Anyone? Anyone?

I need some ideas for fun service projects for Relief Society. (If you are unfamiliar with Relief Society, it is an organization for women in my church. Each ward, or congregation, has one and all women 18 and older are members so it's a diverse group. We focus on service, education, and womanhood. It also happens to be the largest and oldest organization for women in the world!)

What have you done that was memorable, unique, inspiring, enriching, life changing? Or just have a good idea? Remember to click on the title of the post (Anyone? Anyone? in this case) to comment. Or email. Or call. Thanks!

The Sunday Evening Post, Issue 17

Or, Mmmm...

I'm so glad you want these recipes, Sara. Just remember to call them "Jessica's muffins" and "Jessica's Pie Crust"and it's okay with me to add "amazing" in the somewhere. Preferably just before "Jessica"...just kidding...how obnoxious...put it after.

Cookie-like Pie Crust


1 1/4 c. flour
2 T. sugar
1/4 t. salt
8 T margarine, room-temp soft
1 ounce cream cheese
1 1/2 T. oil

Grease a 9 inch pie plate. I use oil. Whisk dry ingredients and set aside. At med-high speed on a mixer (or like a crazy person if you are doing it by hand), cream margarine and cream cheese until smooth, about 2 min. Add dry ingredients while mixer going at med-low speed until like cornmeal and scrape down. Turn up the speed and mix until large clumps. Drizzle the 1 1/2 T oil in as mixing until dough texture forms. (You may need to add a bit more oil if it still is dry or crumbly.) Press into pie pan evenly (bonus, no rolling!). No pretty crust edge, just press it in.

Bake at 325 degrees for 35 minutes. Cool on wire rack.



Jumbo Blueberry Muffins

Struesel Topping
1/2 c. flour
1 t. cinnamon
1/2 c. packed brown sugar
1/4 c. butter

Muffins
2 c. flour
2 t. baking powder
1/4 t. baking soda
1/2 t. salt
2 eggs
3/4 c. brown sugar
4 T. butter, melted and cooled
3/4 c. butter milk (or 3/4 c. milk with a splash of lemon juice; let stand 5 min until curdled)
1 t. vanilla
1 cup frozen blueberries

Heat oven to 350 degrees and grease a jumbo muffin pan.
Whisk dry ingredients.
Whisk eggs and brown sugar until well blended. Gradually add melted butter, buttermilk, vanilla.
Stir in dry ingredients using no more than 26 good strokes. Gentle strokes. There should be a few clumps of flour.
Remove blueberries from freezer. It's very important to leave them in until the last moment possible or they will start to defrost and get soggy. Toss with 1 T. flour and carefully fold in the blueberries.
Fill jumbo 5-6 of the jumbo cups. Filling 5 makes for over the top large muffins. Filling all six of the cups make for more modest jumbo muffins.

Sprinkle ALL of the struessel topping over the muffins. It will look like a tremendous amount but as the bake and puff up, the topping will cover nicely. Trust me and don't skimp.

Bake for 30-35 minutes or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean.

*Thanks to Cooks Country magazine for a good portion of this recipe!

The Sunday Evening Post, issue 17

Or, a little ketchup.

I'm not sure how to respond to comments. So I'm going to "catch-up" a bit. Remember the $250 spring cleaning dollars? It's finally all spent...doing pretty much everything you all recommended minus the free brownie give away, which, Amy, happened to be my most favorite suggestion of all. It still makes me smile. Most of it went to a few free things we acquired and have fixed them up using the extra cash. This piano.

Jared's mom did a majority of the refinishing while she was here helping out after Ethan was born.

Here it in on it's back when we had to put some "stuff" into the pins before it could be properly tuned.



NJP, it is a nice sink. It was there when we moved in. It makes me smile when I clean it because it's pretty. The world needs more pretty sinks, yes?


Garage saling has very effectively whittled away a bit here and a bit there although I assure you it was all QUALITY stuff. My sister-in law Melissa was here this past week (along with Brad and Linnea which was the second time in two weeks---eat your heart out everyone) and she came with me to a couple around the block. She got to witness my infamous hemming and hawing along with talked me into a couple of deals. Thanks. I went back and got those two toy trucks. Isaac's birthday is around the corner and I'm so classy I picked up his gifts right there.

I've been cooking some.

Jared's bday cake. A pound cake and a pound of whipped cream.


Lemon Mereingue pie...this is the best pie crust ever. As a rule I use butter in baking and never buy margarine for anything but for some reason we had no butter and a cube of margarine in the fridge so there you go. I adjusted a few other things like from not having all the ingredients and a great cookie-like crust emerged.


We had some to-die-for blueberry muffins at a friends house. When pressed for the recipe he said he just combined a bunch of recipes he found off the internet. I hate that. So I did my own little search and combine and got these. YUM!


Natalie thought so too.

In case you didn't know, I make some sure good hamburgers. Jared can't always attest to this because he loads up with crazy toppings. This is a hamburgercheetoacononi not to be confused with his regular hamburgerfritoritoringaroundtheroni.




Here I am enjoying Chocolate Chip Cookies for the first time. Did this photo capture my "mmmmmmmmmmmmmm" well enough?

I didn't think so.


I must say though, it wasn't what I imagined tasting chocolate again I expected a little more died-and-gone-to-heaven reaction. But, it was instead a little more like, "hun...okay...pretty good." I meant to photograph everything I ate that day but got as far as breakfast. You probably don't need photos to know what it consisted of.


This jar of Nutella has been in my fridge for six months. Unbelievable. And no, I didn't eat the whole jar!


Jared through me a surprise death by chocolate party that night. I think I was a little dead in the morning. Everyone brought something chocolate. We had:
chocolate chip cookies (more) (and more)
french silk pie
rolos
m&m's
chocolate milk
(are you sick yet?)
chocolate dipped strawberries...minus the chocolate (?)
rocky road ice cream
brownie chunk ice cream
grasshopper cookies
peanutbutter filled chocolate cookies
(go throw up now)

Yes, Denise, it's that need for chocolate is kinda gone in me. It's no longer self-medicating. This new found self-control has spilled over into a few other areas of my life and for that I'm grateful.
So, one of my friends there cornered me later on in the week and asked if I wanted to go sugarless for two weeks with her. I (gulp) said, "Yeah, that sounds like fun!" What do I get myself into?!?! Completely sugarless, folks. Honey is okay and obviously natural sugars in fruit, etc OKAY.
I didn't realize how much sugar I was eating mindlessly. Yikes. Melissa, it is hard. How did you do it for a month? I think my cousin Dawn did it for a year as a teenager. Whoa.


Other events since turning the big @&. :)

I let my drivers license expire. Whoops. So Saturday found me practicing parallel parking over and over and over and...on the curb in front of our house. This is just one of my free comic relief shows I've put on for our neighbors since living here. I did pass. And I will tell you my judge guy (what are they called? the people who have to drive around with you and pass you or not) almost fell asleep TWICE! I wish I would have driven an automatic for the test. I so would have used arm signals instead of a blinker but trying to shift and stick one arm out the window? I'm pretty sure steering with my knees would have lost me a few points.




The kids are fine and happy. Somehow Natalie is fixated on campers and wants to know what our dream campers would be like. Yes. Campers. Here she is pretending to be a strawberry. ??? She gets that from Jared. Although my mom would probably counter by reminding me when I was a piece of toast during a game of charades. Oh, and a pile of laundry folding itself.

She brought me a bouquet from outside. Nice change from the usual dandelion bunch.


I found these sticky-note people all over the desk one day. The black ones have a circle with a dash through it to signify No Frowny Faces allowed and the green ones have no "NO" signage and just mean Happy Faces allowed. I posted them on the fridge to remind me. She also drew a crazy looking face with a "No" sign around it on my June's budget sheet. She said it meant "No Nervous faces." ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!! That speaks volumes.
Isaac is almost 2. That's all. Isaac is almost 2.

You can guess what he was doing while Natalie was being a strawberry.


Ethan. What a fun, fun baby. He's topping the growth charts in the 95th percentiles. He does everything normal like get all wiggly and cute when someone talks to him and his hands are endlessly fascinating. Very darling all around.

boys will be boys

Babies. Babies in the bath. Hardly a better photo opt. Really, we are the only ones who care to see 30 pictures of him in the sink. Perhaps there will be an opportune time to harass him in his teens with these, but mostly it is nice to know we will be WELL stocked with pictures of our kids to delight us to no end well through our golden and silver years.

So during our little shoot getting cute picts like Exhibit A...


We also caught Exhibit B...

The Sunday Evening Post, Issue 16

Or, Self Discipline what?



Tomorrow's a big day. Around the first of the year the thought came to me, "How long could I go without chocolate?" Oh, a year? No. Way too long. Six months? Yeah, six months. And then it was sort of a challenge to myself that I couldn't back away from. So, tomorrow's a big day.