Choice Morsels

This clump of Spring Snowflakes in my back garden bed are always a delightful sight in early spring! It's Snowdrops Southern cousin. There are both Spring & Summer Snowflakes and both have identical white flowers with the green dots, like little fancy skirts. The difference is height. Spring Snowflakes make a clump of greenery about 10 inches in height, while Summer Snowflakes have giant-size greenery, ranging 18 inches to 3 feet in height.  So, definitely mine are Spring Snowflakes. 

Today's Good Eating recipe, Easy Slow Cooker Beef Stew , is one I found on Pinterest that I've made several times with great success! Choosing Your Beef: I generally use Chuck Roast, though you can use any beef roast style or beef ribs or chuck style you prefer. Something laced with fat works better in slow-cooking and will be more tender. You don't need a huge quantity of meat---I usually choose the smallest, least expensive Chuck Roast. Searing: Any time you put meat in a slow-cooker or, I daresay, even an Instant Pot, which is a pressure cooker, you should always sear or brown it on all sides in a very hot skillet with a bit of olive oil. This seals in the juices and makes for a more favorful meat. Also gives it some color, if you're pressure cooking. So cut up your beef into stew chunks, salt, then sear in a hot skillet. I usually sear my meat with salt & pepper without flour, but you may dredge in flour, if you like. (For that use 1/4 cup flour w...

The title is the Mama Kat topic I chose today, "Share something you don't realize you're wasting time on until you've spent an hour doing it." The last time I spent a lot of time trying to accomplishing something that proved a waste of time was a crochet project. I was trying a new pattern.  I have a simple afghan booklet with 3  afghan patterns. I've only made one of the three and I know the pattern works well, but I had some yarn I'd just bought on sale and wanted to try one of the others. I decided on the "Ripple Afghan," pattern which has a up-down zig-zag design involving just two alternating rows of crochet stitch. The first row was a straight row of tripe-crochet stitches. The second row of triple crochet with a decrease stitch worked into that would from the hump of every zig-zag. The two rows were to be repeated over and over until the proper size was reached. i I'd done 8 rows when I realized my ripple afghan was gettin...

Today's Garden Pic is a lovely shot of one of my Cheers Daffodils! They've been fruitful and multiplied, so I have a bunches of them blooming along the back of the house and in containers up front. A snipped several stems and brought them in to put in a vase. They have such a delightful, light powdery fragrance! Other garden projects I did today, despite it being cloudy, was laying in some of the Castle wall blocks that used to line the edges of the veggie bed in short rows of 3-blocks wide to form a walk-way between the new raised garden beds. Then I planted seeds in my in-ground clay pots: more red sorrell, spinach and container peas and radish seeds in front of each clay pot. Radishes are easy and fun to grow. They're delicious roasted or baked. Not just for salads.

Back in December we pretty stopped eating bread--like sandwiches, grocery store bread, etc---mostly. Sometimes, I'll have a half-sandwich at Panera on whole grain bread or I'll eat bread if I've made it myself, usually to go with spaghetti or something. I've only made bread 3 times since December and today's Pinterest recipe I tried for Garlic Rosemary Foccaccia Bread is the 3rd. It was the best bread I've ever made! It was fantastic. Flavorful. Easy. It's kind of a flatish bread baked in a 10 x 13 pan. I stirred it up by hand, though an electric mixer with a bread hook can be used if you have one. (It's not a bread machine recipe) The recipe source recommended a mix of 1 1/4 cups bread flour and 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour.  Mine was a mix of wheat bread flour and unbleached all purpose flour, but she was right--- mixing them does make a good good bread! Also she had a cool technique for proofing (rising) the bread in a dryer---first y...

The Mama Kat prompt I'm doing today is a post on, "Something I Was Thinking About." Actually I was thinking about canning---the preservation of food in glass jars. In our local paper, a particular chiropractor includes a fly-sheet ad for his business and, the funny thing is, back in the mid-90's I did a little work cleaning houses and I used to clean that chiropractor's house every other week. They had a vacuum in the closet I'd use and I remember the upper shelf was loaded with quart jars of canned tomato chunks---but I observed they weren't very well done. The tomatoes were floating high in the jar with 2 inches of liquid beneath. I remember thinking, "Those are tomatoes are really badly canned."  I could think that because I know what a well-done canned anything ought to look like---growing up in Indiana, we had a huge garden and Mother canned tomatoes, beans, beets, jams, jellies, peaches, tomato sauces, homemade chili sauce, pum...

I picked up a cold last week. Over it now. Dave may have it---though, with him it's hard to separate cold symptoms from allergy.  This cold virus seems a combo chest/head cold thing.  I saw a flock of Robins land in my back yard yesterday and spend some time picking the ground for insects. They pass through here migrating North again for spring---that means it's Spring is on it's way! Today's Garden Pic is this Pink Coneflower just outside my front door. I took this picture last week, around 4 pm when the last rays of sun were hitting it.  It actually started putting up this bloom head back in December and opened early in January, bringing cheer to the winter drab. More blooms have since popped up. This location is particularly warm, since it gets Southern sun all day. Plus, here in North  Florida, Coneflowers, don't actually die back; their greenery persists thru winter ignoring even the few freezes we've had. 

Something we had for lunch this week:  Egg combined with turkey spam, spinach, mushrooms. red onion & cheese plus Italian seasoning. Kind of a sloppy Turkey Spam Omelet It was yum.

It started out sunny this morning, but my 9 am was starting to get cloudy, but still pleasant enough to work outside for a couple hours. I've been saving cardboard specifically to put down in the back woodsy bed for weed control and worked on that today. The area is thick with leaf debris, so I raked it out, lay down the card board, then mulched the rakings with the mower and dumped it back over the cardboard. Only got half the area done. Will work on the rest another day. My presence disturbs my the birdies that want to visit the feeder. They sit in nearby trees just waiting for me to walk away so they can get at it! I'd pick up a couple rakes and walk to the garage and when I came back for the mower, several birdie guests were on the feeder and were so determined to eat they didn't rush off. So I paused about a dozen feet away to watch them,  since it was a rare moment to see them close enough to identify who's who.  I've had a  pair of very yellow birds ...

I'm actually baking less sweet dessert items nowadays. I just don't have an audience to eat enough of it anymore, but I did have a cake mix sitting in my pantry that I'd purchased to make something for a Christmas party, which I never did.  So, when I found this recipe on Pinterest for a cake-mix based Pumpkin Bread, I decided that would be a great way to use up that cake-mix. (Photo is from the original Pin and it's pretty accurate looking as to what the loaves look like when made with a yellow cake mix.) It makes two loaves, each about 2 inches high in 5 x 9 bread pans, but very moist and tasty with a cake-like softness. Very nice and super easy. (Use 4 x 6 bread pans if you want taller loaves) Easy Pumpkin Bread with Cake Mix Ingredients 1 box either yellow or white cake mix 1 (15oz) can packed pumpkin 1 teaspoon Cinnamon or 1 1/2 teaspoons Pumpkin Spice 1 to 3 eggs, as directed on cake mix Oil & Water, as directed on cake mix Opt...