Summer Dinner

Here are the ingredients. Tuna fish made with celery, pickle relish and Hellman's; Miracle Whip; fresh local tomato; iceberg lettuce and bread. Why both mayo and salad dressing, you are probably asking? Because my husband and I are both stubborn when it comes to those items. He grew up on Mayo, I grew up on Miracle Whip - neither one of us has been able to succumb to the other's taste after all these years. People have looked at me funny in the grocery store for years when I have both of them in my cart - years ago I just told them we were "newlyweds". They grinned. Now, I just say the hubby is a stubborn old man set in his ways...conveniently forgetting to mention that I am the same way....hehehe. They still grin.




The next step...toast the bread and coat with Miracle Whip.


Add some lettuce and a dab of Miracle Whip.



Now here is the secret...ADD more lettuce and more Miracle Whip. One MUST have the Miracle Whip between the layers of lettuce. *nodding head*



Add the locally grown tomato and tunafish. That tomato looks delish! (Come on now guys, mouths should be watering). Almost finished.

Cut in half and place on plate for adult presentation.



Here is the child presentation, cut in quarters. Now, a little pretending here, please. See those toothpicks, YOU ALL need to imagine they are the frilly colored kind. Cause everyone knows, kids eat most anything if it looks fun and nice. (Good trick to remember if you are a new parent). Guess that's why I had no frilly toothpicks to be found in my house today. I've been sneaky in the past way too many times with my boys...hehehe.

In the middle of the plate is a dessert bowl filled with Granny Smith Apples sprinkled with cinnamon sugar mixture - 3 parts sugar, 1 part cinnamon. And once again, I know you are all seeing a FRILLY toothpick there, not a plain boring one. Not really sure how tunafish and cinnamon apples will taste together...my thoughts on this are that they WON'T taste good together, but who am I? *shrugging shoulders* But the presentation sure does look good! That, you must agree with.

It is just too hot to cook tonight. I had one of these for dinner tonight and it hit the spot. It was so good I decided to share. This is the second sandwich I made. I will eat that later.

While we are on topic of food, I encourage all to try to buy as many fruits and vegetables from your local farmers as possible, this season, if you are not growing your own. The food just tastes so much better! Tomatoes, corn, radishes, onions, broccoli, cauliflower, squash, cucumbers, berries and the list goes on & on. Go on Do It! You know you want to! You wont be disappointed, this I promise.

On a final note, the only thing better would have been a BLT. But, alas, no bacon in the house tonight. Also, I wished I'd had leaf lettuce straight from a garden. One my favorites from Mom's garden, as a kid. Well, the raw peas straight from the garden were pretty good, too. Mom used to get so mad at us girls. We'd snack on them (the peas) all day, only to discover Mom had planned to have peas with warm milk and butter (those were good, too, don't get me wrong), for dinner that night and there were not enough left in the garden, ooopsies. Sorry about that, Mom, but we just could not resist. Then we'd end of having something gross like spinach. Did we ever learn our lesson? Afraid not, for those peas were just too too tempting and ohhh so good and sweet.

And before anyone says anything... No, I am not getting paid to advertise Miracle Whip by using it in almost every single picture that has been posted on this page....hahahaha.

PLARNING

I made this set of bags for a Letterboxing Gather I will be attending next weekend..."Summer Is Here". I also sent one out to "Live And Breathe" last fall. I am hoping the hosts will use them as part of their raffle. I am also hoping there will be tickets in the cup for them. :-).

The crocheted bags are made of PLARN. For those of you not familiar with that term, I shall be happy to explain. It is the combination of two other words. PLAstic and yARN. Pictured below is a "ball of PLARN." not sure why, but that phrase suddenly strikes me as funny. *Maple Leaf Red chuckling to herself*

As you can plainly see, that ball of plarn is a little smaller than a standard sized basketball. I cut plastic bags into strips, knotted the strips together, rolled the strips into a ball, then crocheted a pattern using the PLARN. I roll a ball as big as my hands will allow. If you have rolled yarn before, you will know that the ball just becomes unmanageable after reaching a certain diameter. I stop winding when that ball gets too big for my one hand to hold. My plarn is made from "virgin" plastic bags - if there is such a thing- These plastic bags have never been used. They are leftovers from a Boy Scout project - "Scouting For Food". I have 2 boxes of them. That's about 2000 bags. Sheeez...I really need to get busy, eh? LOL.

I made all three bags from one ball -size shown above- of PLARN. One bag, the smallest, is big enough to hold a gift card. I hope the winner, should they use it as a Gift Card Bag, will let the recipient know that this bag should be "regifted" over & over again. Add a ribbon or a bow or a flower or a button & one has a unique bag every time it gets reused. The middle sized bag is big enough to hold 2 1-liter soda bottles. Personally, I would use this bag to carry around current yarn project. And the largest is well, the largest. Perfect for the grocery store.

Also, please note, I did say CROCHET here. I know others knit (and I do know how to both knit and crochet) with PLARN. I, myself, cannot imagine knitting with this stuff. It is not the most easiest of materials to work with. But hats off to you folks who can manage to knit with it!

One last thing, last year I gave a couple of gift bags to the 3 Blind Mice family as a thank you for hosting a Gather. He wrote to me earlier this year saying coworkers of his saw the bags & took the idea back down to New York City to share with some kids down there. Perfect! An inexpensive craft anyone can learn to do, the material is abundant & commonly found in just about every household. Keeping kids busy is not a bad thing, either.

For more information regarding how to make PLARN, peek around the Internet. There are some really great You Tube video's & some very easy & crafty patterns as well.

Winning...

It is July 20th and we still have not installed our window air conditioners! Hurray for us! I am so happy about NOT giving our local utility company $100.00 + more a month. We usually have the AC's up & running in May.

Granted, the weather has been very cooperative with us. No 90 degree days - well, I take that back we a couple back in April (?) - and we have not had much humidity. That is the key for us...no HUMIDITY! We have been in the 80's.

What have we done to keep ourselves comfortable you may ask?

1st off, I must let you know that our house is pretty well shaded by trees...about the only house in this neighborhood that still has shade trees. *nodding* I know one family cut down their 40 + year old Oak because the acorns were denting their car. HUH? I am not sure why others have cut their trees. Some, I know, where diseased & others had branches that were dangerously close to their homes - a good thunderstorm with high winds may have brought branches thru their roof...understandable.

So, we close all windows in the house by 10:30 AM as to not let the hot air into the house thru the windows.

We reopen windows when it is a little cooler outside than it is inside...time of day is different depending on temp for that day.

We are using window fans to suck that cooler air into the house as well. We close the bedroom doors while this is happening & the boys go to bed and actually are wrapped in their blanket when I check on them before I go to bed at night. The bedrooms are that cool!

I went out to get this "appliance" for us after Christmas. It is just a fancy teflon electric fry pan. My mom had gotten one for our beloved Richard (may he be resting in peace). I was immediately in love with it! Did we really need it? Probably not. One can get the same effect using a fry pan on the stove. My thoughts were it looks like it is fun to use and if my the boys think it is fun, they will use it by themselves. Was I correct in this thinking? YUP YUP YUP! Chalk one up for the Mom *wink wink*. (BTW....And who doesn't like a little Ribbon Candy during the Holidays? hehehe)

Cooking - I have 3 teenage boys to feed - We have been using the crockpot, stove & microwave. Unfortunately, our Propane gas grill no longer works. Salads, sandwiches, cereal have been on our menu as well. When we do use the stove, we have a fan set up in the dining room to blow the hot air out our back door. I cook up ground burger on cool days & throw it in the freezer. That way I dont have to cook it and then keep the stove on to cook the burger in whatever dish it is being used in...pasta dishes mostly. Rice is cooked in microwave.

This is an example of one of the many things we have "cooked" in our Christmas Appliance. A wrap, scrambled eggs, crumbled up Maple Flavored Sauage links, and cheese. We have also made pizzas, some kind of "sandwich" with SteakUms, Shredded Buffalo Chicken cooked in crockpot with cheese, ground beef, etc., etc. One is only limited by their imagination.

We have also been keeping no more than 4 of us in the house at one time. This is kind of unintentional, but it has made a difference. My oldest son works til 3:30 PM. My middle son has been going to the pool about 2:30. By the time the middle son gets home from the pool, the oldest one (the one that works til 3:30) has made plans to go out for the evening. The youngest boy & I have been having Rummikub Marathons outside in the front yard on a cardtable til dark, so our bodies are not in the house heating it up when "Pool Guy" and hubby are home.

So by the time all of us are back in the house, usually 10:00 PM the house is reasonably cooled down again.

We take WARM showers, not steaming HOT showers. The steam warms our house, as we live in a Ranch style home. A cold shower is no good for cooling...my thoughts on cold showers are that they actually make you feel hotter when you get out...your body has to work harder to get back up to it's normal temp (98.6 per "The Professionals" aka Doctors) and therefore you are expending energy which will in turn make you feel hotter. Expending Engery = Heat - if I recall my Chemistry lessons from High School. *shrugging shoulders* Like I said that just seems logical to me.

We also wear very little clothing. Boys are in boxers with no shirt. Hubby in shirt & shorts. Me - I am in skirt, a shirt, sandals, shorts, hair in pony tail, wicking shirts, shirts that "fit" but not alot of material - hubby seems to be enjoying these very much as I am usually known to show no skin at all in public...just ask anyone in town...LOL. I purchased a pair of knock off "crocs" back in the fall. I noticed every time I wore them my feet were cold. I wore them with socks all winter. I am now wearing them without socks and they seem to make me feel cooler - all in my head? who's to know, but it seems to be working so I am not complaining!

I have also come to freezing a Sunny D bottle with water in it and then putting it front of a fan and letting the condensation spray on those in front of the fan which cools us off as we walk by that particular fan.

I belong to a group on http://www.ravelry.com/ called Living Simply. I must admit some of the things we are doing came from that group. I found a great link(http://www.energyconservationinfo.org/summer2007.pdf) to a PDF file put out by our Government that was full of great advice. But the thing that impressed me the most about this particular file was that it was easy to read for all! As a matter of fact, I printed it out and am making my boys outline it for practice this summer (there is some cash incentive involved in this project...LOL).

I think I am going to try planting Morning Glory flowers next year near some of our windows. Beneficial to keeping sun out of windows. Will have to do some research on this idea as, we have shade on some of our windows for parts of the day. Critterliz planted some last year and had them running up and around her mailbox...what a lovely sight to the eyes when one drove by her house! Why not have them running up my house as well?

Should you have any advice for us, please post in the comment section. We just looked at the weather forecast, 74 tomorrow with rain, then 4 days of humid weather heading our way. We'll probably survive the first 2 days of the humid weather, but if the nights don't cool off...we are sunk and the Air Conditioners will go into our windows.