Desert Laura

Thanksgiving week is over and now I'm enjoying a long weekend of resting and relaxing.  Mr. C and I had a nice time with friends up in the McDowell mountains.  There was lots of good food and super nice people to spend the day with. I'm getting ready for some DIY projects for the wedding,and hoping that they're all as simple as they appear in my head.  My plan is to get these done by January.  Some things on my list: Make invitations Make soy candles (about 40 of them) Make thank-you cards Make more olives Sew linen table runners So, our next date night idea was to go out and shoot pool and play darts.  So exciting!  I'm awful at pool and haven't played in a really long time, but I was looking forward to the challenge. We started the evening by making a really good dinner of sauteed vegetables with tempeh in a curry simmer sauce.  We popped open a very cheap bottle of red wine (thank you Trader Joe's for selling wine cheaper than Two-buck Ch...

Mr. C and I have been together for a while and we love to have "date nights."  We try to go out, just the 2 of us, at least once a week.  Dinner, at least.  Every couple weeks we get our dancing shoes on and go to the nearest Blues bar and dance to the old-school R&B cover band...they're great, and we absolutely love to dance .    The other week I had the bright idea of changing things up a bit.  Try to come up with creative things to do on our date nights.  This is a big city and I thought it would be fun to find ways to see it all...and do it all under $30.  So, Mr. C and I each had 5 sheets of blank paper to write 5 different date night ideas on it.  We put these 10 sheets in a jar and every week we would pull a sheet from the jar and plan a night based on what was written. So, this week we went to see a movie...at a drive-in.  There are only 2 in the city, and I haven't been to a drive-in in a few ye...

So I'm seeing a counselor.  It's not a bad thing, really.  I actually like to go every month to chat.  I mean, I'm a social worker and being a counselor is what I do.  So why shouldn't I have some time to be on the receiving end of things for a change?  Lately, the conversations have been about my family (actually, they're usually about my family).  But getting married brings up lots of things that I'd like to think I've resolved, put away in a nice box wrapped snuggly in pretty tissue, never to come out again.  Normally, 6 out of 7 days, the box stays put.  My life is good, healthy, happy. But now that I'm getting married I find myself dealing with my box of old family stuff. I never pretend or claim that I have a typical, functional family.  I think most of my friends know otherwise.  So it's no surprise that I've tried to live the last 14 years of my life in the healthiest way possible.  That means finding some distance b...

So I thought it would be a nice idea to make my own olives for the wedding.  It can't be that difficult and we have tons of olive trees in Phoenix.  So, a couple of weeks ago I drove around with my step ladder and 5 gallon bucket in search for the perfect olive trees.  Los Olivos park was a good start, as I had a suspicion that they had olives there. About an hour later I walked away with my bucket almost full of juicy, ripe olives.  It turns out there are lots of ways of making olives, so figuring out which recipe was the best was difficult.  In the end, I hope these recipes worked! Picking olives at Los Olivos Park A whole park full of olive trees! Separating the green from the black...cleaning and slicing each one. The finished product...4 jars of Kalamatas and 5 jars of Mediterranean Kalamata Olives - Brine 1 Gallon water 2 cups pickling salt 4 cups red wine vinegar Put olives in jar, cover with brining solution. Top with ...