Spiced Bread in Reverse

The finished product. Olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and bread.


Pre-cooked bread. Pizza style dough with cilantro, jalapeno, and sundried tomato add in's!

Cilantro and jalapeno on the cutting block.

One of six or seven jalapeno plants. Next time bread will be a bit more spicy!

Apricot Jam

Colorado is having a bumper crop of tree fruit this year.

Mom and Dad have a tempermental apricot tree.

It has decided to produce hundreds of apricots this year.

Steralizing the jars and boiling the jam.

Filling 20 jars with homemade, homegrown apricot jam.

Yum! Now to make crafty cute labels.

Refrigerator Teacher's Note

I have a hard time passing up the free photo deals that are all over the web every few months. So last time I decided to make some refrigerator/business cards to send home with students that would have easy access to the information needed to contact me.

I first did this when the school picture company gave teachers 30 postcards with their teacher 'portrait' on it. I thought, what on earth am I going to do with this? So I sent it home with the school phone number and email address printed on it and promptly forgot about it.

Fast forward to the next major sugar-infested holiday party (my soapbox is at school and it's summer so I'm ignoring that one) when parent's were in my classroom. Several thanked me for the picture/postcard and said that I was on their refrigerator. (What??!?!)
One apparently (though I didn't really believe them) had to explain that I was the teacher, not her daughter's friend to a visiting house guest. Thus the end of the teacher-portrait-postcard tradition.

Enter the nice picture for refrigerator tradition. Free, fifty, and simple. It's a good thing!

Yo Comments Are Wack!

Here is some more from YouTube's SisterSalad channel. I've watched them for a while. Surprised I haven't blogged about them before.

Sometimes your is possessive, but other times it means you are, put
aprostrophies when you need 'em, and otherwise just delete 'em!

Hope you have been refreshed on your comment grammar. Leave a comment to prove you comments aren't wack.

Saving Garden Seeds: Put it in the Google Box

Another hobby gardener being born:

Until the end of World War II most gardeners saved their own seeds in an effort
to cut costs and/or because high quality seeds were not always readily available
at a reasonable price. That’s all changed. Now inexpensive, high quality seed is
available and we generally recommend that you purchase fresh seed from a
reliable, preferably local, company rather than attempt to save your own seeds
from year to year. "Harvesting and Saving Garden Seeds"

I spent about 20 dollars on seeds + seedlings this year and would love to say that next year I can cultivate some of my own seeds. I know this will work with some but am not sure exactly how and when to harvest all the different seeds.

Hence, I put it in my Google box. Warning: This video has nothing to do with gardening but is very G rated.



(click the link, the video is quite witty!)

So what did I find when I put "testing your saved garden seeds" in my Google box? More greatness in the same article.

"Test germination in February by the traditional "rag-doll" test. Count out 100
small seeds or 25 large seeds and wrap them in moistened paper toweling. Squeeze
out the extra water and place the "rag-doll" in a glass jar with the cover
loosely fastened. Place the jar on a sunny window sill. Unroll the paper after a
week and figure the germination; if germination is below 50 percent, either
discard the seed or double the planting concentration to give the desired number
of plants.""Harvesting and Saving Garden Seeds"

So I've got dill seeds already dried and getting ready to store them. The cilantro/coriander seeds are a bit underdeveloped but if I get the next batch in a week or so I should be ready to go.

So...if your still reading...sorry about the unorganization on this post. It's raining, I'm hungry, and those aren't valid excuses.

Easter Lillies

eeeEEEEeeee! I forgot to take a picture / am waiting for more to open but my Easter Lilly plant finally bloomed. 1.5 years later I guess it was worth that clearance price. Patience...

Book: The Help

Recommended by Coworkers & family friend
Read last night and today
Loved it!!

This is another piece of evidence that well written material with amazing endings are my favorite kind of book!

Skeeter, a young white college-educated girl comes home to Mississippi not sure what to do with her life. Her family still has a large plantation, and her mama wants her to get married. She is part of all the right social circles and has polite little parties with her friends.
Those nice friends, fun bridge clubs, and her parent's plantation all have 'the help' doing most of their work. Maids in the house cooking, cleaning, and raising children while the men pick the cotton, beat their wives, or get hurt in the south's version of 'civil rights'.

Somehow this one white women and several black maids begin to open up to each other and Skeeter is in the process of write a tell all with the help of the maids about each and every one of their white 'families'. Some of the stories are amazing, disgusting, depressing, and just plain curious.

Everything works so well in spite of itself, it's like watching a perfectly choreographed ballet. Everything doesn't always turn out well, but it sure can get interesting!