Jam Sessions

Throughout the week Mike has been slowly packing up things and moving them box at a time into his office and the carpet room. The front room is completely empty and the kitchen is as close as we can get it without moving anything that is completely necessary to living and eating in this house. Mike's office is pretty darn full right now, however it still is possible for him to work in it.

On Wednesday the Water's kids found some mushrooms in their yard, so we decided to see if there were any mushrooms up at the dell. We found three morels, a few clusters of oyster mushrooms, and a cluster of wild onions. We picked one of the onions to transplant to our yard and gathered the mushrooms to make into some sort of mushroom food in the future. Mike sauteed them and froze them, so the next time we make pizza we can have wild mushrooms on one.

On Thursday the kids were bored, so Mike cut up some dowels that we had sitting around the house and made some drumstick sets. He sanded them down and then started using them to hit random buckets and pans and things that we had around the house - telling the kids that they should play drums with him. Three kids joined the band - one as a drummer, one as a guitarist (on Alison's guitar), and one as a pianist (on the electric piano that we have). We have had a few jam sessions since then, so hopefully that is something that we can keep up.

Friday was Alison's birthday, so we made fruit pizza and Alison's chocolate pies. For the pizza we made homemade graham cracker crust (using a recipe for graham crackers that Alison found years ago on the internet. It is mostly butter, flour, cinnamon, and honey). We added Greek yogurt with honey and vanilla to the top as a sauce, and then strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, goldenberries, mangoes, and pineapples to the top of it.

The pies have been Alison's favorite dessert for a few years now, they are made by mixing up a box of brownies and pouring the batter into about 20 muffin tins and baking them as if they were in a 9x13 pan. When they are done you use a spoon to smear the molten brownies up the edge of the muffin tins and then wait till they harden into little muffin sized pie crusts. As they cool you mix up a big box of chocolate fudge pudding (the one would normally take 3 cups of milk), but instead of using milk you use 2 cups of heavy whipping cream and half a cup of milk (and a dollop of mint flavoring). Once you whip it up it makes a super dense chocolate pudding/mousse. You spoon that into the pie crusts and sprinkle chocolate mint chips over the top of them. They are very rich, and pretty easy.

For Alison's birthday Mike gave her a new ebook, Andrea knitted her some slippers, Sara gave her a daily planner and a wall calendar, Timmy gave her a physical copy of the book he wrote, Gideon gave her a set of signs - one saying "Calming Corner", and the other saying "Relax", and Elsa gave her some almond chocolate candies.

Saturday we didn't really have very much planned, so we ended up cleaning up the house, packing more things, buying groceries for the week, etc. The kitchen disposal broke, so mike bought some parts to replace it, and he intends to fix it on Monday (since it is a holiday). He also spent a lot of time fixing all of the neighborhood kids bikes (since they are all always broken for some reason.)