Cooking Class

I had the best time this weekend. First off, I got to see my family and meet my newest cousin, sweet baby Hendrix {and I am in love, btw}. We had a girls night on Saturday and headed up to the Wind Creek Casino in Atmore, AL for a cooking class. It was my friend Libbie's birthday request and I am so glad that's what she chose. So much fun! We had one couple in our class that goes to the class about every two weeks. I can see why they do it. You get a delicious meal, a fun night out, and you learn a little something!

Here was our menu for the evening:

• Roasted rack of lamb with herb chutney
• Asparagus tips, caramelized onion & oyster mushrooms
• Israeli Couscous with Dijon cream
• Poached pear tart with fig & chocolate

About to get cooking!

Stacey and Libbie

The chef was right beside Stacey and I, and us being the nerds that we are, were determined to make the best meal and get the A+ from him. I think we succeeded!

Please excuse all of the bad iPhone pictures, it was better than nothing!

Brandy and Wendy

I love lamb and I usually just grill mine, so it was nice to see how to cook it in the oven and for some ideas of what to serve with it. If David is nice, I may just recreate this meal for him this weekend.

Here's a picture of our dessert before and after:

It was just so cute! It was also super easy. Although I wasn't a big fan of the pears and chocolate together.

Here's our finished entrée:

I think it turned out great! But then again, I had an awesome co-cook!

Well, that is about it for our cooking class. If you are interested in any of the recipes from above, let me know.

If you enjoy cooking, grab your girlfriends and do it. You will have a blast, I promise!

Fun Discoveries

I guess I could write a post about what David and I did for Valentine's Day. But that would be about two sentences and not very interesting since we decided to boycott heart day this year. It  was a low-key weekend with my boys, just how I like it!

On Saturday, we went downtown just to get out and about some. All of the shops were having a sidewalk sale, so needless to say it was super busy. Um- dislike. It's good for the local businesses, but it makes shopping in those tiny shops a little troublesome. I have now lived in Thomasville for 7 years. In those 7 years, I have never been in the little antique shop A Different Drummer. I saw a commercial for this shop, and I was wondering where on earth it was downtown and how I could have missed it! So I dragged David down to go shop and for once, we both agreed that this shop was the bomb dot com.

A shop where they have a merganser on their bags? Obviously this place was going to be my jam. This shop specializes in vintage sports art. Mainly wooden decoys.

There were all kinds of sportsman treasures in there. Beautiful works of art, handcrafted furniture, wooden fishing lures, vintage hunting magazines. You name it- they had it. They also have the cutest garden out back. I have seen numerous pictures of this garden and never knew where in town it was. Now I know!

 

The birder in me of course was in love with all of this! I probably would have left with lots of goodies if I had the mind to! Click on the link above to check out much better pictures of this cute store.

I left with this hunting themed framed needlepoint.

It is now hanging up in my kitchen, that is quickly becoming my "plantation" room. My mother knew I had been wanting to start a collection of Spode Woodlands china, so for Christmas, she gifted me some plates.

All of the white plates are Lenox Butler's Pantry and all of the pewter pine cone serving pieces are from The Gift Shop located in downtown Thomasville. The pine cone wine glasses are from Kevin's Outdoors, also in Thomasville.
My sweet brother gifted me one of the prints that my parents had framed for his birthday.

We always had Springer Spaniels growing up, so this print was super special to me. He kept the German Shorthair Pointer picture, which was the other dogs we always had as well. So my new hunting picture I found fits right in!

Other than Valentine's Day, this weekend was also the Great Backyard Bird Count weekend. This is an annual event that the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society does to gather important data on wild birds. It is to help gauge where bird populations are before spring migration. So of course, I had to get a little bird watching in so that I could do my part to help! We had plans to go down to St. Marks so that we could see some ducks and other water birds, but it was a bit too cold on Saturday for all of that. So we hung around the house.

We did go over to Cherokee Lake (which is a local public park) on a whim to see if maybe there were a few brave ducks out on the lake. We got quite the surprise! There were wood storks at the lake. Cherokee Lake is always packed with people, so I was shocked that those storks were just hanging out.  Wood Storks are an endangered species (although they may have been downgraded to just threatened) so it is usually considered rare to get a sighting of these birds. There were 6 of these guys up in the pine trees.

So that was a nice discovery this weekend! It was the first time I have ever been that close to one to get a good picture. We usually only see them flying. I also got to knock a new bird off my list while at the lake- this pretty white-eyed vireo.

It was a relaxing weekend spent with my sweetie with some fun, new discoveries! Hope everyone had a great weekend as well!



DIY Oyster Ball

I have a little project to share that I completed last weekend. If you are a Pinterest or blog addict like I am, you see all kinds of projects out there in cyber-land. I have had a 5-gallon bucket full of oyster shells that I have been hoarding since back in October. I kept them thinking I could simply display them in a glass container or find some fun project for them. Well, like most things around my house, they have sat in that bucket for months on end. So it was definitely time to do something with those things! I have seen these pretty gems floating around and at $180 a pop, I figured I could make one myself (although if you click through to see the one for sale, it looks 1,000,000x better than mine does!).

First, gather your supplies. You will need:

• Styrofoam ball
• Hot glue gun/glue sticks
• Oysters
• Spray/craft paint in a white or light gray

My first mistake was relying on Wal-Mart to have what I needed. They had no Styrofoam balls there, but they did have a topiary form. With that weird moss stuff on it. Ladies (or gentlemen) do yourself a favor and get a regular Styrofoam ball. That moss made this project much more difficult than it needed to be! Also, cutting that wire stick out wasn't any fun either.

Prepping the oysters was fairly simple. After shucking and devouring the delicious oysters, I simply threw them in the 5-gallon bucket, filled it with water, and added bleach. That's how they sat for the longest time until I realized that it was attracting too much attention from the wiener dogs, so the bleach water got dumped and shortly abandoned/forgotten. Therefore, they were sitting in a bucket full of rain water and pine straw for probably 3 months! So I brought them in, and gave them a good soak in the sink with hot water and bleach and then just took a scrub brush to them.

 

Then I laid them outside to dry. Once they were dry, I gave them a quick clear coating (just spray paint you can pick up at any hardware store) to make sure that any funky smells would be forever locked in!

Once that was complete, it was time to assemble. **Learn from my mistake and paint your ball before you begin. I didn't and I really wish I did. That green moss sticks out like a soar thumb peeking out between the oysters.

I grabbed oysters that all had about the same length to go around the circumference in the hopes that it would produce a somewhat round shape. Just keep sticking the shells in and gluing them in place. Since my ball had that moss stuff on it, I couldn't really stick the shells in, so mainly I had to glue them in place. This took FOREVER! So word to the wise- I thought this would be like a 30 minute project and it ended up taking me about 3 hours! So it wasn't the quickest project. But that was because I had to hold each and every shell to wait for the glue to set.

 

Just keep going and sticking those suckers in the ball! You can see that I had it sitting on that small container, which was a great way to keep it steady in the beginning.

This ball ended up taking quite a lot of oysters surprisingly. And when I was finished it was super, super heavy!

I am going to go back and try to add a few more shells in the gaps if I can because it needs a little extra. But by the time I got the ball to this point, I was so over this project and didn't want to see another oyster for quite some time. I will eventually go back with a paint brush and some paint and paint the gaps that are too small to fill with another oyster shell. You can really see the gaps in this photo.

This thing is quite large, so if I make another one, I will be getting a smaller Styrofoam ball for sure. It doesn't look quite as good as the ones I've seen, but it's close! And for $10, I'll take it!

Happy crafting!

 



Homemade Suet

It's all about feeding the birds today, y'all! During these cold winter months, suet is where its at for several kinds of birds. Suet is basically a mixture of animal fat, cornmeal, flour and seeds/peanuts that many birds love. Because it is made of fat, it should only be fed during the cold winter months, as the fat can melt and get on the birds feathers causing some issues. Plus, the heat could made it go rancid very quickly.

My birds (and squirrels) were going gangbusters on my suet feeder, so I decided than rather buying the premade suet cakes, I could make my own. Thanks to my friend Google, I came across several recipes for homemade suet. It's also a great way to use up any ingredients that you need to purge from your pantry. Here's what I ended up with:

Homemade Suet:

• 2 cups tallow (I couldn't find any tallow, which is beef fat, so I ended up using lard, which is pork fat)
• 2 cups crunchy peanut butter
• 6 cups cornmeal (I ended up using cornmeal mix because that's what I had. It is a mixture of cornmeal and flour. Next time I will probably go with actual cornmeal to help the consistency)
• 1 cup flour
• 8 cups birdseed
• Dried Fruit (optional)

First, melt the lard and peanut butter in a double boiler or the microwave.

Gag....

After everything is nice and smooth, start mixing up the rest of the ingredients.

It was really funny mixing this suet up. It's not every day I cook with lard and/or birdseed! Ok, I've never cooked with birdseed.

Once everything is mixed, put it onto a pan and throw in the fridge to harden up.

I was going to be all fancy for the suet that I was taking to my office and cut out little Valentine Day suet cakes.

I even had red/pink/white string and everything to hang it with but that got nixed because my suet was a little too soft. Hence why all cornmeal would probably work better than the cornmeal mix.

Anyways, after your suet has hardened up just cut it up into rectangles and put in zip-lock bags. Store your suet in the freezer until ready to use. Below is a typical suet feeder.

Yellow-rumped Warbler enjoying some suet

The guys at Birdsong Nature Center have their suet in a cypress stump, which makes me want one really bad now.

Red-bellied Woodpecker

Red-winged blackbird

So go ahead and make some homemade suet - your bird friends will thank you!

{ps -Stacey I can feel you rolling your eyes at the post while I am writing it. Enjoy!}