Choice Morsels

Welcome back! It's almost August! Time does fly! It's stormy again today and was thundering. It's a local coastal storm. The cat doesn't like the sound of rain and thunder. She used to crouch under a stool, butt, in more recent years, tends to ask me to follow her to the back bedroom and have me lay down with her to stroke and comfort her. It gave me a chance to close my eyes and rest for 20 minutes. I'm a little tired today because we got to bed late. After last night's Bible study here at the house, one of the young men wanted to stay and talk about some stuff going on in his life.  We talked from 9 to midnight. Anyway, today's healthy eating topic is coconut!   Generally coconut is either a "love it" or "hate it" affair. I can't say I've ever met anyone who was neutral about liking coconut. But I happen to be one of those happy people who love it. I wasn't the only coconut lover in the family. Whenever we had a box

Mama Kat's Prompt today is: "When was the last time you made something with your hands and what was it?" Yay, "show and tell" craft day! Conveniently, I took a beading class yesterday and made this bracelet! The 3 larger turquoise beads in the middle are my own, taken from an old costume jewelry necklace I took apart. It's funny how contact with skin and alcohol from perfumes and so on can cause gold-coated plastic beads to peel over time. That's what happened to this necklace. Though, the turquoise beads were fine and couldn't bear to just throw it away. I have several necklace's with good parts just like that I'm holding onto to do a re-build on, which is the reason I took the beading class. (Waste not, want not I say.) Everything other then those 3 beads was purchased at the store. Luckily, I found companionable turquoise beads to go with it there, considering it is a very small entrepreneurial craft shop with a limited s

The Mama Kat Prompt this week is was to "dig up a blog post from last July to share."  This one comes from my old Bravenet blog, since Choice Morsels isn't that old. So here it is. One of July 2011's Posts, featuring a mini opinion quiz: A few trivia fun triva questions for you to answer: 1) Do you wear nailpolish on your toes? If so, what's your favorite toe polish color? 2) What's the most boring stuff in the news coverage you wish they'd just quit talking about all the time? 3) What's your favorite color to wear? 4) If money were no object and you could go anywhere for a get-away, where would you like to go? My answers :  *I have this lime green polish I just LOVE on my toes. *I wish to stop hearing about the British royals because I simply don't care. *My favorite color to wear is a purple/lime outfit. *I'd love to go back to the Shades of Green in Orlando and just spend a 5 days there, relaxing. On Other Fronts: *

Today's topic is another common cabinet spice: Cinnamon! The number one benefit of Cinnamon is it can lower your blood sugar levels. A mere 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon a day, daily is enough to do the job with regular use. *It is noteably helpful for Type 2 Disbetes and in testing Type 2 subjects daily cinnamon intake of the above amount in 6 weeks resulted in a 27%  decrease in fasting blood sugar. A reduced level in bad and total choresterol and triglcyerides was also shown. So getting more cinnamon in your diet is a win-win for everyone!  [*cited from Healing Spices by Dr.Bharat B. Aggarwal] Ground Cinnamon One thing we do, is when we're making coffee, we shake cinnamon onto the grounds before turning on the coffee maker! This can be done with either plain or even flavored coffees---the cinnamon really enriches the taste! Basically it's the cheap-mans way of having flavored coffee! And it's a quick way to add cinnamon to your life! We  know a couple whe

I'm only posting 1 garden pic today, but after it I have a funny little story to share. Pic of the Day is my waterfall of orange Million Bells spilling from my large front pot garden! So pretty!  The red-tail grass in the back has put up it's first head. I hope get a nice pic, when it's put up a few more and is more developed. This pot is themed on oranges and red tones. The orange day lily in it is a re-bloomer, so I expect a repeat bloom from it in the near future and, of course, the purple and red petunias are thriving. Okay, now let me re-tell this amusing conversation I had. This was last Saturday and one of the guys in our ministry had invited everyone to his house to watch him set off some fireworks he's purchased. So, my husband and I are sitting in the living room, waiting for others to arrive. Taylor Kitsch We have 2 Randy's in the group and this conversation involves us and the 2 Randy's. For identification sake I'll call the fir

Today's prompt is "Share how your family celebrates July 4th." Back in Indiana, growing up way out in the country, 4th of July was a reasonably big event. It involved a wieners cooked over a wood fire, s'mores, watermelon and sometimes homemade ice cream. Gun-powder based fireworks are illegal in Indiana, so we always had packs of the safe, legal kind full of sparklers. One year our Dad gave us cap guns, that looked like cowboy guns and rolls of caps to go with them, so we could run around snapping those off. They made a delightful popping sound, but the cap smell gave me headache.  Sparklers were our favorites, though, and we'd run about in the growing dusk, writing our names in the air and weaving glittering swirls in the air. I remember several years when we'd drive to Martinsville, which was about 30 minutes away, to attend the public fireworks at the city park. We'd load up the lawn-chairs, the kool-aide and the brownies, then find ourselves

Since for July 4th, 2012, I thought this pic of my red and white petunia's would be appropriate! You can also see my pretty miniature roses below it. (The petunia's are in a pot; the rose is in the ground next to it.) Petunias need frequent dead-heading and tend to get long and leggy as they bloom out.  I snip those legs and "train" them to be bushy with a limited drape. This forces them to sprout new growth. The next photo, below, is a shot of one of my Hardy Hibiscus I have in the front yard next to the parking spot. Notice one bloom is red and the other, pink. Yet this is one plant from a single root. It's uniquely bi-color. The pink portion of the plant didn't bloom last year, so I didn't know. I plan on trying to save seed from this Hibiscus to see if I can luck into more.