awful. Basically I made the eggs too big for the pops and they wouldn't stay on. There were a lot of slow painful cake pop deaths as the pops started out looking good and slowly slid down the lollipop stick. I re-balled several of the pops and those did work slightly better. At that point, however, I was so sick of the pops I gave up and just dipped them in white chocolate. They are DELICIOUS though and I am going to attempt cake pops again in the future...next time I will be smart and follow the directions!

Here are the cake balls:

And here are some of the cake pops that survived the disaster!

One thing I did that Bakerella didn't have on her website (and was actually Rachael's idea), was to put the baked cake in a big ziploc freezer bag with the can of frosting. All I had to do was mush it up and then cut the bag open to form the balls. I also noticed that chilling the dough seemed to make it a lot easier too!

Sewing Project

Instead of buying wicker baskets, I found this great tutorial for sewing slipcovers onto milkcrates! I am happy with the way they turned out, especially since they are stackable!

Community Supported Agriculture

If you are like me, you hate going to the grocery store to wander the produce section, stare at the high prices, wish you could afford organic, pick your produce from the bin, look at the pile of plastic bags you just put everything in (what a waste!), then go wait in line with people who are not happy, yelling at their kids, shooting mean looks at anyone who is taking too long, etc.

The desire to buy local, organic, fresh produce has really been pulling me for a long time. When I learned about CSA's, I was so excited! A CSA is basically a subscription to receive produce or other goods on a regular basis from (small, family-owned) farms. It allows people to form a relationship with their food and to actually know where it comes from (what a novel idea). To me, it's the next best thing to farming it myself. The produce could be organic or include heirloom or unique varieties of foods. By buying into a CSA, you are also supporting a local business.

Although I am sure I will still do my time standing in line at the grocery store to buy food that comes from the far reaches of the earth and is trucked in by gasoline guzzling refrigerated trucks, I feel like I am making a small difference by purchasing from a CSA.

Lo and behold when Rachael found a farm that is starting their CSA this year for the first time! The best part is they are only 2 miles from our house, so we can go pick up our weekly produce very conveniently. We actually already drive down there sometimes to buy veggies so this is a great way to not only support them, but also to guarantee a variety of veggies and fruits (and other yummies) on a weekly basis all summer. Check out the farm here.

You can also see if there is a CSA in your area here.

Cake!

This is the first cake I have ever decorated! (To be fair, the flower wasn't done by me). Ryan's Mom (Bert) and I are taking a cake decorating class at Joann Fabrics. I have wanted to take one for a long time, but never did it until now. It was a lot of fun and we have another session before the class is over. I think that for the future I will probably not take a class. I am going to learn by playing around and reading about it instead. I had a giant bag full of icings and supplies and a cake carrier to take to Joann's last night. Then when we are there, we mostly work on our own and the instructor tells us how to do things exactly like the book does.

And now that's it finished, it's time to eat it!