Saturday Snapshot

 My Saturday Snapshot!

Why are the Handyman and friends making faces? 

Because they thought they were getting some really good champagne.

Some Dom Perignon.

And.... um, you can tell by their faces.... it wasn't very good.

In fact, we didn't finish it.

But it was fun giving it a try!

It was given to  my friend Robbie by a good friend of hers for their anniversary ---or birthday or something--whatever it was, it was a celebration!

This great vintage of 1995.....or is it 1985?

The bottle didn't match the box.

Maybe it was re-gifted?

Every Friday night we have dinner with our friends, The Miltons.  Unless one of us is busy of course.

We've been getting together on Friday nights for the last 17 years.

Sometimes our kids join us, this night at their house, their son and his girl friend were there to help us taste the spoils.  (that's almost not a joke!)

We always have a great time.

All we do is have dinner---sometimes we/they have even gone home before 9pm.

We just eat and have great discussions around a beautiful table.

I am linking to Saturday Snapshot.

Be sure and stop by to check out other Saturday Snapshots at West Metro Mommy Reads.

Friday Friend Recipe #19 Layered "Taco" Dip

I feel as if I always need to explain myself  (the 3 people who read this blog might get tired of this explanation, BUT, I live in fear that a new person might happen along and say  WTH is she talking about!  so.... )

I know that my blog has an interesting name.  A name/title that no one gets, because there are no 'friends' writing posts every week. There is only me. 

Long before I knew what a blog was, I had a group e-mail forum that included my friends from near and far...and originally I would ask them a question on Fridays, cut and paste their answers and  share with all.
We made a cook book---yada yada yada.....

and I am making all the recipes from it!

Now, to get on with my post for the day....

Friday Friend Recipe number nineteen!! 

from Barbara Brown---who happens to be the editor and publisher of the cookbook  (I compiled and begged for people to send me recipes.  Some sent many, some sent one.  She typed them all up!  Man, what a job!)

Where was I?  Oh yes, Barbara Brown  (see ALL Barb's FF recipes, so far,  here) called this Layered Dip, but I added the Taco to it, because it is a taco dip.

Some have called it  7-layer dip, some call it  walk-away-taco dip, but whatever you choose to call it, this is a good one!

Layered 'Taco' Dip

FF Barbara Brown, Buckeye, AZ

1 pkg taco seasoning

1 can refried beans

1 tub guacamole (homemade is best)

4 oz can chopped olives

4 oz can diced green chilies

1 small bottle of taco sauce

1 cup grated cheddar cheese

3 chopped green onions

1 cup shredded jack cheese

3 med tomatoes, diced

sour cream

Mix taco seasoning with beans and spread on platter or in baking dish.  Next spread guacamole over beans. Sprinkle with olives and chilies.  Layer on remaining ingredients, dividing taco sauce in half or thirds.

End with sour cream on top.

Refrigerate 2 hours or overnight. 

Serve with taco chips.

**I got a bit out of order with the layering AND I dotted the sour cream.

As well as used olive wedges instead of chopped.

Forgive me Barb. 

It's soooo good!

My good friend Barb!

Game player, quilter, beach lover, book reader.

Good cook too!

Fun fact?   She has two kids, but they are 18 years apart in age.

Here she is 2nd from the left.

With other Friday Friends at Wallowa Lake, OR.  Summer 2011

Susie, Barb, Mitzi, Sally

(this is the first time, and only, they have met---It was my 'near and far' Friday Friend forum, get together)

They live in: Washington, Arizona, Minnesota, Pennsylvania.

(just for the record)

I am also linking this to Weekend Cooking.  

At Beth Fish Reads.

Outdoor Wednesday and llamas

Every spring for the past 5 years, I've gone on a 'birding weekend' with some of my  best friends.  Um yeah, the weird bird lover ones.  
Weird yes, but serious?  Not so much. Don't get me wrong:  birds... we love to see them, hear them, watch them, learn about them,  but we mostly go for the girls weekend.  (the perfect bloody mary this year!!)

This past spring we went a a new place-- to Burns, Oregon.  They have a great bird festival and we really enjoyed ourselves. We went on some great birding outings/tours, listened to a good keynote speaker (yes, they have these even at birding events), enjoyed seeing some new migratory birds (to us anyway) but on the last day,  we signed up for a llama session.  None of us were sure what this was all about, and I was kind of thinking BORING inside my  head, but guess what?  I LOVED THE LLAMAS!  We all did.   We learned the difference between alpacas and llamas (don't ask me to tell you right now) and how to care for them and how to handle them.  We made friends with them.
It was a fun little session, so I thought I'd share...
 (and then share it with Outdoor Wednesday) 

....My Bird Nerd friends and me, with our llamas. We're the ones with cameras and binoculars around our necks, the llamas are the furry ones. 

Friday Friend Recipe #18--Saturday Night Salad

Another Recipe down in the Friday Friend Cookbook countdown.

Whew.

These are all coming from a homemade blue notebook folder which contains recipes from all my friends--my Friday Friends!

I am so lucky to count these people as my closest friends.

Check out ALL the Friday Friend Recipes (so far) right here.

I've come to the conclusion that salads are the hardest things to take photos of EVER!

But they are so good.

What can beat a good, cool salad on a hot summer evening?

Not much.

I am lucky that the Handyman loves them too.  He is good with a big salad and some bread and if he isn't,  he'll throw something on the grill to go beside it.  

Everyone has a version of an Oriental Salad, some are easy to throw together, some a bit involved. I like to make the one FF Shelly Noble makes.  It's pretty simple and even tho I love to cook, I do like simple most of the time.

My family always got together and had this version of an Oriental Salad.  It seemed as if they had it every Saturday night for one whole summer, so I dubbed it their Saturday Night Salad and the name has stuck.

I made this the other night and it brought back such good memories!

It was soooo good.

I think I had 4 helpings---but that's all I had for dinner.  

I didn't want anything else.

This salad is perfect.

Perfectly great.

Saturday Night Salad

FF Slyvia Delgado Hambelton

Napa Cabbage

Sliced water chestnuts

Green onions--sliced

celery--sliced

Egg strips:  cook 4 eggs (mix all the eggs together and then cook until set like an omelet)

cut into strips

Crunchies:  

2+ T. butter

1 cup sliced almonds

4 T Sesame seeds

2 pkg Top Ramen noodles, crushed

fry until golden--adding more butter if needed

Dressing:

1 cup oil

5 T sugar

accent

seasoned pepper

2 pkts seasoning from Top Ramen

1/2 cup vinegar (apple cider)

1 T soy sauce

Mix well

Tear cabbage, chop chestnuts, slice celery and onion for as big as you want your salad.

Add egg strips and crunchies

mix dressing well and add as much as you like to the salad.

Eat and enjoy!

(my egg strips became egg strip chunks, but still---very good)

This recipe comes from FF Sylvia Hambelton. 

She is my sister-in-law,  my brother's wife.

She has been a part of our family for  just about

25 YEARS!!

woo hoo!

It'll be 25 in October.

She has actually stuck with us that long! 

AMAZING!

STUNNING!

UNBELIEVABLE! 

AWESOME!

WE ARE SO LUCKY!

AND THANKFUL!

AND HAPPY!

You think I'm jesting, but I'm not---she is truly an important and much loved part of our family.

She says she doesn't like to cook and that's fair enough, but what I have discovered is that when people don't like to cook, they have a few signature dishes that people crave!  

(I have nothin, because I keep trying new things and don't remake the old favs)

Seriously, this is one of those signature dishes for her....

it's great and it's always something people oooh and ahhhh over when they eat it.

She has a few more like that, which I will share over the course of the cookbook countdown.

Here is a photo of Sylvia and my brother, standing at the foot of  Wallowa Lake in Oregon state.

One of the happiest places on earth.

Spaghetti #1 -- Friday Friend Cookbook recipe #17

I made my favorite mother-in-law's spaghetti sauce and it was great!

The Handyman said-- "I forgot how good my mom's spaghetti sauce was"

What a nice compliment from a son--who has had plenty of spaghetti sauces in his lifetime.  Most of those would have been mine, as I am constantly trying to perfect a signature sauce.  

In my quest, I asked the Friday Friends to send me their signature sauce recipes and twenty-four of them did.  

24!!  

That means I will be making 24 spaghetti sauces during my FF Cookbook Countdown.

(sigh)

Good thing the Handyman loves spaghetti.

This is a really good sauce.  Not overly tomato-y or bogged down with tons of Italian seasonings (like I tend to do.  I figure if a little is good, a lot is better), just a real full bodied meat sauce.

Her family loves it.  LOVES IT.

All 6 kids and 3 stepkids.

Her is my mother-in-law, Teresa Belcher.

Here is her sauce

Oh... she is a mixer. She mixes the sauce into the noodles before serving it.

My mother was a spooner over the top kinda spaghetti server.

How do you do it?

In the  Friday Friend Cookbook

in which our editor and publisher, Barbara Brown typed up,  she titled this sauce

"My Step Mom's Sauce"

Because one time at a family wedding or gathering, my in-laws 'fake' adopted Barb, so Barb has always had a special place in her heart for my husband's mother and visa-versa.

My Step Mom's Sauce

or

My Favorite Mother-in-law's Sauce

from the spaghetti sauce section of the Friday Friend Cookbook

1 medium onion chopped

2 T. Olive Oil

1 lb. lean ground beef

1/4 lb. lean ground pork or sweet Italian sausage

1 lb. Italian plumb or pear tomatoes, drained, seeded and chopped

1 cup tomato puree

1/4 cup tomato paste

2 cloves minced garlic

2 T. chopped fresh parsley

1/4 tsp dried basil

1/4 tsp pepper

salt to taste

1/2 lb fresh mushroom sliced*

Saute` onion till soft in olive oil.  Add meats and cook through--around 5 minutes.  Remove from heat.  Add the rest of the ingredients (except mushrooms) and return to heat.  Heat to boiling, reduce heat and simmer, uncovered, stirring often, till sauce is thick.  (45 minutes to an hour).

Stir in mushrooms and cook another 15 minutes. Black olives can also be added with mushrooms.

**I bought the mushrooms, but at the end I forgot about them, so we had the sauce without.

I happen to be one of the luckiest women alive-- in that I have always loved my mother-in-law and she has always loved me.

I hope that her example of what a mother-in-law should and can be rubs off on me so that my DIL's love me too.

And like me!  As I like and love them.

Too mushy?!

Heck yah---let me get on with telling you about this Friday Friend  (so lucky to get to call my mother-in-law my friend!  oh dang...mushy again)

My mother-in-law, Teresa Marie Solaro (Stone) Belcher 

is half Italian.

Her father was Italian, so lots of her  cooking reflects that influence.

She grew up with her parents in Nevada City, California, where they owned and ran a boarding house.  She said her mom and grandma cooked all the time and she remembers sitting on the kitchen floor watching them.

The half-Italian heritage filters down...

It makes the Handyman  1/4 Italian of course, and then my kids  1/16, but you'd never know it filtered down that much, the way they love and are proud of their Italian heritage.

This is not a great picture  (photo quality speaking that is)   of my mother in law, but one is which she looks so happy and I like it.

It was a a graduation dinner for one of my kids.

A lot of the family were here---not all of them, but a lot.

I tried to crop it from this bigger picture--

and while I was downloading photos, I came across this one of

Teresa and her daughters---some of my favorite sister-in-laws! (I have 10 of them)

The Handyman's mom, Teresa, and his sisters, Eva, Cheryl and LeAnne.

And that is the story of Spaghetti Sauce #1.

I am linking up to Weekend Cooking at Beth Fish Reads.

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share.

Kid Konnection

We have been busy cleaning out my parents home over the last few months.  While a sad and sentimental journey for sure, it's also been kind of fun discovering and 're' discovering things from our childhood, our parent's childhood and even our grandparent's childhood.
Bibles?  I think I now have the biggest Bible collection in the known world.  I mean, how can you throw away an old family Bible that has your ancestor's name in it?  Along with old letters, newspaper clippings, etc?
I cannot.

Anyway, that is a story for another time. For now... Look what I found!
(bad photos---taken on the guest bed---sorry)

I remember these books from when I was little. They were  not mine, but my mother's and my grandma's books.   LITTLE JANIE'S CHRISTMAS!!!   It is one that I always loved.   I am so glad my mom didn't throw it away.    It is Christmas to me.  Just look at the picture!   Santa across the night sky.
I always thought it was just like that.
In the book,  Janie writes a letter to Santa Claus on Christmas Eve and he ends up coming and taking her in his sled, where they go back to the North Pole and she visits his workshop.   The photos are gorgeous and very old-fashioned.
This book was published in 1946, and you can find it on e-bay for around  $15. 
It was much more fun finding my mom's.

A Lonesome Dolly---my grandma received this from her uncle. There is an inscription inside the front cover.  There is no year or date, but I am thinking it was the late 20's. From now on, I am going to sign and date every book I give to someone.  I usually try to do so, but from now on it's a mandate for me!

And finally, this one I shouldn't be so happy to have.   But I am.  Only for the sake of nostalgia---I have  replaced it for my own children (or grandchildren) with   "The Boy and the Tigers"  Which sounds much better than "Little Black Sambo".

In my mother's trunk there were these few books  and a handful of others.

I wonder what I will choose to keep and what I will choose to give away?

That will be a hard decision for me when the time comes, but then again, does it really ever have to come? 

I have a a whole two shelves full of children's books and juvenile novels. I love having that 'library' for my grandkids... and also sometimes my friends children.

But, is it more fun discovering a handful of treasured books or bookshelves full of all kinds of books?

I am linking up with Kid Konnection at Booking Mama.