Weekend blessings

So I never did get around to doing a Friday five this week.  Life has been so, so busy.  I thought I'd check in today and share some blessings from the weekend.

Friday morning I met up with my cousin's wife who enjoys decorating with old things.  I thought she might be interested in having some of the old and rusty (some would say unusable) items from my parents' basement.  We've been setting some things aside for her to look over.  We finally connected and now she has some new-to-her decorative pieces and we have a few less items to take to the dump.  A good trade, I felt.

Friday afternoon was spent mostly cooking and baking for that evening, when our young friends Sam and Jennifer and their boys, plus our friend Noah, all joined us for supper.  I made a double recipe of a soup that we'd tried on Monday.  It's called Tomato Rice Soup (but it is much more than that!) and is from the Gooseberry Patch Christmas Blessings cookbook.  The soup includes diced tomatoes, chicken, rice, tomato soup, and more.  I didn't use canned tomato soup but created my own healthier substitute from my favorite old More With Less Cookbook.  (You can find the soup substitute recipes in this post: Frugal Cooking if you are interested.)  The soup is truly delicious and everyone enjoyed it.

I also made gluten-free cornbread, using this muffin recipe: Buttermilk Corn Muffins baked in a 9-inch square pan and using 1/3 cup maple syrup instead of sugar.  It came out fantastic and got rave reviews!

Recipe from Faithfully Gluten Free

For dessert I baked a sugar free chocolate cake, again using maple syrup, and frosted it with a peanut butter maple frosting.  Again, this turned out great.  I'll try and post with the link to the cake recipe, and the frosting formula in the coming week, as I want to do a bit of a report on how our 40-day sugar fast is working out so far.

We had a great time of fellowship around the meal and afterward worked on a session of the Bible study we're doing together.  This "six-week" study on the Sermon on the Mount is taking us much longer because of the way we're doing it, but hopefully we are all benefiting from the slower approach.  I know that I am!

Saturday morning we worked on tasks around the house early and I put in time on my Sunday School lesson. Then Mr. T dropped me off at my dad's house and I began doing some tasks there while he went off to pick up grandsons Sam and Josiah to help with a dump run and a trip to our local Habitat for Humanity Restore.

We spent nearly four hours at the house and got loads of things out of there, including an old kitchen stove from the cellar.  (It was a relic of the summertime baking business I had as a teen, but my mother also found it useful on hot summer days.) The dump and Restore runs were successful and we also prepared many boxes for the thrift store.

I returned home mid-afternoon (while Mr. T took the boys home) and made a pasta salad and frosted another chocolate maple cake, to take along to grandson Sam's birthday celebration that evening.  I squeaked in a 20-minute nap before it was time to leave.

Sam chose a supper of burgers with all the fixings (and I do mean all -- Sam is known in his family as the Condiment King) and we also enjoyed chips and pasta salad.  His cake was chocolate with peanut butter frosting (as was the one I brought along, though ours was free of refined sugar) and he had Reese's Peanut Butter Cup ice cream to accompany it.  A fun time.  I love it when someone opens a gift and shouts "YES!".

Sunday was another day of blessings.  We heard great messages at church, enjoyed wonderful fellowship with visiting friends, and took a walk together in the late afternoon.  The weather here has been beautiful -- sunny and warm -- so that's been yet another blessing.  We spent an hour or more working at my childhood home following our walk.

A blessed weekend for sure!