Date Night

The other night Vince & I ventured out to eat Thai Food. We wanted to eat at the Lime Leaf downtown, but they were rude to us (they seated people that came in after us before they would seat us). The part that really bothered me is that the party that was seated didn't even have all the other half of their party there yet. They were waiting on two more. So I knew that service would be bad that night. It was way packed so we ventured to the next Thai restaurant. Bangkok is located on the east side of town. It has a quiet atmosphere & great food. We enjoyed our dinner immensely. And Vince looked so cute after he paid the check.

Thanksgiving Preview Meal

When I first moved to SC, I would travel to Kim's house or one of Dad's brother's houses for Thanksgiving. Then when Rachel moved to SC, we started doing our own SC Thanksgiving meals. I did Thanksgiving with Rachel for several years. Then after meeting Vince, we started a Gatlinburg Thanksgiving tradition. It's great to go out of town & have someone else do all the cooking, but I love being able to eat all the traditional food just the way I like it. What better way to do that then to make a preview meal of Thanksgiving at my house.

Tonight we invited Barbara & Jerry over for a turkey dinner. I have not made a turkey at home in at least 3 years. My roaster oven was getting tired of sitting in the garage unused. Last night I did some prep work so I wouldn't have to do as much when I got home this evening. I bought the boil-in-a-bag sweet potato souffle from Wade's. I boiled the bag & put them in a baking dish last night. This by far is mine & Vince's favorite sweet potatoes ever - anywhere. I also mixed the green bean casserole up in another dish. And I soaked the turkey in a brine solution overnight. I decided to use all the good china and set the table last night.

At lunch today, I came home (after eating some Peach Blossom spaghetti) and started the turkey in the roaster oven. I slathered it with butter & some spices. When I got home from work this evening, the turkey looked fabulous & golden brown. The butter really helps brown it in the roaster oven. I put the neck bone on to cook for the gravy, started the dressing, & threw the green beans & sweet potatoes in the oven. I then mixed the fruit cocktail & cool whip for the fruit salad. Then I mixed the whole cranberries, crushed pineapple, and walnuts for a cranberry salad.

The gravy was the last thing I fixed right before we sat down to dinner. It all turned out really good! I love being able to use all the good china as well. (And thanks to Vince & Barbara for helping hand wash all the dishes!) Now I'm ready for the real deal next week! Gobble gobble!

Sewing So Much

Next weekend is the Santa Shop, which is the time of year that I sell my jams & jellies at a local church. This will be my fourth time going. Last year was not too good in terms of sales. I'm hoping the economy is making a come back & I'll sell out this year (like I did my first year). For the first time ever, I'm adding a new product at my table...hand sewn purses. I bought the material several months ago from an auction at work. I've been dawdling & not getting any sewing done lately, so this past weekend, I finally had to buckle down & get it done.

I started sewing around 11am on Saturday morning. Luckily, the previous weekend, I had cut out the patterns for 25 purses. So all I had to do was sew the liners, interior pockets, outer layer, snaps and handles. I say "all I had to do" as if it was easy breezy. I found out really quickly that the thinner & slippery-er the fabric, the easier it was to sew. If the fabric was more like leather, then the stitching jammed up and looked like a pile of mess on the fabric. It didn't matter if I turned the tension to 0 or 9 or anywhere in between. My machine is not made for leather. It almost made me start cussing. But I managed to get a few purses sewn together out of the difficult fabric & then moved on to the easier fabrics. Vince only had to get his pliers out once to fix the foot on the machine that the tough fabric had snapped off.

Around 9:30pm, I finally stopped sewing for the night. I had done all the pockets, inside liners, and outer parts. And I had sewn them all together. On Sunday, I started around 2pm with the handles & snaps. All the snaps are hand stitched so it was a tedious process. By 10pm, I had only 6 purses left to put snaps in. The rest are completely done. Whew! My back was so tired of leaning over a machine & my fingers were tired of being poked with a needle. I tried to use the thimble (& did several times when working with the leather material), but it mostly just gets in my way.

I have lots of them that look great. Several that look a bit wonky & one or two that I don't think I will be selling. Who knows if anyone will actually buy these. My mother-in-law did purchase one from me yesterday, so I've at least sold one! I started thinking about my presentation of the table at the booth next Saturday & thought about needing some kind of hat rack to hang the purses on. I have 2 small black fold out stools that ended up being a great rack to hang them on. Once I set up my booth with purses, jams, & jellies, I'll take a picture of it to display here.

Another first for me this year is having a friend come & sell her handmade items at my booth, too. Dawn has been knitting hats & such to sell along side me. I hope we both sell out & have a great time! Come join us next Saturday from 9am - 2pm at Poplar Springs Baptist on 417.

Food Contests

I've recently discovered several food contests that I can enter to win money. I applied last month for The Next Food Network Star, but I haven't heard anything back from them. I assume if I had been chosen as a finalist, they would've contacted me by now.


This week, Food Network posted a contest on Facebook. Each applicant can enter up to 5 video submissions for recipes using Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce. I have submitted 3 of them so far. They will let me know in 5 - 7 days if the videos are accepted. Then starting in December, I have to get the public to vote for my videos to win. Once I know the website & info, I'll be passing it along to all my blogger readers, Facebook friends, family, etc. Then you guys will have to tell all your friends to vote for me to win.

In the meantime, if you'd like a sneak preview, I've posted all three videos on You Tube.

If you go to http://www.youtube.com/ and type in dodi1018 in the search bar, you'll see the three videos. Here's the link:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbJ0D2Jwp24


I think I sound very southern and sometimes the word I want to say just doesn't come out. For example, I keep wanting to say "golden color" and it comes out "golden flavor." What is a golden flavor anyway??? But it was fun to make the videos. I wish my kitchen was set up differently so I could look straight on at the camera while cooking. I have my back to the camera often so I can see what I'm doing.

One thing I found out is that you collect a lot of dirty dishes (mostly prep bowls) when you have to pour out everything from a labeled container. Lea & Perrins only wanted their name brand in the video. So I couldn't show Heinz ketchup or other name brands.

Sunday Visit, Thanksgiving Tuesday

On Sunday evening, my Uncle Ken & Aunt Connie stopped by for a visit. We ate an early dinner at City Range. All four of us got the filet mignon and were not disappointed. That steak is so good there. I highly recommend it. It was nice to see family this past weekend. It was kind of strange to see them all since we didn't have to travel anywhere to see them.

On Tuesday night this week, I met up with the ZTA sorority sisters that live here in town. We met at one of the girl's houses and each brought a pot luck dish that reminds us of Thanksgiving. A few of us got that hint (some more than others). I brought sweet potato souffle and a dessert. Another girl brought turkey & dressing (no gravy...I really wanted some gravy). Then we had mushroom wraps, leek soup, Oreo balls, chips and corn salsa, and cheesecake. None of those reminded me of Thanksgiving, but they were good. The leek soup was surprisingly great. I got the recipe for that one.

Here's the dessert that I took.

I got this idea from mom last year. She & the kids made them at Christmas last year. They were so cute. I modified them a little for easy transportation. Here are the ingredients:
2 Oreo cookies
1 Rolo
1 Reese's mini peanut butter cup
6 slivered almonds (you can use candy corn, but the weight of them would probably fall out from transportation)
1/2 a candy corn (for the nose)
orange, chocolate, & white icing

A Bigger Patio

My dad came down this weekend to help me work on enlarging my outdoor patio. Since I've lived in this house, I've wanted a bigger patio. The current slab poured was 10' x 10'. As soon as Vince & I put a grill & patio table with chairs on it, you couldn't even walk on the patio. There was no room to grill without moving the chairs around and I had no room for a lounge chair to lay out & read. Dad offered this summer to come down & help me get it enlarged once the weather got cooler. And apparantly, the cold weather has arrived.

The above picture is before we started working.

Dad arrived Thursday around 4:45pm and I got home right about the same time. He started working on it right away & got all the grass dug up for the new patio area before it got dark & before Vince got home from work. When Vince got home from work, we all decided to eat at Shogun's Japanese Restaurant. I haven't been there in forever. It was really good food.

On Friday morning, Vince headed off to work. I took a vacation day from work & helped dad with the patio. Our first order of business, however, was breakfast. I took him to the
Skillet downtown Spartanburg. I had blueberry pancakes that were probably the best ones I have ever had. They were really good pancakes. We stopped at Home Depot to see what kind of patio stones they had. I didn't find any that I really liked so we headed over to Lowe's. I found some grey stones that had a unique pattern in them. We calculated that we would need 42 stone tiles. These tiles are about 40 pounds a piece (we weighed them on the scale). There is no way I wanted to put 1680 pounds in my car, so we decided to take 2 trips.

Once we got the tiles home, we loaded them in my wheelbarrow and carried them to the backyard. Each wheelbarrow trip was about 280 pounds worth of stone tiles. We went back to Lowe's for the 2nd trip & decided to get the 300 pounds of sand on a third trip. For a small space, the weight of all these items sure does add up.

Since the 10' x 8' patch of land had been cleared the night before, I laid out black paper that is supposed to prevent weeds and grass from growing through. We then covered it with a thin layer of sand.

We used this large broom to help level out the sand. It was a very handy broom.

Each tile was laid (sometimes 2 or 3 times each). We would walk on the tile & make sure it didn't wobble. If it did wobble, we had to pick it back up & level the sand again. This was a slow going process. Since each tile was 40 pounds, dad laid every one of them. I was in charge of the sand leveling.

After all the tiles were laid, we used two bags of sand to brush it in between all the cracks. It really made the patio pop when we did this final step. You can tell it's not the most level thing ever, but I'm really proud at how great it turned out. It looked really great....except it needed a few more things.

Dad & I hopped in the Rav4 one more time & went to Carolina Garden World. We found 3 juniper bushes to provide a privacy screen. You can barely see one corner of the new patio from the street, but I wanted it to be more private. It will take a couple of years, but these juniper trees should grow up and fill in nicely to provide a natural privacy screen. We also got 3 small gardenia bushes for the front part of the patio. We were 8" short in being the same length as the current patio so I thought that adding some plants would help fill in that gap & make the edges look clean & finished.

As the sun started going down, it started getting a lot colder & I had to put my coat on when we finished planting the bushes.

I think it turned out great! It made the whole patio area look so much bigger. The only thing left to do is add a bit of mulch around the new bushes. I left a little bit of space between the bushes so I could add some annuals during different seasons. I can't believe we finished this whole space in one day. When Vince got home from work, we celebrated by going to Wade's for dinner.

Happy Halloween!

Vince & I shared a relaxing & quiet Halloween this year. It was the first time as a married couple that we were home to celebrate the holiday. Last year we were in Cosby, TN, attending my cousin's wedding. It was a gorgeous day this year! The leaves were turning colors & falling & the temperature was warm with a cool breeze. The weather just screamed for us to be outside. It was a perfect day to go somewhere like the Biltmore, but we also wanted to be back in time to pass out "candy" (a.k.a. pretzels) to trick-or-treaters.

I got online & looked for parks around the local area that we had never been to. We decided to venture to Croft State Park. The website boasted of 2 lakes, trails, horseback riding, camping, and more. Upon arrival, you have to put $2 per adult in an envelope & place it in the collection box. You take the stub and put it in your car. The drive in the park is really long. We didn't see hardly any signs except one for horse crossing & one for bike crossing. We passed a large shelter where a group was having trunk-or-treat for kids. We drove all around & found no signs showing us anything. We saw the lake & the camping area & even the place where the horse trailers parked. But we had no idea where any trails were.

We ended up just kind of looking lost in this big park & decided to just sit in our chairs, watch some horses & have a snack. It was kind of boring, but I was determined to be one with nature on this pretty day. I opened a Kinder Egg (yes, they were from our wedding in April 2009), and I got a witch as my toy. I have never ever gotten a Halloween themed toy from a Kinder Egg. What are the odds that I finally open one on Halloween & get a witch? Freaky (but cute). Vince got some unknown looking critter.

After a few minutes, we packed up to leave. And lo & behold....we found the perfect thing for Halloween! A grave yard from the 1800s. We must have missed it on the way in, but we parked & got out to look at all the Revolutionary War tombstones. Some were so old you couldn't read the writing. And some had trees growing right up through the tombstone. It was so cool to see that kind of history on Halloween.

After we got home, I washed the slugs out of the pumpkin & put some salt in it to get ready for the trick-or-treaters. My new neighbor and her 2 little girls were also outside. The 4 year old asked me if I was was going to come trick-or-treat at their house. I told her no because I didn't have a costume (total lie, but I wasn't going digging in my attic any time soon). She gave me a Tootsie Roll. Sweet.

We had about 15 trick-or-treaters. All of them were cute & quite little. I think the average age was about 5. Only one child who looked about 11 or 12 came by in a t-shirt & jeans carrying a Wal-mart bag. All the rest were dressed up with princess being the number one costume choice this year. Luckily, we aren't stuck with loads of candy this year. I think the pretzels were a great choice since we have to eat the left overs.