Random photos

I haven't posted in a while. My apologies. So here I have a random photo dump till I get my thoughts together and post a real post.

Oh this grub came and decided to eat my tomato plant. jerk.. you can see the look of self satisfaction on his face.

Zucchini and squash from my garden. they are huge!!

We've been watching Toy Story 3 a lot lately, and bebe has her very own Lotso. So I decided to take him out to enjoy some sunshine. He wasn't very happy.

Tortillas.

I am a tortilla eating champion. Note I said EATING. Not making. Today my lovely husband made dinner for us, however... we ran out of corn tortillas for tacos. sad panda. But wait.. I know how to make tortillas. Thankfully I have all ingredients on hand for flour tortillas.

I love tortillas and really there is nothing at all like a homemade tortilla with a slathering of butter on it. yum.

You can google recipes if you like, but I'll post a basic recipe.

4 cups of flour

1/2 cup shortening ** use lard if you can it gives it a much better taste than shortening**

1&1/4 cup warm water * important use warm water not cold, it works much better*

1&1/2 tsp salt

put flour, salt and shortening in bowl, cut shortening with a dough cutter ( or your hands work well too) adding small amounts of water as you mix. The dough will become elastic. make sure to knead well, but not over knead. ( i have no pics for this sorry)

Pinch of a small ball of dough, slightly flatten it out as you shape it.

Roll it out till its about nice and thin and as round as you can ( i suck at this part and most of mine come out misshapen. its sad) Important, use flour when rolling and when shaping the dough.

Place round or odd shaped tortilla on your griddle, or as I call it comal. ( this is after I turned it)

Once it bubbles flip it over. This is what I mean by bubbles. ( this is my grossly misshapen tortilla )

Heat other side till its nice and brown, remove, fill or not and enjoy. =)

Super important to make sure your griddle is nice and hot and to make sure you wait for it to bubble before turning it. otherwise it turns out like this still tasty but not as pretty. You can always throw it back on the griddle to brown it up.

This is my comal, well one of the 2 I have. this one is my grandparents. I can still see my grandfather heating up tortillas for my grandma on it in their kitchen.

hope you've enjoyed my tortilla tutorial and enjoy eating as many as you like. oh quick note, if you put them in ziplock bags after heating you can freeze them or refrige them. They don't last in the fridge as long as store bought ones ( preservatives and all) but they never last that long in my fridge anyway lol.

Cooking soundtrack: Owl City: Maybe I'm Dreaming.

Completely random

I finally picked up my crochet hook again. This of course entails me checking out what my local library has available for me to borrow. I found this lovely book, the title alone made me check it out.

Hopefully it will keep me interested in going forward with my crochet.

Here's my second random I'm planning my oldest daughter's quinceanera, she is wanting bright colors so we were at hobby lobby and found these really cute flowers to use ( maybe) in her center pieces. The benefit of me toting my camera with me everywhere.

Self portrait.

I always am behind the camera rarely in front of the camera... so here I am in a study of self portrait.

Failed first attempt...

better.

not the best, but now you all know what i look like ( for those that don't )

Wordless wednesday.

Garden pictures and update.

Well, my mint dried up. =( sad panda I am, my lilly of the valley doesn't seem to be growing too much and one branch kinda dried up. My tomatoes are doing ok, cherry tomatoes are doing the best, the others are still trucking along. My zucchini and squash are doing fantastic! I don't have bees, but the ants are doing a stellar job of pollinating for me. The flowers I planted in front of the garden area are blooming. I just don't know what they are lol. I planted more yesterday so hopefully I'll have some gorgeous smelling flowers to entice the bees to hang around.

Zucchini on the right, squash on the left

LOOK LOOK!! I GREW IT!!! (lol)

I seem to have more squash than zucchini, but its all good. look how cute it is.

These are the leaves from the zucchini plants in the very back. Ginormous..

My mystery flowers/plants. of everything I threw down there only 4 bloomed and I have no clue what they are... My mom says they aren't snap dragons, so either Imperial stock giant, lupine, or maybe even sunflowers. *shrugs* i have no clue. planting is such a mystery.

Total Freebie!!

I can't wait to try it in my wash. =) Thanks to my friend Brandi for giving me the link to get the freebie.

8th Annual Pork and Brew

First I want to say sorry it took me so long to get these pictures up, what can I say, I'm lazy lol.

Anyway there were tons of things to take pics of and I took 601 pictures. *faints* here is a small sampling.

They had live music all day, this couple was dancing, melted my heart.

Not everything was rosey and cheery at the pork and brew.. Here you can see the smoke from the Las Conchas fire. :( its only 40% contained, but hope the coming rain helps.

The Trophies after all you need something to rub in people's faces right?

I didn't get any pics of the bbq pork. sorry too busy shoving it in my face. These were not as good as they look, the caramel tasted too much like butter. no bueno.

my brother being a smarty pants.

With peanuts... only my husband enjoyed them.

One of the cooks, yes he has a pig on his chef hat.. every time I had an opportunity to get it, something got in my way, people, children...best I could get.

This is the first year they had a carnival. It was expensive and a little bit rickety looking but aren't all carnivals?

By the time I took the carnival pics I was sitting at the tent trying not to melt from the heat. That was the best I was willing to get lol. The food was awesome, we went on Friday so it wasn't super busy, but it was hot and sweltering plus it was on concrete so it was probably hotter than it normally would have been. blech.

Something that didn't make the news was there was a chainsaw accident at the chainsaw cutting area by the carnival. I thought at first someone fainted by the hubs said that he overheard someone cut a finger or hand.. *shudders* thankfully that was only open to pro's. However still scary to think that someone lost a limb or appendage.