Jill’s Jumble

We hosted Mother’s Day Brunch for my mother and mother-in-law. Also in attendance was my father, father-in-law, brother-in-law, and BIL’s girlfriend. Luckily everyone gets along really well! And everyone seemed to enjoy the food. People really like the Baked Pork Spring Rolls I’ve mentioned in one of my Bento posts. What I was most excited about was the fruit salad I made!

Aren’t the bowls adorable? I found a small watermelon in the grocery store when I was purchasing the fruit for this salad. I couldn’t resist buying it and using it to serve the salad! In addition to the watermelon the salad also contains pear, apple, banana, and strawberries. The “dressing” was just the juice from half a lemon. Next time I think I’ll have to add blueberries for more color.

My first foray into quilting was in middle school. The various teachers held classes in their hobbies. I chose to attend my French teacher’s class on quilts. I don’t remember very many details as it was nearly twenty years ago. But I did piece a pillow by hand using the Card Trick block pattern. I wish I could find that pillow to show you a picture of it.

I have to admit that brown, orange, and green aren’t a particularly favorite color theme of mine but that’s what I ended up with. It was a small pillow too. Maybe 9×9?

My next start to a quilt was during the last quarter of eighth grade. The home economics teacher taught quilting! I was very ambitious and thought I’d make myself a full size Irish Chain quilt. Well, it’s not actually finished yet!

Easter 2005, I did pull it out and figure out what to do with the start I’d made. It’s now in two parts, a pieced top with borders awaiting sandwiching, and the preemie quilt pictured here. It’s been donated to a local hospital.

I cut my Nine Patch blocks in four and rearranged them to create this pattern. The technique is called Disappearing Nine-Patch. I loved the little pinwheels this particular arrangement created so I tried to emphasize them with my quilting. The curved lines are hand quilted while the straight lines are done by machine. At the time I didn’t even have a walking foot to do those straight lines, never mind a free motion foot for the kind of curved lines I wanted! Here’s an image of the back to get a better idea of what I did with the quilting:

1. This story really just needs to be told but it was prompted by this post on a personal finance blog I read regularly.

We had our wedding on the lawn at my parent’s home in rural Vermont to take advantage of their view of Mount Mansfield. The night of the rehearsal, we all gathered by the arch to begin. Someone commented that the ground was moving. Upon further inspection, it was discovered that there were ants crawling all over the lawn in concentrated patches. Flying ants! Swarming flying ants! We got on with it and the rest of the evening went just fine.

In order to save money, I made my own wedding dress and underpinnings. Well, mostly, my mom did attach the lace to the sleeves for me the morning of the wedding. I was helping my matron of honor finish her bridesmaid dress. As you can imagine, things ran a little bit later then intended but I don’t think it was so late as to cause a problem. We just had more witnesses to the pre-wedding pictures then we expected!

I do regret not knowing exactly how dry the grass had gotten since that morning’s rain. I ended up walking up the aisle barefoot so as not to ruin my beautiful shoes. The local military range did choose that day to test their big guns though. We are so used to them here that we didn’t think to tell my cousin, the minister, that they weren’t thunder. So we had some lovely punctuated moments during the ceremony.

Just after I said my vows and the minister had turned to Justin with the intention of having him say his vows, we all heard a loud crack. My cousin Taylor had fainted and hit his head on the house! So between our vows there was a brief intermission to make sure that Taylor would be okay. Shortly after the completion of the ceremony, the ambulance arrived for him.

Soon after the ambulance left with Taylor and his mother, we started the reception. However, the reception was also interrupted. We experienced a multi-town power outage. Luckily the owner of the DJ company lived nearby so my brother ran his truck over there to get a generator to finish the reception with. While waiting for the music, we filled in with the cake cutting. I specifically waited to get tested for food allergies until after I’d gotten to eat some of that cake! That’s right, it was filled with gluten, dairy, and eggs.

Remember the shoes I mentioned not having worn during the ceremony. Well, I’d forgotten to put them on for the reception. Until, that is, I was reminded by a little three-year-old girl who asked her grandmother why the “princess” wasn’t wearing shoes. I told the little girl that I’d forgotten them. Then I pulled them out from under the table where they’d been stashed so that I could put them on for her.

The reception continued once the generator arrived. About an hour before the DJ expected, I decided it was time to wrap things up. I got my now-husband to pull the car around and we had our last dance. Hop into the car and away we went. Only to stop once to pull the trailing balloons and such dragging behind the car, and a second time because the drops of rain starting to come down were big! Sure enough, we finished our drive to the other side of Mt. Mansfield in a deluge. We only had to avoid two branches that fell into the road just in front of us!

Upon our arrival at the bed & breakfast, we got the best customer service I have ever received. They let us pull into their garage so I wouldn’t have to run in my silk wedding gown through the rain into the B&B! All is well that ends well, right?

Well, the rest of our honeymoon didn’t go perfectly either. Our only checked bag got lost somewhere between NYC and Brussels. We did get it a couple of weeks after our return to the States.

1. While the purpose of this blog isn’t frugality, I do have a few tips based on my own experience:

-If you are confident in your sewing skills, sew your own dress. I also sewed one of my bridesmaid’s dresses in addition to helping with my matron of honor’s.

-That leads me to this: when transporting a sewing machine from your house to you mother’s make sure it’s not going to tip over in the car. I was without that sewing machine for three months while it was in the shop being repaired (waiting for a part). Not only will you have to pay the cost of having it serviced, but you won’t be able to do any other machine sewing to save money in the meanwhile!

-Reuse! My veil was the same one my mother used when she married my father.

-Comparison shopping is key, but you might want to pay attention to the details. The company we went through to rent the tent, linens, and tea cups (not a particularly frugal way to go, in general) had the most expensive rental prices on napkins that I’d seen despite everything else being cheaper or the same price. I opted to have pretty paper plates and clear plastic silverware from Costco along with personalized paper napkins. As a matter a fact, I might have gone overboard with the personalized stuff we had. The centerpieces were created from votive holders that were personalized. The favors we gave out were also personalized.

-By holding the wedding amongst my mother’s flower gardens, I opted not to purchase flowers from a florist. Before the rehearsal, my bridesmaids and I created boutonnières from the flowers in the garden. Mom also created a couple of bouquets for the buffet tables. For ladies in the wedding party I opted to have simple bouquets of dried lavender stems. The flower girl’s basket was one that I’d had forever, newly lined with the same fabric as the bridesmaids dresses and filled with loose lavender flowers.

-Take advantage of friends of the family. Both our photographer and our DJ qualified there!

-Consider staying with relatives for part of your honeymoon. My family in Belgium loved having the opportunity to see us as part of our “voyage de noce”. The ones who had come over for our wedding were particularly amused to see us again a week later in another country!

We ended up having a big meal at lunch due to a visit from my husband’s aunt and uncle from Michigan. Dinner needed to be a much lighter meal. You should have seen how excited my husband was when he realized what I’d made for dinner!

Isn’t it amazing how such simple fare can bring so much joy? This tomato soup wasn’t entirely from scratch but it was really quick and tasty. It reminded me of the gazpacho that my husband and I had in Paris on our honeymoon. I can’t wait to try it cold!

When I make soup, it’s different every time because I usually just follow a pretty basic guideline rather then any kind of formal recipe. In this case, here’s what I did:

Tomato Soup

Ingredients

1. Butter
2. One Leek, cut into 1 inch chunks
3. Three celery stalks, cut into half inch chunks
4. Two cans of diced tomatoes (14 – 16 ounce cans)
5. One can of chicken broth (14 – 16 ounce cans)

Instructions

• In a saucepan melt the butter.
• Add the leek and let cook until soft.
• Add the celery and let cook while you are opening the cans.
• Add the cans of tomato and chicken stock.
• Mix and allow to simmer so that everything is hot.
• Using an immersion blender, blend everything together.
• Serve hot with a bit of cheese.

Yum! Goat cheese for me and cheddar for my husband. He also had his soup with crackers. I’m sure I’ll be making it again. I love making soup like this with fresh tomatoes too!

So, part of what I wanted to do when I started this blog was to point out that there’s a lot of gluten free stuff out there.  You do have to expand your mind beyond food though.  This spring I’ve been having a great time admiring the flowers coming up in my garden.  Here’s a particular favorite:

I love crocuses.  My favorite color is purple.  We’ve got a few white ones and a few white and purple striped ones.  We also had snow drops.  Right now, we’ve got daffodils and lungworts.  While lungwort isn’t a particularly appealing name, both the flower and the foliage are pretty.  I’ll have to take a picture of ours for a future post.

The weather lately has been just gorgeous! We’ve been taking advantage of it a lot. Sunday we had a lovely dinner out on our deck.

The nicest thing about this meal is how quick it is the prepare! While you are melting butter in a pan, slice up a couple of chicken breasts so they resemble chicken tenders (or just use chicken tenders). Once they are in the pan cooking, cut up some romaine lettuce and any other veggies you like. Actually, in this case, you have your husband cut up the lettuce then add cucumbers. Apparently he hadn’t noticed that I’d snuck in a few snowpeas while he was still cutting up lettuce!

Here’s a close up:

I just used the melted, browned butter as my dressing. My husband added bottled dressing and croutons to his salad.

We’ve also been taking advantage of the new grill we just got. Lots of meals lately have involved sausages of various kinds. Last night my husband let me know that he’s not really fond of sausages unless they are hotdogs! Further inquiry resulted in the statement that last night’s smoked bratwurst were okay, but regular bratwurst isn’t. The pesto romano sausages I had in my first bento was also okay, though I recall he only ate one of those. Too bad I’ve got regular brats in the fridge I can’t wait to have because I love them. There’s very few sausages I don’t like.

I made a bento in a hurry yesterday that even features some mini sausages. But because I was running late, no pics were taken. It contained the mini sausages, cucumber, and celery with some PB to dip it in.

Tonight we’ll have steak and the second bell pepper with cheese, but on the grill this time!

Last night I went to a friend’s birthday party.   Knowing that I would most likely be allergic to whatever was served I brought a Bento dinner.  It features spring rolls I made by modifying this recipe.

A couple of strawberries, carrot, and snow peas round things out.

There’s been one other bento I didn’t post about.  Most of the spring rolls stuck to the cookie sheet I cooked them on so they weren’t nearly as pretty.  Some of the broken ones plus some cucumber went to work with me on Friday.

Dinner tonight was pork chops cooked in coconut oil with cheesy peppers and applesauce. This picture didn’t come out as well as I would have liked. I didn’t think to take a picture fast enough!

The cheesy peppers are a really versatile food that a friend of mine came up with for camping. She starts them in the oven at home then rewarms that for meal time at the campsite. At home we either cook them in the oven or on the grill. We haven’t gotten our grill up on the deck yet so these were done in the oven. Here’s the recipe:

Cheesy Peppers

Ingredients:

• Bell Pepper
• Grated Cheese

Instructions:

1. Cut the bell pepper into wedges along the ribs so that they form cups when they are lying on their skin.
2. Place grated cheese inside the cup.
3. Cook either on a cookie sheet in the oven set at 350F or on your grill until the cheese is browned. Approximately 25 minutes.

In my case I used goat cheese which doesn’t seem to brown the way cow’s milk cheese does. So I just cooked them until the cheese was obviously melted. I love that the peppers aren’t fully cooked through. They come out surprisingly sweet which somehow works well with the cheese.

And here’s a picture of my husband. He wants me to write a blog just about him. He’ll just have to accept cameo appearances in this blog.

As I’ve been exploring the way I now need to eat to accomodate my allergies, I have run across bento. I’ve always loved Japanese food so this is ideal for me! So to celebrate the beginning of this blog I give you my first bento!

It contains a number of naturally gluten free foods. Cucumbers, mustard, polenta, and meat. Granted you may want to be careful of what mustards and prepared meats you buy, but generally these foods are gluten free.

It’s nothing spectacular as an example of bento but in good bento tradition I’m using up leftovers!