• 15 minute posts,  domesticity,  easy on the words,  Stealthy Spy Cooking,  Tis the Season

    Popsicle o’clock

    popsicles

    You know what brings all the kids to my yard? Popsicles that’s what. I’m keeping the whole neighborhood regular with these fruity yogurt pops. They are so delicious and good for you! Well, not counting the sugar in the vanilla yogurt I add… but the fruit! Delicious summer fruit!

    we scream for POPSICLES! summer girl

    apricots and strawberies

    This week I added apricots to the mix since we have so many of them. They are so tasty all blended up!

    vanilla yogurt makes the world go 'round fruity sludge

    stars

    And pretty too!

    popsicle o' clock

    It’s popsicle o’clock!

    Now go make some. Here’s my official recipe:

    Cut your ripe juicy fruit up (maybe a cup or two). Add two heaping big spoons of vanilla yogurt, blend in your trusty blender, pour into your popsicle mold of choice, freeze for a day and EAT!

  • 15 minute posts,  Buddies,  crazy stuff,  easy on the words,  elsewhere!,  gardening,  I forgot to tell you this earlier,  the sticks

    99 degrees in the shade

    gurlz in the hood

    Dude. The over-100-degrees weather I dreaded since I moved out here to the sticks (aka desert), is here.

    chillin'

    I’d say we’re coping quite well.

    Super Chic and Boo

    Fitting in with the natives.

    Bugalug Secret Agent Bug

    But then it’s not like we didn’t have practice.

    neighborhood kitten

    bathing beauties

    So far so good.

    my dad

    By the way, my dad is here. He was even here on Father’s Day! Which was really cool. We didn’t do anything special for him which pretty much sums up my dad: We love him to pieces and we take him for granted. Rapunzel is baking him an entire batch of chocolate chip cookies for him to take on the road with him. So there’s that. But it’s not even a drop in the bucket compared to how much he does for us. He fixed my swamp cooler and killed about 99 black widow spiders I had living around the outside of my house the first day he got here. The rest of the time he’s spent helping my mom move back into her old house. (Yes, we’re kinda sad. More on that later.)

    I love my dad so much.

    And I didn’t even make him his own Father’s Day cd or buy him that Archies album he’s always talking about (which one was it again Dad?) Sheesh.

    farmer bren

    He’s been raving about my sugar snap pea garden and begging me to blog it. So this is for you, Dad. Here’s a picture of me behind my row of sugar snap peas, or were they snow peas? I always mix them up. Anyway, they are not supposed to grow in the desert. It’s like some kind of freak gardening event and my dad has been flipping out about it because they remind him of living in Northern California where they grow all the time and bring back memories of his childhood.

    sugar snap peas from my garden!

    See! Sugar snap pea harvest!

    peas!

    Truth be told, my mom and I had a whole mess of seeds. Some I had ordered off the internet blindly, not paying attention to what region of the earth I live in and others were just random things that people had given us from 1986 and beyond. Most of the seeds got left in this little wheel-around card/stool thing my mom has and were the unfortunate victim of a hose accident. They got soggy, they molded, the end. But some of them survived and that is what we planted. That is how we came to have about 20 pea plants growing in my backyard. Usually they would have croaked and died under the scorching hot desert sun but because we had such an unusually cool spring they survived! You could even say prospered since I’ve picked them twice now and there are still more flowers coming.

    dinner with garden peas!

    They were delicious in dinner.

    p.s. I’m posting about my weight and working out over on my review blog. But there’s also a little video of my dog poop and weed infested backyard you might want to spy on so you don’t get too jealous of my mad gardening skillz. And of course there’s $$ dangling at the end to make you comment.