Shirley Ellis awesome!

The FHDOJ — Friday Happy Dance of JOY! — has commenced, and we’re doing it here today. Thank you @LdyDisney!

I think you can get a t-shirt like that at L.L. Bean. Just sayin’.

TGIF, baby!

Elen

June 2009

These chicks have tripled, quadrupled, super-sized. Lookin’ good, chickies.

May 2010

Mama Hen is putting on weight and multiplying. I think she ate one too many peanut butter whoopie cookies over the blizzard months. Okay, that might have been me.

End of May 2010

Uh, oh. What is happening here, Mama Hen?

July 2010

Mama Hen, I thought we had the talk about safe…

Oh, Mama!

Days later, July 2010

You never listen!

Reap what ye sow, Mama. Reap what ye sow.

Okay. I’m just having a little fun with you today. It comes under the heading of procrasti-writing. But our time together here is over. Muse Boy — remember that hunk-of-burnin’-mat-master from yesterday? — He’s hovering. Hovering, I tell you. That can only mean one thing.

Write or die!

Elen

…to ripen.

In the summer, I live for tomatoes, baby!

Vine ripened grape, cherry, plum, beefsteak tomato goodness.

They become snack food, toasted tomato sandwiches, grilled cheese & tomato, BLTs, ratatouille, Ray’s Red Sauce, broiled sides, and on without end.

Do you have a fave way to prep and consume tomatoes? Let’s hear it.

Conn is standing over my shoulder as I post. How did that happen? Remember Conn here and here? It’s probably the tomato talk. He’s a much more selective — and by selective, I mean picky — eater than Sven. Let’s just say, he doesn’t have the sweet tooth that Sven has.

I guess Conn is back. I haven’t been able to wrangle out of him exactly where he’s been all this time. Yet! I’m guessing he got on board with one of Sven’s island vacays. You know the ones. They usually involve some chick named Birgit or Ilsa. Let’s just say the legs are long, the hair is blond and braided down to the other hemisphere, and the Great White North is a Double D — DD. I can feel Conn’s eyebrow raise as he continues to read breathes down my neck, so I’m thinking I’m on the right track here…

You!…Write!

This is Bad Boy Mat Muse. He’s also known as Wonder Boy Muse and Alpha Muse, depending on my mood, and his. Conn used to be in the sidebar, upper right corner. I took him down when I adopted my first soldier with Soldiers’ Angels. Said I would leave him down until my soldier came home. Then, I just adopted another soldier…and another. I can’t see when I won’t be an angel with SA, so Conn is back. He is eye candy for my writer’s brain and keeps my word count crunched. Sometimes, he brings out my inner drama queen. Did you just hear a snicker?

Come and get me, Muse Boy.

Elen

Before Twitter, I would have opened a cookbook for a recipe. But I’ve met so many wonderful cooking artists on Twitter, that I whipped open my mini and logged on to one of the many — the one being Two Peas and Their Pod — and plunked oatmeal cookies in the search bar. A bunch of stuff popped-up, not all cookies, but there it was — the oatmeal cookie of my dreams: Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies with chocolate chips. Three cookies rolled into one. Ding. Ding.

Maria substituted mini Reese’s peanut butter cups for the chocolate and I, having neither option, sent Mr. G, honey racing to the store for semi-sweet chocolate chips. He was thrilled to be furthering the cause of home baked cookies; truth be told, cooked anything after the Horrible Heat Wave. I say that in my head with all caps.

Zip. Zip. And he was back with two boxes. Uh, oh. The last time I visited the grocery store — last month, maybe last year — chips didn’t come in boxes. He’d brought me Baker’s semi-sweet chocolate.

We might have had the little these-aren’t-chocolate-chips talk. But it’s okay. I was on a mission, and nothing was impossible.

I whipped out a honking big knife, got all Rambo’d up, and chopped that semi-sweet into yummy, edible chunks. Then, it was mix, mix, stir, stir, scoop, scoop, plop, plop.

It was as I was taking the first tray out of the oven that it hit me. I miss my boys. I don’t have any boys, but I inherited two lean-growing-into-their-feet-cami-covered geek boys when the kidlet hit 8th grade. They hung out mostly on my doorstep, ventured into the front hall occasionally, and stampeded into the kitchen when cookies were baking.

One boy could smell cookies up one and two blocks over and would mysteriously appear at the door. We wondered why he never rang the doorbell, but we always knew he was there. We could feel him. The other boy made smiley faces in all our cookies. Best smiley faces ever. Ever.

These former stoop-standing-hall-lounging-kitchen-venturing Army Cadets are now serving in our Canadian Armed Forces, and I miss their cooking-sleuthing-baking-eating-ways.

I tend to make small cookies, because I get a bigger happy eating two small cookies instead of one big cookie. It’s how I roll. But we have a little cookie baking tradition here at La Casa Elen. As we get to the bottom of the bowl, when there isn’t enough dough left for a decent cookie sheet, we make one big cookie.

Got a cookie baking tradition? Quirk? Oddity? Let’s hear it.

You can find Maria tweeting @ TwoPeasandPod. I love how she thinks about food.

Miss my boys.

The awesome kidlet — well, she’s mine forever.

Elen

On Sunday — Independence Day — I committed the sin of gluttony, featuring: Elen’s grilled burgers, Elen’s awesome potato salad, and PW’s blackberry cobbler.

These were the major players. There were minor players, but we won’t go there.

Now, I’m doing this:

It might take 600 60 days.

And this:

It might take forever. Okay. I will not be doing that on my knuckles, but I’ll be sweating just like that. Maybe more.

Hello Monday!

Elen