Delicious Pizza

Tonight for dinner, I tried out a new homemade pizza recipe.

It was deep dish.

And it was DELICIOUS!

Absolutely, positively, best homemade pizza crust I have ever tasted. No exaggeration.

I was going to take pictures with which to liven up this post. But....we ate it too fast...and I forgot.

But it's ok, just go here for both the recipe, and some pictures - remarkably mine looked a lot like her pictures....I guess that means I made it correctly :-)

Shopping Success - Take 2

Perhaps one of these days I will tire of grocery shopping, and it will become a mundane task that must be done. I am told that many household maintenance things become mundane after a while (laundry has, that is for sure!)

But for now, grocery shopping is still a very exciting adventure that is both challenging (especially end-of-the-month-on-a-budget-shopping) and rewarding!

My last grocery store run for this month happened earlier this week. I had exactly $26.28 left to spend at the grocery store. I was a little sad that there was not more left, because Acme had some lovely sales this weekend. But oh well, we shall not starve; and there will always be more sales.

Armed with my $26.28, my circular, my list and my heap o' coupons, I headed to the store.

I got all this:
(plus (3) 8 oz packages of Ham Slices that didn't make it into the picture))


Retail Value: $62.12


Amount that I saved: $37.12
Amount that I paid: $25.00

Oh so satisfying.

Some highlights of the trip:

Mon Amour's Favorite: Buy one get TWO free scrapple. He loves scrapple; I never buy it cause its gross; but I can't resist a buy one get two free sale...and Mon Amour was excited. (the ham was also buy one get two free)

My Favorite: Free Gallon of milk with the purchase of 4 bags of cereal - that were more than half off, a great deal even before the free milk. Better yet, the milk should have cost me $3.60 - meaning I should have gotten $3.60 off....but the coupon said "max value $4"....so the cashier just took off $4. A bonus 40 cent savings! My milk was more than free. yay!

Amount left in grocery budget: $1.28. Success.

Color Accent Photos

Just some random color-accent photos for your enjoyment.

A friend made this mask while at my house the other day. It was for a masquerade ball.
Pretty fancy for a 75 cent craft mask, some glitter paint and some colored feathers.

And some Valentine's flowers.

With a bottle of Valentine's dinner wine in the background :-)

Thanksgiving in February

It's officially a tradition. Last week, Mon Amour and I held our 2nd annual Thanksgiving in February feast. Last year we had some friends from church down for this celebration (I think there were about 12 people + kids at that one) and this year we had my family over (total 10 adults).

Everyone but Mon Amour is in the picture. Someone had to actually take the picture...

There are many reasons why we enjoy this tradition:

1. It's an excuse to have a yummy meal
2. What else are you going to do with that really cheap turkey you got in November that is just taking up space in your freezer?

3. February is in general a rather boring month. It is still winter...but folks are looking forward to spring, and there are no significant celebrations. So we added one.

This year there were a few extra reasons we enjoyed the celebration

4. Mon Amour and I spent Thanksgiving at his parents house - and Thanksgiving is my mom and grandmother's favorite holiday. So we needed to recreate it.

5. And, it was my grandmother's birthday the day we celebrated, and my Aunt's birthday the day before that. So we made some birthday pie (i.e. we stuck candles in it and sang the song)

It was a very lovely time. I can't wait to see what next year's Thanksgiving in February will look like.

Weather.com

Weather forecasts these days are getting frighteningly accurate...or rather they THINK they are getting frighteningly accurate - really the more details they guess about, the more chance there is to be wrong.

That said, I still check weather.com for the forecast pretty much daily.

Usually it says something like "sunny" or "partly cloud" or something simple like that.

Recently though - it had a rather out of the ordinary forecast:





I may be the only one who finds this interesting. But I truly find this forecast amusing.
I guess it was accurate - it was not raining where we were though the radar showed rain all over the area where we live. So perhaps there were some "Showers in the vicinity". Who knows.

The best part about this forecast is that I really have no way of telling if they are right or wrong. If it was raining where I was, I would be like "how nice, they are right about the showers", if it wasn't raining where I was, I would think "Hmm....it must be showering somewhere in this 'vicinity'".

Congratulations weatherman - an excellent fall back forecast for those days when you don't know what will actually happen.

Fire Protection

The very first thing that my mother did after Mon Amour and I moved into our small farm house was buy us a few essentials - like a set of flashlights to ward of the darkness, a fly swatter to take care of the swarms, two lawn chairs to sit in on a romantic evening watching the sunset, and a pair of smoke detectors because our house had none.

We were slackers and it probably took us a good 6+ months to actually put them up. I kept telling my mom, though, that they did have batteries in them and they were sitting on top of the mantel, so if there had been smoke it would have detected it eventually.

We did recently manage to get the smoke detectors on the wall. There is one in the bedroom, and one in the kitchen. We are now very safe.

Very very very safe!
Our fire detectors (mainly the one in the kitchen) are overly zealous about their fire detecting duties.

The first time it went off was when I was cooking bacon. Okay, I thought to myself, I probably had the heat on the skillet turned too high (I am an impatient cook)...and there was probably some smoke. I wafted some fresh air towards the smoke detector and it stopped. Crisis averted.

But, no, it goes off every single time I make bacon, or brown hamburger, or cook tortillas; and no, I don't constantly cook things on too high a temperature such as to cause them to smoke unnecessarily. We simply have zealous smoke detectors. Why am I so sure?

Our smoke detector went off the other day when I ..... burnt toast!

Yes, I burnt a piece of toast. It wasn't even black. It was just really dark brown.
And the smoke detector went off. The smoke detector is on the other side of the kitchen....a good 9 feet away.


So, in summary, we are very very very safe when it comes to house fires. Not only can you see the entirety of our house from any give point in the house, but we also have smoke detectors that will let us know if our toast is becoming overly brown.

Poor Farmer

The other day as I was taking Marge out for her first thing in the morning trot around the yard, I looked out in the field and saw this:

I don't know what you think this looks like....but to me, it looked like the cows had turned carnivorous and had gotten hold of a poor farmer and eaten everything but his denim over-alls.

I honestly couldn't come up with a better explanation than that for what I saw, and I was thoroughly amused (it was funny because even though I couldn't come up with any other explanation, I knew my explanation to be false)

All day long the cows kind of stood around the lifeless blue heap and every time I saw it, I thought the same thing.
"Poor Farmer"

Turns out it was just a tarp. It blew out of one of the barns or something. Now it is waaaaay out in one of the empty corn fields. I guess no one wants it, cause every day it blows a little bit further away.