Abducted by Aliens Part Deux

The insanity continues as does my apparent alien abduction. This time it's related to yard work instead of baking bread. As a permanent disclaimer, almost all gardening / landscaping / planting activity has been inspired by by my Dad. He has been a great teacher along the way, and I hope one day to put to use the master skills he's passing on to me.

There are 2 main projects we've undertaken at the moment: 1) the garden and 2) the front yard. This time, I'll focus on the garden. The front yard, 116 plants and all, is another post.

As you might recall, last year I had a tomato plant in a pot. It yielded a pleasant harvest, and I decided to be adventurous this year and go for a small garden. To start with, we planted onions.


Not too long after that I planted a couple green bell pepper plants.


A couple weeks ago it was time for the tomato plants, one of which we lost to a tomato cut worm. What is that, you might ask? I have no idea. I just know that when I went out to check on my plants the morning after planting them the evening before, one of the tomato transplants was completely chopped off at the base near the soil. My Dad tells me that this worm wraps himself around the stem and chews it off. BAD worm, bad!!!

Back to the nursery to get another plant. This time, we cut up a straw and wrapped it around the stem of both the new plant and the existing plant to prevent the worm from eating any more tomato seedlings. I am learning so much!!!


K and I decided to take advantage of the amazing weather this weekend and extend our garden even further. So much for "small." We (mostly he) worked up the soil, we made a run to Home Depot for some soil conditioner, fertilized, then planted both green beans and squash - from seed, as you can obviously tell by the pictures.



And now all we do is wait. And water twice a week. And fertilize once a month. And wait. But mmmmmm I want some fresh veggies now!! Must be patient...

Ten Months Old

Abducted by Aliens

So I haven't talked to my dear friend Susan in a while. She happened to call this past week and we caught up on life in general. Oh how I miss her and wish we lived in the same town! Throughout our conversation, I heard myself saying things like:

--"I get kind of excited about cooking these days and the other day I made homemade pimento cheese. I can also make steak now - both broiled and chicken fried."
--"I have a garden that has onions planted so far, and this weekend I'm going to plant bell peppers and cilantro. I also got this coupon from Groupon for a nearby nursery, but I have to wait till the last freeze passes before shopping for tomatoes, etc."
--I started laughing out loud as I said this one. After replaying everything I'd just divulged to her, I found myself thinking - who AM I?? Here it is: "I have dough in the refrigerator that I made from scratch earlier this week and I'm going to bake some homemade bread."

After a long, quiet pause, she said to me, "I feel like my friend Stacy has been abducted by aliens and I have no idea who I'm talking to now." Ha.

Abducted by aliens or not, I did indeed bake some bread this week. Like homemade, as in I bought yeast packets from the store, put it into my Kitchenaid mixer with flour, water and salt, used what I thought was the dough hook (only it was the wrong tool - but it still worked), and let the finished product rise in a corningware dish for 2 hours. I even brought the dough back to the bathroom counter to remind me to put it in the fridge after I brushed my teeth so it wouldn't sit out all night and go bad.

Once baking time rolled around, I was completely unsure how the bread was going to turn out and had NO idea what I was doing. In fact, I was kind of dreading making it for fear of how disastrous it could potentially end up. I mixed the dough up on Tuesday, and it sat in the fridge until Sunday when I finally overcame my procrastination.

This is the book that I got the recipe from:


Lauren - you should get it!! It really does give such easy instructions and talks about the effect on the dough if you use too much water, more flour, etc. There is NO KNEADING involved, and once you let it sit out for a while before baking then it only takes 25 min to cook. The rest you can keep in the fridge for up to 14 days and supposedly the longer it sits in there the better the flavors get. I don't have a baking stone, so just used a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper and it worked just as well. This is what my bread turned out looking like:


After my first bite, my response was, "it tastes like bread." Let me just tell you that after that statement sunk in, my apathy turned to pure excitement as I realized the magnitude of this baking victory!! Coming from a girl who knew how to make ONE dish coming out of college and was happy eating Lean Cuisines and Spaghettios every night for dinner, I'd consider this a delightful accomplishment. I'd also like to give thanks to The Pioneer Woman as she has greatly inspired me. While others have known about her for quite some time, her blog and recipes are still new to me and have taught me many great things about being creative in the kitchen. :-) But seriously y'all - if you like bread, go get this book and make you some, because if a cooking impaired mama like me can do it then ANYONE can do it!! Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!