Part of our daily routine has become at least one dip in the pool. Of course, before we get in, I put sunblock on both my little girl and me. There are two ingredients that are used in the United States to make true sunblock - zinc oxide and titanuim dioxide. The Coppertone for Kids is sunscreen. The Banana Boat Baby is sunblock and lists titanium dioxide as one of its ingredients(in the whopping list of inactive ingredients). So it’s good to know that our sunblock does contain titanium dioxide. Here is a website that lists some kids sunblocks as well as sunscreen/sunblocks.

I’ve never been much of a gardener but recently I’ve been very interested in doing more. I planted a few herbs earlier this year that seem to be taken over by weeds. I did also plant some sunflowers in a container. The seeds were a year old, so I wasn’t sure if they would come up at all. After a few weeks, I started to see some progress.

Now about a month has passed and they have really started to grow. It almost looks like they are getting close to blooming.

I’m very excited as this is the first flower I’ve grown from seeds. It’s very encouraging to see it grow and prosper. I try to water early in the morning or in the evening since it’s bad to water flowers in the heat.

I might do some fall planting but will have to do some research on which plants/flowers work best in our climate.

Key Lime Pie is very simple to make especially if you use an already made graham cracker crust. The most difficult part is squeezing the limes. The recipe I was using didn’t have a meringue. To me it really needed it or at the very least a whipped topping.

Also I didn’t have a proper zester so I think a lot of the white part of the lime made it into the zest. This is very bitter. So before I tried my second attempt, I bought two things - a zester and a juicer(manual). I also topped it with meringue, too.

The juicer - even if it was manual - helped greatly with squeezing the limes. It was so much easier than trying to do it by hand. I didn’t use as much zest on the second one and mainly used it on top of the pie. I’ll be making this again soon. It’s a great summer dessert.

I love bargains and stopped by the local thrift store. They had a sale, so I just had to rummage through all the knick knacks. Then I noticed the stacks of plates. Since we really needed plates, I took a look at the plates and found four that I really liked. I only found one bowl that I liked but plan to keep an eye our for more of these -

I told my husband that it would be nice to have some ‘real’ plates for if/when we have company over. It would be so nice to do some entertaining again. At least now we have real plates should we have people over for dinner.

I ran across a buttermilk biscuit recipe that was on a friend’s blog and decided to give it a try. I knew there wasn’t that many ingredients in biscuits but never liked the idea of getting my hands into the dough for kneading. But with rising prices of my beloved canned biscuits, I really need to make biscuits from scratch. Here is my first ever attempt at making homemade biscuits.

They turned out pretty good and tasty. Our oven is temperamental, so it’s hard to cook anything to perfection in it. I really would like a cast iron griddle since that is what my mom uses. All in due time I guess. Right now I’m just thrilled that I will be able to make editable biscuits and won’t have to buy canned ones anymore.

I bought the generic Rice Krispies and then discovered that the recipe wasn’t on the box. My husband found a recipe online for Rice Krispy Treats at Cooking for Engineers. It was the first one he found that sounded correct or close to what we were used to.

So I made the treats and then my husband suggested sprinkling semi-sweet chocolate chips on top. that was pretty good, so when I made another batch, I used both chocolate chips and Reese’s peanut butter chips. Now that was divine - of course I love peanut butter.

Now we are out of marshmallows but still have plenty of cereal. I will be buying some more marshmallows since this is one of the easiest treats to make plus the little girl can help out. She loves to help in the kitchen, so I’d like to encourage her as much as possible.

I can’t believe I haven’t bought a food processor before now. I guess I just had in my mind that I wouldn’t have any use for a food processor. I will be using it again this weekend to make blueberry butter and slicing up some vegetables for a salad. It does help to cut down prep time for meals. Since it makes food prep a breeze, I may even cook more. I’ve never been much of a cook but lately I’ve really had the desire to cook, so I’m glad that I have discovered a useful kitchen appliance.

We have very limited cabinet space and the space that we do have it oddly-shaped. That’s a big drawback of this mobile home. I’m not sure who designed the kitchen but it’s obvious they had never spent that much time in one.

I’m not sure why it seems the rule that spices reside in the small cabinet above the stove but this just doesn’t work well for me. So, I moved all the spices to a another cabinet. Now my pots and pans are in that cabinet. It works better for me to have the spices at a lower level.

Hopefully I can keep the momentum going this week and finish organizing the kitchen. Then it’s on to the rest of the house. If I can get that done, then I will be a very happy housewife.

His video graphics card can handle two monitors, so technically I might could move my video card to his computer and have three monitors - if we had a third one. We would need a bigger desk.

So I’ve managed to create a small amount of space by breaking down my computer. Now if I can just find more items to consolidate then we might have room for everything for once.

After preparing the jars, I cooked the blueberry jam with a ton of sugar, pectin, and lemon juice.

After adding the sugar, I then noticed that my pot was way too small, so I began to dump out some of the mixture with measuring cups as I didn’t want to paint my stove purple. So it was a learning experience. I did get 12 small jars of blueberry jam. I was glad that all the jars did seal.

Next time I will buy bigger jars instead of these tiny cute ones. I seriously thought they held more. My husband opened one up today and used half of the jar on three biscuits. I was glad that I had bought a canning kit that had some neat tools in it like the magnet to retrieve the lids from the boiling water.

Up next I plan to try apple butter. I may also try blueberry butter since we still have plenty of blueberries. I used the website PickYourOwn.org to find instructions for blueberry jam and will try a few more of their recipes in the coming weeks.