Recipes - quick, easy, & delish... & the garden, Day 1

We've had an adventure-full day!  We began at Lowe's, studying the soil bags and trying to figure out what we needed to do.  We eventually bought 10 bags of organic Miracle Gro and 2 bags of vermiculite.  We also got some seeds (cucumber, beans, peas, and pumpkins) and some 2x4's for the sides.  2 strawberry pots that were on clearance also jumped into our cart - I'll share when and if we figure out how to germinate the seeds.  A quick stop at Marshall Grain Company yielded us a bag of molasses, and we proceeded home to where our muscle men were digging a hole. 

We quickly ran into clay. Lots of really hard clay.  We gave up digging at about 3/4 of a foot and started discussing drainage (since our hole now looked more like a boat).  This discussion evolved into deciding to cut our bed dimensions to 3.5 x 6ft for cost effectiveness while we're just getting started.

We are going to fill back in the hole (shh, it never happened), and put down a mix of Miracle Gro, molasses, and vermiculite.  We are positioning the bed so we can use the back chain link fence as a trellis and we're trying to use 2 2x4's stacked as our sides.  One mystery yet to be solved involves how far apart we're actually supposed to plant the seeds.  Everybody, including my mini-farming book, tells you different things.   I'll let you know how it goes!

Recipes!  Quick!  Easy!  Delish!
I posted a link a week or so ago from a website with homeschooling resources.  This mom also has recipes on her site and we tried out a few of them tonight.  WOW!!  We had scalloped potatoes made with only 3 ingredients, and zucchini "boats" with hamburger meat.  They were SO GOOD.  If you hear I'm making them, you should invite yourself over for dinner.  If I hear that YOU are making them, I'll probably invite myself over.    To top it off, I made some butterscotch bars (5 ingredients!) and used whole wheat flour.  My hubby LOVES them and actually likes them better with the whole wheat flour.   Here's the website:  Heavenly Homemakers.  Let me know what you make!

Carrie then was inspired to make butter out of the leftover cream from the scalloped potatoes.  After a good five minutes of shaking, she had butter!  As she was rinsing it, we decided to make it into buttercream icing!  I've been wanting to replicate the chocolate lasagna that Olive Garden used to serve, and my sister (in law) shared the recipe with me.  We whipped up a cake and made the icing.  Icing will commence tomorrow.

[So, if you want to plant a garden and eat some chocolate lasagna, you know where to be tomorrow!]