food – Page 2 – Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs..

So, in my mind I view these updates as different from my Coffee Catch Ups. I feel like in my coffee catch up posts, I focus on the big events. In these, which are more rare, I feel like I share more about the smaller, more everyday, the little things in our lives. What we are doing for joy, the small things, our hobbies. I don’t know if that is what actually happens in these posts, but that is what I aim for.

One thing I have been doing is baking more. With prices at the grocery store getting higher, I have been trying to figure out ways to change our eating habits, by making more and buying less processed versions. I obviously don’t have time to make scratch versions of everything we eat- that would be a fulltime job all on its own, I think. But I have started with some easy, quick things. For one, I “make” my own granola to put on yogurt. That is super simple! Just some oats, maple syrup, honey, cinnamon, whatever bits you want to put in it, and then pop it in the oven for a little bake. I eat this almost everyday for lunch!

I have also been making Wyatt’s beloved granola bars. He loves Kind bars, which are a bit pricey. So I searched online for something to make in place of them. I didn’t find an exact replacement, but I found a recipe for crumbly jam bars that looked interesting so I went for it. The first batch I made was half jam, half plain, because Wyatt is a picky kid with plain tastes. Much like his mother was as a child and still sort of is as an adult. He was not a fan of the version with jam in the middle, but loved the plain version. Mine look like sawdust blocks honestly, but they are so good! They are have this brown buttery caramely oaty taste. I can’t describe it exactly, but they are very good. Even Billy, who is not a fan of that sort of thing, will sneak one now and again. The best thing about them is they only use 8 ingredients and take half an hour tops to make! Some of the ingredients were a bit more up front, but when added up compared to buying actual granola bars it is still cheaper overall, because I can make so many with the ingredients. There is no refined sugar in them either, and while the coconut sugar really isn’t that much better for you, it does have a lower glycemic index so I tell myself they are better. This is the recipe that I use, although I do mix it up a bit.

These are the berry oat bars from the blog The Oven Light. The only things that I do differently are using different flour (I use a white wheat flour), and omit the jam since Wyatt likes them better without. They are super simple and take me no time at all to whip up for the week.

We have also been making our own cookies. I found an awesome recipe for chocolate chip cookies, and it makes so many cookies that we freeze the dough in small bunches to use later.

Later this week or maybe the weekend, whenever I have time, I am going to try making English muffin bread, since we only really eat bread in the morning as toast, and also a different cookie I found last night on Pinterest. They are honey pistachio cookies, and they sound fantastic! Wyatt loves pistachios, and eats them as a snack everyday. I think I will sub the sugar in the recipe with coconut sugar since we like it in the bars. This recipe is from Recipe Yumm.

I have also been keeping up with my embroidery, and with my coloring. I love to sit and color in my cute little book with my new markers while Wyatt paints with his paint sticks. I love these darn paint sticks. Wyatt loves to paint and wants to paint every day – and sometimes it is just a darn mess and a pain to do all the brushes and different paint and water, and well you get it. So on days where I just want it to be simple, he uses the paint sticks. He loves them – and so do I. It’s a very relaxing activity, to sit quietly and paint and color and listen to music. I have my tea, he has his water. I love the simple coloring books best. I don’t want complicated. We watch a YouTuber sometimes who reviews adult coloring books – I can’t remember her name but I will update this when I remember it, or look it up.

Cozy Spaces || Alcohol Markers || Paint Sticks

And then this week, inspired by both Jeanie from Marmalade Gypsy and Lisa from Boondock Ramblings, I have gotten back into my genealogy! I have found out a lot of information, including a little mystery! I had started my family tree a long time ago, before most of this stuff was online, and had a tree of names and was working slowly on sending away for the proof. Well, I was in my early twenties and soon lost interest. I saved everything though, like the little goblin I am, and pull it out every so often and look at it, and dabble. This week though I have gone a little nuts with it. And then I found some information that is super confusing!

Ok so, let me lay this out. My dad’s great-grandmother, Marie, married his great-grandfather, Alexander “Sandy” Walker in 1905. She lists her name as Marie Domaine, and her parents names as James Domaine and Josephine Bernard from France, although they supposedly lived in Pennsylvania, where Marie lived. However, I can only find one of these names, Josephine Bernard. In the 1900 census, a Josephine Bernard, born in France, and her daughter Marie, also born in France (in the same year that our Marie Domaine was born), worked as a housekeeper for a widower named James Cadamore. Josephine was also listed as a widower. Then I find Josephine Bernard later, married to James Cadamore. I find nothing of Marie Domaine or that last name, and no James Domaine. The area is the exact same, the same city in Allegheny county, they have to be the same people, right? But where did the Domaine come from? Did Marie leave home and create a new identity? Lisa suggested that Domaine is her biological father’s name, who if she is the Marie in the census, was born in Belgium. What is the story here? The dates and location and most of the names fit – just that Domaine is weird. What do you all think?

And this is it from me today! I am off to find some more coffee. I hope that whatever you do today, that you do something that makes you smile, my friends!

And don’t forget, we have drop in crafternoons! Our next one is May 24th. If you are interested in dropping by, send me an email at crackercrumblife@gmail.com!

Hello everyone!! I hope you are having a good week. We have had a mostly relaxing week, which has been refreshing after the two months of crazy we went through. Next week we have a bunch of appointments again, but this week was a nice reprieve.

A week ago Friday we had Wyatt’s preop appointment. This is the first time we have had a planned surgery with Wyatt and it feels so different. All of his previous surgeries have been emergency and I didn’t have time to think about them. They just sort of happened while I was in a state of shock. This one I have months to perseverate on it – however that also gives me time to prepare everything. I had a lot of questions, about bathing and recovery time and the length of the surgery (3 hours) and just all sorts of things. I think the surgeon was slightly amused at my notebook of questions and comments, and at one point I mentioned something about Wyatt, and my dramatic son who likes to troll me, was acting out what I asked about. The doctor had a chuckle and looked at me smiling and said “Your son is messing with you,” and I was like, yeah, I know he does that all the time. Because Wyatt does like to mess me with me, the turkey. When the doctor walked out at the end of the appointment he ruffled Wyatt’s hair and said “Don’t give your mom too much trouble.” It made me feel better in a way – he seems very stoic and quiet, the surgeon, but he picked up on Wyatt’s personality very quickly. It was reassuring, to have Wyatt be seen like that.

Afterwards we treated ourselves to a trip to a French-Asian bakery in Ann Arbor. If you are ever in the area, you must visit. It was the best pick-me-up to follow that appointment. We went to Tous les Jours, which is near Jackson Road, and Schuler’s Books, if you want to combine a visit to a fantastic bakery and a bookstore. Just saying. Anyway, my brother Devin, SIL Chrissy, and the girls (Mermaid and Hurricane) went out there few weeks ago and told us that we needed to go. When I saw that it was a hop skip and a jump from the hospital, I was like perfect.

There was so much to choose from! It is definitely a place where you want one of everything. When you walk in, it is a nice spacious room with tables on one side, and baked goods on the other. Some of it is self-serve, and some of the treats are in bakery cases at the front, things like the macarons and cakes. We started with the self-serve, obviously, and may have gone a little crazy. They just had so many options! Chestnut bread, strawberry croissants, ube cream donuts, taro cream bread, apple caramel pie, different warm croissants like ham and cheese or garlic and cheese – literally too many things to name. We chose to buy a variety and share them among the three of us, each of us picking out things out. Wyatt picked a chocolate cream filled donut, and accidentally touched a shrimp kimchi cake in the process so we got that too, I picked a caramel apple pie pastry, Billy wanted the ham and cheese croissant based on Devin’s recommendation. Then we also added a milk cream red bean bread, cranberry cream cheese bread (these are like little buns), a blueberry bun, and two macarons, a pistachio flavored one for Wyatt and lemon for Billy.

We all had our special pick in the car on the way home since we had gone to the office super early and needed to eat still. Billy and I loved ours; Wyatt did not like his at all. It was very fluffy airy chocolate and it exploded all over him when he bit into it and he hated that. The only thing he actually liked was his macaron. I think he was wary of the other pastries after his chocolate experience. We also tried the cranberry cream cheese bread thinking Wyatt might like that; he didn’t, but I think under different circumstances he would. Billy and I loved that too. Big surprise. Lol. Billy said though that the best thing was the shrimp kimchi cake that we bought because Wyatt accidentally touched it, so that turned out to be a good thing!

Then, on Sunday, we had my mom, Devin, Chrissy, and the girls over to celebrate my mother’s birthday. It was a nice time – my mom just gets such a kick out of the kids. It was good to see her smile and laugh. She has gotten very frail everyone, and I hate it. It’s hard to watch your parents age. Just why did it seem to happen so fast and all of a sudden? It was nice having her here though, and the kids had a lot of fun playing. Hurricane had me running all over the house. She will come up and very seriously take your hand and lead you off somewhere to play. For some reason she was intrigued by my bedroom that night. I guess there is a lot to see in there. It’s sort of messy.