Tastes of Spring: Rhubarb

Wow! It has been a while since I've written a new post. It is definitely spring here in the Pacific Northwest, and I love it! Besides the fact that the weather can't make up it's mind and can (and usually does) go from rainy to sunny several times during the day. It makes getting out into the garden or going for a run a little tricky.

On Easter I went up to Mt. Vernon to visit my grandparents and see some tulips. They're so gorgeous!

While I was up there I stopped by my dad's cousin's house to pick some rhubarb. She has a HUGE plant (wish I took a picture of it); so big that you could not even tell I picked about ten stalks! So now I have lots of rhubarb, and need to figure out what I am going to make with it. Such a hard thing to do since my family and I LOVE rhubarb! I cut up 4 cups for a pie for my dad's birthday and stuck that in the freezer. Of course we had warm rhubarb sauce over vanilla ice cream for dessert that night. Now I still have plenty of rhubarb to try out some new recipes. My aunt gave me the Taste of Home Farm Fresh Favorites cookbook for my birthday a few years ago so I decided to look in there. Low and behold they have a whole section with rhubarb recipes; muffins, pie, jam, ice cream, etc. Which one to try first?! This morning I made the Rhubarb Lemon Muffins (recipe in the link), and the turned out great. They are especially delicious with a little butter and homemade strawberry jam!

I think I may try this recipe again, and use grated fresh ginger to replace the lemon peel. They would become rhubarb ginger muffins.

Next recipe to try is the Rhubarb Popover Pie (again recipe is in the link) for breakfast tomorrow! And of course I'll be making a batch of rhubarb jam! What are your favorite things to eat in spring? Do you have a favorite recipe with rhubarb?

This is How My Garden Grows (May 2013 Update)

I have been so busy lately that I have been horrible at weeding my garden, and planting seeds this spring. Thankfully rhubarb doesn't take much care so I already made a rhubarb pie!

The raspberries are trying to take over the whole garden area. I've been pulling shoots out of every section lately. The bees are busy pollinating, which is what I like to see! There are already too many berries starting to grow that I can't count them all. :) In the picture, don't mind the patch of dandilions that currently occupy the raised bed.

This year I'm trying out those Topsy Turvy tomato growers. I hope that having them in a sunnier spot will produce more red tomatoes instead of being left with a bunch of green tomatoes in the fall. A bonus is that while out for a walk around the neighborhood a couple weeks ago, I found a table with FREE tomato starts! I'm Dutch, so anything free is awesome!

Another new addition to my garden this year is the strawberry tower. I got the idea when I was on a field trip to Seattle Tilth with my pre-k class. I figured it would be easy enough to DIY so I drew a mock up on Google SketchUp first, and then handed the plans over to my Dad. Thanks to Stacy for the strawberry starts to put in it! I'll transplant the rest of my strawberry plants after they finish producing fruit this summer.

Last but certainly not least, is my flower bed. Which has actually been getting more attention lately than the garden. I noticed dahlia shoots coming up so I weeded around them. I had to cut/pull out some of the vinca ground cover to give the dahlias and iris more space to grow! I aslo took out the sticks that were supposedly supporting them as they grew, and replaced them with tomato cages since I won't be needing those this summer. A nice addition of rabbit poop fertilizer, and they're growing wonderfully. Now if only the slugs would stay away from them. :(

I'm hoping that blogging about my garden gives me more motivation to finish weeding so I can plant more. What have you planted in your garden this spring? What would you like to grow in your garden?

Dad's Birthday Choices

My Dad's birthday is tomorrow so I've been scouring my cupcake book, and Pinterest for ideas of what cake/cupcakes I should make for him. His favorites are raspberry, coconut, and coffee.

So far I'm either making cinnamon rolls or scones for breakfast. The cupcake choices are as follows: coconut with raspberry butter cream, mocha with raspberry butter cream, or mocha with espresso butter cream. Such a tough choice!

It helps that he has a sweet tooth, hmm probably where I get it from, so he'll enjoy whatever I end up choosing. I'll post pictures of what I chose tomorrow.

Winter Crafts & Activities

Now that winter is almost over, here are a few of the crafts and activities we did in the Frog class.

Lick and stick snowman pictures. Sorry, it's sideways.

Doily snowman picture. We hung these on their lockers. Again, sorry it's sideways.

We also made borax crystal snowflakes which I posted about a few weeks ago. The kids also had fun playing with the shaving cream snowman in a bag activity.

The beginning of February was literacy week at our school. We had fun reading The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse by Eric Carle and we painted funny colored animals, too! We also read The Mitten by Jan Brett, and decorated a mitten and made animal puppets to tell the story. Finally, for our assembly we retold the story of Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, and the kids loved making wild things masks. I wish I could post a picture of all of them because they were SO CUTE! Although, I'm slightly biased since they're my class. :)

These are just the few crafts and activities we had time for. I found tons more on Pinterest that I wanted to use, but there isn't enough winter! Maybe I'll use those next year.

What are some of your favorite winter crafts and activities with kids? I love to hear feedback!

Learning How to Knook

No, it's not the e-reader from Barnes & Noble. It's a special crochet hook with a knitting needle on the other end. For me it's the combination of two of my favorite hobbies, knitting & crocheting, into one awesome craft! With a little help from a kit I got at JoAnn's and watching a few YouTube videos I have gotten the hang of how to knook.

Pictures are always helpful so here are a few of my new adventure:

This is the Instagram picture before I even opened the kit

Figuring out the knit stitch

Figuring out the purl stitch and making stockinette

Starting my first project: spa cloth from the booklet that comes with the kit

Super excited to be using scented cotton yarn! (Sorry it's sideways)

Finished spa cloth!! (Again, sorry it's sideways) Working on more to add to my Etsy shop. :)

So far I'm enjoying this combination of knitting and crochet. It's also a great conversation starter since hardly anyone knows what it is! My next knook project is a toddler hat for a friend's 12 month old. What knitting or crochet projects are you working on?

Other Wedding Projects (the last post)

I'm horribly late on posting these pictures of other projects for Diana's wedding! But better late than never, right?

After Diana and I finished the wedding invitations we still had some work to do. There were still table names and place cards to make along with programs to put together. That was all part of my wedding gift to them. I also helped her make cute tumblers for the bridesmaid gift baskets.

 

One of my favorite things that Diana and Aaron did was collect rocks from different beaches in the area, and used those in the bottom of the bowls for the center pieces. Where they got the rocks coordinated with the table names. The bride & groom table had rocks from all of them. Isn't that a cool way to add in a piece of the Pacific Northwest?

Fun Fact: Mukilteo Ferry Park is the beach where they got engaged!

This is my place card. We printed names on one side with table name on the other, and the little "C" in the corner indicated that I chose the chicken option for food. Then we simply stamped on the side with Baroque Motifs to match the table names.

Diana typed up everything for the programs (with a little help from Google!), and we went to Kinko's to print them. Pretty basic: cover, order of ceremony, listing of the wedding party and parents and grandparents, timeline for the reception, a short thank you note, and their new address is on the back (due to privacy I'm not posting that). Can you tell she's very detail oriented with the specific timeline for the reception? Good thing it all went according to plan. :)

I found these tumblers at Dollar Tree after looking everywhere else for them. I got the glitter glue from the dollar section at Target. Diana wrote our names on the side and bride, maid of honor, and bridesmaid on the lids. One thing we didn't realize until putting water in them is that the glitter glue comes off then it gets wet. Looking back we should've spent a little more for the puffy paints instead. Oh well, they were still cute while they lasted. :)

That wraps up my wedding projects posts (finally!). Since the wedding in September I've had a lot more time to work on other projects. I'll post more about those later...