A Home packed with His Blessings

On Thursday mornings, the girls and I have a mission. The home of a young mother from our church with four sons 4, 2 1/2, 16 months, and 6 weeks, is our stopping place for a few hours. A home where the Word of God is written on pieces of paper and dry erase boards throughout her house. A home full of activity and life.....blessings.



We have art time with the three preschoolers.



I make her casseroles of macaroni and cheese for her supper to pull out of the refrigerator and bake during that can be tricky time when everyone is hungry and needy.




A home where lace curtains state the fragile beauty of God's grace and goodness.

So glad you asked

I was secretly hoping someone would ask for the Focaccia Bread recipe. And someone did, so here it is:

FOCACCIA BREAD
1 tablespoon dry yeast( one envelope)
3/4 cup warm water
2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons olive oil

Dissolve the yeast in warm water and let stand for 5 minutes.
Mix the flour and salt together and then add the yeast mixture and 3 tablespoons of olive oil. After stirring until incorporated, knead on floured surface until smooth and elastic, about 2-3 minutes. Place in a greased bowl, turn and cover with plastic wrap. Set to rise until doubled in size, about 1 hour.

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Grease a pizza pan or round baking sheet. Punch dough down and rest it for 5 minutes. Form the dough into the circle shape. Create hills and valleys in the dough by randomly pushing the dough apart with your fingers. Brush with 1 tablespoon of olive oil and sprinkle with desired topping. Cover with plastic wrap once again allow to rise another 15 minutes. Bake for 20-25 minutes until brown. Cool completely in pan on wire rack.

Now for the individual preferences, toppings!

There is a gamut of choices for toppings. Suggestions include:

thinly sliced red or vidalia onions,
roasted garlic, sun-dried tomatoes,
black olives, shaved prosciutto, rosemary
Whatever you might have around or anything that says delicious to you.

If you get a chance to make this bread I would love to hear feedback, but beware this bread could be addicting! Just ask, I should know.

A New Summer Dress for Charlotte

Children's Corner Mary De pattern, minus the smocked front, became a dress sewn up for Charlotte in a pink floral cotton.


Aqua gingham piping and yo yo added an unprecedented touch. At least twice my husband commented, "What a pretty dress". When your Daddy acknowledges feminine appeal one must take notice and smile.

Blueberry and Blackberry Fields

By the railroad tracks lies a blueberry and blackberry farm. While we picked this morning a passenger train, then a carrier train whizzed by the berry fields. How awful to be riding the train and see the plump ripe berries hanging on those vines and bushes and not be able to immediately plop one in the mouth.

The skies were blue, our teeth were blue, and our fingers were purple.


But nothing could be finer than to be in those fields this summer morning.

Farmers Markets, Delis and Good Food.

It actually materialized for my husband and me this morning, a trip to the next town to visit the local open-air Farmers Market. A bonanza of fresh produce and all manner of plants, flowers and herbs graced us everywhere we looked. I love visits to Farmers Markets. After making our purchases we stopped at our favorite deli for lunch.


Even though soft drinks do not normally tempt me ( I reason I would rather have my calories in other ways), still I always, always drink a Dr. Brown's Black Cherry Cola over ice when eating at this deli. It just wouldn't be the same without it.



If I was a queen, or merely had a better cutting garden, I would set fresh flowers in an assortment of vases all over my house. At the Market, wide-opened trucks are pulled up into the shady pavilion and flowers are arranged into the most beautiful bouquets by limber hands. My husband knows he will not get away from there without buying me flowers. They now sit in my dining room. But I would prefer to carry them around with me from room to room; I do not want to miss a single moment of their life.

What we ate for supper tonight is what makes Saturday evenings in the summer especially haunting. Sliced tomatoes with basil,

and cantaloupe with prosciutto, goat cheese, and mint. If you have not tried this combination, maybe you should. Visions of some Food Network celebrity describing such a dish play through my mind when I eat it. Honestly it is that good! I got the idea from a birthday party I attended two weeks ago. The brother, a owner of a fine restaurant in town, catered the event. And this was one of the dishes which I knew I was destined to come home and try.Something else you might want to try if you have not made it before, focaccia bread. Talk about easy and quick. You can start this bread and have it on the table within a couple of hours, from start to finish. That's reason enough for loving this bread alone, that it happens to be so utterly delicious lifts it completely off the charts.

To finish the course there was grilled baby squash and zucchini, a tossed green salad with arugula, and because a meal without meat is missing something to my husband, tender and juicy beef fillet grilled medium rare.

Breaking and Dipping Bread

Don't you love when you can make something that makes the gathering for family dinner slide up a notch?

Homemade french loaf broken and dipped in olive oil, fresh chopped herbs and spices is considered one of those things at my house. Presently, I have focaccia dough rising for tonight's dinner. The fresh rosemary is resting on the kitchen counter while the red onion is waiting to be thinly sliced, to top this bread in added savoriness.

My mouth waters.

Borage

Borage, one of the gems of my herb garden this summer.
An edible flower, I like to set them in ice cubes to swim around in my ice tea.

Something to enchant, unless you are six and think an insect has landed!

These Happy Sewing Days

"I declare," said Ma," I don't know how we ever got along without that sewing machine. It does the work so easily; tucking is no trouble at all. And such beautiful stitching. The best of seamstresses could not possibly equal it by hand."
These Happy Golden Years
Laura Ingalls Wilder


Yes, the sewing of lovely seams on my sewing machine, creating sundresses of bright floral cottons for Charlotte and cute skirts to wear on these hot summer days for me.

Ice Cream and Cobbler

It does not take a special occasion to indulge ourselves in the making of homemade ice cream at my house. It reminds me of my childhood and the too numerous to count times of churning with the old-fashioned, wooden-boxed, hand cranked ice cream makers in my grandmother's backyard. The cousins would all take turns, one sitting on the top to steady it and the other one to turn the crank. Since we were such a large family of aunts, uncles and oodles of cousins, everyone joined in and it would take two freezers to feed us all.

Our ice cream maker is an electric device, but it still turns out the most delicious of ice cream. We truly can not decide which flavor is our favorite, strawberry, peach or banana, but banana has been the favored choice lately.

Company is coming tonight so I plan to make a peach blueberry cobbler with homemade vanilla ice cream for dessert. The cobbler does not need the ice cream and the ice cream definitely does not need the cobbler, but what a mingling to cause the taste buds to explode with sweet ambrosial pleasure.

Energizing through still, mindful hand and brain exercise

Passing tiny passages of my day with a little knitting and a little reading. This arrived in my mailbox last week.

A whimsical, tug at the creative and childlike heartstrings of you premier publication.

The knitting is from a pattern found in Debbie Bliss's Spring/Summer Magazine. It has pleats around the neck and I was not going to be settled until I attempted to knit some of these pleats on a garment.

A Time to stop, and taste the herbs

I could be forlorn about forgetting to take pictures of today's event, but because the day was wrapped in what makes for such good stuff, any disappointment dissipates like puffs of smoke.
Another luncheon, this time a meal shared with the mothers and daughters of the Bible Study I lead with three of Rose's peers.


Everything was prepared with herbs in mind carried with a vintage flair. I am partial to chilled soups for summer luncheons, therefore, gazpacho was served in soup cups, all in a different china pattern. Rosemary buttermilk biscuits with butter meshed with oregano, thyme and parsley; deviled eggs with chives; cantaloupe with prosciutto, mint and goat cheese, rounded off the menu. And for dessert, lavender pound cake with a touch of lemon cream cheese icing and sweet plump raspberries on the side.

The girls went upstairs while the mothers sat and talked. Time stopped in our world for a while as we sat around the dining room table, but upon glancing at the clock, we regretfully acknowledged it was time to go........

After it was all cleaned and washed, this is one of the few photographs I have to remember the day. My wedding crystal, all rather lined up as soldiers, don't you think.?