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Y’all overwhelmed me with you kindness and support!  Thank you.  You also surprised me by your favorite category.  “Faith and My Mom” was the category you mentioned most.  Thank you for validating all those heart-spilling sessions.  Glad to know they don’t leave you wishing I’d stop all the blubbering 🙂

After entering numbers 1 through 88, random.org chose number….13!!!  That would be Jennifer Holderby!  I’m sorry that I don’t know how to take pictures of computer pages–so you’ll just have to trust me with the number.  Jennifer, I’ll be emailing you in just a minute to get your address so that romantic evening can start making it’s way to you.  Thanks to everyone for playing along!

And now a recipe.  It’s been way too long.  It’s hard though, to me, to make a meal AND photograph it while trying to keep the hungry hoards at arm’s length.  I also don’t usually know beforehand if a recipe is “blog-worthy.”  Then, once it’s cooked, it’s too late to take pictures of the process.  Well, this one has proven itself time and again…so I finally took some pictures.  Here’s what you need:

We are making pureed cauliflower, or as I like to call them around here “Gluten-Free Mashed Potatoes.”  Some of you may be asking (as our friend Tommy did to our entire Community Group when he came to visit before Christmas). “What is a gluten?”  I have Wikipediaed it if anybody wants to get technical: gluten definition.  But for all practical purposes, this is what gluten means to me: NONE OF MY NEW FRIENDS HERE CAN EAT ANYTHING THAT I COOK!!!

Stop with me for a second, catalog through your “company” recipes for some that don’t involve flour, potatoes, sugars, preservatives…   It was jarring at first.  I found that I sprinkled at least a teeny bit of sugar (be it white or brown) in almost everything–including vegetables, marinades, and salad dressings.  However, after getting my mind around it, and sampling some of my friend’s fair, I must say that I have discovered the deliciousness of whole new foods that I never touched before (cauliflower, brussell sprouts, raw foods…) and this little recipe was the by-product of not being able to bring myself to serve a meal without some kind of starch on the plate.  Now, every time I make a “gluten-free” meal, Jeremiah claims that HE wants to go gluten-free.  Gluten-free has come to equal good in our house. How about I stop introducing the recipe and just give it to you already?

First, put a large pot of water on the stove to boil and wash your cauliflower.  Yes, we are going to eat this junk, and we are going to like it.

Cut off the florets of cauliflower and discard the hard center and leaves.  The cauliflower looks sort of intimidating and solid when you hover over it to make the first cut, but just dive on in with your knife and you’ll find it looks a lot like broccolli on the inside.  I bet y’all are laughing.  Has everybody been eating cauliflower without telling me?  You let me come out here all alone to face food sensitivities and cauliflower!

Roast 3 or 4 cloves of garlic:  Preheat oven to 400 degrees, place cloves on a baking sheet and let them cook for about 5 minutes.  (Watch them because they will burn to a crisp–trust me. But you want to cook them long enough that they are tender on the inside. Just give ’em a little squeeze.)

Your water should be boiling about now, so toss in the florets and cook them until they are tender (about 15 minutes).  You want to be able to easily spear them with a fork, but don’t let them go to total mush.

While they’re cooking, unwrap the delicious goodness.

And cut off the nasty rind that makes it smell like an old folks home.  Then cube the yummy inside.

Drain the cauliflower, chop up your garlic (unless you took the 30 minute route–you perfectionist, then you can squeeze in the garlic instead of chopping it), and stir in the Brie.  Add salt and pepper to taste. Please don’t forget that.

Finally, spoon it into a food processor (in batches, unless you have a ginormous one) and puree until smooth.

A Kitchenaid mixer will not give you the consistency of mashed potatoes.  You will be eating lumpy taters in a watery suspension and your guests, even if they are gluten-free and desperate for a plate of mashed potatoes, will not be excited about it.

I served my potatoes with Martha’s chili rubbed skirt steak and green salsa.  The green salsa is Martha’s as well, but I couldn’t find the recipe anywhere on her website.  The ingredients are listed above, in the caption.

Jeremiah said it was one of his favorite meals ever…And I’ve decided I like Gluten-Free Mashed Potatoes better than the regular ones.  They just have more flavor, and I feel like I’m doing something good for us.  Now that’s saying something for a vegetable I wanted nothing to do with a few months ago!

 

We are all different.  Different strengths, weaknesses, loves, and hardships.

As a parent, I want to be watching as those strengths and loves emerge–to help them grow.  I also want to be watching for the weaknesses and hardships–to help them grow stronger.

Pace loves language; she has from an early age.  And recently we did the most awesome project together that we’ve ever done.  She came to me in the kitchen and asked me to help she and Mary Aplin put on a play.  I told her I thought it was a great idea and started rattling off well-known fairy-tales that I thought the three of us could adapt pretty easily.  None seemed to fit her liking.  Just as I was getting frustrated (and about to tell her to go do her own play if none of my ideas were good enough :)), she said, “Momma, will you help me write my own play?”  I wanted to turn a cartwheel right there in the kitchen.

We sat down at the table, and I put on a kettle of tea.  I took pen and paper in hand, and as we both sipped, I dove into her imagination.  It went a little like this:

Me: Ok, Pace, what do you want to write a story about?

Pace: A Prince and a Princess, but I want to tell about the Prince first.  He’s hunting.

Me: What is he hunting?

Pace: A wild boar.

Me: Is he in the woods or in a field?  Is he walking?  Is he by himself?

Pace: He’s alone in a forest and he’s riding a unicorn.  But just before he’s about to shoot the boar with his bow and arrow, a dragon swoops in to protect his hoggy friend.

Me: Does the Prince kill the dragon?

Pace: Yeah, he does, because he wants to get the boar.  But the Prince didn’t know that the dragon was the witch’s favorite pet! {She’s really getting fired up now.  Arms are waving, tea is spilling, she’s in a creative frenzy, and I’m so proud I could cry…I think I actually did}

It went on like this for two afternoons.  Making her tell me not just, “the princess had a beautiful gown and she was picking flowers.”  But drawing her out, making her describe the dress, the smell of the flowers…helping her learn what little I’ve gleaned about making a story come to life.

At some point I told her we were writing a book and not a play.  Finally, after three solid pages of handwriting, we’d reached an ending.  I handed her some markers and told her to start illustrating different scenes, while I took our jumble of thoughts and put them in an orderly sequence (and added a few vocabulary words :)).  When we were both done, I let her pick out a fabric and I (crudely) bound it together with a little cardboard.

And when we were all done, it was eleven pages long, and we were as proud as two peacocks to add our very own creation to our little library.

And then, there’s Mary Aplin.  She does not love language like her big sister (at least not right now), but she is the most hilarious joy-filled child I have ever encountered.  She is also extremely flexible:

And spends a surprising amount of life on her tippy toes.

We have different little things we love to do together–a lot of them involve helping her develop her language skills, which give her fits.  But today she went to a birthday party where she got to bounce and spin and turn somersaults, and I got to see her excel at what makes her shine.

Mary Aplin came home from the birthday party with a medal around her neck.  I asked her why she had a medal and she answered in the clear language that we’ve been working so hard to develop, “Cause I’m a winner.”

We haven’t signed the girls up for ballet or gymnastics because it seemed like too much money right now, but after hearing those words out of Dapples mouth it hit me how much she needs to feel like a winner in the areas where her strengths lie.  I’m looking for summer ballet camps for that little chicken wing.

I can’t begin to thank y’all for the amazing, heartfelt comments you left on the last post.  I am so thankful for yall…  I’ll be back on Wednesday morning to announce the winner!

I am so excited to welcome all of you friends to this new space!  I have been dreaming and planning (and categorizing a whole lot of posts :)) for a long time.  First, I want to thank the three people who made it possible:  Mrs. Linda (Jeremiah’s Mom) who gave me the most beautiful pair of boots I’d ever seen for Christmas…that wouldn’t zip over my calves.  One devastating experience (who wants to find that they have fat calves on Christmas morning?) and boot return later, I asked if I could use that money to do this instead.  I simply couldn’t bear to try on any more boots anyway.

Second, my friend Caitlin, who listened to me try to turn my life’s passion into a simple blog header…and she actually produced the impossible!  She is such a creative, talented person, who creates images that make me say, “That is just what was jumbled up as a bunch of feelings in me and you made it real and visible on paper!”  You can find her design business here.

Finally, Chris, the blog butler.  Who did the painstaking grunt work of transferring all the old blog to this new spot.  Who dealt with an incredibly anal person who wanted to tweak one thing after another.  Who was patient and kind throughout the whole process.  Who gave me a custom looking blog for a fraction of the price.  Thank you Chris!

And now, to celebrate the grand opening, I want to do a giveaway!  I want you to poke around the site, browse the category headings and tell me which category you relate to most.  I talk about a lot of different subjects on this blog, and I’m wondering which subject speaks most to where you are.  So, if you’ll leave a comment by midnight on Tuesday March 15th, telling me which category you like to read most (and why you like it would be even more exciting), then I’ll draw a name at random and mail you a package to create a romantic evening in your own Storywood.  To include:

A box of my favorite local chocolates–Frans Gray Salt Caramels.  Don’t get me wrong, Theo is great, but these caramels with a sprinkling of salt make me weak.  I could inhale a box without blinking…probably has something to do with why those boots wouldn’t zip.

A bottle of The Jack, our favorite local wine.  I am the farthest thing from a wine connoisseur, but I do happen to know that this wine tastes delicious with those chocolates.

And finally, what makes for a perfect evening at our house–a good read-aloud book.  I love to read out loud and fortunately Jeremiah loves to listen.  We’ve done a few classics together, but it is really better to do lighter reads out loud (at least for my mind to follow).  This is a good one to do with your husband because it has a combination of manliness (two strangers struggling for survival in the wilderness after a plane crash) and romance (the man is recalling–in dictation form–his love story with his wife).  We are only about halfway through, so I can’t make any promises about the outcome, but I can promise an intriguing, light read.

So, I hope you win!  I hope you get to snuggle up with a box of chocolates, a glass of wine, and a book to share with the man you love…

However, if you are not yet 21 (I can just see me getting arrested for contributing to the delinquency of minors) or if you have not yet found that man worth spending the rest of your life with, then I’ll send one of my new favorite girl movies (that sweet Mrs. Ohs recently sent to me), instead of the wine:

You can snuggle up with your best girl friends and pass around the chocolates while talking about how a man could never appreciate the fine points of humor in this movie.  Breathtakingly beautiful and it’s Austen…so you know it’s wonderful.

Welcome to Storywood!  Browse around and leave a comment so I can send you a box of happies.