Winter

Da Bull

Well… Saturday didn’t go the way we planned…. Here’s the story….

My dad was sent out of town for work and wasn’t sure when he was going to come home. No big deal. Friday morning I woke and went to my Mother-in-Law’s to water cows, what I do most days. When I got there, a few of the cows were at the stock tank, the mosied off and the bull came over. We’ve had this bull now for about a year. He was supposed to be a show bull but they decided not to show him and we bought him instead so he’s not really afraid of anything. I just knew he was up to no good for some reason but I couldn’t place a finger on it.

Later that morning I got a text message from my MIL saying the bull was out. Not a big deal except I was 20 some miles away so I jumped in the truck and headed that direction as fast as I could get there. I got there, we got him in, and I went back to what I was doing.

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Be Our Guest

Beauty and the Beast is probably one of my all time FAVORITE movies. That and Dirty Dancing. I’m pretty sure my grandma was a saint because anytime I was at her house I just HAD to watch Beauty and the Beast. I almost know all of the words by heart. I wish I was kidding….

Tbug likes Beauty and the Beast too. It isn’t her favorite Disney movie, that would be Lion King, but she does like it. A year ago I heard they were making Beauty and the Beast into a live action movie… to say I was excited is a bit of an under-exaggeration. So I marked it on my calendar a year ago when I heard about the release date. Yes, that’s true… maybe a little sad, but very true.

This year Tbug and I were discussing it and she said she wanted to see it too. I told her it was a date. Well then all the scuttlebutt about gay scenes and people needing to avoid it and yada yada yada. I hate to say it but that didn’t detour me at all from seeing it and truthfully, you have to be looking to see the scenes they were referring to as gay… whatever.

I would like to say the movie is friggin awesome. We saw it in 3D and I may not do that again. I will be owning this movie when it comes out on Blu-ray/DVD. Loved it! I wanted to be Belle. I kind of like her! She’s my favorite Disney Princess! Very Educated. Very worldly. Doesn’t want to settle. Yet finds her prince… who wouldn’t want to be her?

Rainbow Cupcakes

It’s time for the next installment of this cupcake thing I’ve been up to. Remember, these come out of the January/February 2017 Food Network Magazine.

When I woke up the morning I made these, I was worried about having 2 ingredients. Lemons, which I was fairly certain I had and Cake Flour, which I was pretty sure I didn’t have. I did go to the pantry to see if I had cake flour and surprisingly I did. WHAT?!?! I guess I bought it for something else one day and had some leftover. So… if you don’t have cake flour, not to fear! Make your own! Wait, what? Make your own cake flour. Yup! You read that right!

Cake flour:
1 cup all-purpose flour minus 2 tbsp (that is subtract 2tbsp of the ap flour). Then add in 2 tbsp corn starch. Use your handy dandy sifter and sift 5-6 times to incorporate the corn starch. Bam, your own homemade cake flour.

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Tale of the New Dishwasher

Every so often life doesn’t go as planned. It happens. Last week I went to start the dishwasher and about 3 minutes in it started beeping at me. I opened the door and it was throwing an error code and it stunk. Like water was standing in it and it was stinky. Yuck! Couldn’t help but wonder how long the water stood in there really.

I finally got the code to clear, tried to start it again, and no go. <sigh> So I wound up doing all the dishes by hand and then right after that was when I took Abug to bed and she threw up and it started a downhill spiral, real quick. Anyway… we won’t focus on that!

So When hubby got home from his work trip he took the dishwasher out and tried to figure out what was wrong. We got one code error to clear and a new one fired up. End of the story was, the dishwasher was toast. Luckily it isn’t ours… lol. It’s mom and dad’s dishwasher so we told them what was going on. We went on the hunt for a new dishwasher for them.

We wound up at Lowe’s. We asked the guy what he recommended and then that’s the one we bought. The next thing was to install it. I think daddy had a pretty cute helper! Just saying 😙😜.

Quilt Block 5

I found my sewing bag and took it down to grandmas. I had a bunch of material in the bag some of which was hubby’s old uniforms that I cut into different squares. My goal is to make his uniforms into a quilt, I even blogged about it once upon a time. That’s as far as I got… cutting up his old uniforms. I asked grandma if she had any idea on how we could incorporate that into Abug’s quilt top. The color I wanted to pull from Quilt block 4 was blue so we decided to do stars and stripes and incorporate hubby’s old uniform.

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Banana Pudding Poke Cake

Yesterday was the 1st Thursday of March. That means that it was Dive Club meeting. It was also National Banana Cream Pie Day. Here recently I was reading through the March 2017 Southern Living Magazine and ran across this Banana Pudding Poke Cake recipe. It looked phenomenal. I decided that Banana Pudding and Banana Cream Pie are similar enough, it counts so I decided to make the cake for Dive Club. Can I just say, I’m glad I did…. WOW!

They also had a little information about Poke Cakes which I found really interesting and want to condense down and share with you. I loved the opening 2 sentences: “Most cake names don’t include the punch line. But yes, true to its name, a poke cake is a cake that is punctured with holes–on purpose.” Hey that’s pretty cool right?

Usually once the cake is punctured, then the baker adds something sweet over the top that will seep into those holes and add to the richness of the cake. The intent is to infuse a lot of flavor into the cake to add that extra punch of flavor.

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Totally Spent

This has been quite the last couple weeks of emotional roller coasters. It started 2 weeks ago this Sunday. Hubby, Abug, and I were at breakfast with my parents when hubby’s sister called. She called him first and then me, that’s an obvious sign something is wrong. So I immediately called her back. We found out that his grandma was headed to the hospital.

Grandma woke up that morning not feeling well but insisted on going to Church. When they got her to church hubby’s cousin is an EMT so she grabbed her stethoscope and listened to grandma’s heart/breathing. Decided she needed to go to the hospital so hubby’s Aunt Robyn loaded grandma up in her car and took off for the hospital.

The hospital is maybe 10 miles from the church if that. They went out the main drag to the highway and from the highway entrance it’s like 5 miles. The hospital is out on the highway. I guess when Aunt Robyn turned on to the highway Grandma had been saying that she was having trouble breathing. AR told her to breathe from her nose (she’s on an oxygen tank) and that’s when her eyes rolled to the back of her head and she quit breathing. AR found out her car will run 110 mph on the highway. She turned on her 4-way flashers and put the pedal to the metal.

By the time we got to the hospital a lot of the family was there in the waiting room, but no one knew anything. They were still trying to get Grandma stable. We sat in the waiting room until about 3pm that day. They finally got her stable, but had her sedated so she didn’t try to pull the trach tube out. We were then able to go back and visit with her.

Now our small town hospital is very lightly staffed so they usually use it as a transfer hospital these days. That being said, they couldn’t get an ICU room over at the bigger hospital for grandma so they kept her there until around 7pm or so that day when finally an ICU room opened and they transferred her.

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Frozen Peanut Butter Pie {National Peanut Butter Lovers Day – March 1}

Today is National Peanut Butter Lover’s Day. I have a bunch of peanut butter lovers in my life… me… well I like it on toast and I like it in a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich (I prefer grape jelly), but otherwise, it’s just kind of a hit or miss thing with me…. Of course truth be told, I’m a savory over sweet kind of person anyway….

But this recipe… this was my grandpa’s favorite recipe and it’s so simple. 4 ingredients plus a pie crust and something for a topping if you want… That’s it….

Make the filling, pour into a pie shell, stick it in the freezer for like 4 hours (if you can wait that long), and bam, you have a frozen peanut butter pie.

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