Spring: Fertile and Promising

They say “change is the only constant”; that has proven true for the past year or so of my life. I have missed my little corner of the internet, this blog, but it’s been hard to keep up. Aside from the “normal” hectic schedule of student life and mama-hood, we have had some real sadness and grief to work through. A few days after my birthday my wonderful mother-in-law Cindy lost her battle to lung cancer, which certainly shook our family to the core. Over the past four months there has been a lot of upheaval on my side of the family, and now my grandmother is terminally ill. I’m not ready to write about it yet, but I feel that this blog has served as a good outlet for my thoughts in the past.

Sam, O, and I have had some very positive changes in our lives as well; the biggest and best change was our recent move from apartment (on a very busy and polluted street) to a house (complete with yard, grass, and ample room for a garden)!! I hope as we enter Spring that our lives will continue to grow in a positive way. Spring does bring forth all that lovely, energizing, forward pressing WOOD energy!

Interesting fact about our new home: The original owner of the house was Sam’s great-grandmother Dorsey! My wedding ring is actually a ring that belonged to Dorsey, and in the backyard are some very beautiful camellias that Dorsey herself planted! I found that all very coincidental …

Fancy Flower Cupcakes

In the past weeks, O and I have started attending a really fun Early Childhood Education class. Today our class had our Spring Party, to celebrate Spring of course! I signed up for dessert and what could be more spring-y than cupcakes made with flowers??

This was also a special occasion for me as it marked the first time I got to bake something fun (as in Not Dinner) in our new retro kitchen! AND I got to use my Kitchenaide for the first time!! Yay!

Awesomely Retro Double Oven …

… which is SO retro the temp setting is off and we have to confirm with this thermometer.

I call her Buttercup. Love.

One of my favoritest cake recipes is for Raspberry Rose cake. I will admit, it’s not really a recipe so much as a baking hack. My secret ingredient: Rose water. I got the idea after eating some Turkish Delight and wanted to find other ways to bring rose flavor into my life.

I just get a regular box o’white cake and make it with rose water in lieu of regular water. It’s that easy! I then add about 1 – 2 tsp of raspberry extract, but feel free to skip if if you want just that rosy flavor. I usually use a chocolate buttercream frosting when I’m making this in big cake form, but it tastes really good plain too! (There is a part of me that wants to fancify this recipe and make it from scratch … )

I decided to make the rose cake in mini-cupcake form, but I also wanted to try something new and a little different, so I found a very simple recipe for Lemon-Lavender cupcakes. I’ve always wanted to bake with lavender! It’s one of my favorite flowers and I use lavender essential oil for EVERYTHING! It really is a miraculous healing plant!

Ingredients:

• 1 C white whole-wheat or all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 tsp dried lavender buds, roughly chopped
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 3 Tbsp unsalted butter, cubed and brought to room temperature
• 3/4 C granulated sugar
• 1 large egg, lightly beaten
• 2 Tbsp lemon juice
• 1 Tbsp lemon zest
• 1/2 C buttermilk
• Confectioners sugar (for icing)
• Fresh lavender buds (for garnish)

My Lemons and Lavender – (I found dried lavender in bulk at a local health store, but if you’d prefer to order online I love Mountain Rose Herbs, great quality!)

Cubed Butter – So beautiful, so delicious.

Preheat oven to 350*F, and prep cupcake pan with paper liners. Mix flour, baking powder, salt and lavender flowers.

In a separate bowl, cream your butter and sugar – beat for about 3 min. It is supposed to look “light and fluffy”, but mine looked like this:

Beat in egg, lemon juice, and lemon zest. Add some of the flour mix, then about half of the buttermilk, then some more flour, then the rest of the buttermilk, and then the last of the flour. It should resemble this:

Your batter is done! Fill those bad boys up and get ready to bake!

IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT BAKING TIME: If you are using STANDARD cupcake size, bake for about 20-25 minutes. If you are using MINI cupcake size, bake for only 10 min, then check. Use the toothpick test for both sizes. After baking let them cool in pan for about 10 minutes then remove to cool on a rack.

Mmm … aren’t they pretty?

I used a simple powdered sugar glaze that I drizzled on top of both cupcakes, but using the rosewater trick again you could do a rose sugar glaze, or a lemon sugar glaze, or chocolate, or … well, be creative!

I’m happy to say that I thought they were delicious and so did the other parents at class today.

I think the only thing I would change about the Lemon-Lavender cupcakes is that I might add another 1/4 C of buttermilk. They were very good, but had more of a muffin consistency than the light fluffiness of a cupcake. I did enjoy the lavender/lemon flavor combo! I think I have Lavender Lemonade in my future!

On this day in 1981 … I was born!

Today I entered a new decade of life. Thirty. The big 3-0. Over the proverbial hill – though more hills await in ten, twenty, thirty more years – and am I any older or wiser? I never thought I would have a problem with aging, at least not this early in the game. Well, I can’t really say that I do have a problem. I feel like my life is pretty much what I had hoped it would be by this age: marriage, motherhood, and the end of my graduate studies in sight. That said, I would like to think that I could manage to live to the age of 90, in which case I’d have to live my entire life over – twice! - before I die. So … that’s a comfort.

30 things I’ve learned by the age of 30-

1. Books make great companions.
2. We all love at least one asshole. Try not to love two (or more) assholes.
3. Don’t let above-mentioned asshole define you. In fact, don’t let anyone else define you.
4. If you must make mistakes (and you will) LEARN FROM THEM!
5. Spend time alone and get to know yourself.
6. Going to Disneyland alone is amazing!
7. Positive thinking manifests positive energy which manifests positive results. The same applies to negative thinking – so don’t go there!
8. Treat others the way you want to be treated. Seriously.
9. Don’t lend friends money. It just ends badly, even if you happen to get the money back (and sometimes you don’t). No friendship needs that kind of strain.
10. Get EVERYTHING in writing. Before it happens. (see #9)
11. It’s OK to dump toxic people. (see #7)
12. Other people will have opinions of you, much like you have opinions of them. Guess what? It’s none of your business what they think of you.
13. Massage is a great gift … receive it often.
14. Spend time to experience a bit of life before you decide what you want to do with the rest of it.
15. Life is long enough that you can be more than one thing, but short enough that you need to get to it already.
16. Hugging trees is fun!
17. Bodies are amazing, versatile, and can endure a hell of a lot.
18. Travel.
19. Keep learning. Teach yourself to do things.
20. Go outside your comfort zone.
21. Breath deeply.
22. Eat a lot of greasy carbs before a night of heavy drinking.
23. Sunscreen works!
24. Love is going to hurt some of the time, so find someone who is worth hurting for.
25. Food is medicine.
26. If you ever think to yourself “Oh, so-and-so seems like a great person, but I’d hate to be on his/her bad side!” you should get away from that person AS FAST AS YOU CAN! Avoid those relationships.
27. Nature can and will heal you, if you let it.
28. It’s okay to say “I don’t know”.
29. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Be gentle with yourself.
30. I know what I know. I know that there are things I don’t know … but I have yet to comprehend all the things I don’t know I don’t know.

Misty May Moon

Taking the Real Food Challenge

Our family has been participating in a local CSA program since August 2010 – not very long, but long enough to know we love doing it! We do get a lot of food, and there are weeks when I feel pressured to use it all (I mean, how many butternut squash is too many? I’d say seven- that’s how many we got this winter. SEVEN!), but now that little O is starting to eat solids it is even more important for us to be eating real food at every meal. I will admit that I don’t eat real food all the time. Some weeks are better than others, and a lot of it depends on my mood and energy level and motivation. And then there is the addiction factor- I know a lot of people have been throwing around the word “addiction” lately (“I’m totally addicted to Facebook!”, or “He’s addicted to music”, etc), but I think addiction can be recognized as something that creates an adverse physiological response when you don’t have it any more. I’m not talking about something you need, like water, (because yes, you will absolutely have an adverse physical reaction if you don’t consume water), but things we don’t need: sugar, fat, salt, caffeine, etc. I LOVE sugar … and fat … and salt … and caffeine. In fact, on my best (worst) day, I can have a soy caramel frappaccino and french fries and I feel that all is good with the world. Until about an hour later when my stomach starts to turn and I feel pretty shitty, and I get grouchy. On the days I don’t have these things I get a headache, and I’m grouchy. It sucks to be grouchy.

I think one of the coolest things about my husband is that he is a little bit competitive. Not in a douchey way, but in a fun way- this is a guy who will challenge me to rock-paper-scissors to do even the most mundane of tasks. We have found that the best way to motivate each other is to make is a challenge, put a little wager on it, and publicly shame each other when we slip up! That is why I’m writing this actually- we decided that we are going to take on a Real Food Challenge.

There is an awesome blog, 100 Days of Real Food, all about a family who – you guessed it – took a pledge to eat only real, minimally processed foods for 100 days. These are my kind of people! Part of their mission is to inspire people to take a 10 day pledge to do the same- eating real food. Sam and I are signing up! Starting May 1, we are eating real food. I hope to continue past 10 days; actually, it would be great to do 100 days, or even a year, but we’ll start small.

O is now eating almost everything we give him and trying to grab food off of our plates; I don’t want him to be a chicken nugget baby, I want him to have real food. We are really doing this for him.

New Blog Home

It has been a quarter of a year since I last wrote. I’m afraid I have writer’s block, but I know that to write again I must simply sit down and get to it.

I have much to write about, but all in good time. I do not want to write about how I am too busy to write [sad but true], or how hard school is [I'm surprised I passed my classes!], or how little spare time I have with a little munchkin [babies are hard work!] so I’m getting it all out now. Just know that this is my reality. I will try not to be too whiney!

As my long time reader(s) may notice, I have moved the blog to it’s current location- everything is here, but the old posts have some strange formatting. I am hoping to write more, expand my writing, and maybe get it out there into the world a bit more than just my close friends and family … it’s a bit of an experiment for me.

Peace!

>Wordless Wednesday

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“One for each night, they each shed a sweet light

to remind us of days long ago …”