Picture Perfect Cooking

Our church has recently started a new Sunday school class for our age group and the focus is on building friendships, friendship with God, friendship with Jesus, and friendship with our fellow man.  I have really enjoyed the lessons so far because they have made me stop and think about things that I normally do not. 

Am I a good friend to God and Jesus?  Do I stop and think what They would want me to do in situations as much as I should or do I just plow on through doing my own thing?  I know God and Jesus bore the ultimate sacrifice for me and actually ask very little of me for Their love!

Am I a good friend to C?  To me, marriage should be the ultimate friendship!  C is my best friend and I know I am very blessed to be in a relationship like that.  I happen to work in the office that processes divorce cases so I know how rare they are.  I try to put him first and not give in to my selfish “only child” ways, but it can be hard.  C is much better at that than I am. 

Am I a good friend to my friends?  Do I support them when they need it?  Do I reveal enough of myself so that they know who I really and truly am?  That is something that I have always struggled with…how much to share is too much?  There are things about me that very few people are aware of and I can’t seem to shake the notion that it is better to keep certain things to myself or to an extremely small group.  I hope that, in the long run, that being private was not a bad thing.

Finally, am I a good friend to myself?  You are probably thinking that that is a strange question, but when you stop and think about it, can you love someone else if you don’t love (or even like) yourself?  I think a lot of people struggle with this, especially women.  They get caught up in what is going on around them and forget to take care of themselves. 

Reading these lessons has made me think about these things more and I hope that leads me to better relationships with God, Jesus, and the world around me.

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Raise your hand if you LOVE to clean your house?  I thought so…not many hands raised.  I am like that, too; I love a clean house but don’t really like the work it takes to get it that way.  One think that I now do that makes the job a little easier is to use as many non-toxic cleaners as possible.

I used to use regular cleaners that had strong chemicals and fragrances added to them to make your home smell “clean”.  Guess what?  A clean house really doesn’t have a smell at all, good or bad. 

When I walked down the “cleaning” product aisle at the grocery store, my eyes would start watering and I would usually sneeze at least once.  Why was I bringing this stuff into my living space when I couldn’t even walk past most of them without tearing up?  That’s a good question so I set out to find a solution.

After some online searching, I purchased a few products to try and have found ones that I have stuck with for quite a while now.  My favorite brands are Method, Mrs. Meyers, and Seventh Generation.  All three seem to clean really well without a lot of extra scrubbing that some of the more well known brands require. 

In my bathroom, I use Method Bathroom Cleaner (formerly Tub N Tile).  It has a mild fragrance that makes the rooms smell so good, but doesn’t overpower the senses.  I also use Method Le Scrub on my shower doors and tubs.  We have extremely hard water which leads to terrible hard water stains on the glass doors.  I had tried CLR, which did not work very well and the smell was hideous and then tried Le Scrub.  I still use Comet on my toilets because I have not found a replacement that I like as well.

For dishwashing, I love Seventh Generation products.  My favorites are the Free & Clear Dishwashing Liquid and the Lemon Automatic Dishwashing Gel.  I also use Seventh Generation’s anti-bacterial wipes.

Finally, to soften our clothes and add a slight lavender fragrance, I turn to Mrs. Meyers.  Their liquid fabric softener and dryer sheets are perfect and I make them last as long as possible.  I use just a tiny bit of liquid softener and thin it with water and I use each dryer sheet for multiple loads.

This is just my little way of keeping C & I safe from unnecessary chemicals which may or may not be harmful, but why take a chance.  I have read on other blogs that some people actually make their own products, but I have not quite worked up to that point yet.  It is interesting reading, though.  By the way, these companies have no idea who I am and have offered me nothing for these thoughts.  I just like them!

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I love to read blogs; blogs about gardening, organization, simplifying, “green” living, finance, and especially cooking!  Until about a week ago, these blogs were organized in my “favorites” in different category folders.  This method worked pretty well, except that I had to either open them one at a time or, if I tried to open multiple, it took several minutes for them to load.  Another drawback of this was that I had to be on my home computer to find them easily since that’s where they were stored.

I consider C a tech master!  He loves technology and keeps up to date on all of the latest innovations.  His job is technology in education for the local school district so he reads a lot of blogs for ideas as well.  He had been using Google reader for some time and told me that I might like it, too.  Last week, he helped me set up an account and taught me how to add my blogs.  It was so easy!!

All you need is an email address and it doesn’t even have to be a Google address.  Any old email will work.  Once your account is activated, all you have to do is search for the blogs you enjoy and subscribe using the “RSS” feed.  What’s that you ask?  Well, many blogs have a subscription area that has a link to their RSS feed on which to click.  If the site doesn’t have that, look at the address bar at the top of the page.  There should be a little orange square with white stripes.  Found it?  Good.  Just click on that and choose “subscribe to RSS”.  When you do that, Google reader will ask you to confirm your choice and that’s that. 

But, wait!  There is another neat feature about Reader.  After you confirm your subscription to that particular blog, Reader will give you a short list of similar blogs that you can review.  I found several new ones that way.

When it is time to read the blogs, just the ones with new posts will be listed.  Reader does strip out a lot of the extra stuff that shows up on the blog’s main page, so if there is images or graphics that you want to see, just click on the link and the page will open in another tab.  So simple!

Now I can read my blogs anywhere that I have an internet connection and can get to Google’s site.  That means if C & I are traveling and I have some downtime and internet access, I can kick back and read. 

So, if you like to read blogs, and who doesn’t, check out Google Reader.  It is free and helps corral an out of control blog list like mine!  Note:  Google has no idea who I am and has not paid me a dime to write this!

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One of the best books I have read in the last couple of years was Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen by Julie Powell.  It is a funny and poignant book written by a lady who felt down on her luck and decided to turn her life around by cooking her way through Julia Child’s venerable cookbook, Mastering The Art of French Cooking Volume 1.  If you haven’t read this, please do.  The movie is good, but the book is so, so much better.

Anyway, I received a cookbook as a Christmas gift from my wonderful in-laws.  It is Southern Plate: Classic Comfort Food That Makes Everyone Feel Like Family, and yes, it is written by the lady who has the awesome website, Southern Plate!  It is a collection of classic southern recipes that she has gotten from family and friends throughout the years.  Many have been passed on through multiple generations and this is the first written version available.  So many recipes have been lost due to the fact that they weren’t written down; they were just taught to the next generation in the kitchen.

When I finally had time to sit down and really start to read through this book, I was amazed.  Some of the recipes I had cooked before, but the majority I had not and they all sounded delicious!  I had an epiphany..I need to do a project of my own:  A Picture Perfect Cooking/Southern Plate Project. 

Now, don’t get too excited.  Mine is going to be a little more low-key since I have already used a few of her recipes on my site, I am just going to use more and post them as part of my “project”.  I don’t plan on running myself crazy trying to get them done in a certain amount of time, and I won’t be able to fix any of the chicken or turkey dishes.  Why?  Oh, that’s right, I have never shared this with you.  I am deathly allergic to poultry.  Yep, you heard right, poultry of any kind.  That means no chicken or turkey for this gal, and I am not just a little allergic to it, I am full-on anaphylactic shock allergic!  One time, I brought home a chicken dinner for C, and I accidently got a little grease on my finger.  I touched my face and a big hive popped out almost immediately just from that little bit of contact.  Now you know my kryptonite.

Please keep reading.  I will let you know when the project begins!

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This is the second week for this feature, and I had not really planned on it being a feature, but here goes.  In trying to improve my writing skills, I hope to post a little something every Thursday (or at least most Thursdays) that is about something on my mind.  It may be personal, blog-related, news-related, or just a random thought.

Today is an audience participation day.  I have to admit something first, though.  I have had this blog for almost two years and very few people in my community know about it.  In fact, I can count on one hand the people I have told about my blog.  I am not embarrassed about it…far from it!  I have just always thought that this was my “alter-ego”.  I work in a very public job in a very small town where everybody knows your name, your parents’ names, and your grandparent’s names.  You get my point, and even though I never put anything offensive or embarrassing on here, it has been hard for me to tell people about it.  This space has been a sort of refuge from the real world since it contains only things in which I am interested.

What I want to know is this…when you first started blogging, did you tell your family and friends immediately or did you get your feet wet first?  If you didn’t tell them quickly, how did you let them know about it later?

I have people ask me for recipes fairly often and I have thought about telling them that it is on my blog, but I just can’t get the words out.  Help!

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If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know most of the posts are about cooking, photography, books or gardening.  Those are my favorite hobbies and what I enjoy writing about.  I have never been a person who journals; I had a a little girl’s diary with a little gold lock on it (remember those) when I was a child, but most of the posts were about going to school or playing or something along those lines.  I usually work through my problems in my head instead of writing them down, except to-do lists… I love to-do lists!

Anyway, back to writing.  I started this blog almost two years ago and when I look at those old posts I realize that my writing has improved.  I am still a long way from a good writer, but it is getting better.  I guess I had better clarify by what I mean by “good writer”.  My grammar and punctuation are usually good, but sometimes the content itself can be a little, I don’t know, dry.  I read in a book years ago, that someone’s prose was not “prose-y” enough, meaning the writing was not very interesting.  I want to continue to improve and grow in that area, and that has led to this post.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a blog post published somewhere that referenced a Wired magazine article about blogging.  The title is “Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004”.  Click here to read the article in full.  The gist of the article is that blogging is dying because it has been taken over by big business.  The article also contains a link to the Technorati’s list of the top 100 blogs and when I read the list, I realized what the writer was talking about, but (and this is a really big BUT) maybe what this particular writer is interested in is not what the “small” bloggers are blogging about.  I wonder if he stopped to think about that. Even the blogs that I read that I consider BIG blogs are not on this list. 

Also, I think there is a substantial difference between a “blog” and a “website”.  Some pages that I read regularly started as blogs, such as The Pioneer Woman or Southern Plate, but in my opinion these pages are now actual websites with multiple pages, links and ads.  I think the writer of this article is missing the big picture a little bit…small blogs DO still exist, they just may be harder to find and I think it has a lot to do with the subject matter you are searching for.

When I have searched for cooking or gardening blogs, there are many to choose from that are written by people just like you and me.  They use the blog as a creative outlet or an online archive.

Also mentioned is how Twitter has kind of taken over where blogging left off.  I don’t know about that since I don’t use Twitter.  I have nothing against it, I have just not gotten “into it”.  It is hard to post a recipe with multiple photos in 140 characters or less! :) 

What does this post have to do about cooking or photography?  Not much, but when I read that article, it actually made me a little mad.  I know my little site is not on this article author’s radar, but it is on a few people’s.  If they enjoy it, then I have done my part.  I know I enjoy other “little” blogs that are still personal and relevant at the same time!

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