Happy Easter

It was a wonderful Easter today. It started out with a great homily at church. I got goosebumps when father did his welcome -- "welcome to all of you, no matter your gender. no matter you race. no matter your ethnicity. no matter your religious background. no matter your marital status. no matter your history. no matter your sexual orientation. welcome to all of you because we are one in Christ." he continued into the definition of the pascal mystery and talked about how it is still a mystery - no one here knows what life after this life entails. It was good, i wanted to record it. He is one of our favorite priests as he is a history of religion professor at ASU. His homilies usually reflect this in giving the history of the readings, why Christians believe what we do and bringing into it what others (Hindus, Buddhists, Jews...) believe. Very refreshing to hear this broad perspective.

mini calla lilies for easter. aren't they beautiful?!

We came home and started cooking a yummy meal for a couple of friends we had over. This weekend was kind of a home-makers weekend if you will. We died Easter eggs, made fruit smoothie Popsicles, baked a pie, baked cinnamon rolls (both from scratch!), and I completed some sewing projects. It was a wonderful weekend of "nothing to do" and its hard to believe the triathlon countdown is on! We leave in 5 days! Our easter package from Kathy and Jim -- Look at the box in the back, carefully and lovingly decorated by Jim! :) Thank you! It includes many of our favoritesOur homemade popsicles and berries in the back. We had lots of berries from work and being on sale and yogurt that needed to be used.

Coloring our eggs - we tried using natural dies this year the steaming bowl is red cabbage juice, then berries, and turmeric. We let them sit in the dye bath overnight in the refrigerator.

the berry juice made some cool patterns, cabbage awesome blue and the turmeric was a nice golden yellow. Later i added some of the yellow ones to the cabbage to get the greenish color

Triple berry pie - the top crust is rolled out on the table - de.lic.ous.

There you can see the green eggs -- our baskets the easter bunny hid. Ask gabe how this went for him. I guess the easter bunny hasn't always hid gabe's easter basket...

crazy fun cake

ive never made a crazy fun cake before but last night we did. Check it out:

Here are instructions on how to make these fun rainbow cakes

its really yummy too which doesn't hurt!

crafty sunday

Today was a day of making things. I had to do a couple things for work, one of them being to bake numerous agave leaves for snack this week. I made cinnamon chips out of tortillas using a pastry wheel to cut the leaves out to look like an agave leaf. It is one of my "craftier" snacks (all of our snacks relate directly to the theme).

While I was making tasty agave leaves gabe was making whole wheat pizza dough. We got the recipe from Everyday Food which was a gift from Jim and Kathy and had a great January issue! (thanks Jim and Kathy!) It made 8 individual size pizza crusts which we layered in between wax paper and will freeze. Very handy for a quick yummy homemade fresh pizza! We'll let you know how they are, we haven't made this recipe before.

I got the sewing itch this morning and decided that I wanted to make something with my new sewing machine i got for Christmas from Gabe but hadn't used yet. I decided to make these thrifty pants from a t-shirt. After a number of good hearted attempts and making some seams and the sewing machine kept jamming up (the second project I attempted and it did the same thing the first time) Gabe decided we need to get a different sewing machine. So we gracefully took that one back and got a lovely green singer.

Sadly I was having some problems a bit further into my project and spent a good hour trying to figure out what was wrong. I was frustrated and gabe came through once again like the prince he is to solve my thread tension problemos. Hooray! I finished my pants, with few blunders. Well kinda - i still have some resolving to do with a small hole that somehow appeared...

Okay i can't seem to get the pictures to upload so i'll have to do try again tomorrow. i need sleep

Pizza dough - we made our pizzas tonight - it is SO yummy!

These are the agave leaves for my little kiddos snack this week. They sorta look like them...

My new beauty, i'm having fun!

From the too big to wear T-shirt to my new lounge/yoga pants!

simply sensational truffles

I volunteered to bake for our chruch's craft fair this weekend. We just got our Food and Family holiday magazine so flipped through there to decide what to make. I found the prettiest truffles and the receipe was so easy! So I decided to try making truffles for the first time. The making the truffle part was really easy, just two steps really. The decorating is what was a little more meticulous than I expected, but they were worth it. They were SO good! And they looked nice too, I thought.

The different kinds I made

Packaged for the craft fair bake sale

Pumpkin Muffins

Since I keep mentioning this lovely food item I'm giving you the recipe because one of the reasons they are so fabulous is because they are SO easy! I don't have a recipe card for them because you can easily keep it in your mind:

Pumpkin Muffins
1 can of pumpkin filling
1 can of water
1 box of spice cake mix
1/2 package of chocolate chips (optional - i make both with and without)

Mix all ingredients together and fill muffin tins with mix. Bake at 375* F for about 25-30 minutes or until you can remove a toothpick without any mix on it.

Enjoy!

joyfully laborous labor day weekend

I must say this "update" comes late because i've been knocked out for the past 4 days painfully with what I now believe was the flu. I'm happy to see that we have some people that look for these updates though...thank you joey :) As life gets busier these next few months, I will do my best to update...


Our plans for the long weekend consisted of relaxing and doing whatever we wanted really. This was mostly based on the fact that in the next 3 months we have 3 weekends with nothing planned. So we gleefully did things with our hands this weekend. Gabe and Chris built some REALLY fun games and of course we tested them out. I baked banana bread, honey whole wheat bread, and made potato salad all from scratch. It was quite enjoyable.

Gabe hung a "double" clothesline for us, I love it!

The MEN are building happily
The banana bread and whole wheat honey bread
The potato salad