Happy 30th Anniversary and St Patricks Day

Today is our 30th wedding anniversary. Wow! It is hard to believe it has been that long. The years have been great. We have so many wonderful memories and more love for each other everyday. Isn't it strange how the longer you are married the more you fall in love?We became sweethearts 31 years ago. I am so glad that my dreams came true. That my knight in shining armor came and took me to be his bride. Our oldest daughter could not be with is as she lives in Texas, but we received a happy phone call wishing us a "Happy Anniversary". Thanks Dana and Jac! Our youngest daughter surprised us with these beautiful flowers along with a homemade gift and card. The words on the card
are perfect. I hope you all can read it. DD loves to wood burn and made this beautiful plaque for us. Around the edges she put the word love, in many different languages. I hope everyone can read it because it is beautiful. She said she ran out of room and had to put the date March 17, 77 instead of March 17, 1977, but we don't mind. Thanks BB! Here me and DH are with our flowers and gift. As you can see in the picture I am a blubbering idiot. Of course if you ask anyone in my family they will tell you that I cry at the drop of a pin. I won't tell anyone, but DH has gotten very tenderhearted over the years and he too, tears up in touching moments. (and commercials, television programs, stories in church.... the list goes on and on) Oops! Sorry Yogi, I guess it isn't a secret anymore.

I am so proud of our girls and thought I would share their happy faces. This is our oldest daughter, Dana. I keep asking for her to send pictures, but her and her sweety are so busy. Hi Dana and Jac! Send momma pictures!

Here is BB, our youngest all dressed up to go to a St Patrick's Day party with her sweetheart. She was very inventive this year. She dyed a white halter top forest green, sewed on stretchy sequence, made matching wrist bands, sprayed her white flip flops green, and cut shamrocks off the tinsel and glued it to her cheeks. You look cute BB, great job!

Ok, I guess that is enough of the bragging momma for now. On to FOOD! I decided I was going to get a head start on some cooking for the week, but did not accomplish nearly as much as I wanted to. Anyway, nothing real exciting, but tasty for sure. I had some potatoes that were beginning to grow. I usually use organic when ever possible, but we were given 5lbs of russets and they seem to begin growing much faster that our usual organic Yukon Golds. I also had some fresh chives that needed to be use. Our family loves mashed spuds, which is what they will have this week. I added "no-chicken" broth and a tiny bit of plain soy milk and mashed away. Then stirred in some finely chopped chives along with salt and pepper. My next adventure was to use up some veggies that screaming "use me". I diced up 2 pounds of carrots, 3 small sweet potatoes, a cup of onion, about 10 or 12 cloves of garlic, and some red and orange bell pepper. Tossed them with a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper. Roasted them for 30 min covered at 425 degrees, lowered the temp to 375 uncovered them and let them cook another 10 min. or so to get some nice carmelization. They taste like sugar. BB, the youngest, is not crazy about cooked carrots and she said she will be eating these for sure. We go through steamed veggies in this house like crazy. I cooked up 6 pretty good size zucchini and the last 3 tiny, yellow, crookneck squash. I was going to make stuffed acorn squash for dinner, but my mom came over and gave us dinner money from my her and my dad Thanks mom and dad! We don't have any vegan restaurants near us, but I tend to be inventive whereever we go. We all know that it is a hit and miss with most restaurants. We ended up going to Chili's. They have a meatless black bean burger that is really good. I ordered just the patty along with 2 sides of steamed broccoli and corn on the cob, hold the butter. I forgot to take my camera, but I promise it was really good. Omni man had his usual meat and potatoes with corn. Chili's has nothing in the way of desserts for vegans so we came home and I made Chocolate Agave Cupcakes from VCtotW. They call for 1 cup of unbleached flour, but I used half whole wheat pastry flour and they turned out great. In fact, they are too rich for me, but I enjoy savory over sweet 98% of the time. I cut the recipe in half and baked them in my mini-tart pan. Then I frosted them with your typical "butter" cream frosting made out of Earth Balance and vegan sugar. After we took the picture we decided they should at least have something green on them for St. Patrick's Day so we cut more lil shamrocks from the tinsel and decorated a few to be festive.

That is about it for today. Thanks for putting up with my lengthy post. I hope everyone had a fun, safe, and yummy St. Patrick's Day.