Week at a Glance

I have been up to a few bouts of creativity this week.  Tuesday brought a fabulous mission of making a cape for a sisterwife who had been tasked with bringing it to a bachelor party.  Not only was it an awesome cape of goodness and fun but it was also supposed to be as embarrassing as possible. This was achieved with pink satin, purple disco sparkles, lots of gems and one iron-on patch of a unicorn.  It took us two nights to muscle through all that fabulousness and in the end I am left with wanting to make a cape of my own.  I even asked if it was possible that the cape would not be left in NC but brought back for future use by us...verdict is still out on that one.  However, I am willing to bet that it will immediately be adored by the intended recipient and will not grace OH with it's presence again.  Have I kept you in suspense for a picture long enough??  Here it is:

 Unmatched creativity my friends.  That is all I have to say.



Wednesday brought me a lot of sunshine so that I kept being drawn to the backyard for small tasks like weeding and prepping our beds for planting the second round of garden goodness.  However, I am an avid recycler (which is part of what makes me a minihoarder) and have a hard time throwing away anything that might have another use/second life.  This week I decided it was time to make use of all that mail that Max was ignoring and I have been diligently shredding.  I could have taken it to the curb and sent it on it's merry way with the other recyclables and I could have used it to start a fire in the backyard pit.  These uses are far too ordinary and mundane for my tastes this week.  I decided to go the path less traveled and use my large collection of paper shreds as mulch for my perma garden bed.  Out of the 13 there is one bed that is home to my  3 year old oregano and thyme plants so it never gets tilled or mulched like the others.  It is now the proud bearer of my mulch experiment:

I think it looks pretty neat.  It had to be watered down to keep it from flying all over the yard but once it was soggy it stuck perfectly well and reflected lots of rays to help the plants along.  Also, it is currently doing it's mulchy duty of smothering out the weeds that had started to form in the bed.  I should have taken a before picture but I didn't think of that until now.  So there you have it.  We'll see how it progresses through the summer and if it really is worth all the trouble. 

Pretty Things

Just wanted to share a couple of the pretty things that were making me smile today:

Pea shoots stretching for the sun!!

 An amazing purple azalea that I picked up at my local nursery.

I'm an addict!

I have become completely obsessed with making my own pizza dough!  I am a very impatient cook which is why I don't do much from scratch that can be found in a box or bag.  Of course we all know that that isn't the healthiest option around.  However, that all changed when I discovered how I didn't need to spend hours letting it rise, didn't need a kitchen-aid mixer and don't even need fresh yeast.  I like to add fresh herbs and a cup of whole wheat flour into the mix then place it in a an oven that has been set to 200 degrees and then turned off.  In 20 minutes your dough has doubled in size and away we go!  Here are the calzones that I made for dinner last night.

They were dreamy! Of course I forgot to put my freshly grown mushrooms in them so they could have been a little better.  Yup, that's right.  I said freshly grown!!  I decided a couple of months ago that I was going to go ahead and buy the mushroom growing kit that I have been eying for the last two years.  It looked something like this:

I was pretty skeptical at first since it was a box of rotting trees and mess with another bag of smaller also bad smelling dirt.  You take the smaller bag and add water then spread it over the box of rot and leave it in a corner in a cool room which was our basement.  Two weeks go by and I forgot to even make sure they were still moist and okay until last night.  I tipped the edge of the box down expecting to find nothing but dry wasted money when to my delight I found this instead:

Aren't they beautiful?  Finally, something that I can't mess up even if I forget they exist!!  I can't wait to taste them so we are making stroganoff for dinner tonight.  Yum!