Inspired by Soule Mama…

A weekly post capturing a single moment from our wild life, to savor.

Since we purchased our house over a year and a half ago we’ve been wanting to add some timber to it! We’ve been designing and scheming, then milling and cutting, sanding and oiling, and this weekend finally installing and partying!

The picture below shows us raising the two posts!

Here it is installed, in just 3 hours, we went from a stack of wood to a beautiful Pergola! Our living room faces South West and get’s lots of  late afternoon sun with its gigantic window. The idea is that the we can have some shade cloth or a bamboo rolling screen to help shade the late afternoon sun that comes in that window!

This is obviously a very abbreviated version of our installation and work! If your interested in Timber Framing here’s the website http://www.swiftsuretimber.com for our family business! We are insanely blessed to have so many dear friends help us over the past few months, put this all together and then put it up!

Did I forget to mention food? Ah yes! I spent all day Saturday preparing for the party! Chocolate coconut oatmeal cookies, hot artichoke and cheese dip, potato and asparagus salad, garlicky hummus, stuffed eggs, white chocolate chip cookies with dried cherries… the list goes on! I don’t think I’ve spent that much time in my kitchen in a while, I had a blast!

They have become a weekend regular in our house!

Here’s a couple versions we’ve had over the past few months…

Lemon Sticky Buns

If you decide to make these sweet buns of heaven, make sure your cream cheese (for the frosting) is at room temp, or warmer!! Our first batch turned into chunky city, and we were running around the neighborhood begging more powdered sugar from the neighbors!

Walnut Sticky Buns

This is actually a wacky recipe mix of The Joy of Cooking’s Sticky rolls and Martha Stewart’s Monkey Bread Recipe.  I use the sticky part of the sticky rolls, and the bread part of the monkey bread recipe, a wicked collaboration. If your curious about the monkey bread I blogged about it here.

Cheese is good.

I’ve been meaning to make cheese for a while! I was even gifted with some cheese making supplies & a cookbook this past holiday season. Even though I read the book cover to cover, I never got around to making any cheese. It sounded scary. Boil a pot of milk, and magically you have cheese (oversimplification, yes)?

So, I signed up for a cheese cooking class at our local Co-Op! I feel much more comfortable learning it in a class, before experimenting at home!  It was on Saturday and on Sunday morning I purchased a new Stainless Steel pot, a slotted spoon and we were making cheese!

First the Mozzarella

Then the ricotta.

YUM YUM YUM!

The mozzarella & ricotta have been used in pizza, risotto and eaten fresh! They turned out FABULOUS… to our surprise!

I had a little tamale fever the other night! So we whipped these up! On a weeknight even!

Zucchini and Cilantro Tamale’s from The New Vegetarian Epicure! I just LOVE this cookbook! Now if I could just get my hands on the original edition The Vegetarian Epicure!

The tamale’s turned out great… Etta even had her own baby cheese tamales! She gobbled them up quick!

Inspired by Soule Mama…

A weekly post capturing a single moment from our wild life, to savor.

The sun is shining so we are back in the garden…  After some boring projects like turning compost… and cleaning beds…. we planted some wee little starts and lots of seeds.

Here’s one of our little starts! Swiss Chard! YUM

Inspired by Soule Mama…

A weekly post capturing a single moment from our wild life, to savor. Etta’s first Photo!

We’ve been spending our weekends on the hunt for morels!

Our dear friends have a nice big piece of property, that is abundant in morels! So we’ve been journeying out to the Applegate Valley and hiking all around on the search…

Here’s a couple we found last weekend!

This guy above is actually the size of my HAND! It’s a giant, the biggest one found all season! Colton spotted it with his magical Morel vision!

As you can imagine, we’ve been eating lots of morels too!

So… We decided to celebrate Easter this year…. Well the bunny and chocolate and eggs part of Easter.

Auntie Rene & I decorated the eggs and then the munchkin tried to find them on Easter morning. She’s not much of an egg hunter… It took all of us adults pointing and guiding to get her to find them. But in the end she did! She even manged to keep most of them in her basket!

All in all, it was quite hilarious! As you can probably guess, her new favorite word is Egg!