Blooms and Bites

BLOOM AND GROW: Last week, we got to do a little crafting for a back-to-school gathering for teachers and staff at the kids' former school. 

It was a garden party, and the theme was 'bloom and grow.'

Annabelle used her Cricut to cut out letters, which we mounted on a mesh background. 

She also made some tags for the teachers' grab bags. 

They were fun projects. We miss doing stuff like this. It used to be a near daily occurrence, it seems like. 

FAIR FOOD: The fourth Saturday in August was our most recent Teen Feed date. Since it was just a few days before the Washington State Fair opens, we went with a fair food theme for some fun. 

The Italian sodas looked tasty!

We had big, beautiful ears of locally-grown corn, bathed in butter and salted just so.

We had caramel apples - not the big, whole kind. Instead of whole apples, we sliced them up and drizzled them in caramel sauce.

Scones are a staple of the Washington State Fair. Fisher scones have been sold there for over 100 years. I contacted the Fisher scone people and they sold us a commercial sized box of scone mix at a greatly discounted price. It let us cook up about 8 dozen scones.

The main entree was corn dogs. Not the most high falutin' food, but the Teen Feed crowd liked them.

One thing I didn't like was the oven on site and how it cooked the corn dogs. It's a big commercial convection oven, and for whatever reason, it was turning the corn dogs too brown and crispy on the outside but still frozen like a Popsicle on the inside. Not good. 

So, Annabelle put some in the microwave. And then forgot about them. This is what that looks like.  

In the end, everything went mostly OK and we made over 80 meals.

SALSA: Our garden is on its last legs, pumping out the last bits of produce. 

Our pretty little dark purple peppers joined pounds of tomatillos in some salsa I canned on Sunday.

VISITOR: The kids and I came home from an errand a couple of days ago. Imagine our surprise to find this slinking around our floor in the kitchen. 

                                                   

CJ managed to corral it using a cake lifter and a colander and released it back to the 'wild' (our backyard).

CREEPY: Speaking of creepy crawly critter, my latest woe-is-me chapter involves a sneaky spider. On Saturday, I felt an itch on up upper right arm and felt a little spot. I figured it was a mosquito bite. Turns out I figured wrong. I felt sick all day long and didn't know why. 

Later that day, the bite site swelled up to the size of a hard boiled egg and turned black and blue, which was when I realized it was more likely a spider bite. This is what it looked like six days in. Pretty, no?