Happy 93rd Birthday, Grandma!

Today is my Grandma's birthday! We talked on the phone yesterday, and I miss her very much. I only get to be with her once a year anymore when we travel home in the summer. In fact, these photos were taken at her home last July.

Back in the game...sort of.

It seems this has been another winter with sickness settling its way into our home. Colds, earaches and the like have hit the family. Yuck! Pick a day and one of us (or all four of us on a really bad week) was suffering from some symptom. Which is why I haven't kept up with the HBin5 Bread Braid as much as I had hoped to. Back in January, I did manage to bake the Soft Whole Wheat Sandwich bread and even made hamburger and (really sad looking) hot dog buns, but never got around to blogging about it. Oh well. We are getting healthy and now it's time to get back in the game :)

Assignment #7: Avocado-Guacamole Bread and Pesto Pine Nut Bread

I say I am back in the game "sort of", because I only made the Avacado-Guacamole Bread this time around. When I first got the new book, "Healthy Breads in Five Minutes a Day", one of the first breads I made was the Pesto Pine Nut Bread. I made two loaves. We enjoyed one with neighborhood friends at a potluck dinner and the other went into the freezer. I meant to get it out when my parents came to visit in December, but forgot all about it.

Thankfully this bread-braid assignment came along just in time for their next visit this week. It's our youngest son's 3rd birthday on the 22nd and "Grandmom" & "Kapa" are coming back! I'll get the loaf out and we'll see how well it survived in the freezer. I have never frozen a loaf of bread, but it should be fine. Right? I'll let you know later.

Okay, back to the bread I did bake.

I mixed up a 1/2 batch of the Avocado-Guacamole bread, per our baking schedule from Michelle over at Big Black Dog. I didn't have fresh tomatoes, so I used some from a can. I mashed up the avocado (okay, my 3yr old did!), added the crushed garlic and tomatoes and then remembered I was only making a half batch. That was easy enough to fix however. I used half in the recipe and mixed in more of the canned diced tomatoes into the other half of the avocado and scooped it up on some whole grain chips. Yum!

On baking day, I made a batch of Bob's Red Mill: 13 Bean Soup Mix. It was a lovely dinner, and very pretty.

I am looking forward to reading everyone's entries for this bread-braid and I'll see you again in April for the Carrot Bread. Take care!

"Oh let the light shine in"

That is how my DH likes to get our boys going in the morning...with a croaking "Oh let the light shine in". They laugh every time. For the first day in a long time, we can shout out "let the SUN shine in"! What a glorious sight it is. But it is also reveling that I need to wash windows, and quickly!

I am so excited to be able to offer a few knitting classes in February and March, including the Maine Morning Mitts shown above. This sample is knit in Malabrigo...yummy!

Check out the Class Schedule at my LYS. My friend Jerri is teaching a beautiful felted scarf class that requires no knitting or sewing. It's created with a piece of silk and lots of layers of fiber. The results are stunning.