Lemons and Zucchini! and Witches, Ghosts and Spiders, Oh My!

My little patio Meyer lemon tree is TRYING really hard to give me ripened lemons but we're in a microclimate where it is 64 degrees during the summer! Aaargh! It has managed to ripen a half dozen so I quickly picked those, zested them and squeezed the wonderful juice from them to use for these delicious Lemon Zucchini Drop cookies.





These are soooooo good! So good that my 7 year old, who plugs his nose when he has to swallow vegetables, devours them! I got this recipe from my MIL. I'm sure she doesn't mind that I share it here. These are soft and almost cake-like and are not very sweet. If you have a garden with an over-abundance of zucchini, shred some of it and use for this recipe!



Lemon Zucchini Drop Cookies
Stir together
2 c. apf (all-purpose flour)
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

Cream together
3/4 c. softened butter
3/c c. sugar

Beat in
1 lg egg (egg substitute ok)
1 tsp grated lemon peel

Stir in Flour mixture until incorporated.
Stir in 1 c. grated zucchini
1 c. chopped pecans (optional - if you do add these, toast them first to release their flavor)

Use a small ice cream scoop for uniform drops. Bake at 375 oven, 15-20 minutes or until lightly golden.

Meanwhile, make the frosting:
1 c. powdered sugar
2 Tbls lemon juice (fresh is the best - don't use bottled or it will taste like medicine!)

When cookies are done, immediately spoon a small amount of frosting on top so it coats the top of the cookies. Use the back of the spoon to spread the frosting around. Frosting goes a long way so don't spoon too much on each cookie.

Makes about 3 doz.



Here is a comparison of regular sized lemons and Meyer lemons...Meyer's are much smaller, thinner peel and very juicy. The flavor is out of this world!



This is how cold it is where we live...basil DOES NOT EVER GROW here!!! This is the 2nd year I've tried to grow basil and it just spits out little tiny leaves, shrivels then goes straight to flower. Now, if we lived just 3 miles from here across the freeway, the temperature there is 10 degrees hotter. I see people with huge lemons on their trees and herbs that are growing all over the sidewalk. Sigh....



Look at what's new at my shop! Go get them before they're gone!

Summer wind-down, Dizzy Blooms and another necklace

Summer is definitely winding down, trying to squeeze out as much fun from it as we can before it's over!


Photo above was at Marine World.



Sand sledding! When we got home, took about 3 days to wash off the sand from their hair.


A beautiful day on the Oregon Coast.

So two more weeks before school starts. And with that I'll get 20 hours of kid-free time. 20!!!!!! Last school year I had 1 1/2 hours of free time. In that 1 1/2 hrs, I squeezed in grocery shopping, post office and starting dinner. Can you imagine what I'll do with 20????!!!! Me neither!


Here's another one of my Mom's necklace now listed at my shop. It's a gorgeous necklace with beautiful beads and stones. I love how it's shorter than standard size so you can wear a rounded neck shirt and still have it show. I just wish I knew the names of the beads! And look at the cool gift bag/purse that it comes in!! That is another one of SU! paper that's retired.


Introducing the new Dizzy Blooms! Can use them on so many things! And look at the colors I've got!

Jewelry, notebooks and bats!

Look at what's new at my shop!

All are listed except for the blue necklace - need to go find out from my Mom (yes, she also makes jewelry!) what kinds of beads she used. It's a gorgeous necklace - great to wear with jeans. And look at how it's going to get sent - in that new adorable paper purse I designed! If you know SU! that paper I used to make the purse is now retired. Sure wish I got more than 1 pack of it! LOL!

The bats on the Halloween cards can be removed and put on your refrigerator - because they're magnets! It's a gift and a card! How cool is that?!

Raspberries!

We brought back 6 boxes of raspberries - picked from the kids' grandparents' garden in Oregon!



Look what we've made with it so far...





The jam is freezer jam - good in your freezer for a year! A note on those pectin boxes...if you use them after the marked expiration date, your jam will NOT set! I learned the hard way and have 2 batches of strawberry "jam" that is now essentially just strawberry syrup.

Head over to Dizzy Broad for a HUGE clearance sale! Got to make room for new stuff - like Halloween! Also have listed the first 2 of my Mom's recycled plastic grocery bag purses! Get them while they're still available!

Man in Skirt and back from vacation (again!)

It seems that we just got back from our Florida vacation and off we went again but this time to the Pacific Northwest. We had a wonderful visit both to Oregon and Washington states! We even made it to the Oregon Coast with the entire family which consisted of 9 children! I believe the adults were officially outnumbered by the little ones.

Can you guess where this photo was taken? Yep, that's a man in a "skirt" and its type used to just be found in Seattle but we hear they can now be seen about town in Portland, OR too. Apparently, a lot of carpenters like to wear these "Utilikilts" because of the good airflow! LOL!



And what kind of animal leaves these type of footprints? I believe they call her "Rosie" and the famous pig can be found in front of the fresh fish store where they throw fish around when someone buys a piece of fish.



Look at this beauty! When kids got too close to it, the fish monger behind the counter made it move. Can you guess what it is?




And here's my family at Pike Place Market. Love that place! We lived downtown Seattle for 2 months and we went to the market everyday to buy fresh produce. We even got to visit my favorite bakery: The Three Girls bakery!



Here's the view from our house when we used to live in Seattle:

That cruise ship above was one my parents were on when they were on their way to Alaska!


That is the Puget Sound where you can see lots of Islands, cruise ships, ferry boats, Navy ships, barges, sailboats and once, we even saw a bunch of Orca whales!


Now here's our view from our house in California:



No comparison!

More vacation photos tomorrow. Hope you all had a Happy Monday!

Baking some snacks for the road

My daughter and I were busy trying to bake up some snacks for our trip tomorrow. The challenge we had on hand was to only use ingredients we already had at home.

What would you do with these? In case you can't tell from the photo, these are frozen cranberries that I've had for 2 years (Yikes!) and whole oats.


How about some healthy Cranberry bars - only has 3T of canola oil in the entire recipe and no cholesterol!





Now the snacks for the kids...these are known to have many names (coconut, nuts, choc. chips, graham cracker) but this particular recipe only used 3-4 T of melted butter. We used pecans we've had in the freezer. A quick toast in the oven releases their flavor. We used skim sweetened condensed milk to save some fat calories. I was hoping to use up all my leftover graham cracker crumbs but the recipe only used up 1 cup. I always have broken grahams around that can't be used for s'mores or Chocolate eclair so I keep processing them and saving them for that someday that I will make cheesecake from scratch.







I'll be back in 2 weeks! By the way, we tasted both desserts and they were both delicious!

And the winner is.....

Heather C.!!!!! (had to wait until my daughter woke up this morning to select the winner!). Send me an email to let me know where to mail your box of goodies! Congrats!! I expect to see a photo of this citrus bag prominently displayed in your new home :-).

Will post later!