For Levi

My daughter cuddled up with me in bed yesterday as I was trying to read my book and begged me to read to her instead.  She certainly knows my soft spot.  Anytime my daughters bring me a book, I will read it to them.  Yesterday she picked Where the Sidewalk Ends, by Shel Silverstein.  I love this book.  And I love the fact that my daughter, at three, is just starting to really pay attention to the poems and the illustrations and find them humorous. 

This little poem from the book, and it's accompanying illustration, reminded my of my friend's son, Levi.  He's two, and when we visited him recently he showered affection on my daughters, especially the one-year-old--tackling her with hugs and kisses over and over again.  He is adorable.

And so I present, for Levi:

Wishing you hugs, giggles, kisses, grins, cuddles, and wins today!

The Perfect Iced Tea Concentrate: The Rule of Three

It's summer!  It's warm out.  It's sunny.  We're lazing the days away by the pool.  OK, maybe not.  It's cloudy, cool, and rainy here today, and I've been working at my computer nonstop for weeks.  But technically it IS summer.
To me summer means iced tea.  My mom is a big tea drinker.  She likes her tea black and straight, only occasionally (and regrettably in my opinion) reverting to her Southern roots and adding in sugar.  I remember back to my childhood getting regular phone calls from her during the day, asking me to get a jug of tea started and outside in the sun so it would be ready when my parents got home from work.  It's not uncommon for my mom to comment on the quality of iced tea she's had when talking over her day.  And yes, a meal can be a total disappointment when the tea is bad.

She's been a big fan of the tea at the cafe in her local Barnes & Noble.  I hear repeatedly how good it is.  Despite being across town, I know for a fact she eats lunch there regularly, and I'm fairly certain it's only because she loves their iced tea.  She does that.  She chooses a restaurant based on the quality of their tea.

If my mother were to pass down to me one recipe, one creation that completely encompasses who she is as my mother, it would be the recipe for good iced tea.  When I was back home visiting my parents a few weeks ago, my mom excitedly told me she had perfected the "recipe" for good iced tea.  (She had made an earlier attempt during my last visit home but had missed the mark.  She didn't quite have the flavors and proportions figured out.)  She described the process, and I tasted the new tea.  It was good.  Really, really good.  She told me the secret: the rule of three.  She learned the process carefully watching her friends at the B&N cafe and taking mental notes.

If you like plain, black iced tea, I highly recommend the recipe below. It's not fancy.  It doesn't call for tea leaves.  You can use your microwave. I suspect you could play around with the tea varieties if you're so inclined, add some lemon, make it a hard iced tea, or even (blech!) add some sugar.  It's not sun tea, but on a cloudy day like today, I'm just fine with that.  It's a concentrate, so you can save some room in your refrigerator.  But most importantly, it's a delicious, refreshing, and guilt-free summer drink!

Perfect Iced-Tea Concentrate
1 quart jar full of water, microwaved (or "nuked" if you're my mother) until very hot. 
Add 2 bags Earl Gray and one bag black tea. 

Steep until really strong (2-3 hours), ignoring the dirty patio table.

Remove tea bags and refrigerate.

When you're ready to drink, remember the rule of three: Fill your glass 1/3 with concentrate, 1/3 water, and 1/3 ice.  Mom says if you want to get fancy you can use a shaker to shake it.

Enjoy! And if it's really good iced tea, it might just make you feel like this!

Garden Update

I posted some pics of our vegetable garden early on.  We used Weed Barrier this year to keep the weeds to a minimum, and let me say I'm so glad we did.  We were away from home for about a week, and when we came home our plants had doubled in size.  Had the weeds had the run of the garden, we would have been in big trouble.  Instead, I weeded the entire garden (basically the area between the plants in each row) in less time than it took my husband to take our girls to the park. I took these photos on Thursday, and the garden has exploded with growth even since then.

So far we've got a bumper crop of radishes, and I've harvested two zucchini. There are about 962 more radishes where these came from.

We've got tomato plants loaded with green tomatoes.  A little early for that, isn't it?

Several squash are on the vine. And I'm VERY encouraged by these big, beautiful watermelon vines, currently with blossoms. 

Deer and rabbits have been munching the leaves of our green beans, but they are full of blossoms, so I'm expecting them to be just fine.  And the peas are looking good.  I think.  I've never grown peas before, so I'm not exactly sure.

The cabbage are huge and it looks like heads are starting to form.  The pepper plants are growing pretty slowing but are hanging in there.

For the first time it seems like the cucumbers are lagging behind everything else, but a few days ago they had a growth spurt and are now sporting blossoms.

Back in June on a whim I entered our garden in our local paper's Beautiful Garden contest.  Mostly I entered because I was so excited to finally have a vegetable garden I could be proud of.  I was also encouraged by the fact that no one else had entered at the time.  The voting period has officially begun, and I've got a 2 in 3 chance of winning first or second prize.  Now I admit the other two entries are very beautiful gardens, but I'm telling myself their owners are retirees who have all day to spend tending plants. I, on the other hand, have a crazy work schedule (12am anyone?), two little ones at home, and a very busy husband.  So if you're so inclined, send a vote or two my way.  You do have to register on the new paper's site first, but once you do that it's pretty easy to vote.  And you can even vote daily...not that I'm doing that or anything!  There's a handy link to the voting on the upper right corner of my blog.  Thanks, everyone.  And happy gardening!

Hello, Summer!

Sometime in the last few weeks, summer arrived.  I almost missed it, because I've been stuck inside at my computer working more hours in the last two weeks than I have in any other two-week stretch in the entire four years I've been freelancing, including before I had children. Despite all that busyness, we decided to officially kick off our summer with a weekend visit to our friends in Illinois.

Over the Fourth of July weekend we were lucky enough to visit our long-time friends John and *Bethany at their home in Illinois.  We've known them for years.  I went to high school with Bethany.  My husband was John's roomate in college.  We introduced them to each other, and several, several, several years later they married.  We now have children and houses and real jobs.  We talk about things like politics, investment fees, and retirement.  OK, our husbands talk about that stuff.  Bethany and I talk about diapers, baby vomit, and potty training.  We've grown up, but we're still great friends.

Our children are ages 3, 2, 1, and two months, and they're each exhibiting the classic signs of their age.  The oldest is schooling the others in the art of sharing and everything else she has seemingly become an expert on overnight. The two-year-old is smothering the one-year-old with an abundance of kisses, hugs, and general attention.  The one-year-old is keeping one eye on mommy and the other on the baby, along with an errant finger in her eye and a joyful "Ba-by!" thrown in. And the baby is just soaking it all in--napping, nursing, spitting up, and blowing out diapers as babies generally do.

I hope you all had a fun holiday weekend.  I did.  I closed the laptop for a couple of days (mostly), sat back, and enjoyed good company, delicious food, and making some lasting memories.

*Bethany just started blogging.  She's full of brilliant ideas.  She's super crafty.  She asked me with a completely straight face if I've ever made my own English muffins.  She has.  Check out Bethany's blog, Crafting My Happy Life.



Sinfully Good Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars

Last Friday I had an exceptionally busy day.  I had work to do, a house to clean, groceries to shop for, dinner guests to entertain and cook for, and (completely separate from the dinner guests) my sister and her family were house guests for the weekend.  For a girl who is lucky to get dressed in real clothes during the day, it was a lot. 

I survived (with a couple hours of help from my babysitter--love her!).  I got my work done, cleaned the house, bought the groceries (with both girls in tow), prepped food, showered, and actually "got ready"!  This was all very exciting.  I went with a pretty simple meal: grilled t-bones, hamburgers for the kids, baked potato wedges, salad, and watermelon.  Yum!

My original plan for dessert was to buy some of that pre-made cheesecake filling, use a pre-made graham cracker crust, and plop some strawberries on top.  Easy peasy.  Unfortunately (or not) my grocery store doesn't carry that cheesecake filling stuff, so in the middle of the grocery store (again, girls in tow), I used my phone to track down a recipe I had read that morning in a blog.  Mind you it was not a blog I subscribed to (I do now; it's fabulous!), and I had gotten to it from a maze of other blog links.  After much searching, I was very happy to find the recipe and quickly picked up the ingredients.

And here it is: Confessions of a Cookbook Queen's Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars.  No pictures from me, I'm afraid...I had a lot going on!  But they are every bit as delicious as they look in the link.  The middle layer has the consistency of those school lunch peanut butter bars (am I imagining these?) but, of course, these are a millions times better. Rich and dreamy.  I followed the directions exactly, except I couldn't find the Minis the recipe called for, so I bought Miniatures and chopped them into quarters.  The dinner guests, the house guests, and my family loved them.  I hope yours does too!

Keeping a Neat Garden

OK, if someone had told me last year I'd be blogging about how to keep a tidy garden, I would have literally rolled on the floor laughing.  It's always been a struggle for us to keep the weeds at bay, but last year after an untimely vacation (is there such a thing, really?), we came home to the biggest weed patch I've ever seen.  Surprisingly there were still some thriving veggies in there, so what's a girl to do?  We put our neighbor girls to work.  It took two teen girls almost four hours to get the job done.  And they were working hard, trust me, I was watching them from the air-conditioned comfort of my kitchen window.  It got a little embarrassing when one of their mothers came over to offer them support and an extra pair of hands for a little bit.  I was even shamed into coming out to help.  We paid the girls well, and it was worth every penny for us; I'm not sure the girls felt the same way.

Each year since we moved into our first house, over six years ago, our gardening efforts have gotten more and more involved.  The first year the garden was an afterthought.  I planted, but I didn't really expect anything to really grow.  That was the year I learned that radishes thrive in my soil, I ate some unidentified weeds thinking they were early spinach, and I handled all of the weeding (not that I did much).  I grew a very, ahem, "natural" garden.  It's a strategy that has persisted until this year.  Let me tell you, veggies grow just fine when they are surrounded by weeds.  And I have a theory that all of the weeds throw the rabbits and deer off track.  They seem to have stayed away from our plants when they were the weediest. 

Since that first year, our garden has grown.  The variety of plants has expanded.  This is my first year for potatoes, peas, and cabbage!  Last year it was okra and broccoli.  Over the years I've learned a few things.  I've learned I can actually grow watermelon large enough to eat (IN MINNESOTA!), only to have them all crushed by baseball-size hail days before harvest.  By the way, that was the only year I've been able to grow them.  I try again every year and fail--usually because I can't find the young plants in the tangle of weeds.  I'm trying again this year, and so far they look great!  I've  also learned two people really can't consume a 10'-row worth of radishes even if the radishes do grow really really well.  The same goes for cucumbers.  You can only eat so many.  We've added a fence after rabbits and deer ate the leaves off of two big rows worth of green beans and to keep our dogs out after they ran all over our freshly planted seeds scattering them everywhere.  Last year we got fancy (ha!) and used string to mark our rows to supposedly help me know where my pants and not the weeds were coming up (did I mention I ate weeds?!?!). We've learned a few things.  But clearly we had some room for improvement in the weeding department.

Last year, my husband asked someone at the nursery what they do to control weeds in their garden.  She said they use Weed Barrier.  Now we've talked about it before.  Weed Barrier is an investment.  It's not cheap, but after Weedgate 2010 I was willing to give it a shot.  Once the initial tilling was done and the weed barrier was down, I was responsible for doing the actual planting.  I will say it was hard work this year!  Cutting strips out of the weed barrier to plant the beans, peas, radishes, and carrots took extra time and energy.  But just LOOK! 

It's June and everything we planted is thriving.  I weeded the garden the other night and it took me minutes!!!  Not to mention I can do it in flip-flops and come out with toes still relatively flesh colored.  Totally worth it.  My husband tells me we can use the weed barrier for several years, so I think we have a winner. 

One of Those Days

Yesterday was just one of those days.  The kind of day I wish I could wear headphones and still be an effective parent.  Seriously, I think scientists should study my daughter.  It must be medically significant to be able to talk, sing, laugh, cry, scream, grunt, giggle, groan, holler, and otherwise vocalize astonishingly loudly, nonstop for 12 hours all without the slightest strain of the vocal chords.  I blame my husband; he's the talker in the family.  When I married him I guess I didn't realize I was signing up for that same quality in a three-year-old!
It was also one of those days where after putting the girls to bed and finishing up my freelance work, I finally got a long-overdue shower.  It was lovely.  I enjoyed every minute.  Then I got out, dried myself off, towel-dried my hair, and was half dressed before I realized while one of my legs was baby smooth, the other one sported several days' growth.  Yes, I had only shaved one leg.  So I re-undressed, the towel came off my head, and I went back into the shower one more time.

Have you had one of those days?  Where you forget to shave one leg?

I also learned these fun facts yesterday. 

• Sheets are disgusting.  According to this article, "sheets can contain 0.1 gram of feces, salmonella, and E. coli after just one night's rest. That means they'd collectively contain about 10 billion microbes." And that's nothing compared to the feces party in your carpet.  Seriously.  Disgusting.
• There's a birth control shot for men.  Well, it exists, but approval is still being worked out in India, the home country of the shot's inventor, and maybe in the next year or two the FDA will start it's own research in hopes of eventual approval in the United States.  So basically by the time I'm menopausal, there will be a birth control shot for men.  Sigh.
• I had one more thing, but my browser isn't working to bring up the article.  Basically it was all about the harmful effects of the sun, including the risks of skin cancer.  And since we had a week of 90-degree temps here and I've been outside with my daughters every day in that blistering sunshine, I was suddenly alarmed at the sight of my slightly darkened (compared to the the usual pasty white) arms and ashamed at my previous pride in the first glimpses of a tan in years.  Damn you, sunshine!

Coming soon: Fighting weeds in my garden the lazy way.  And this year I don't mean hiring the neighbor girls to do the weeding.