I’ve taken off quite a bit of baby (and just plain Being Married To Keith) weight since this winter by avoiding all of those ingredients but yesterday my sweet tooth was not going to be tamed. I was reading a book about a bakery and a man who had something called “sweet sense” and well…

I had to bake something. Right then.

I looked through my recipe books and online for something new, something semi-complicated but in the end all I really wanted was dough so I went with chocolate chip cookies.

Nothing new. Nothing complicated. Just good ol’ cookie dough. Mine are a mix between the Nestle recipe and a recipe I found in Southern Lady magazine and since I couldn’t find my measuring spoons yesterday (they were hiding in the dish drainer, those sneaky spoons!) I would be hard-pressed to call it a “recipe”.

But we know that all good things start with butter.

I used my favorite pan from The Cake Pan Lady… the one I use to lay claim to mah may-un at community functions. Hee hee!

Here’s an important first step. Open the bag of chocolate chips and let them air out reeeaaaal good.

Test them too. You wouldn’t want to make a whole batch of cookies and then discover that the chocolate chips have turned bad, would you? Nope because that would be a tragedy.

Test thoroughly because sometimes the chips at the bottom of the bag are different than the ones at the top. So take lots of random samples to ensure freshness.   

It’s a miracle I have any of this stuff left in the house… by the way, the culprit turned out to be my oldest redhead. She got busted in front of her younger sister who was madder than a hornet that SHE didn’t think to steal the brown sugar when I wasn’t looking.

Truthfully, I could probably have stopped after the eggs and been happy.

But look what I would have missed. Yum.

Rather than make these into individual cookies, I like to pour the batter in a pan. I like the soft, gooey, chewiness of it all.

Today it’s back to the broccoli and the peanuts and the spinach and the fruit and I’m going to try really hard to stay away from books about bakeries.

Post from: The Cotton Wife

Right at this moment, I’m sitting here at my desk with a cup of coffee and trying to decide what is more cringe-worthy…

Looking at old pictures I took when I had no clue what I was doing

Or

This book I have from the 2nd grade where I and all of my classmates (all 19 of them) wrote about the loves of our lives and who the cutest boys/girls were at the time.

It’s a toss-up even though Kenny Rogers makes an appearance in one of them.

My oldest asked for a photo shoot the other day, just like the one I did for my uncle in Nashville.

And when I framed it, I started looking at all the photos in that frame… all stacked behind one another in a 16×20 glimpse of the past.

I was so proud of these baseball pics…

Blah colors, zero composition, and you can hardly see her face. What’s not to like?

Or this one. There’s enough grain in this photo to feed a third-world country.

At least whatever is wrong with this photo, I ignored on purpose because I just plain like it and Maggie was cooperative.

Oh – and here we go. Ah yes, the pride and joy of my tiny little point & shoot. I thought I had something here. And don’t get me wrong, I will always love this photo but professional, it is not. Even WITH the super-cool text at the bottom.

Look – you can actually tell what color her eyes are in this one! Yay for light!

I wouldn’t be so embarrassed by these if they were truly just snapshots that I took. But I was trying.

Oh well. That’s what practice is for, right? And I still win because I will have all of those too-dark, too-grainy, too-everything photos forever and ever.

And recently, I tried to go backwards and recreate a photo I took more than two years ago…

You may remember seeing this photo of my father-in-law just before he passed away. The other day when we were pulling the irrigation reel, Shelby plopped her brother on this tractor and inspiration struck.

So now I have this one framed… a recreation of that accidental shot that I took when I didn’t know anything about aperture, ISO or white balance.

Whatever might be wrong with those old photos (and even the new ones), I’m so glad I never deleted anything.

Post from: The Cotton Wife

This has been an unbelievably hot, dry summer here in Virginia.

We’re fortunate to have irrigation, although rain gets the job done much, much better.

Here is one of the systems we have in place… it’s called a reel system.

Water comes out of a nearby mill pond through the pipe and the huge rubber tube and gets sprayed onto the field.

Keith has to drag the spraying part out into whichever part of the field is due for a drink.

Sometimes wayyyyyy out.

It’s a lot of work. A whole lot. But seeing your crops get even just a little water seems worth it.

Post from: The Cotton Wife

Again!

Except this one was much less expensive and a million times easier.

Courtesy of my new favorite store (kitchen or no kitchen… they have everything, they’re fast and the prices are really good!), my children now have this retro silver kitchen set to play with.

Click here to see the whole kitchen set.

They love it!

It’s really well made – not at all flimsy and it was easy to put together. My nine-year-old and I put it together in under two hours. And she’s way more handy than I am. Keith could have put it together in about thirty minutes.

I love the colors, the vintage vibe and I love how it keeps the kids preoccupied while I am cooking or doing laundry.

I’m sure CSN Stores would have preferred clean, fully clothed children to serve as models for their product, but this is the way we roll (in the dirt). 

Thank you CSN Stores! I hope you all visit their website – I’m not kidding when I say they have almost everything.

Let me know what you find!

Post from: The Cotton Wife

I am used to making things from scratch but something I had never made was laundry detergent.

My friend Sandra over at The Cumberland Island Quilt Chick shared this recipe the other day and while I like making things, it was the idea of saving THAT much money that appealed to me.

There are only three ingredients:

A bar of Fels Naptha

Washing Soda

Borax

I also bought some essential oils because the Cotton Husband likes his clothes REALLY REALLY fragrant.

Don’t ask him about the time I bought unscented detergent (thinking of the babies’ sensitive skin)… he refused to wear any of the clothes. He never actually complained to me, but each morning I could hear him sniff a shirt, put it back and choose an older one that had been washed in MountainSpringGlacierTideOrangeGroveLemonTree detergent. 

According to Sandra, I got ripped off on the ingredients by buying them through Amazon, but even still – the price should work out to pennies a bottle. You’ll get a LOT of gallon-size bottles out of those boxes of powder!  I just need to shop a little smarter next time.

The first step is to grate 1/3 of the bar of soap (Fels Naptha) and melt it in water on the stove.

Then add the washing soda…

Then the Borax…

Stir and let sit on low heat until it’s thicker… almost like honey.

Add one quart of HOT water to a 2 gallon bucket or dishpan and then pour in the mixture.

Then fill the 2 gallon container with cold water, stir well and let sit for about 24 hours. (The 24-hour part came from Sandra. I am far too impatient for that and waited only about an hour before filling up my containers. I will let you know if they explode or something.)

This is also when you’ll add the essential oils. I bought citrusy ones, but Lavender would be wonderful!

And that’s it! Really, really easy and at a minimum of mess. I mean, when the “mess” is soap how hard can cleanup really be?

Sooooo… this is all well and good but let’s see some results.

For the test, I chose a terribly unfortunate purchase I made a couple years ago: a white bathmat for the girls’ bathroom. Ugh. That wasn’t the best choice. Mud color with pink sprinkles would have been better.

Before:

Aaaaaaand…

Washed with 1/2 cup of detergent in cold water:

Well, I’m sold. I didn’t use bleach or Oxyclean or anything else other than the homemade detergent on that rug and it came out perfectly clean. Impressive!

Here’s the recipe:

RECIPE:

1/3 bar of Fels Naptha (grated)

(This is just a hard bar of soap that is for laundry stains,etc.)

1/2 cup Washing Soda (not baking soda)

1/2 cup Borax Powder

*Put Fels Naptha (grated) in large pan of 3 pints of water. *Heat to dissolve.

*Then, stir in washing soda. *Then, add Borax. Let thicken on low heat until it looks like honey.

*Remove from heat. *In 2 gallon bucket (or a dishpan), put in 1 Qt. HOT water. *Next, add the honey looking soap and stir.

*Then, fill the 2 gallon container with COLD water. *Stir till well-blended.

*Let this set until it gels somewhat-24 hrs. or so. *Put into containers for storage and easy use.

*Use 1/2 cup per load of wash.

*Optional: Add essential oil for scent.

Post from: The Cotton Wife

None of my little girls ever did this.

(She’d have done better trying to coax him out with some Nabs.)

And while the girls wanted to make brownies the other day, M.K. scratched at the door like a little puppy until I let him out.

Where he dug in the dirt before getting in his car and driving a thousand miles.

So far his first words are “Tractor” and “Daddy”, he grabs for your beer, he hates baths and he has no trouble ripping that diaper off any old time.

Whoo, boy. I think this one is going to keep me on my toes.

Post from: The Cotton Wife

Anyone who knows me (or who has even read my “About Me”) knows that I am a local girl who sticks close to home. For goodness sake, I went to college an hour and a half away and got homesick. Pitiful.

I love everything about this place… really, I do. I couldn’t be without even one piece of it.

We go on vacation to the same place every year because we’re completely familiar with everything the Outer Banks has to offer. Heaven forbid we venture someplace new. How would we know where to eat?

And please won’t someone have mercy on the man who dared to mention that he was not familiar with my last name and thus, I must not be “from here”. Whooo boy… He saw a bit of my father-in-law that day in the way I puffed and huffed and drew myself up to my full height. A peacock would have been shamed.

Yes, it slips my mind from time to time that our way of life is not normal. As I mentioned, I visited the dentist the other day which is a good thirty WHOLE minutes from home.

An excursion, really. There’s a Dairy Queen so it qualifies as a treat.

At any rate, I sat down next to the daughter of one of my childhood friends (who happens to be a hygienist there) and across from my neighbor and his dad. Naturally we all chatted about this, that and the other (including farmland and hunt clubs). Then the conversation really picked up when Alice Gail took a break from someone’s teeth and came out front to join her daughter for a few minutes. In the middle of all this, I noticed this woman to my left looking at all of us like we were a few sandwiches short of a picnic.

She said, “Are you all from here?”

My neighbor and I laughed,  “Of COURSE not! We’re from a couple counties over!”.

Ummmm…. turned out that wasn’t exactly what she meant.

She was from New York City which earned her an “Ew” from my neighbor there, bless his heart. So to her, we were indeed all “from here”. And it baffled her that so many people in one place knew each other, knew each other’s families and could talk so comfortably and at length with each other.

Maybe if she sticks around for at least twenty years or so, she’ll begin to be considered “local” too.

I think it’s worth a try, anyway. She might get used to it.

Post from: The Cotton Wife

I took all of these pictures to show off the beautiful new blooms on the cotton plants.

And then my cousin George pointed out to me that cotton blooming right now isn’t necessarily a good thing.

This always – ALWAYS – happens when I plan a post without consulting the Cotton Husband. The whole darned post ends up being wrong.

I hate that.

I still haven’t verified anything with him yet because I just got back from the dentist and I got four, count ‘em FOUR, shots and he just laughs at me when I try to talk.

But the nice man down at the gin says that although the crops are certainly dry, if we get enough rain this week then cotton will make it – early blooms or no blooms.

So right or wrong, here are these purty picktures

of blooms that the Cotton Husband may or may not welcome.

When my face un-thaws, I’ll be sure to ask.

Post from: The Cotton Wife

When we built these drawers, I worried a little about critters.

There aren’t any tops at all on the drawers, so while the flour is loose I leave the sugar in the bag. I feel like it’s pretty safe that way… no bugs can get in.

Imagine my surprise when I went to get the sugar today …

It seems like I have at least two little girls who have figured out that I don’t check the brown sugar on a regular basis.

Oh… I can’t wait to catch ‘em in the act!

Post from: The Cotton Wife

I don’t have so much of an inner Martha Stewart as I have an inner Grandma Walton. Wait – maybe that’s flattering myself a bit much. Let’s go with Granny from The Beverly Hillbillies.

My friends Yoga Gal and Mama from the Bowling Team inspire me to try to coax some Martha out once in a while and lately it’s been about toys.

My babies like the old washtub just fine, but when Mama wrote about her kids’ water table it got me thinking…

It turns out my kids aren’t allergic to “new” the way I am.

They kinda like it.

So to help my children shuck off the horror of aluminum washtubs, wooden swings and homemade seesaws, comes CSN Stores.

They wrote to me last week and wanted to know if I’d consider being part of their team… if I’d consider doing reviews and giveaways.

Me?

I mean, I cook with my grandma’s cast iron skillets, what do I know about stuff?

But my children shoved me down, stepped to the computer and cheerfully agreed to review new, exciting, clean, un-dented products.

First up? A vintage-style kitchen set. Ordered last night with one arm twisted around my back and set to arrive in a few days.

They’ll… I mean, I… will let you know all about it.

Post from: The Cotton Wife