YUM!!!

I love this recipe!  Love, love, love it!!!  My sister make the best fruit pizza!!  Even though I make this recipe, it's always better when she makes it.  I think that's true of all recipes.  I used to love to cook.  Used to.  Everyone told me I was a great cook, but I thought my food was so so.  I reckon we love the cooking of others simply because we don't cook it ourselves.  My mother was a fabulous cook.  She no longer cooks because she has horrible arthritis and has trouble getting around, but back in her day, she was the best.  People would "drop by" our house at supper time just to eat her food.  Of course, they were eating my food, too, but somehow there was always enough  food at our house.  She grew up with 4 best friends and they all double dog swore they would live near one another when they grew up.  And they did.  Mom and one of those sworn friends were ALWAYS cooking and baking.  One would bake a cake and call the other and say, "I just baked a ______ cake.  Would you run over and try it for me?"  There was always someone in our house eating something.  Food was central to any entertainment that went on in our house.  Mom was in a bridge group that met once a week.  When she entertained at our house, the cooking would commence about 3 days before the appointed bridge day.  She would whip up some reeeeeely good dishes. She always laid out a spread worthy of her girlfriends.  And we would reap the benefits of the leftovers.  She always made enough for the family.  When they had parties, there was an abundance of food.  My parents were also in a group of friends who played cards just about every weekend night, so we rotated with them from house to house on the weekends and the food was out of this world!!  Actually, this group of friends was the same girlfriends, but included huzbins.  I guess huzbins are crucial to a good poker game.  In case the wimmenfolk start fist fighting.  There was never anything that exciting happening at these games.  The interesting thing about my mother's cooking is that when she married, she couldn't cook a lick.  My dad's mother and his sister taught her to cook.  They, too, were fantastic cooks.  Another memory - my sister and I would plead with Mom to buy us store bought treats.  Mom baked for us cookies, pies, cakes and the best sweet rolls, but we wanted Oreos.  Proves how stupid kids can be.  Somewhere along the way, my sister also turned out to be a fabulous cook.  Odd, because we weren't allowed in the kitchen, except to wash and dry the dishes.  Mom's OCD.....  Enjoy my sister's recipe and do it soon - summer fruits are on the wane...

Oodles of Doodles

I can't just doodle.  You know, make strange little marks on a paper.  Or nice objects on a paper.  Or pretty pictures on a paper.  I consider pretty pictures on a paper paint material and I must paint them.  Another doodle I sometimes do (but haven't done in quite a while, now that I think about it) is scribble doodling.  I take a pencil and close my eyes and just let my mind go blank.  This is relatively easy, as my family tells me there's little in my mind.  Then I hold the pencil and just let it flow on the paper.  It goes everywhere.  After about a minute, I stop and open my eyes.  I ignore the paper for a while, but come back to it and behold!!  Up pops an image!  Mind you, it's sometimes not a cohesive picture, but more a representation of something.  And it's almost always a drawing within the scribbles, which means I will erase all the scribbles around the perceived drawing, then I'll ink the vital scribble lines, then paint inside the lines.  This is a fantastic activity for kids.  It's also a fantastic activity for adults, especially those who say, "I can't draw anything."  Oh yes you can.  Look at these - I came, I scribbled, I saw.  I saw a mama reading to her child, a woman sewing, and a jester.  I'm sure a psychologist could tell me that I see what I want to see.  Duh...  That's the objective here.  My parents read to me a lot, I read to my children a lot.  I've done much, much, much sewing in my lifetime.  And I used to be a jester in a royal court.  Seriously.  Not really, but I do like to laugh a lot and act like a fool.  Truthfully, my entire family likes to laugh and act like fools.  Every Christmas for years, we would create a "Stupid Christmas Photo" to send to all our friends.  One year, the photo involved the huzbin and kids standing over me with angry faces while I was sprawled on the floor with X's on my eyes.  Another photo we all wore a King Tut mask.  Another one was the family in a rubber horse head.  Those are some that quickly come to mind.  There are others, but I don't want you to think ill of me.  Now that I think about it, the entire family is a pack of jesters, all wanting to entertain and make merry all the time.  Like last week, my mother went to visit her sister in a nursing facility.  My mother has terrible arthritis in her spine and has to use a walker.  She's also pretty much doubled over at a right angle.  As she was trying to push open the door to leave the facility, two aides came over and asked, "And just where do you think you're going?"  They tried to escort her back to her room.  When the rest of us heard that story, we laughed and laughed and laughed.  She didn't realize she was making the rest of us merry!!!  But she did find it humorous.   Good thing she can laugh at herself.  Sometimes.  Sometimes not, but that's a whole lifetime of stories I'll save for another time.  Look at these scribbles for now.

Doodles and More

Sometimes girl's just gotta doodle.  Doodling helps me create something when I don't want to make a painting.  Doodling is good for the soul.  When I was a little girl, my sister and I colored every day.  Our favorite coloring book was a "Bride" coloring book.  It was a thick book, with lots of pages just waiting for our crayons (Hello, my name is Barb and I sniff crayons).  The Bride coloring book followed a pretty young thing from dating days to her honeymoon.  My favorite pages were always the pages with flowers - I would color those first.  Then I hit the pages with dresses.  I would color the dresses up and make them all gorgeous.  My sister would do the same.  I am left handed, she is right handed so it made for some great double coloring.  I would color the left page, she would color the right page at the same time.  Oh my, we did have some beautiful pages in that book, but we never colored the bride's boyfriend/groom.  Why would we?  He had nothing lovely to color.  We had that book (hidden in a desk) for years until our OCD throw away everything not nailed down mother got her hands on it.  I would love to have it now.  I would color all the flowers, then all the dresses.  What does this have to do with doodling??  Nothing.

Dress Up

When I was a little girl, my sister and I had a closet containing dress up clothes.  Our aunt was married to a band leader, so she got to nightclub around and look all fabulous and glamorous.  When she tired of wearing the same thing over and over, she would pass the goods to us and we would trot around wearing evening gowns and high heels that were held up by ropes and belts.  We were also fabulous and glamor

ous.  We thought we were and that's all that matters.  I remember one very full slip that was the bomb.  It was a black satin tiered job, with different colored ribbons separating the tiers.  Pair it with a striped tee and several pins holding it up and I was stylin and profilin!!  It made me feel soooo good.  Little girls love to dress up still.

Today is August 25.  Hard to believe.  The weather here is just beautiful, but cooler than usual and the humidity is low, which is a rare summer occurrence in my part of the world.  Therefore, I'm thinking of autumn.  Not that I want to think about autumn right now - I love warm (hot) weather.  So this post is helping me think of springtime again.  I made this back in the early April of this year.  It makes me feel happy to see a little girl playing with chicks.  When I was 3, I was spending some time at my grandparents farm and spent the better part of an afternoon trying to take a chicken into the house.  Pick up chicken, carry chicken to door, place chicken on porch, open door, turn around and look for chicken who walked away.  Repeat about 40 times and you have an afternoon's activity for your child. 

If you go to just about any store in my town right now, you'll see the leftover school supplies and the beginnings of the Halloween goods.  Therefore, one must assume that Halloween is right around the corner.  The August corner.  That's not really true, of course, but we had some cooler weather a few weeks ago for a day or so and I thought of Halloween.  We live in the sticks and our children are grown and gone so we don't decorate for Halloween.  I've never ever had a trick or treater.  Sad.  I like to see the kids in costumes and would love to give them an overdose of sugar, but it's not to be.  So I have to celebrate the holiday by creating some Halloween pix.  I made this one on watercolor paper and used colored pencils.  It makes the picture a little rough, but I like to try different stuff every now and then.  Like going to the grocery store with no underwear.  Not really.  I would never do that. 

Oh, I have another little Halloween goodie.  I painted this one with watercolors a few days ago.  I copied this one from a vintage post card.  I like it!

Beginnings

Today I

begin the effort to be honest with myself.  I love to create and I want to keep a journal and make myself post what I'm doing.  I'll also be able to keep track of what I'm doing, so at the end of the month, I don't have to wonder what I did with my time and why I'm not getting anything else done.  I will be able to look at this blog and see that I DID do something.  Something creative.  Because I have to make stuff. 

I made these cupcakes (sadly, not in the oven) last summer.  My garden was blooming beautifully, so I assumed the cupcakes would, too.  At least these lasted.  They're not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but they got my paintbrush wet and me seated and trying to paint.  I love watercolors.  And cupcakes.