Lesson 1574 – Easy appetizers for when you leave the nest

Some of my kids are beginning to leave the nest. One left this morning to move into his first apartment.

He’s an officer in the Army and so he’ll be getting a lot of good advice, but the one piece of advice *I* could give him was “the best thing you can do for your wallet and your health is to learn how to cook.”

All my kids have learned how to cook to a degree (at the very least they know how to follow a recipe.) There are about 4 meals that they can make without opening a cookbook.  But if you make the same four meals over and over, you’re going get bored and bored people start eating fast food or going out to restaurants just for a break. And that begins to impact your health and wallet.

I’ve been working on a family cookbook for some time, I keep adding to it when I find something that the kids should know.

This was added today.

Easy Appetizers for When Guests Come Over

When you want to have friends over always put out something to eat. It doesn’t have to be much and variety helps. This summer when we were on a family vacation, each night I’d put the following out on the back table so that everyone could relax with drinks and nibbles before dinner.

Trust me, it not only is impressive, but it’s also much appreciated to be able to “break bread” with good friends while conversing.

It helps to have a collection of small bowls ready to use. You can buy them anywhere or even use something like vintage custard cups (often found in thrift shops.) Keep them cleaned and stored between use for when you need them.

Basic Appetizers

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Lesson 1310 – The heartbeat of home

Sent chick #4 off to college today. It leaves the girls in high school and two of the boys, one of which is working full time, the other attending college while living at home. Those two gone, but not gone.

You’d think I’d be used to this, but I find that my equilibrium is off. Where is everyone and where do they need to be, I ask myself as I count the bodies that are supposed to be in the house and find myself coming up short.

Where are Logan and Trevor – still sleeping?

Oh, they’re gone.

Lesson 831 – Coming to an end

Last night as we all sat down to dinner, everyone suddenly realized that summer was rapidly coming to an end. Maybe it was that the nights are getting cooler (so cool that we have to find our sweaters) or that the days are getting incrementally shorter – shadows are now on the tops of the trees that just a few week before glowered in setting brilliance while we dined. Leaves are starting their magically impossible wardrobe change and there is a very definite crisp apple-scented feel of approaching fall in the air.

Kids will soon be leaving to go to college and back to school. Swim team and days of nothing to do in the afternoon but what you want will soon be over.

Lesson 830 – A room of my own

Those who follow me on Facebook know that I have an, um, obsession with tiny houses. (Hi, I’m Wendy and I can’t get enough of tiny structures.) There’s usually not a post on a tiny house that doesn’t escape my feed. I read up on how to build them, I came close to buying one located in Mass, and I am constantly intrigued by people who convert things like campers and sheds into tiny living spaces where there’s a place for everything and everything is in its place.

There is a certain kind of magic in a house where the empty spaces found between the moments of your life whisper to you instead of screech.

In my defense, though, I’ve always loved tiny things. Trolls were the dolls I preferred, and I remember once spending hours and hours, making doll houses out of discarded treat-sized boxes from our Halloween candy, as I recall, the Milk Dud boxes were the perfect size for a living room.