Tomato flatbread and a broken dryer.

My husband has built me a clothes line. 70 dollars and about 4 hours of work has set us up to do our laundry dryer free from now on. My parents tease, living in the pacific northwest (well known for all that rain) they think I am overly ambitious to completely forgo using a dryer. But the outside clothes line is set, and for all those rainy days we have set a couple lines across the kitchen where it tends to stay warm and dry, the extra high ceilings made it the best choice as well. Kiki thinks its hilarious, she points and giggles while I hang her footy pajamas or little baby pants.

But really when it comes down to it, drying our clothing this way fits in nicely with our general feelings about how we want to live, and one less large appliance that makes noise/ breaks down/ needs replacing/ and drives up the electricity bill is an added bonus. It really is only doable at this point though because I do have the luck of being a stay at home mom. I honestly cannot imagine trying to line dry clothing for 5 people while working full time.

As a stay at home mom I cook everyday, usually at least two if not three full meals as well as an afternoon snack for my children. You would think with this amount of time spent cooking it would be easy to post recipes and share what and how we love to eat. But it's not. I am absolutely terrible at taking pictures of what I have made, rather I forget to take pictures would be more accurate. I have plenty of pictures of my kids or parts of our house that we have changed/painted or things my husband has made but very rarely do I remember to photograph what we eat.

So my goal is to at least once a week post something that Kiki eats for snack. We do snack in the afternoon when she wakes up from her nap. Mia usually has some as well but it still has to be cut into tiny, tiny, baby bites. No matter what the size Mia will always try and eat all of what you give her at once, which tends to stress me out and is what drives me into cutting everything into tiny, tiny baby pieces.

And since Mia is content at this moment (throwing all her books on the floor, and babbling) and Kiki is in fact still napping while her snack cools I have a moment to share. I ended up making individual tomato flat bread. Since we really don't do any dairy ( Even though Mia is the only one who is lactose intolerant) I ended up using a fair amount of nutritional yeast (How is it so good?)

Individual tomato Flat breads:

15 Ping-Pong ball sized pieces of Basic bread dough

1 roma tomato sliced into 15 thin pieces

parsley, salt, pepper, nutritional yeast to sprinkle over the top of each

olive oil.

Pre-heat the oven to 460 degrees F, flatten out each of the 15 balls and place on a baking sheet. Rub a drop of oil over the top of each.

sprinkle the nutritional yeast over each to coat the top well. Next place one slice of tomato on each tiny flat bread. sprinkle over the salt, pepper, and parsley and let rest till oven has pre-heated.

bake till a nice golden color, about 15-18 minutes. Let cool briefly before eating.



If you keep the bread dough on hand like I tend to, its a quick and wonderful snack. Kiki likes nothing more than fresh baked bread, she tends to choose it over cookies or cakes. Lately we have switched to using 3/4 whole wheat pastry flour and 1/4 white bread flour for most everything. This recipe still yields a nice crispy crust even with the substitution.

oh! We have continued with the painting, including the piano and our room.

The piano

Growing up my father always stressed sports for my brother and I, which we took to pretty quickly. Soccer in the fall, basketball in the winter, baseball in the spring, and swim team in the summer. We loved it. It kept us in shape, we learned all the life lessons sports are supposed to teach, and made a fair amount of friends as well.

My mother always enjoyed seeing us happy and I am sure agreed with a lot of what playing sports taught us, but at the same time wished we were more musically inclined and saw a  reasonable amount of benefit to my brother and I both learning an instrument, which again she was probably correct about. The problem was neither my brother or I really had any interest in learning one, but mom insisted and so after trying a few different instruments I finally settled on the clarinet ( I am pretty sure this is why my brother also ended up with the clarinet seeing as we already had one..)

I barely practiced showed a little but not much aptitude for it and really just kind of pushed through those three years of band, and as soon as I was able I dropped it.

Now after however many years later, and a rather exhausting 45 minutes last night there is an upright piano in our living room. Neil has a little experience and plays 'house piano' as he puts it. I have no idea what I am doing, but Kiki is in love with it. She is the real reason we ended up spending a couple months looking on craigslist till we found a free piano we could call our own. And now after the however many years followed by the exhausting 45 minutes Kiki now has a piano and Nonna has her little musician.

So here are a few more pictures of the littles at the piano for Nonna.

Tuscan Beans and a lemon

Well I have at least started! There is not to much going on yet but I have official started my Etsy page! The Laurel Road hopefully once I get through the process of posting everything I have to sell, and then filling out all the little areas I will get back to making things to sell.

The past week has mostly been taking pictures and figuring out how to really start this. That and some how everyone was sick again. I don't think we can win this winter. I feel like there has been such a small amount of time where everyone felt well and no one had a runny nose or a small fever, but at least living in Oregon means that winter comes to an end far sooner than I am used to. The ground hog has no pull on this part of the world. The warmer weather and all that mud are headed our way soon.

I can't wait to get the girls outside playing more often. The problem with moving to a new town at the start of winter is we missed the whole summer of meeting kids at the playground who would want to come over to play inside through all these rainy days. Luckily though we have a wonderful library program and Kiki has made at least one little baby friend and Mia is really still a bit to young to notice. I honestly think the most awkward part of meeting kids Kiki's age to play with is trying to figure out if I am going to get along with the other mom.

I had never really considered the adult dynamic in a playdate situation. Some one suggested its sort of like dating but with completely different criteria. It less important if both parties have a common interested and much more important to have children the same (-ish) age, which is then followed by if and how well those kids get along (can they occupy themselves for an extended period of time?). Once theses items have been checked off you pretty much signed up to at least have a cup of coffee with this almost stranger and stumble through a conversation, that if your lucky can cover more topics then just your child's sleeping, eating, playing, tantrum throwing (or not?) habits.

I suppose there is the other side to this same coin though. As you bring your kids to different parks or library programs there my be a mom or two there who you always smile at or make a quick joke or two with and always seem to almost get along with. Yet theses moms seem un-reachable. Why? because their kids are not the same age as your kids, or your kids don't run over and try and play with their kids and in fact seem to have less in common with the child that has the interesting mom than they do with cheese ( both of which can be smelly).  At this point though my children are thankfully to young to really have that much say in who they play with, and I think this might be  my only chance to have a say in selecting a mom friend and not just be issued one based on my young child's whims.

In the mean time though, with all the little projects, cooking and baking, runny noses, scraped knees and baby melt downs I don't really have all that much time for a mommy friend as it is. And honestly As I watch the pile of clean laundry grow (going unfolded) turning into more of a mountain and less of a mole hill I am more than happy with two little girls running around under foot a good friend in Scotland, the same in Wyoming  and  wonderful husband who comes home each evening right about dinner time.

And since dinner is a topic always on my mind I should probably share one of our favorite dinners as well. Its a recipe for Tuscan Beans. I am not really sure where I came across it at this point but its one of those recipes that once you have made it, it tends to stick with you. We eat it probably about once a week theses days and always end up with leftovers that either get eaten with a fried egg on top the next morning or turned into something new.

I am not sure how authentic theses beans are now that I have made them a few times but here is the recipe I use.

Tuscan(-ish) beans

2 carrots
2 celery stalks
1 onion medium?
2 cups of great northern white beans
2bay leaves
salt and pepper to taste


dice all the vegetables  and cook at medium low with a little olive oil for about 15 minutes, do not allow the onions to brown.

splash in a little more olive oil, add 2ish cups of white beans, 2 bay leaves and some pepper and stir, let cook a minute or two. (do not add salt at this time, adding salt to beans while they are cooking does not allow them to fully soften.)

Pour enough water into the pot to cover the beans by 3 or so inches. leave on medium low and let simmer for 3-4 hours. Add a little more water here and there to make sure the beans do not get dry, about 5 minutes before serving add salt to taste.

The Beans end up soft and buttery, Perfect with a crusty loaf of bread. Splash a bit more olive oil over the top right before serving the beans and it turns out so nicely. The kids really seem to enjoy this as well.