Month: November 2007

I really like buying ornaments for my friends who celebrate Christmas – and this morning, I got an email from the B’ham Museum of Art for their gift shop’s ‘Holiday Gift Guide 2007’ – and one of the things featured was a selection of Gee’s Bend ornaments.

Oh! And if you have a Frank Fleming Christmas ornament, you are lucky. Lucky-lucky. I went to a local gallery to see about buying a couple for some friends as presents, and guess what? Apparently Frank didn’t bring his kiln with him when he moved to Huntsville, so it sounds like he doesn’t want to sell any more of them, and even the ones that they had at the gallery may be going back with him instead of being sold at all. So…this may be the end of any of his ceramic items. Even his bronze pieces are hard to find right now. I have one of his bronze calla lilies, but I would love, love, love, LOVE to get one of his catfish for Av. If any of you know where I can find one, please email me! Thanks!!

Last year, the Alabama Folklife Commission issued “Bullfrog Jumped” – they describe the cd as:

…a collection of songs sung by mothers, grandmothers, school teachers, babysitters, and children across Alabama. During the summer of 1947 they sat at their kitchen tables and on their front porches in front of a portable disc recorder and enthusiastically shared their favorite folksongs with Professor Byron Arnold, a “songcatcher.”

Shug and I listen and sing along to the songs on Bullfrog Jumped during our morning time every day, and we love it. There are 42 different songs! Samples are available to listen to at Amazon here. The artwork is by Bethanne Hill.

The other casserole for Thanksgiving was corn pudding. It takes no time to put together but it really turns out great.

Ingredients:
2 cans creamed corn
3 tbsp butter, melted
3 eggs, beaten
2 cups milk
1-1/2 tbsp cornstarch
salt and pepper (I use lots of freshly ground pepper in this), some cayenne too
butter for the baking dish

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 350*.
In a mixing bowl, add all the ingredients and stir to mix well.
Butter the baking dish (I used a 10.5 x 14.75″ dish because that makes it a thin layer with lots of nice crust, but you could use a smaller dish and that would make it even creamier inside since it would be a thicker layer) and pour the mixture in the dish.

If you use a large baking dish, this will only take 30-40 minutes to bubble well and bake through. If you use a smaller dish, it may take closer to an hour. When it is nice and bubbly in the middle and golden brown, you know it’s done:

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving! Av’s mom put me in charge of the pies and two other dishes, so I decided to make a couple of casseroles.

I love green bean casserole, but rather than doing the usual recipe that has cream of mushroom soup and those weird canned fried onions on top, I tried to do it a little more home-made…and it turned out *so* wonderful! From now on, I’m calling this *the* green bean casserole!

Ingredients (serves 12-14):
1-1/2 sticks butter
2 white or yellow onions diced
1 white or yellow onion sliced very thinly (for onion rings)
16 oz. button mushrooms, sliced into 4-5 pieces each
8 tbsp flour
4 cups hot milk
2 28oz cans green beans (I should have blanched fresh beans but I was lazy!)
12 oz. freshly grated parmesan cheese
oil for making onion rings
flour for dredging onion rings
salt, pepper
10.5″ x 14.75″ baking dish

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 400*.
First, cook the two diced onions in 1/4 stick of butter, then when they are softened, add the mushrooms and cook until heated through:

In a very large saucepan, whisk together the butter and the hot milk along with the flour. Once that’s nice and smooth, add the green beans along with the onion/mushroom mixture. Season with salt and ground pepper.

Take half the contents of the saucepan and pour into a baking dish. Add half the freshly grated parmesan:

…then pour the rest of the saucepan’s contents into the baking dish, and cover with the remaining parmesan.

Be careful when putting it in the oven, because it is really-really heavy. Set the baking dish in the oven and cook for about 20 minutes – it will be nice and bubbly. While it’s baking, make the onion rings. Take the sliced onion and dredge the rings into flour, then place in a hot oiled skillet and fry until done (these are nice if they are super-thin). Season these when they first come out of the pan.

Once the casserole has cooked for 20 minutes, layer the onion rings on top and it’s all done!

Every year, I make this pumpkin pie recipe – it’s different from the usual, and it’s excellent.

Ingredients:
1-1/2 c. buttermilk
1 cup pumpkin
2 tbsp butter, softened
3 egg yolks, beaten
2 tbsp flour
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp baking soda
1-1/4 c. sugar
pie crusts (I always double this recipe, which makes three regular-crust pies, or two deep-dish pies)

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 400*.
Add the buttermilk, pumpkin, butter, and beaten egg yolks to a large bowl, then add the flour, cinnamon, sugar, and baking soda, and mix well.

Bake for 10 minutes at 400* then lower the temperature to 350* and cook for another 40 minutes. Check on it at 40 minutes and then every five minutes until it stops being jiggly in the middle.

I want to start making a scrapbook for Shug soon – what I’d like to do is to make the first book of him from our first ultrasounds to him being six months old, then do another every six months.

I’ve been thinking about doing it digitally and making it into a real “book” using either Blurb or Lulu. One great thing about either of those is that it would be super-easy to order several and give them to different family members and friends.

We have tons of ultrasounds – in fact, this is the very first one, when Shug was only about 5-1/2 weeks:

It was our very first peek at Shug – we had a high-risk pregnancy so rather than getting two ultrasounds during the whole nine months, we got something like eleven or twelve!

(this is one of our very first pics together:)

Now Shug’s 4-1/2 months old and is talking and giggling all the time (and rolling over both ways!). He is so much fun!

Leslie wants us to get together and do a traditional scrapbook. There are lots of fantastic ideas for page layouts here in the Scrapbooking Flickr group, and we got one of those big new scrapbooks from the Martha Stewart line at Michael’s to play with. I’m going to download the software for Blurb and see if I can get started on our first digital scrapbook this week during his nap-times, too…fun!