Heavenly Body Butter
I know I’ve neglected my blog and my readers for the last week. It’s a busy time right now and with doing traveling on some weekends, usually those weeks end up being an exercise in controlled chaos trying to doing daily things while also trying to fit in travel prep. I quite literally feel like I’m all over the place sometimes. There is the house cleaning (anywhere know where I can find a good house elf?), the paying job, the reading, the writing, the cooking, and the other stuff. On the right is a picture of the body butter I made last week. It was supposed to be just shea butter, carrier oil, and essential oil. However, after it cooled, it stayed liquid. So, that meant putting it back on the stove and adding a little beeswax to get it a little more solid. Experimentation always takes more of my time. Rarely does anything come out right on the first try. When it does, it is celebrated even if it’s just me patting myself on the back. I still have soap to make, which I should have done today (sorry Stick), but I drove back from Cincinnati this morning and I’m working on laundry and another experiment – brown rice pudding. Then there are writing projects that seem to keep popping up. Focusing on one project tends to take the focus off of others. But, I am enjoying it. I even did my first copywriting project last week as a favor for Silly Sissy. I know at some point I’m going to have to say no to someone’s idea for another project, but every project I work on right now helps me hone my skills.
A gluten-free Southern style dinner cooked by my husband
There are changes coming down the line for me. I drove up to Cincinnati so my husband and I could look at apartments over the weekend. The company he is working for is looking at expanding up there and they’ve started looking to hire new developers. This means no more traveling for either of us to see each other on the weekends. Something we are both looking forward to. We did find a place we liked, now it’s a matter of timing. An opening for the floor plan we want at the time we want/need to move.
The nice thing about this past weekend was my husband cooking for me. It’s not very often he cooks for me since he’s gone all week and I tend to do the cooking on the weekends when he’s home. Lunchtime on Friday he presented me with the plate on the left. My eyes went wide as I registered how much brown rice and gluten-free cornbread was on the plate. The brown rice was sticky just how I like it and the cornbread was nice and moist. I had some of the cornbread the next morning for breakfast and wasn’t too impressed with how it was as a leftover, but I ate it anyway. It turned to mush where I added the honey and the rest of it was grainy. The type of grainy that gluten-free baked goods tend to get. Blech. The gluten-free Italian chicken sausage and pinto beans were spectacular. I didn’t get any leftovers though. My husband saved those for his lunches this week.
Nacho Salad with Skyline Chili
One of the things I’ve neglected since going gluten-free is checking on Skyline Chili being gluten-free. Well, I tried to check once on my phone when we were at the Cincinnati Zoo, but pdfs don’t work on my phone. My husband wanted to fix some over the weekend, so when we were at the store, I checked the can. Sure enough, gluten-free. I remembered this time to check the website when we got home and they have a lot of naturally gluten-free items on their menu. Nice to know in a pinch! One of the things I loved at Skyline when my husband first introduced me to the chain restaurant was the Nacho Salad. They took it off the menu several years ago, but we recreated it this past weekend. We used green leaf lettuce, tomatoes, black beans, black olives (that my husband had to pit and slice), canned Skyline chili, and colby jack cheese. Oh, can’t forget the corn chips, which aren’t pictured.
Not only was it nice to have a break from cooking, it was nice that my husband is making the foray to learn about gluten-free cooking. Hopefully, there will be more meals cooked by him in the future.
Life is taking me to places I never thought I’d be. 20 years ago I never would have thought I’d be in Kentucky, let alone moving to Ohio. I never thought I’d be on a gluten-free diet. I never thought I’d have so much going on with writing. Well, okay, I had dreams of writing best sellers. I’m still working on the best seller, but having other projects and this blog were never part of the dream. Sometimes, you just have to go along for the ride and let life do the leading.
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