FriedOkra

My Recipe and Method for Making (Crazy-Delicious) Homemade Yogurt

2014-05-09T09:23:00.002-05:00

I've been making my own yogurt lately, and it's so simple and so delicious that I thought I'd share my recipe and method with you. This method combines measurements and steps and equipment from various (sometimes super-picky and intimidating) recipes I've found on-line, and to me simplifies everything down to almost the lowest common

Simple Italian-Inspired Summer Salad

2014-04-11T10:22:00.001-05:00

Are you grilling this weekend? Have your side dishes planned? Here's an amazingly fresh and delicious salad for you to try that won't take you 15 minutes to throw together but will leave you and your fellow diners exclaiming over it for at least 4 times that long. I discovered the basic elements of this salad last Friday night when

I'm Leaving You, But Not Empty-Handed

2014-03-19T09:42:00.001-05:00

The kids' spring break starts tomorrow, and we are planning all sorts of awesome adventures for our time off, so I'll be missing around here for a week or so. I hope you have a great week, no matter what you're up to, and I wanted to leave you with some of my favorite reads from the past little while. I wanted to do cartwheels when I read Tsh Oxenreider's post about blogging your passion (and

5 Easy Home Brighteners for Spring

2014-03-16T12:13:00.003-05:00

The front lawn of our public library, March 5. Up until the past few days, the weather here has carried on as if it never saw me flip the calendar page, or as if it saw and didn't feel the event warranted a response. Perfectly normal for Illinois, though. In Illinois, March comes in like a polar bear and goes out, well, like a cold, damp, irritable polar bear. Wearing rain boots. (

Why You Should Stop Smuggling Kale into Smoothies and Juices and Just Eat It. For Real.

2014-03-12T05:00:00.000-05:00

If you hang around in the healthy-eating blog world or Facebook or Instagram, you already know that kale is very much en vogue right now. At this writing, Instagram users have hash-tagged almost 670,000 photos with #kale. Go look! BUT if you do look, you'll also notice that a vast majority of those photos picture delicious, crunchy,

Two Girls on the Run (One Probably Very Much Ahead of the Other, But Still)

2014-03-10T09:06:00.001-05:00

I'm that person who only ever runs because the rain threatens to frizz up her beachy waves or one of the kids just found a can of gold spray paint and is curiously fingering its trigger in the middle of the living room rug. I hate running. It's in no way fun to me, and it makes my knees hurt. But danged if I'm not taking up running. A little bit. In an accidental, wait, what

I Don't Have Dreams Anymore

2014-03-04T10:41:00.000-06:00

Photo credit Kelly Sauer. I don't have dreams anymore. Do you? And I don't mean sleep dreams, I mean life dreams -- big visions for what I want my future to look like, things my daily activities chase after. I'm not working towards a big wide rainbow goal. I realize this from time to time and it tends to scare me, especially when I hear other people talking about their own dreams and how

What I Wore in February

2014-02-28T12:05:00.002-06:00

Happy Friday! For those of you who are interested in such things, here's a quick look back at what I wore in the glorious month of February. (I say this because when I took an informal poll of a random cross-section of my friends and readers about what they thought I should be posting here, they all said, "We want the outfit posts back." I know I also have readers who may find this type of

Who Snuggles Whom?

2014-02-26T13:48:00.000-06:00

This is hard. I have to tell you about a major shift in the foundation of my marriage. And I need you to weigh in with your thoughts, because I think Al and I may be at an impasse. (Please know that you're getting almost as much time to prepare yourself as I did.) Last night, as we turned out the lights and settled into our customary sleeping position, Al spoke shocking words into

The Accidental Elder

2014-02-25T03:00:00.000-06:00

I love how they do middle age. Drooping should be this graceful on all of us. Sometimes I look up and realize with a heart-thud, Whoa. All of a sudden, I'm older than a hell of a lot of people. I don't even know when that happened or how, because yesterday I was too young to do things I'm too old to do today. A big part of me struggles hard to be okay with this shift. To not find it

Staying Connected as a Family when Family Time is Limited

2014-02-21T11:14:00.001-06:00

The FriedOkra family has a somewhat unique challenge.Al manages a couple of branches for a huge, household name financial services firm and his commute to either branch takes no less than 90 minutes one way on a good traffic day. Two to three hours on a bad one. We haven't had many good traffic days lately. (/understatement) And as we're rapidly approaching tax season, his work days don't

Quick and Easy Restoration for Dry Winter Hair

2014-02-19T12:59:00.003-06:00

Winter hasn't begun to wear out its welcome with me yet -- I'm still enjoying the coziness and comfort food and snow fun, and another month of all that doesn't sound bad to me at all. ::dodges flying vegetables:: My hair, though, has gotten quite tired of all the dry heat inside the house and the hair dryer I'm forced to use

Our Mostly-Unplugged Valentine's Weekend (with My Chocolate Cupcake Recipe)

2014-02-18T15:22:00.000-06:00

The quarreling about screen time got louder and uglier as days and weeks of snowfall and cold piled up and we sheltered in place. IN PLACE. IN THIS PLACE. IN THIS SAME PLACE EVERY SINGLE DAY FROM HERE UNTIL ETERNITY. And it kept getting harder and more ridiculous for me to say No Screens! to them from my semi-permanent place in front of this laptop here at the kitchen counter. Kinda like

I'm Not the Mother I Want to Be

2014-02-12T15:06:00.000-06:00

Sometimes - well, often, if I'm honest - I'm not the mother I want to be. I'm a dreamer, a perfectionist, a woman with an ideal vision for everything. Sadly I probably don't have the firmest grasp of what's really true and realistic about kids, and that leads to disappointment and frustration, to which I react in ways that don't line up with my ideal vision of motherhood, which invariably leads

If It Ain't Broke

2014-02-11T09:39:00.000-06:00

Way back in November, we came home late from a trip to the beach in South Carolina and after schlepping dozing kids and luggage inside and dropping it all where it needed to be, Al and I went to bed with great anticipation of sleeping our own bed, sighing and burrowing down and making all those clean-sheets-everything's-perfect yummy noises we all make, because Own Bed Love is

Keep Growing

2014-02-10T09:37:00.000-06:00

You always have the amazing and important growing inside you waiting to bloom out. Always. You might be in a season of quiet right now, plodding across calendar-grid days, carbon-copied and laid end to end, same after same. You may be struggling and wrestling with pain or circumstances, alone with your heavy heart and aching for comfort you can't seem to feel, even when it's

Recovery

2014-02-07T08:55:00.001-06:00

It snows here. Life has to go on, and it does. I channel my inner Maggie O'Connell, get dressed, and do life. The toughness of winter weather reminds me good things about myself. I'm strong and resilient. I can go out and shovel or blow a foot of snow off the driveway or stack a half-cord of firewood, one woman against the elements, me all muscle and determination and snot, in a blinding

Our Favorite Ranch Dressing and the Easiest Appetizer Ever

2014-02-06T12:36:00.000-06:00

Some nights I wake up in a full-on heart-palpitating sweat over over what my kids ate the preceding day. With the constant barrage of scary What's Killing Americans on This Particular Day articles and links and stories, I'm finding it hard lately to set plates of ANYTHING in front of my family and not feel pang of doubt and guilt that I might be inadvertently poisoning them. Do you feel that

Bloom

2014-02-04T08:57:00.000-06:00

Ninety-nine days out of a hundred, I watch her walk down the sidewalk to meet her friends and head off to school, and I feel happy and proud of her fierce, confident independence. I like to think I gave her that independence - at times it even came to me insisting on it. I guess I'll really never know for sure if it was my amazing maternal skills or if she's just who she'd have become no

My Week on Instagram - Frozen, But Still Amazingly Warm

2014-02-02T12:10:00.001-06:00

To see my photos in real time, click to follow me on Instagram. Did y'all have a good week? Are all of my sweet Southern friends recovering nicely from Snowpocalypse 2014? Believe me, I'm the last to cast aspersions about how it shuts everything down, wa-a-a-ay down. Listen, I know what snow does down there when the temps are low enough that it doesn't melt on contact. Up here, when it

That One Time We Went to the Airport and I Saw a Woman's Behind and Then Peabody Didn't Quite Bleed to Death

2014-01-28T10:39:00.002-06:00

I’ve told you about coming home from Virginia last weekend after Owen’s memorial service, but not about the fun we had getting there. It was a bright and sunny Friday morning, and we’d sailed down to O’Hare surprisingly quickly and easily considering the Elsa’s-having-a-bad-hair-day weather we’ve been enjoying here lately. We’d breezed through check-in, flown through security, had a hot

On Not Being Prepared

2014-01-27T14:13:00.000-06:00

We returned home last night after being in Virginia for my nephew Owen’s memorial service. Owen left us right before Christmas after a 3 year battle with rare form of Leukemia. He was 11 years old. We drove home in the dark after a late afternoon flight out of DC, a windy, flake-laden blizzard raging as we tip-toed our way up I-90 in my old 4Runner, which we lovingly refer to as The Sled. I

15 Things You Can Do Today to Make Tomorrow Your Favorite Day of the Week

2014-01-23T13:48:00.000-06:00

Oh, these January days, y’all. Are you dragging? Because I’m dragging, and I need a good swift kick to the rear to get me back up on my feet, so to speak. I’m writing out a few steps I know to be effective at boosting and rejuvenating me, and sharing them with you so if you need a boost, you can take a few of these ideas and see if they

That Time I Said "Whatever!" to my Kids and Didn't Regret It a Bit

2014-01-21T10:39:00.001-06:00

Al had the day off yesterday so he and I took the kids to eat at the local hibachi restaurant (Haha JAPANESE EGG-RORR haha!) for lunch and then we went bowling and THEN we spent what felt like about half of my lifetime to date in the arcade there, them with their plastic "credit cards" and us each hauling around a teetering arm load of coats and scarves and mittens and purses and phones, as we

A Pre-Holiday Handful

2013-12-10T13:56:00.000-06:00

A favorite nook at home right now. 1. I was really touched when the receptionist at Peabody's physical therapist's office actually came out from behind her counter and sat next to me this morning to say, "Last week when you were here, you didn't seem like your usual cheerful, funny self. I've been thinking about you all week. Is everything okay?" Pretty amazing, huh? You just never know who