Spring in Kansas

I feel like Spring has officially sprung here in good old Kansas. The temps are no longer in the frigid range and my flowers have begun to pop up and bloom.

I like to think that I have jumped head first into Spring cleaning of my house but let's be completely honest I haven't. A few things have managed to get removed from my closet and some wallpaper has been destroyed but other than that I have nothing but a list of to-dos to show for my efforts.

The most likely culprit of my lack of cleaning has been my garden. I managed to convince my dear husband to do the heavy lifting for me and till up the garden after I raked out as many dead weeds as possible.

Probably because I picked up all this fertilizer for "his" yard...

Surprisingly it didn't take too much to convince him to build me a couple raised beds for my strawberries either. I managed to get those painted and then we got them settled in the ground. We threw some regular soil into the bottom part of the beds and then I bought a couple bags of good top soil from Home Depot. Last night I finally got my strawberries transplanted just in time for the rain showers today.

Still have lots to plant.

Let's take a moment now to appreciate some of Spring's beauty…

The new table and chairs I snagged at IKEA for my back deck…

Dinner on the grill...

Browsing the local greenhouses…

And the start of baseball season… Go Royals!

First Time at the Farmers Market

With my new job comes this lovely little perk called "summer hours". Basically, Monday through Thursday you work an extra hour each day and then you get every other Friday off. For a grand total of 5 Friday's off throughout summer. It's fantastic! 

I enjoyed my first Friday off this past Friday. I spent the day catching up on cleaning. Boring I know, but I did have family coming over on Saturday for a Fathers Day cookout so I figured I better make the main floor presentable. 

Besides wasting my whole day doing laundry and cleaning, I decided to do some baking to take to the local Farmer's Market. Since I have a fairly large garden and I'm hoping to take some extra produce to the Farmers Market later this summer I wanted to check it out before hand. 

I baked up some super simple peanut butter dog treats as well as some super delicious human treats that I like to call chocolate chip cookies. (P.S. I'm a CCC addict. The first step is admitting the problem right?!) 

Guess which is which!

I decided to give my  Grandma, who is a notorious bread maker in my home town, a call and see if she wanted to bake a few loaves I could sell for her. She contributed 8 still warm from the oven loaves of bread. My mom also added in some of her beautifully iced sugar cookies and I threw in a couple jars of my homemade apple butter. I was all set and ready for the sale. 

Since you only have to pay 5 bucks for a space I figured the worst case scenario was I lost 5 dollars and gained a few extra pounds eating the cookies. Luckily the FM had a decent crowd during the 5-7 time period and I sold 6 loaves of Grandma's bread and several packages of both kinds of cookies and dog treats plus almost all the apple butter.

The next day my parents were having a garage sale so my mom sold almost all the rest of my homemade goodies. Now don't get me wrong, I still ate my fair share of cookies but I'm okay with that:)

I spent the rest of the long weekend hanging out at home cleaning up the house and having a cookout. My mom and I did manage a mini movie marathon and watched The Fault in Our Stars and Maleficent on Sunday. I haven't read The Fault in Our Stars yet which I hate because I always prefer reading the book first but I thought the movie was excellent and I'm pretty sure there wasn't a dry eye by the end of it. Maleficent was also good but not quite what I was expecting. Overall I would recommend TFIOS if you can only pick one. 

Hope you all had a good weekend! Maybe I'll share my dog treat recipe soon. 

Super Simple (Healthy) Salsa

Since summer is winding down (I realize it's fall but I don't want to let go of summer quite yet) I decided to share one of my super simple recipes for salsa (or pico de gallo, whatever you want to call it). Bonus, it's healthy!

We've still got a few tomatoes so I made up a batch last weekend and I'm hoping to make more this weekend. Crossing my fingers for more tomatoes.

Anyhow....gather your ingredients. 

Ingredients

Tomatoes (duh)

Cilantro

Lemon (lemon juice works fine too)

Onion

Garlic Powder

Sea salt (prefer the sea but regular works)

Pepper

(If you want to get crazy you can add a jalapeno, but I'm not a fan so I leave it out.)

Hello gorgeous.

Dice your onion. I use about a quarter of a medium sized onion.

Dice your tomato. Two big or 3-4 small-ish ones.

Throw your tomato and onion into a bowl. 

Dice up your cilantro. About a tablespoon.

Add to tomatos and onions.

Squeeze lemon juice onto the mixture.
(Add jalapeno hear if you want.)

Add about a tsp of garlic powder.
I use powder instead of salt so we don't get too much sodium.

Generously add pepper if your husband is a pepper lover like mine.
Plus a pinch of salt or so (you can always add more later). 

Mix it up.

Admire how beautiful and summery it looks.

Next, put it in the fridge for about an hour so the flavors can mingle. 

Most important step right here....taste it! Does it need anything else?
Add it in and stir it up. 

Eat with chips or on a taco salad or off the spoon.
There's really no wrong way to eat this stuff.
(We like to call nachos a taco salad in our house. Sounds healthier!)

That's all there is to it! See, told ya it was easy. 

Now hurry and make some before all the tomatoes are gone. 

Linking up at Tell it Tuesday with One Fine Wire. 

Weekend Recap

Busy weekend once again. Does anyone ever have a non-busy weekend? Tell me your secret please.

Friday morning I managed to remember to start the crockpot (miracle), so by the time we got home from work we had a delicious roast waiting for us. OMG yum. Having Seth home in the evenings now is awesome. Even if it means he falls asleep in the recliner at 9:00 while watching Dateline. He did manage to wake up long enough to crawl in bed. The lives of the rich and the famous right here peoples.

Saturday morning was your usual fair of laundry and picking up around the house while Seth worked on a few things outside. I managed to make some dried cinnamon apple chips though (which you will find a recipe for soon). 

Hello fall in a jar. 

We like to have date nights at least once a week but we've been trying to be on a budget (see this purchase) so we haven't gone out as much lately. Since we've been being good we went ahead and splurged (ha) on dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings before meeting up with Seth's brother, Kyle, to go see Captain Phillips. I would definitely recommend it if you are looking for something to see. I still want to google and see how accurate it is to the real events that happened to Captain Phillips. Crazy stuff though. 

Around our house, Sunday morning involves Church and then stopping by my parents house to see how the process is going. It's almost done praise the lord. We even managed to help by hanging a kitchen light fixture and not getting electrocuted. Winning. By the time we got home it was already almost one and I helped Seth paint the last section of the floor in his shop. After getting high on paint fumes we watched Gunnar try to catch a bird on the pond for approximately 30 minutes before Seth shot it so Gunnar could retrieve. Poor puppy wasn't quitting 'til he got the bird so good thing that doggy can paddle!

Somehow we managed no naps all weekend which I find to be a bit of a shame, but I'm glad we got some stuff accomplished. Including dinner of taco salad with homemade pico de gallo salsa (recipe also coming to the blog soon). 

Get in my belly. 

Seth's out of town this week (again) and our two year anniversary is on Tuesday so I'm a little bummed about that but I guess we will just have to celebrate this weekend. 

Happy Monday!

Linking up with Sami. 

How to Make Pickles

Well I did it. I made my first batch of canned pickles last night and they look pretty darn good. I was actually pretty surprised at the easiness of the whole process. 

I got the recipe from my cousin, Theresa. 

Ingredients:

Dill Seed - 1 tsp per pint jar (2 tsp for quart jar)

Garlic - 1 clover per pint jar (2 cloves for quart jar)

Cucumbers - Enough to fill your jars - I used the pickling cucumbers from my garden.

Brine:

2 cups vinegar

4 cups water

3 TBSP Pickling Salt

(I doubled all of this because I was making 8 pints.)

Put 1 tsp of dill seed and 1 clove of garlic in each pint jar. Then fill with cucumbers. They can be sliced, speared or whole. However, you prefer really.

For the Brine you just boil the vinegar, water and pickling salt for a few minutes and then pour it over the cucumbers, in the jars, and seal the jars. 

Lastly, put the jars in a hot water bath for 10 minutes. Remove (carefully) and let cool. Make sure all your lids seal and then store for 2 weeks before opening so the flavors can really marinate. 

For a spicier version just slice a jalepeno in half and add it to a jar before adding the brine. 

Now I just have to be patient and wait the two weeks before I can open and test them out! I will let you know when I do:)

Maybe I should get pregnant now that we have a pickle surplus??

Let me know if you have any questions about any of this or the canning process itself. I promise it's a lot easier than it sounds:)

7 Quick Takes {11}

Zippety-do-da it's F-F-F-Friday again!

Which means, you can find me linking up over at Jens. 

1. I always get so ridiculously excited for Friday's and I don't even care. It's also August which just happens to mean it's my Birthday month!! Hopefully I don't get too annoying because my Birthday isn't until the 31st so I get to drag it out for the whole month. Seth just loves it when I do that:)

2.You know what else this lovely little month happens to bring? A vacation! And boy do I need it. Seriously, it has been way too long. I'm considering trying to talk Seth into moving to Europe so we can get 6 weeks of vacay like they do over there. Somehow I don't think this will be quite as easy as the DVR was. Anyway, one week in the beautiful Caribbean should tide me over for a couple months. 

3. I'm making pickles this weekend! Canning them that is. I've been stockpiling all of my little pickling cucumbers for the past week and I'm hoping they turn out okay. Canning just makes me feel like a little Betty Crocker. 

4. I have what I like to call a Love-Hate relationship with paying bills. I hate paying bills like water and electric because I know they are never going to go away. Ever. I do love that they are relatively small bills though in the grand scheme of things. I hate paying bills like my car payment, Seth's student loans and the house payment because these are much larger bills to pay. However, I do love knowing that someday these bills will be paid off and we won't have to pay them again. Plus what's not to love about transportation, education and home sweet home? #AmericanDream

5. Every year, since graduating, I can't help but suppress the smothering feeling of wanting to go back to school every time the back to school supplies hits the shelves. I seriously love and always loved school. Those beautifully sharpened pencils, stark white notebook pages and un-chewed pen caps get me Every. Single. Time. Maybe someday I'll go back for a teaching degree so I can stay in school the rest of my life while bringing home a paycheck. Enjoy it while you can kids. Before you know it you will be wishing for nap times and dreaming of the day when your biggest decision was the slide or swing-set. 

Stay in school, you fool.

6. I think I've previously mentioned that my mom is a nanny for a little one year old girl named Charlotte. She is pretty much adorable as can be and my mom texts me a photo just about every day of Charlotte's OOTD. Let's just say this girl has some seriously cute clothes. Since she's not mine I don't want to post photos of her but trust me. Anyways... here's part of the text convo from my mom that makes me smile:)

7. I stopped by my Grandma's yesterday during lunch. Her garden tomatoes haven't turned red yet so I dropped off some of mine for her with some additional produce. Conveniently enough she had just finished baking bread and gave me a loaf. Warm-out-of-the-oven to-die-for homemade bread. I guarantee Grandma has given out thousands of loaves of bread in her life and I have had many of them. However, a lot of them are frozen (cause it freezes beautifully) and I have to wait for them to thaw. I forgot how amazing it is straight out of the oven though. Grandmas are the best!

Some of my haul for the week.

Carb gold!

Weekend Adventures and some GORGEOUS photos!

Only way to beat those monday blues is by re-living the weekend. 

Linking up with Sami's Shenanigans.

1. Made some yummy blueberry pancakes Saturday morning mid-day for breakfast.

2. My parent's house is coming along slowly but surely. Hopefully they will move in soon so I can get all their junk out of my basement:)

3. Hung out with the little sis-in-law this weekend. She's 8 and pretty much my mini-me.

4. Cleaning out the closet, possibly my favorite new outfit.

5. SIL showing some attitude in her new birthday outfit she picked out. 

6. Picked some fresh veggies from the garden. I'm SO happy it's tomato season again. And for all those non-tomato lovers out there...what is wrong with you?! 

7. Closet in need of some major tlc and a large clothing purge.

8. Veggies became dinner last night. Cucumber onion and tomato salad. So fresh. So good. 

9. Did a little spray painting for a quick project I will hopefully be posting soon. 

10. Me and SIL relaxing at the outdoor theatre waiting for The Sound of Music to start. Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens...

11. Gunnar helping me price garage sale bargains for Saturdays sale. 

And....

12. Took some Senior photos of my gorgeous cousin Sophia. 

Growing a Garden

Remember when my garden looked like this? All sweet and innocent in nice pretty rows?

Barely sprouting out of the ground?

Well, it's been a month and we have had lots of rain. Which means, my garden grows right along with the weeds. So, it turned into a jungle. 

Literally, a jungle. 

Monday, I busted out the tiller, my garden gloves and an empty wheelbarrow and went to work. After about two hours I had a pile of weeds, muddy knees and some satisfaction.

This picture doesn't even do the amount of weeds justice. It was A LOT.

My jungle is starting to resemble a garden again.

Thank goodness. I was about to spray it all with roundup and say, "let's try again next year."

So far, I have been able to pick, and eat, some lettuce, spinach, onions and my husband had a few Serrano peppers. It's coming along slowly but surely. Not that slow really but it sure seems like it.

We have lots of tomatoes that are waiting to turn red and I'm pretty sure I planted too many green beans. Oh well, I guess I will have some to share since Seth doesn't seem too excited about them. 

Fresh food from your own garden is by far the best. I guarantee it!