Favorite Ingredients Friday for February 8

For Favorite Ingredients Friday today, the theme is Valentine’s/Chocolate. Right away I thought of this wonderful dessert!

DOUBLE CHOCOLATE TORTE

1 package fudge brownie mix (13x9-inch size) plus the eggs, oil and water it calls for
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips, melted
1/2 cup butter or margarine, softened

2 cups whipped topping
Chocolate or heart-shaped sprinkles

Prepare brownie mix as package directs for fudge-like brownies. Spread batter in a greased & floured 9-inch round cake pan. (Or do as I do and don’t bother with greasing & flouring -- just place a 9-inch round of wax paper in the bottom of the cake pan.) Bake at 350º for 38-42 minutes or until center springs back when lightly touched. Cool for 10 minutes.

Invert onto a serving plate and cool completely. In a bowl, stir together the chocolate and butter until smooth. Spread over brownie layer; refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Just before serving, top with the whipped topping. Decorate with sprinkles.

Yield: 9-12 servings.

This recipe is so easy and takes such ordinary ingredients, yet produces something really special! You might already have all of the ingredients on hand. It is decadent, for sure. I found this recipe in an early Quick Cooking magazine.

If you would like to see more recipes with this theme, check out Favorite Ingredients Friday
and see what others have shared today. Happy baking!

Show & Tell Friday for February 8

For Show & Tell today, I thought I would share all of the beautiful snow we are seeing up here. We got about 6 or 7” in yesterday’s storm, but it amounted to quite a bit on top of all the snow we already had. This is the sort of heavy wet snow that clings to tree limbs. It looks really odd to see several inches of snow just standing atop tree branches. It still looks like that today; the snow is not melting or being blown off by the wind. In addition, we are expecting snow showers most of the day today!

Here's a snow-laden evergreen branch:
The snow is just sitting on top of tree branches:
A snow-covered bush:
Snowy trees:
Snowy treetops:
Next to our front porch:
Snowshoe tracks:
A pileated woodpecker has been busy here:
I think this little bush looks just like a snowflake!

Hope you have enjoyed the show & tell. To see what others have shared, visit There is No Place Like Home and check out the links. Show & Tell Friday is a highlight of my week!

A light over the stove

When we built our home, we didn’t do a particularly great job planning the lighting in the kitchen. There’s a light over the sink, and then another overhead light in the middle of the room. We added a fluorescent light under a cabinet. But there’s no light over the stove, an omission that our friend Dick immediately noticed. He knows my hubby leads an extremely busy life, but for a number of years he has ragged him about the lack of a light over the stove. In fact, one time, just before Dick and his wife came by for a visit, we hung a dollar-store lantern on a nail over the stove where a clock had once hung. Then my hubby called Dick into the kitchen and proudly pointed out the light over the stove. Time has gone on and the lantern, no longer working, continues to hang over the stove.

Last Saturday afternoon, Mr. T proposed an excursion to Lowe’s and Home Depot. He has a little bit more free time than he once had (but not much!), and he wanted to go look for a real light to go over the stove. He was thinking to use a type of swag lighting that could plug into an outlet, so that he wouldn’t need to tear into the walls or ceiling to rewire anything. (He had helped our son-in-law install this sort of swag lamp on our last visit to Nevada, and thought it would work well for what we needed over the stove.)

Our search was fruitless. The man at Lowe’s told us they used to carry all sorts of lamps like we were looking for, but no more. It seems maybe we waited just a little bit too long to put a light over the stove!

However, we managed to still make our trip worthwhile by stopping for supper at our favorite diner. A meat loaf dinner for Mr. T and a hot turkey sandwich for me, plus a shared dessert of Toll House Pie, went a long way toward assuaging our disappointment over the light.

Our next strategy is to check the thrift stores and consignment shops... whenever we can find a little free time. Maybe we will have a light over the stove by the next time Dick visits.

Menu Plan Monday for February 4

Menu Plan Monday again! Mondays seem to come around so quickly. As I was thinking about menu planning, I was reminded that I have been planning my menus for many, many years. One time, probably a year or two before we got married, I remember visiting the home of a young, very busy couple. On the fridge or a cabinet door, I can't remember now, was posted the menu for the week. I was SO impressed! And I decided right then and there that I was going to do that very same thing. I have made a menu plan for all the years since. It really is a huge help. It's encouraging to me to visit I'm an Organizing Junkie and see that often well over 100 people are sharing their menus. So if you need menu planning ideas, go visit Laura and check out all the links to menus!


This week's menu features some repeats, since there were some days last week when particular menus didn't get used or got rearranged. Here's my plan:

MONDAY: Herbed Tomato Soup, Grilled Cheese & Walnut Sandwiches

TUESDAY: Pizza, Pasta Salad

WEDNESDAY: Mexican Beef Stew, Cornbread

THURSDAY: Macaroni & Cheese, Green Beans, Coleslaw

FRIDAY: Spinach Tortellini Soup, Bread or Rolls

SATURDAY: Shepherd's Pie, Green Beans, Applesauce

SUNDAY: Curried Chicken with Peaches, Rice, Asparagus Stir-fry Blend

Favorite Ingredients Friday for February 1

For Favorite Ingredients Friday today, I would like to share a favorite biscuit recipe of mine. These are the best baking powder biscuits around, in my humble opinion. Yesterday I made a batch of them and cut them in heart shapes to give to my parents with a jam/jelly assortment for their wedding anniversary.

EGG BISCUITS

3 c. flour
4 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 Tblsp. sugar
3/4 tsp. salt
3/4 tsp. cream of tartar
3/4 c. cold butter or margarine
3/4 c. milk
1 egg, lightly beaten

Preheat oven to 400º. Into a large bowl, sift the flour, baking powder, sugar, salt, and cream of tartar. With a pastry blender, cut in the butter or margarine until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. In a small bowl, beat together the milk and egg. Add to flour mixtures and stir until flour is moistened.

Turn the dough out on a lightly floured surface. Knead dough once or twice and roll out to a 1/2-inch thickness. Cut out biscuits using a 2 -1/2-inch biscuit cutter (or whatever size you have). Place the biscuits on an ungreased baking sheet. Bake for 12-15 minutes or until golden. Serve hot. Yield: 18 biscuits.

These unusual biscuits are absolutely wonderful! They are good with butter and jam (or just jam -- there’s plenty of butter already in them!) and they make especially good strawberry shortcake biscuits. The recipe is from an old cookbook published by Current®, Inc.

To see some favorite recipes from others, head over to Overwhelmed with Joy and see what’s cooking!

Sew Crafty Friday for February 1

For Sew Crafty Friday this week, I’ll share my final embroidered flour-sack towels in the “Fine China” set.

Here is Wednesday's towel, which I finished this week:

And here is Sunday’s towel, still a work in progress but coming along nicely.

I did all of my flour-sack towels (up until this one) with only 2 strands of floss. I was afraid that 3 strands would be too heavy for the light flour-sack material. And the 2 strands are holding up beautifully on my daughter Carrie’s towels, which she uses on a daily basis. But then on someone else’s blog, I saw towels done with 3 strands of floss and loved how they looked. I finally decided to do this last towel with 3 strands, reasoning that the recipient isn’t going to be displaying them all together. So this “Sunday” one is being done with three.

These flour-sack towels are going to my daughter Joanna in Nevada. I thought others might enjoy seeing how she is displaying the ones I’ve already completed and sent to her. She is displaying them along with some of her vintage dish towel collection and putting up the appropriate flour-sack towel for each day. Isn’t this a pretty display?

To see what others have been crafting this week, head on over to Waiting for Him and check out the links. Then take a few minutes to share your own projects!

Show & Tell Friday for February 1

For Show & Tell today, I would like to share some nifty items which make life easier in my kitchen. They are all things which Mr. T has added to help me out with kitchen storage. He would want me to caution you, I know, that these items are what he calls “rustic, very rustic.” They are by no means fine carpentry and he realizes that. But these things are a huge help to me and are commented upon by almost everyone who spends any time in our kitchen.

First: The mug rack. This is simply a board with cup hooks in it, placed up at the top edge of the ceiling. I took this photo this morning when several mugs were elsewhere, so that’s why it isn’t full. He put this up because we had far too many mugs to keep in a cupboard. Many are still in a cupboard, and I’ve given away and yard-saled others. But the ones we use almost every day are on this rack. A nice plus to keeping mugs here is that, on days when the wood stove is going in the kitchen, the mugs stay warm. Pre-warmed mugs for hot beverages!


Second: The spice rack. He built this because I tend to buy spices at the dollar store or the kitchen store, and the bottles are larger than the spice bottles sold in the supermarket by the brand-name spice companies. As I acquired more and more of these larger spice bottles, we had to do something, so he built a rack specifically to fit them.

Third: The tea rack. When we came to the point that we had so many tea boxes that they began tumbling out of the cupboard, we had to figure out different storage for them. I saw a rack similar to this (fancy, made out of oak, I believe) in a tea catalog for around $80. Mr. T figured he could make a “rustic” one out of pine to serve the same purpose, and he did. It works admirably. I couldn’t get a photo that showed the top shelf (too narrow of an area where the rack is located next to our back door), but the top shelf could be used either for display (which I do) or for 2 additional tea boxes.

At the bottom of the rack, I have hung a teapot hanging made out of felt from a kit some years ago. I’ve always wanted to make another, and saved the pattern just in case. Maybe someday!

And then this final photo, which was not taken in my kitchen, but instead in a kitchen in faraway Nevada. My daughter who lives there wanted a tea rack, so on one of our visits, Mr. T and our son-in-law worked together to make one. It’s so neat to think of her having something just like mine, that was handmade, in her kitchen too.

To see what others have shared for Show & Tell this week, go visit visit There is No Place Like Home and check out the links. It’s so much fun to see what others have to share!