Recipe Tool Box

I went to a bridal shower last weekend for a good friend of mine, Kelly, in Kalona. It was very nice and such a pretty part of the state!

Here is an actual text conversation with Kelly a couple days before the shower:

          Me: I know what I'm getting you! It's not on your list!

          Kelly: Oh boy! I'm excited!

          Me: It's something that may get passed down to your grandchildren.
          Me: And I'm making it.

          Kelly: That's a real head-scratcher!

          Me: It also may cost less than $3.
          Me: Maybe more with the card and wrapping paper.

          Kelly: Oh Lord!

          Me: But in perspective, a bronze Olympic medal only has a material value of $5.

Know what it is? I guess I gave it away in the title of my post! I can't claim it as a completely original idea since one of my favorite wedding shower gifts was a recipe box from my mom. What made it special is that she filled it with her favorite recipes. Did you know Target doesn't sell any recipe boxes in their stores? Walmart has exactly one recipe box, and it's in the canning section. Are people who can the only ones who use recipe boxes? Maybe so! It looks like this.

 No offense to any of you who have kitchens with strawberry wallpaper and a lattice boarder, but YUCK! The good news is that for $6.88, you also get some matching strawberry recipe cards. I doubt Kelly is into strawberries and red lattice, but I had an idea to transform it into something more awesome.

Did I mention that Kelly and I work at a company that manufactures tool storage? We both love tool boxes! If you don't have one, you should buy one. They make great gifts!  I used some acrylic paint and a metallic paint marker to make the modifications. Then I sealed it with polycrylic to give it a shiny, durable finish. Our coworker, Betty, made the Domino logo, which will be Kelly's new last name. It turned out like this.

I tried to skew the photo angle so you don't notice that the top handle is completely off center. Did you notice? I would try to do a better job with that if I did this again.

Then came the fun part. Recipes! I completely entertained myself personalizing them. Here are a few examples.

Yard Bird Spaghetti

This one looks and tastes good enough to serve to company. Admittedly, some of the others I’ve given you do not. Well, most of them taste fine. But some people are scared of casseroles, so my advice is to avoid casseroles for company unless you know them really well.

1 can cream of mushroom soup

1 can cream of chicken soup

1 c. chicken broth

2 c. shredded Cheddar cheese

6 oz. cooked spaghetti

4 c. cooked chicken, diced

Parmesan cheese

Mix first soups and cheese in a large bowl. Add spaghetti and blend. Stir in chicken. Place in a greased 9 x 13 pan. Bake at 350° for 30 minutes. Top with Parmesan cheese. 

Cucumber and Onion Salad

Could you ever see yourself with a vegetable garden? If so, plant some cucumbers and onions so you can make this dish. If not, I don’t blame you. I can think of lots of better ways to spend my time. One thing I’d rather do than plant a garden is to go to the grocery store to buy cucumbers and onions.

2 cucumbers

1 onion

Salt

½ c. vinegar

2 T. sugar

½ c. water

Slice cucumbers and onions into a bowl, salting each layer. Combine the rest of the ingredients and pour over the top. Chill for at least an hour.

 

Corn Supreme

When I was first married, I made a recipe called “Cheesy Corn Delight.” I thought it was delicious, but TJ was not impressed. We compromised with Corn Supreme, but let me know if you want the recipe for Cheesy Corn Delight. I had to promise not to make it ever again. He still makes fun of my Cheesy Corn Delight, and I don’t think it’s funny.

1 can cream corn

1 can whole kernel corn

8 oz. sour cream

1 stick margarine

2 eggs

1 box Jiffy corn muffin mix

Salt & pepper to taste

Mix all ingredients. Dot the top with margarine. Bake 45 minutes at 350° or until set in the center. 

Eclair Dessert

This is a good one for company because it looks harder to make than it really is. Try to be happy whenever you cook or bake. I believe it will taste better, don’t you? It’s sort of like how you can tell when someone is smiling when you talk to them on the phone.

1 box graham crackers

1 6oz package instant vanilla pudding

3 c. milk

8 oz. Cool Whip

1 tub chocolate frosting

Line the bottom of greased 9 x 14 with whole graham crackers (don’t break or crush them). Mix pudding with milk and let stand several minutes. Fold in Cool Whip. Pour ½ over graham crackers. Add a layer of graham crackers. Pour on remaining pudding. Place 3^rd layer of graham crackers. Chill overnight. Top with chocolate frosting. Good leftover!

Homemade Cinnamon Rolls

Just get the frozen ones, Kelly. They taste almost as good as homemade and are a heck of a lot easier to make. Just follow the directions on the bag. However, I don’t recommend this “recipe” if you’re planning to be in the Iowa State Fair cinnamon roll contest. Did you know the first prize wins $5,000. That’s actually true. The winner is usually Amish or Mennonite, but I hope you win. You could go on a fun trip with $5,000. I would be happy to go with you as long as you don’t insist I wear a bikini. 

She liked it!

Gemstone Sludge

Yesterday we had Alli's 11th birthday party, and I decided my giant midget wrestler name will be Gemstone Sludge. Alli is crazy obsessed with Angry Birds.

She wanted to do something out of the ordinary, so we went to Niagara Cave near Harmony, Minnesota. On our way there, we stopped a train in Cresco and then had some play time.

I had never heard of Niagara Cave, but it's one of the top ten caves in the US. It is two hours from Waterloo, and is totally worth the drive! Unless you're one of those people who doesn't like caves.

We bought some sludge in the gift shop while we were waiting for our tour. The good news is that the girls each enjoyed sifting out a bunch of rough gemstones. The bad news is that the sludge is a set-up. Someone mixed a few glassy stones into bags of sand and marketed it as Gemstone Sludge. It's all a bunch of marketing mumbo jumbo. If you're looking to get rich quick, hear me now. Stay away from the sludge at the Niagara Cave gift shop. I'm not saying I don't recommend sludge, just be smart about it and don't get addicted. 

We didn't have enough people with us to have our own cave tour group, so we went with some strangers. They were making weird monkey sounds throughout the tour and took a super long time taking photos. I tried rolling my eyes at Ryan, our guide, like "can you even believe these people?", but he pretended he didn't see me. Later, I thought about the people I had brought. For one thing, Alli and some of her friends were wearing fake mustaches. Also, Ryan didn't seem to appreciate my jokes about the rocks looking like various body parts of people in our group. And he didn't even smile when Gwen, my youngest, asked if he was a cave man. There is a decent chance Ryan was in cahoots with the monkey-noise-makers, and they probably all were eye-rolling at us. But at the time, I genuinely thought we were the normal ones.

If I ever become a cave tour guide (you never know), I would make up legends and names of formations just to mess with people. My Aunt Claire was a cave tour guide in Hannibal, Missouri. I'll try to schedule an interview with her and will post anything interesting that I find out. 

When we got home, the girls played a game I'll call Dicey Bags. I loved a similar party game when I was little, but I can't remember all the rules. I made up some rules, and the girls loved the game!

Dicey Bags
What you need:
- 1 brown paper bag per player, each filled with a different prize. Fold over the top so players can't see inside.
- 1 die per player
- 1 pad of paper & pen for every two players

How to play:
- Each player chooses a die and a paper bag. Pair up the players and give each pair a pen and pad of paper.
- Players take turns rolling the dice. Whoever rolls the higher number wins a point. No one scores on a tie. Use the pen paper to keep track of points. The first player who gets to ten points wins the round!
- The winner peaks inside their bag and decides to keep it or trade it with their partner.
- At the "head table", the winner stays, and the loser moves down to the lowest table. All other winners move up toward toward the head table. Play as many rounds as you want! 

The girls didn't want to stop playing, so I rummaged around the house for prizes to put in the bags. The prizes kept getting worse and worse. We hit a low when someone won a kitchen scrubbing sponge.

Midget Wrestling

I saw something exciting yesterday on my drive into Chicago! There's a place near Elizabeth, Illinois called Shark's Roadhouse. I've never gone inside, but I bet it's similar to that dance place just outside the county line where Wren took Ariel in the original Footloose.  Here's a picture from their website.

I noticed a sign outside the place that said "8pm Fri Midget Wrestling." That's tonight! I wish I lived a little closer because that sounds like an awesome night of fun. I went online and found pictures of the headliners. Look at the stars on the leg of Starla's outfit! Oh, I want to go, don't you?!

I had a lot of time in the car by myself yesterday, and I spent some of that time thinking about becoming a Giant Midget Wrestler. I have always dreamed big. I'm only 5'3", so I'm not too much taller than a dwarf. And I think I might be pretty good at midget wrestling. Anyway, my guess is that midget wrestling is more about showboating than actual wrestling. And I can showboat with the best of the showboaters. I basically just need an incredible outfit and a website to get started with this.

Before changing carreers, I did some research on midget wrestling income potential.

Hmmm...no jobs found. That is disappointing. My theory is that most people enjoy watching midget wrestling (admit it!), but there simply aren't enough midget wrestlers in this part of the country. Ding! Ding! Opportunity! You better bring it, Starla! Sha-bango!

Well, I'm off to the Hobby Lobby with my 40% off coupon to find some spandex and glitter. Don't worry, TJ. I can write it off on our taxes as a business expense. Does anyone have a suggestion for a stage name? Starla is already taken, so think of something more exciting.

The Tragic Life of My Protegé

Here's a fun story from 1998, about a year into our marriage. TJ never liked my Mazda Protegé, but I had picked it out by myself using my usual method of finding a car salesman who doesn't bug me. It sounds like a simple concept, but it's harder than you might think to find a car salesman that fits my standards. I'm super picky about my car salesmen. Not so picky about cars.

This isn't my actual car, but this is exactly what it looked like.

We had just bought TJ a brand new 1999 Dodge Ram truck. We bought it in about 15 minutes without test driving it because we were on our way to a wedding. When you're looking at new cars, there's no reason to mess around with a test drive because you know it's going to drive nice. Even though I'm not picky about vehicles, even I had to admit that it was a big beautiful truck! It was white like an angel. You'll see the irony in that in a minute.

Our driveway was only one car wide, so we had to park one car in front of the other. Luckily, our neighbor's driveway was right next to ours, so we could cut through their driveway to get either of our cars out. Do you know where this is going?

I was still sleeping when TJ left for work one morning. I heard a BIG crash. I hoped it wasn't what I thought it was, but it was. The bed of that white truck was sitting on the hood of my little black car. TJ was laying face down, spread-eagled in the grass. At first I thought he was hurt, but he was just trying to make it un-happen. I've done a lot of dumb things, so I was very nice and supportive. Insurance covered all the repairs to replace my hood that had been crinkled up to the windshield. In TJ's defense, you absolutely could not see that little ninja of a car parked behind the truck. I no longer parked behind the truck.

This is not the end.

A couple weeks after my car was fixed, TJ had parked my car behind his truck. When he left for work, that next morning, I heard another big crash from the driveway. . I didn't get up. This time, I was mad! I didn't want to call insurance again, so TJ made plans to fix it with his dad. TJ wasn't looking forward to that. But before he could fix the car (it wasn't quite as bad this time), I was driving my car through a McDonald's drive through. I said to my coworker, "Hey! That truck in front of us is exactly like TJ's new truck!" Just then, the guy driving the truck realized he'd driven past the first drive through window. So he suddenly backed up, right into my car! Yeah! The poor guy's eyes got big when he saw that I was hugely pregnant and there was a lot of damage to my car. So I say, "Don't worry about this. My husband actually did this to my car, and he's not getting out of it." I convinced the guy to go, and away we went! Eventually, TJ and his dad came through and made all the repairs.

This is not the end.

One day, TJ drove my little Protegé to an out-of-town jobsite in order to save gas. It hailed there so badly that the Protegé was totaled! We got our check and I moved on to a newer car.

This is not the end.

We sold that dimpled, totaled out Protégé to a kid that worked construction with TJ. A couple weeks later, that unludky kid parked the Protegé behind TJ's truck on the job site. And TJ backed into it one final time. I'm not even kidding.

This is the end!

P.S. Mazda heard about this story and stopped making the Protegé in 2003.

Truth?

Kids can be counted on to tell the unedited truth. I was in Walmart several years ago when my middle daughter, Alli, was about 4 years old. Alli has always been compassionate, so my heart swelled when she went right up to a lady riding on one of those scooter things and kindly asked if her legs hurt. The lady smiled big and admitted that yes, her legs did hurt. We were all touched for a second until Alli looked up at me and said loudly, "Mom! That lady has a moustache!" We walked away.

SOMETIMES, it goes the other way, and the kids choose not to tell the truth. There is one fib that will always stick out in my mind. We moved from the Des Moines area to Waterloo in 2004 when TJ got a job as a professional firefighter. Our oldest daughter, Emma was in the middle of her kindergarten year. Our youngest daughter, Gwen, was born a few days after we moved here, so it was a stressful time for us all. See how cute Emma was in kindergarten?

When we got to Waterloo, Emma joined kindergarten at St. Edward's Catholic school. A few months later, TJ picked her up after school and overheard a boy say to his mom, "That's the girl whose sister died in a fire." The mother immediately shushed the boy and turned away. It seemed like he may have been talking about Emma. Weird, right!? We went to parent teacher conferences a few weeks later and asked the teacher about it. That's when we found out that Emma had stood up in front of her class and told them that her baby sister died in a fire, and that we had moved to Waterloo in order to get away from all that. What????

Marvin, the child psychologist, told us there was nothing wrong with Emma other than being a little dramatic. He also recommended we read the Sunday comics...I'm not sure why, but Marvin really loved the Sunday comics. He especially like to quote Calvin and Hobbes. I didn't see how that would help us keep our daughter from telling people they had a baby sister who died in a fire, but I've got nothing against the comics. Here's one for you, Marvin.

Anyway, we moved to a different school district and thought that was the end of the "my baby sister died in a fire" shenanigans. But SEVEN YEARS later, I went on a girls weekend. One of the other ladies on the trip had a daughter who had been in Emma's class at St. Edward's. And guess what? She still believed that we'd had a baby that died in a fire! I'm sure there are still people out there who believe Emma's story, but I want to set the record straight. If I seemed happy, it was genuine. I wasn't putting on a brave face and going home to grieve. There was no fire. And thankfully no dead baby. :)

My Stool Sample

We needed tall bar stools when we moved into our house. They could not have backs on them so they could slide all the way under the bar in order to give any sort of walk-through path between them and the kitchen table. I also did not want fabric on my stools because fabric + kids eating = stains. Another problem is that I don't like to spend money, at least not for things like bar stools and polarized sunglasses. So I did a temporary fix and bought $20 bar stools at the Kmart. They were the right height, but the light colored wood was wrong and they were as boring as my required college religion course. Three years after that temporary solution, I saw an idea to spruce up my stool samples here.

I always have to wait for my darling husband to leave the house before pulling out the crafts. He does not have the vision and gets anxiety about the "worse" before it gets better. Luckily for us both, he's a fireman and spends a lot of nights away from the chaos I create. I often pretend to be sleeping on a Saturday morning when he gets up early and softly kisses my forehead before leaving to work. Keep in mind that he loves me in spite of me. I spring to life as soon as he backs out of the driveway. I sprint to my trunk where I've hidden craft supplies from the Hobby Lobby that I bought over my lunch hours.

See how I lose my focus? Ok, back to the stool samples. Here's what was stashed in my trunk: spray paint, Mod Podge, and quilting squares of a fabric that matched my blue/brown/green vibe. I also had some polycrylic leftover from another project. I decided to start and finish one stool so I wouldn't waste all $60 that I had invested in the three stools. I spray painted the stool a dark brown, which seems like a healthy color choice for a stool sample, you know what I mean? While that was drying, I used a bowl to trace and cut a circle of fabric that was about a 1/2" smaller than the top of the stool. I Mod Podged it to the seat and sealed everything with about 3 coats of polycrylic.

Wah Lah! I took no before picture, so here you can see the before and after picture all together.

Here's another after that shows the beautiful thin brown legs, similar to what I remember having as a child after spending a couple weeks at the lake.

It's been a couple years, and after being used by lots of little bottoms, the stools are holding up just fine. And also we've been able to remove all speckles of brown spray paint that I accidentally got on my black car.

Let's Get this Party Started!

Restrictions
This is my first post on my first blog, so let's get some things straight. Here are a few things I will not commit to:

• A regular blogging schedule. Please don't count on me to provide your daily dose of blog nutrition. It's more like a homemade peanut butter cookie that your grandma sometimes lets you have after your afternoon nap. It's the kind of peanut butter cookie with a chocolate star candy pushed in the middle. The thing about perfect peanut butter cookies with a chocolate star is that there is no known way to predict when a fresh batch is going to magically appear in the cookie jar. Just keep checking back and never give up hope.  
• A specific topic. Focus IS NOT MY STRONG SUIT. I would love to zero in on crafting, but I don't always have crafting time or mojo. Besides, what if something spectacular happens, but it doesn't fit into my blog theme? You would want me to tell you, wouldn't you? That's what I thought. You talked me into it. No theme. Life is unpredictable, and so am I.
• Proper grammar. I will write run-on sentences I will do it often. Sometimes fragments. I will end sentences with a preposition if I want to. I will often interject a word in espanol*. I will use the word "pop" to describe soda and the word "stinky" to describe poop. And I will start and end sentences with the word and. You are correct to assume this is done on purpose as part of my writing style.

Topics
Things I may cover:

• Colorful tales from my past, present and future
• Crafts and creative ideas
• Public restroom reviews
• Book reviews
• Recipes (I solemnly vow to keep my recipes out of public restrooms.)

Politics
I promise not to write about politics on my blog, but here's a list of all the important issues, just in case you want to know where I stand. These are my personal beliefs that I keep close to my heart, and therefore are not up for discussion, thank you muy mucho*.

• Helicopters: pro
• Cameras that catch you speeding: no
• Seat belts: pro
• Syphilis: no
• Dentists: pro
• Cocaine: no
• Kittens: pro
• Prostitution: no
• Cheese: pro
• Spiders: no
• Parking within marked parking spots: pro

If you want to tell me that spiders are good because they help control the insect population, please google images of "spider mouths" and refer to my statement about "not up for discussion."

Footnote
* Please read the names of foreign cities or countries with your natural English accent. For example, it drives me bonkers when a native English speaker is talking along normally until they suddenly enunciate Madrid (not Madrid, Iowa, which has a completely different pronunciation), with a strong Spanish accent, and then go back to their Midwest English accent. Know what I'm talking about? That makes my mouth twitch. Same thing goes for Paris. Don't call it "Pear-ee" unless you are speaking French. I realize you're trying to sound sophisticated, but it backfires. In case you are wondering, there is also a Paris, Iowa. I come from a little town called Gladbrook, Iowa. I believe it's the only place in the world with that name. Yes, I do realize this footnote exemplifies my lack of focus.