Anniversaries

Yesterday Bug and I celebrated our third wedding anniversary. He sent the most beautiful flowers to me at work, and I made some of this favorite cookies, the lemon cooler kind you can't seem to find in the store anymore.   Thanks to Reggie's Flowers!

See below for a great recipe a fellow Blogger at allthatsplatters:
Lemon Coolers
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1/3 cup sugar (I used brown sugar, was out of white)
1/3 cup shortening (I used butter)
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups cake flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon of lemon zest

Lemon Powdered Sugar
1 cup powdered sugar
rounded 1/2 teaspoon unsweetened Kool-Aid lemonade drink mix
1 teaspoon grated lemon zest

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.Cream together sugars, butter, egg, vanilla, and salt in a large bowl. Add the flour, baking powder and 1 teaspoon of lemon zest. Add 1 tablespoon of  lemon juice and continue mixing until dough forms a ball. Roll dough into 3/4-inch balls and flatten slightly onto a lightly greased cookie sheet (I used parchment-lined baking sheets). Bake for 15 to 18 minutes or until cookies are light brown.
As cookies bake, combine 1 cup powdered sugar with the lemonade drink mix and lemon zest in a large plastic bag and shake thoroughly to mix. When the cookies are removed from the oven and while they are hot, add 4 or 5 at a time to the bag and shake it until the cookies are well coated. Repeat with the remaining cookies.  I got about 30 cookies out of this recipe.  I'm really digging her recipes...

It's amazing what we have done in our gardens around the house in the time we've been together, and it makes me happy to see how we've grown together as a result of all that digging, planting, replanting, sweating,freezing. It's so rewarding to see things grow and be able to say, remember when we planted this or that....

Frost! ...& of course....Pyrex!

We had some light frost in our area this week which has had me running around the yard like one of the 10 million squirrels in our yard. Thankfully we've got a lot of hay so I got creative with it for protection. I think it worked good.
Hubs found a cool chicken dish at the GWill & we found some Pyrex in Butterfly Gold at a flea market.
eBay is rolling along with no real excitement-knock on wood!
I have to post this pic of my friend's little girl-she's already mopping!

Primary Colors set & Fiestaware!

I finally finished the Pyrex Primary Colors set. Some of it I had, but I cheated with eBay a little to get. I'm OK with that!
My Bug made an excellent GWill find! Fiestaware! He's so awesome he's making deals in the GWill parking lot! He's got a lunchtime GWill addiction & he's made some great finds! I'm so jealous. The GWill is 5 minutes from his work.
Thanks to the nice lady who saw him at the GWill and gave him the lid to the Fiestaware sugar bowl he bought from her a while back in the parking lot!

I've found some Pyrex in the wild, A Homestead casserole and mixing bowl. They may not be the most popular, but I like it!

Springtime Crazies

Well, it's that time of year again. Time for the yard to be mown, time to plant a garden, time to find time to do all of it. Time for a prescription for nerve pills. I still haven't figured out how we get it all done.
The mini-greenhouses all have different types of basil, cress, dill, sage, and some bright purple zinnias(super excited about these). They work great, but I have renters. The frogs have arrived for the year, and have decided that these little trays of dirt make great hiding places. They wait on me to come out and take the lids off the trays. It's cute and all, but they're taking over my baby plants! Guess I've got to move them.
We have started to move dirt down to our main garden and planting corn, cabbage, broccoli, kale, beets, flowers, strawberries, my fingers hurt! This is an intensive process, and my Hubs has his doctorate in various types of excrement.
We raise worms for their poop, we have horse poop, chicken poop, and compost, or veggie poop. All of this poop makes for great dirt, as the dirt in the middle of NC is all red.clay.mud.
We get our exercise!
We also plant in the Native American tradition of the three sisters, planting in mounds. This didn't work so great last year, but we've made our dirt piles bigger, and didn't use fresh horse poop. My Dad said it was too "hot" (hot: redneck term for the poop is too fresh and will kill your plants because literally gets the ground hot where it's decomposing), and we didn't listen, so we had small jalepeno plants last year trying to make halepenos as big as the plant. But I did learn that gourds we grew last year seem to keep away garden pest animals, because the vines smell horrible! I'm the queen of the run-on sentence.
Our asparagus is in it's second year, and we finally got to cut some to eat. It was delicious, and I can't wait for next year when I can cut lots!
The next endeavour on our list of projects is to learn the canning process. Hopefully I won't blow up the house or singe anyone's eyebrows. It can't be that hard, can it?
As for the Pyrex collection, I'm running out of room in the Grandma Rizzo cabinet. I arrange this stuff. I must be weird.