Labor Day!

Happy Labor Day! I hope everyone is enjoying their day off! I know I am!

I will start with a comment from my last post:

Megan, I love that you're continuing your education and that you'll be able to help support your family as well as use your skills & interests. I'm wondering, will Stevie be going back to school (I'm assuming she hasn't graduated from high school yet)? And does she have any plans to develop her marketable skills outside the home?

I am doing cooking school mostly because I don't know how to cook and I want to be good at it for my family. Catering might be something I will do but I am not wanting to do any restaurant jobs.

Stevie has her home school diploma and not a GED. Her plan is to be a wife and a mom and to have a big family and to be there for them. She is pretty set on this and when I saw her at church yesterday she looked the happiest I have ever seen her so I am thinking this is a good thing for her. It's not like she didn't have a choice. Lauren is the middle girl in the family and she wants to be a doctor and she has the grades to do it and everyone will help support her when the time comes. We are not like some groups that raise girls to be poly and the girls all have choices and Stevie chose this and her husband is happy about it because that is what he wanted too. As long as they are happy I will be happy for them.

Here is an easy basic recipe I did for church yesterday and you just make it as big as you want for your family or party.

Fancy Mashed Potatoes

5 pounds potatoes, peeled and boiled until soft.
4 cups half and half
1/4 cup olive oil
8 cloves of garlic, minced
1 head of cabbage cut into 1/4 inch wide strips about 1/2 inch long
3 onions minced
1 teaspoon oregano
Salt to taste or use none at all.

Sautee the onions, oregano, and garlic in the olive oil at a medium heat for about 2 minutes until they just start to brown. Put them in a mixing bowl.

Boil the cabbage for 3-4 minutes and remove it from the water as soon as it is a little soft. Do not cook it until is completely soft. It needs to be a little crispy. You can boil the cabbage with rosemary or bay leaves but if you use bay leaves remove them from the cabbage when you are done boiling.

Mash the potatoes with the half and half and mix them until they are smooth. Now gently stir in the cabbage and onions & garlic.

If you want to be really cool use a cooking torch to lightly brown and crisp the top of the mashed potatoes after you put them on the plate. Sprinkle with melted butter.

This is really good with beef and salmon but if you serve it with pork or a white fish then use only 1 clove of garlic for every 5 pounds of potatoes so the flavor of the meat is not overpowered by the garlic.


The weather here is finally starting to cool off but they say we will have 100's again this week. Yuck. I am so tired of the heat! I really can't wait for some cool weather. We have this beautiful fire place and it will be nice to have everyone around the fireplace on a cold night.

Pastor Jeff gave a really great sermon yesterday on why the Bible doesn't have any new parts to it. I didn't know that the Old Testament was old when Jesus was born and that the Jews thought it was done back then. So no one added to the Old Testament and then Jesus came along and the New Testament is supposed to be limited to things that were written from the time of Jesus and anything written after his time is not included.

Something else I never thought of is that the New Testament might be about Jesus but nothing in it was written by Jesus. It is all other people who wrote about him who are in the New Testament and Pastor Jeff said this makes the New Testament unique among different holy books because Jesus never wrote about himself and let other people write things down as witnesses to what he did. After church I said to Pastor Jeff that Jesus probably wrote letters to his family and to the Apostles and would it upset things if a letter written by Jesus were found someday? He said it would be something really important to read a letter written by Jesus even if it were just a letter to his parents. I think it would be nice to know what Jesus thought about things and to see it in his own words.

It is a little quieter in the house without Stevie and all the excitement of the wedding being over. Shari is a little quiet and I think she misses Stevie a lot more than she is saying. Steve is being Steve and Saturday night said me and Christie have to get busy filling up Stevie's empty room. Christie is back to trying to have a baby and I am sure I wrote this before but it is making her a lot happier. She is back to being herself after losing the baby earlier this year and trying to have another baby is doing something good for her.

It is a really beautiful day today so I am going to go out and do some stuff in the garden. I hope you all have a nice day!

Cuddling under a fluffy quilt on a cold night.