Minty

Lime Ice Cream

Been making this a lot lately.  It doesn't last long. Lime Ice Cream: (You're going to want to double this because you're about to make lime ice cream) 1 pint cream
Juice and zest of 8 limes
1/2 can sweetened condensed milk
1/4 cup sugar, more or less to taste

Mix it all together. You might be wondering, "Am I going to get that thing where the fat from the cream gets on the roof of my mouth?"
You betcha you will.  You're welcome.

Orange and Yellow Beets

My Answer to the Vegan, Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free, Egg-Free, Nut-Free, Low-Sugar Birthday Snack for School

 

Home made cloud marshmallows and rainbow fruit kebabs...

I didn't have time to find a cloud cookie cutter so I just made this wonky one by ruining a flower cookie cutter with a pliers...

The kids recognized them as clouds, so I guess they turned out!

We've discovered this variation of our usual apples and peanut butter snack:  Put honey and dried blueberries on top of the peanut butter.  It's delish...

I found these long-coveted books at a church rummage sale for fifty cents each...

Paddle to the Sea isn't hard cover, but still, I was excited.
And the making has started for Matthew's 4th birthday...
Felt leaves for a garland...

Needle-felted acorns, useless maybe, but fun to hold and look at...

And acorn cap jewels for party favors...

I'm just going to go ahead and put spinach in everything

Lately, the only cruciferous vegetable I can get Matthew and Danny to eat is broccoli and they're even getting tired of that.  This means that in the last month they've eaten broccoli MAYBE eight times.   Other than that, the only other veggie consumption has come from whatever vitamins/nutrients I'm hoping have leached out of vegetables into whatever dish they're in (like soup), and I'm sure that's negligible.  Worrisome indeed.  Joseph will eat a salad at every dinner and in fact, has requested spinach salad for his school lunch, but Danny especially avoids leafy greens.  So, I'm hoping I can just sneak it in.  So far, I've put this pureed spinach in pasta sauce, muffins and pancakes...

It's undetectable, except for the effect of the color which no one has asked about.  And of course, I haven't volunteered an explanation for why everything I cook these days is green.  You can see specks of green in tomorrow's pancakes...

I also plan to put it in things like chilli and smoothies.  I would certainly prefer that they just enjoyed eating leafy greens but I'm getting desperate here.

Summer Harvesting

I decided to give up on picking blueberries and just bought 9 quarts from the Farmer's Market along with 3 dozen ears of corn for the freezer...

We picked this sunflower and harvested the seeds...

But then we discovered that some larva beat us to the punch.  You can see a few of these seeds have holes...

The biggest success was these fried green tomatoes...

Matthew got the idea to make ketchup out of our tomatoes so that's next on the docket.  I'm still searching for a simple recipe.