Blogging Necessities

I’ve been having a harder time blogging lately, and I think I’ve finally figured out why.  In order to blog, I have to have

• time enough to write (and I am not a fast writer)
• an idea
• mental energy enough to put it all together.

I’m not sure why, but having the first three all at the same time has been difficult in the last few weeks. 

It might be because I have really been concentrating on doing the most important things first this fall.  I’m happy to report that 50 % of the time I am 50% successful, which is about 300% better than before! 

I’ve also been trying to use my time effectively to go through my house, getting rid of things we no longer need and organizing the things we do need.  I’m happy to offer pictures of my newly organized pantry as proof that I have succeeded at (and, more importantly, finished!) least one project.

This reorganization was prompted by an awesome sale that enabled me to by 3 dozen cans of Campbells Cream of Chicken soup for 49 cents a can.  (And I’m sorry, I buy a lot of store brands but I don’t care what they say—the campbells soup is better!)  Once I bought the soup and looked in the pantry to see where to put it I realized that

• there was no room
• anyone in the pantry during a tornado or earthquake was going to die.

When I reorganized I went through and checked all of the dates.  Ouch.  After the infamous Ice Storm of 2002 I realized that we really needed to have some food that was edible straight from the can, that didn’t need to be made or baked or messed with other than heating.  So I bought lots of soup and stew and chili…we were ready for another power outage, indeed we were.  It just didn’t happen, and because we don’t normally eat those things (from cans) we never did…and yesterday they went the way of all the earth…(which means into the garbage truck.)

[Just a note for anyone who, like my sister, is astounded that I threw away food…The chili was at least 8 years out of date—purchased after the ice storm in 2002.  The salad dressing bottles were brown instead of red.  And the stew was bought to be prepared for Y2K!!!]

As I put things back into the pantry I was careful to put lighter things on the top shelves and the canned foods on the lower shelves.  Hopefully now anyone stuck in there in a tornado will emerge full and alive.

The pantry reorganization took me more than two days, and taught me again that painful lesson—that the road to organization is sometimes enormously messy.

Thankfully Russ and the kids were super good sports about the disaster that was our kitchen for the better part of 2 days!

Another thing that kept me from blogging recently was baking.  Our ward had a dessert auction last week to help raise money for a sweet man who needs a heart transplant.  I couldn’t figure out at first what to make, and I finally decided to make a trio of cheesecakes:

A Raspberry Crumb Topped Cheesecake for breakfast,

Mini Pumpkin Pecan Cheesecakes for lunch,

and a Chocolate Swirl Cheesecake for dinner.

I had lots of fun baking but I was sure tired by the time I was done.

On other fronts, the dehydrator runs day and night, drying apples.  And I eat half of them as soon as they are cool!  I have a solution, though.  I’m going to borrow another dehydrator, so that I can dry twice as many at once.  That way I’ll have some to save and some to eat as well.  (It’ll practically be like having my cake and eating it too…except much more nutritious.)

Hope you are all enjoying the beautiful fall!