Cider-Roasted Squash

This is a recipe I found years ago in a magazine.  It is a quintessentially fall dish, and you will not believe how good it smells while baking!

8 cups peeled, seeded winter squash, cut into 1" cubes (I like to use butternut)

1 medium onion, cut in wedges

1/4 cup apple cider 

2 Tbsp EVOO

1 Tbsp brown sugar

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 tsp pepper

1/4 tsp ground nutmeg or ginger

In a greased 3 qt baking dish, combine squash and onion.  Combine remaining ingredients and pour over veggies, tossing to coat.  Bake uncovered at 450°F for 35 minutes or until tender, stirring twice.  Makes 8 servings.

Tech-Challenged Mom Gets iPhone

Yesterday Craig got a new iPhone...not the newest one that comes out tomorrow, but the one that was the newest one a few months ago (4, I think?).  He passed down his iPhone 3 to me.

I have been using a Tracfone that is several years old.  It doesn't have internet.  It doesn't have a camera. I could text, but didn't bother to figure out how.  I paid about $100 a year for all the minutes I needed.  It was a great, simple phone, and I highly recommend Tracfone if you don't like being on a contract and paying big bucks every month.  You can even choose a smart phone if you like.

Anyhoo, that is to say that I am not iPhone savvy.  Up until now, Craig's iPhone was nothing more than a Scrabble machine to me.  If I ever tried to use it for another purpose, invariably I ended up pushing the wrong "button" and messing it up, and getting mad.

So, this is going to be interesting getting up to speed with the "new" technology.  Wish me luck.  Do you have any tips or apps that you just can't live without?

Beautiful

This morning as I was watching for the school bus with my daughter, the sun was at just the right angle that I noticed this enormous, perfect spider web in the little tree in our front yard.

There was also an enormous, fat, size-of-a-half dollar spider in the middle of it, and as my son said, "I don't do spiders".  But I got close enough to take a picture, and although the sun was in my face so I couldn't see the viewfinder, or what I was focused on, I managed to get this cool photo.

We have been having beautiful fall weather for the last week.  It's sunny and warm, the colors are popping out everywhere...a perfect autumn.


A perfect picture of the wonder of God's beautiful world.

Inspired

The other day I got an email from Rebecca, a senior at UC Davis.  I don’t know Rebecca; she just wanted to let me know that my blog had inspired her.  Isn’t that cool?  She and two friends are living together in a house this year, and were looking for a way to assign chores.  She googled “chore wheel” and found my post.  The chore wheel has been effective for three years in our house, and that’s a record for us.

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Here’s her version.  I like how she put it on a bulletin board with a pushpin in the middle to turn it.  So smart and simple…why didn’t I think of that?  Mine turns works fine on its brad, but the pushpin didn’t even occur to me when I was searching high and low to find that stray brad.

I’m impressed that these girls are so organized with their chores and bills.  I honestly don’t remember how we did it when I was living in a house with two other girls.  Of course, I was only 17 and they were 19, so maybe we weren’t too worried about it.

What were you like in college…super organized or not so much?

Fall Porch

There's no denying it--fall is here!  We are supposed to have glorious weather this week, with cool nights and sunny days around 80 degrees.  This weekend I got my front porch ready for the season.

First off, I needed to redo my DIY vinyl numbers.  After almost two and a half years, they had become brittle and started to flake.  No problem, I just repeated the process.

before

I'm still loving last year's Dollar Tree wreath, so I put it out again, but added a little embellishment with our initial.  I got it at a thrift store a long time ago, and it just happens to be the perfect color for this wreath (you can also see the new and improved numbers).

Because the wreath is made out of foam board, it was easy to poke a couple of holes in a hidden spot underneath the leaves, and use floral wire to attach the A.  Since the wreath is so light, the letter weighed it down on one side, so I anchored it in place with sticky tack.

Add a couple of pumpkins, and my porch is ready for fall.

{Did you see my announcement?  I hope you'll come visit my new blog!}

Announcement

Sorry I've been MIA this week.  I've been busy working on another project.

I'd like to announce the public opening of my new blog, Spoons.

It's a little bit scary to put it out there, because it is a totally different side of me, one that I have not addressed here on Homebody.  It's a different topic and a different genre, and I realize that it may not have the same audience.  But I feel like you are my friends, and I hope you'll at least check it out.

As a side note, I decided to try out Wordpress for this venture, and there are some inconsistencies in the appearance of these early posts.  I'm still trying to figure out the ropes.  For the most part, though, I like Wordpress so far, although there are a couple things I'm not in love with.  But maybe I'll figure those out as I go along.


I don't intend to abandon Homebody, so I hope to see you around!

Another Craigslist Purchase

In the family room, I had a white slipcovered sofa that was a craigslist purchase three years ago.  It's a nice-looking piece, but the slipcover was starting to get raggedy, and honestly, it's not too comfortable.  The cushions are feather-filled, but the seat cushions also have springs, which seem to be bent or something because it's very lumpy.

A few weeks ago I was browsing craigslist, as I often do.  I always search "IKEA", and this time an Ektorp three-seater sofa popped up.  These go really fast on our CL and I figured it would already be gone, but she had just listed it late the night before and I was first in line!  There were others after me who would take it if I didn't.

It was only $125, and I had some money from some ebay sales, so I grabbed it.

The red slipcover works well in the family room, though I do plan to eventually get a new cover.

There are a couple of mysteries about this sofa. I knew it was an older model, and it's definitely well broken-in.  But it is different from my Ektorp sectional and chair, and different from my friend Dixie's two-yr-old  Ektorp sofa.  (It is an Ektorp; the tag says so.)

First, the seat cushions are all foam, and the newer ones have a feather layer.  Second, the seat is deeper; I can sit normally in the new ones with my feet touching the floor, but not this one.  This is not a bad thing; while the new one is comfortable, this one is sink-in comfy-cozy.

I do, however, wonder if a new Ektorp cover is going to fit it.  I haven't tried switching a cushion cover yet, but you can see that the new brown one is wider and thinner than the old red one.

One possibility is that the sectional and sofa cushions are different sizes.  In fact, I just checked and the new sectional cushions are wider than the new chair cushion, so it stands to reason that sectional and sofa could also be different.  But Dixie has confirmed that her sofa cushions feel like my sectional, and not thick and cushy like the red sofa, so there's at least that difference.

Do any of you have an older Ektorp sofa for which you've successfully and recently replaced the cover?  I'm not in a rush to get the new cover, but at some point I'll chat with the IKEA helpline and see what they can tell me.

Oh, a couple of you asked what I was going to do with the spools I got last week.  I didn't have anything specific in mind, and for now they're just in the Coke crate that's on the coffee table.