Monday, December 29, 2008

Christmas Time

We had a great Christmas here. Susan liked every thing she got, especially the new cell phone and me and Dan have been having a blast with the Wii we decided to get for each other. Here are some pictures from Christmas morning.

This first one is hilarious. I went to a craft fair a few weeks before Christmas and Binder Park Zoo had a table set up and were selling a few things and I bought Susan a journal and letter writing set called Poopoo paper. It is made using elephant poo recycled into paper. I thought it was genius to do that and have since learned they do it with Panda poo too. All the money went to help elephants in the wild. Anyways here is the picture when she read it and realized what it was LOL.





Susan in her pile of wrapping paper.





This picture is Susan realizing we bought a Wii.





These next picture are us playing a maracas game we got. You have to shake the maracas in time to the music on the game. It's a lot of fun.











This is Susan and her boyfriend. I get a picture of them together every Christmas.





Susan got a ton of books for Christmas this year. I think around 14 of them. 4 of them are a teen vampire series (no, not Twilight). She wanted the Twilight series but I have a problem buying her a series she has recently read since she doesn't read her books twice. I didn't know why she wanted it but I got her this other series instead. I'm planning on reading them as well. I'll read them first as I read a lot faster than Susan. As a gift I recieved Patricia Cornwell's new book and I also recieved Stephen Kings The Stand. The uncut version. My mom has read it before and said it was a really good book. I've seen the movie and love it so I'm looking forward to reading it and all the other books as well. I also have a book called On Strike For Christmas. It sounds like a good one too. Here's my stack that I'm reading right now.





Here I will share pictures from Susan's Christmas concert. This year she was in the chior as well. Some how she get placed in there for her first trimester so she went ahead and sang in the concert even though they are in their second trimester. Then of course the band played and Susan is first chair and had 3 solos. It was a great concert and they finished up with my favorite Christmas song. Susan is the blond in the second row.








Susan playing in the band.








This is the apron I made for my mom for Christmas. She seemed to really like it. Susan picked the fabric.





The gluten free food I made was nothing exciting. It was delicious but no new recipes. The doctor did increase my Lyrica and it seems to be working well so far. He also gave me a prescription to help me sleep at night and it helps with pain and it has been woking very well. It's nice to be getting a decent nights sleep for a change with out waking up constantly because some thing or other hurts. I'm also on some thing called Ultram. It's a pain medication that slowly releases into my system over the day. It seems to be working well too but I may up that one.

Well, I guess that updates every thing and spell check isn't working so I hope every thing is looks and is spelled right.

Bye!

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Christmas decorating & Leftovers

First off I'll share what I did with some of our left over turkey. I made a turkey buffalo pizza. Gluten free of course. It just like the chicken buffalo pizza I make except I had turkey. The ingredients are.....

1 gluten free pizza crust (I make mine from a Better Batter Flour recipe)

left over chicken, or turkey in this case

Gluten free ranch salad dressing

Franks Red Hot sauce

Cheese

Make your pizza crust how ever it is you make it. I always pre cook mine for about 10 to 15 minutes. Spread as much ranch dressing onto the crust as you and your family would like. Chop up some left over chicken or turkey and toss in a good amount of Frank Red Hot sauce. I don't have an amount, I just make sure it is good and saturated. Then sprinkle the amount of cheese onto the crust that you would like and spread the hot sauced chicken or turkey on top of that and bake until the cheese is good and melted and browned on top a little. After all that is done you end up with this.



I made 2 of these and this is what we had left.



Just enough for Dan's lunch.

I also had an infusion last week and on those days I can't cook so Dan makes what he now calls Dansketti. I don't know if that is how it would be spelled but you get the idea. Here is the dish he made for me.



It was good too! His spaghetti is always better than mine. I have no idea why because we make it the same way but even Susan agrees it's better.

And now I will share a few pictures of our Christmas decorating.

These are 2 new ornaments I bought for Susan this year. A glass blown saxophone and clarinet. Why, because those are the 2 instruments she plays for her high school band.





Here's Dan and Susan goofing around because ever since Susan was little he has lifted her to put the star on top and since she got tall enough to do it herself he always poses behind her now.



And here we are after a job well done!



And this one is Susan and Dan decorating her pine tree outside. She brought that tree home in like the 3rd grade and it was less than a foot high. Hers was the only one in the class that made it. I believe they strung it with 3 strands of lights.



Well, that's all I'll share for now. Blogger is being fussy and not saving or wanting to upload.

Bye!

Sunday, December 7, 2008

Thanksgiving 2008

Well I thought I would share our Thanksgiving with you and the gluten free foods I cooked. OF course it was entirely gluten free as it was at home and it was delicious! It was just the 3 of us and I made WAY too much food. I do have a dinner of turkey and a dinner of ham frozen. First off I will say, I made a gluten free pumpkin roll!!! And it turned out awesome and I took it to a friends house that night and it disappeared. I never even got to try it so now I am forced to make another one.



You heard me.................


Forced!









Forced!



This here is the gluten free pie crust I made. I took a pamelas bread mix and used the pie crust recipe on the side. The only change I made was I added a few tablespoons of sugar.



The ingrediants.




Crust in pie plate.





Mixing pie and into the ovens.









Finished product.





Delicious! The best crust we've had since going gluten free. Next time I will spray the pie plates as it stuck to them pretty good.


I also made gluten free mac and cheese. Here is is going into the crock pot. I followed the directions exactly and I should have known better!





Looks good right? Turned to complete mush!! I will try this recipe again making modifications. Like maybe into the oven for a bit instead. You know I think I have the ingrediants so maybe I'll try it for dinner tonight.


Here's what Susan did while I cooked.





BTW, that is my chair and laptop thank you very much!


And Dan helped out by eating leftover frosting from the pumpkin roll.





And now will follow a series of pictures of the food I made.















And so I will end my Thanksgiving sharing with a picture of Dan helping with the clean up.





And me.....


"If some one asks for another piece of pie!!"






Am I right people or what.


Ha,ha!



Bye!





Friday, December 5, 2008

Sewing Room

Okay, This will be a little out of order because I wanted to talk about this before I forgot, haha. Then I will move on to Thanksgiving and other things. Anyways, I was on the fabulous yahoo group Stashbusters yesterday and was suprised. I've been on and off this group for years and had it set to no mail for a year due to all the health problems I was having and it has such a high volume of mail I just couldn't keep up. I decided to reactivate it the other day and have since been enjoying the posts very much. Yesterday some one posted that they put links to websites that listed sewing room pictures. What an incrediable amount of work people did! I so enjoyed looking at sewing rooms and getting ideas. Imagine my suprise to see my sewing room pics from my webshots in the list of one page! Awesome! But then while looking at them I thought "Oh no! That was like 3 or 4 room organizings ago!" so, since Dan just helped me move stuff AGAIN (thanks babe!......he reads my blog you know, what a guy!) anyways he went in a moved my heavy desk and all the furniture where I wanted it this time and I now share with you the way my sewing room looks now. Nothing is staged and the pictures were taken this morning just the way I left it last night. I'm in the middle of making pj pants and a Christmas curtain for my kitchen. Are you ready????

Are you excited????



Okay, okay, I've got to have a little fun once in awhile!



This here is the view of my ironing area from the door.




This is the view of my sewing and ironing area.




This is my cutting area.




This is my part of my scrap booking area and right now it houses my serger since I am working on pj pants. I love this serger. It's a Pfaff Hobby Lock. Awesome serger. The table is one of my favorite. Dan took an old broken up treadle and used the base to make a table for me.




This is a shot of my design area that is above my ironing area and there is a book case behind the ironing board too.

Hey....I only have so much space.





This is a picture of my thread racks and tool rack that hang above the cutting table. The thread rack is a little inconviently placed but it's the only area for them.




This picture shows you how the serge and sewing area is set up. Don't forget that where the serger is is actually my scrap booking table. And with looking at this picture I realize what a mess my scrap book area is! But it is an organized mess and I know where every thing is!




Well, I think I have shown the whole sewing room here. Hopefully I can give someone else ideas or just some enjoyment from seeing it. I will post about Thanksgiving and Christmas decorating in another post.


Bye!

Sunday, November 23, 2008

Christmas Baking Fun

Or it was supposed to be..... no just kidding, it was fun, but you thought you would read some thing dramatic didn't cha? Nothing out of the ordnary but I do have some beautiful pictures to share.



I like to get my cookie baking done by Thanksgiving so I can put some out here and there during the holidays. Before I was diagnosed with celiac disease I would make a ton of cookies every year, pack them in Christmas tins and give them to friends and family. Now the flour is too expensive to do it for anybody except my household. I also did not make the variety I used to make, I made sugar cookies, pumpkin cookies which is a new recipe for me, and I still need to make my peanut butter balls.

I made the pumpkin cookies first. It was a recipe given to me off the Silly Yaks web site. These cookies are delicious and we thought it did not even need the frosting but then with the frosting on it, YUM, YUM. I thought it was very close to what my favorite gluten filled pumpkin donut was so I am very happy to have this recipe and I will try frying it some time for donuts.



Here they are on a plate set that belonged to my grandmother. Beautiful plate isn't it?



I also made some sugar cookies. This recipe came from the latest Living Without recipe. I followed it exactly using my beloeved Better Batter Flour and placed the dough in the fridge and left it until the next day until I could get to it. When I tried to roll it out the whole thing just crumbled apart. I know what you are thinking, you're thinking "how did she fix it?" Good question. I crumbled all the dough back into my stand mixer and added a few table spoons of water to the dough, mixed it up and bam, beautiful sugar cookie dough! I was so excited that I fixed it.



During that baking day I also decided to try out a pie crust recipe and a bread recipe. For the pie crust I also used the Better Batter Flour and a recipe that was from the Silly Yaks site. It used eggs and cream cheese which was new ingrediants to me for a pie crust. I made a cherry pie and since the crust was pressed into the pan I had the delima of how to do the top crust. I tried to roll it out in one piece but it kept breaking and I knew I would never be able to to a full top crust. What was the solution you ask, good question! I rolled out small sections and cut with a christmas tree cookie cutter and placed them around the top in a nice looking arrangement. Are you wondering if I will share pictures? Of course!!

This is the cherry pie before the top crust.



And here I am cutting the crust out and placing it on top.





Here it is all arranged on top and ready to go into the oven.



Here is the finished pie!



It looked good and tasted great. I do prefer a pie made with instant tapioca rather than flour though. With the instant tapioca you don't get a lot of runny juices like you do with it just tossed in flour.

The bread recipe I decided to try first came from one of Bette Hagmans books More From the Gluten Free Gourmet. It is her french bread recipe and it came out so beautifully and tasted so good that I decided I did not need to try any other recipes. It was a winner. It tasted and had the texture of how I remember french bread being and had a beautiful crunchy crust. In fact the next day I made chili and turned the rest of the bread into a delicious garlic bread. No pictures of the garlic bread but I do have picture of the french bread when it came out of the oven.





I think covered every thing with the baking. I'll leave you with a picture of what one of our cats did all day while I was busy in the kitchen.



Helpful right. And here is a picture of our fun in the snow that evening.



What can I say, Harry likes to be buried in the snow.

Bye!