I read about Send Something Good over at Gastronomical Sovereignty and since it sounded fun and I end up getting a present out of it (okay, a package. All for ME!), I thought, why not? Today is a link up where all the bloggers involved are introducing themselves. Welcome to my all about me post.
I’m a forty-something mother who despite my extreme dislike of soccer, has become a soccer mom. Don’t tell my daughter. I have a very handsome hubby that I met when I fell off the roof of my garage at a party in college. He is a Riverkeeper, which when I try to explain to people what that is, I just call him the old man of the river. He monitors and advocates for the river. I don’t really talk about being eco-friendly a whole lot on my blog because I prefer to just walk the walk rather than talk about it. I also like to say that Environment Non-profit isn’t just a job, it’s a life style. Together we have one completely amazing 10 year old daughter. She is the most responsible, punctual member of our family. She thinks that cleaning bathrooms and making beds are fun. I’m really not sure where she got this from. She also watches Martha Stewart and Julia Child and then comes up with these insane craft projects. I know exactly where that came from.
I love thrifting. Just about everything in our house we have gotten second hand. It’s the thrill of the hunt as well as I am just that cheap. I prefer old things. Among the vintage things I like to collect and use are tablecloths, napkins, aprons and cookbooks. You might notice a theme there.
I love to cook. I will rant about the state of our food system, which I think needs to be completely overhauled. There are changes that need to happen at the top, but we need a good grassroots effort to help make this happen. To this end, I am involved in local food issues where we live, I am on the vegetable garden committee at my daughter’s school and have committed to starting up a garden at the school she will attend next year as she moves up the upper elementary school. At the same time, I also have a fondness for food that really isn’t food, like Twizzlers and BBQ corn nuts. I think that fresh cotton candy and a perfectly roasted marshmallow are a certain happiness that can only come from sugar melting on your tongue. Everything in moderation, including moderation. I keep exactly one processed food in my pantry and that is Kraft mac & cheese. We don’t eat it alot, but man there are times when that is the bomb.
I love to bake. I show up at friend’s houses and immediately start baking in their kitchen. I love chocolate cake and will make you the best chocolate cake you have ever had. I am the sort of person who will make a cake that takes 2 days to complete. It is so worth it. It’s that good. And this is from a girl who used to never make a recipe that was longer than a paragraph. My husband dared me, I never stand down a dare, and the rest is history. He also bought me a stand mixer on the condition that I use it at least once a month.
I love to garden. Digging holes in the ground is my ultimate happy. My love of gardening and cooking are somewhat related, as I’ve had a garden so that I can have my own tomatoes most of my life. I even attempted a tomato patch in college. Somewhere along the way I learned to can, so I do a good bit of that. I even teach canning classes. My jams and jellies don’t always turn out, I prefer to just make fruit butters in the crock pot, but I might try jams again this summer, since you know, I am a canning instructor. I love to pickle things. I will pickle anything and everything, including radishes, green beans, okra and watermelon rind. I like to try things just to see if I can do them, which explains all the pickles. We grow all kinds of native flowers, flowers I just really like, vegetables, fruits like strawberries and blueberries as well as a few fruit trees (cherry and peach). We have squirrels that think all of this is grown for them and some years they win. They will hop up on my kitchen screen door and yell at me. I am trying to convince my daughter, who learned to shoot and liked it at camp last summer that if she wants to move up to moving targets as she claims, then she should start on our squirrels and I’ll get her a gun just for that. She just rolls her eyes at me and says shooting squirrels is not the same as shooting skeet. She truly is a little lady.
I love to read. My husband is pretty convinced we’re going to die in a crushing avalanche of shoes and books. He tries to keep me on a no-net gain of both of those and so far is only successful on the shoe part. He says I get a certain glow when I buy a new pair of shoes. Also, if I have the mini-me with me, she will rat me out if I made a shoe purchase around her. I’ve been known to keep a new pair of shoes in the box, hidden in the closet and he STILL can tell I bought a new pair. But books, I have books on everything. We are big do-it-yourself-ers, so we have books on that. I have quite the cookbook collection. Novels out the wazoo. I love British Chick Lit, Stephen King, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Louisa May Alcott, Anne of Green Gables, John Steinbeck and more, but I have never read the Twilight series. I just refuse to. I read the Anne Rice vampire books. One vampire series is enough. Pat got me a kindle for Christmas, hoping that this would mean maybe I’d get rid of some books. HA!
I am often called ‘crafty’ because I sew and knit. I am fascinated by quilting and the mini-me thinks this needs to be ‘our’ new thing, but honestly, I have enough trouble finishing any project besides dinner in a timely fashion – a quilt will take me freaking forever. I have been working on a sweater for my husband for over a year. Most of my knitting gets done on roadtrips, at soccer practice and watching tv. College football & basketball season are prime knitting times. I have a hard time sitting still, I definitely have a hard time sitting and doing nothing, so knitting fixes that for me. Also, you can drink and knit much easier than you do anything else while drinking. I like being productive, even if I have just sat on my rear and watched college football all day long. Knitting gives me something to show for that.
At one point, I ended up with a monthly wine column for a lovely local publication that is no longer. I will sometimes write about wine on here (some of my regular readers are still waiting on my post about Riesling and it’s coming, I just have a wee bit more research to do…). Despite this, I still claim to not know a whole lot about wine. But I like it.
My living room is painted orange and contains a purple velvet sofa with leopard print throw pillows. I mention this because every time someone new comes to our house, they walk in and stop to take it all in. I love color, even though I tend to wear black as much as possible. (It’s very slimming and forgiving of how much food I spill on myself. I don’t eat a meal that I don’t wear.) Those also happen to be my favorite colors – purple, orange and leopard print.
When I’m not babbling on here, digging up my yard, volunteering at school, running my girl scout troop or any of the other things that keep me running all day long, I have a small home-based business I started last year, where I provide home-cooked-meals-to-go for busy working people. It’s slowly growing by word of mouth, which keeps the growth manageable. I cook the way I cook for my own family, because I do feed my family the same thing – there is an emphasis on local, organic, whole grain & primarily vegetarian. We don’t eat alot of meat because I don’t like to touch it when it’s raw. What meat we do eat, we normally tend to be a on first name basis with, because we have a number of friends that raise livestock. The pig that is on my header is currently in my freezer.
And that is probably much more than you’ve ever wanted to know about me. I tend to blog about all of the above, as well as how much I avoid cleaning my house. Two bathrooms seemed like a good idea at the time, but having two bathrooms means you have to clean two bathrooms. Ugh.
Here are the rest of the bloggers. Go check some out and see if you can’t find some fun new blogs to follow.
Chicken Wire & Paper Flowers 
i'm so glad i've gotten to “meet” you… 🙂 we're kindreds. though i don't know if I'd want to keep the pigs head in the freezer 😉
I'm happy to have you participating in Send Something Good! Talk to you soon!
A RIVERKEEPER?! That sounds AWESOME! 😀 haha! And I'm pretty sure you should write a book about your life and it will be called “Riverkeeper”!
Gentri, There is already a book called “Riverkeeper”, by John Cronin & Robert F. Kennedy Jr about their fight to clean up a river that the Waterkeeper alliance came out of. The book about my life would more likely be named something like my blog.
Kristy, the head isn't in our freezer, just some sausage.
Love your blog! Glad I found it!
xo-Deidre deejmbl.blogspot.com
you sound so awesome.
seriously, i love chickens too.
a friend of mine has some and i remember when they were chicks and loved to cuddle.
It sounds like you've got a great and fulfilling life going on–wonderful! I especially loved reading about how you met your husband (I laughed out loud), what kind of person your daughter is, and your meals from home business (great idea!)
I'm glad there's another Beckie/Becky in the Send Something Good Project : ]