Breakfast Grits ~ Strawberry Crunch and a lot dirty dishes day

 

(recipe is from The Southern Lady Cooks, online)

I made us a sausage/tomato/chili and cheese grits breakfast casserole, to use up some tomatoes from the freezer.  It was the first time to try this recipe, and it was delicious.  So delicious my husband kept coming back in the kitchen to get another bite, and another, and another....so good.  I made farm fresh scrambled eggs to pair with it.  I will be taking some to youngest, as it made a lot.

Where do you all buy your grits?  I'm having a terrible time finding organic/non-gmo grits.  I need to day to search online I guess.  Any tips on where to buy them would be great.  It's been a while since I bought any, so if I find some, I will stock a bit in the freezer.  

In celebration of the crazy work schedule ending, I baked a strawberry crunch for my husband to take to work, for their celebratory dinner at work.  I love having those frozen strawberries on hand, and they smell as fresh as they did when I froze them.

After all the dishes were washed (hubby did the washing), dried, and put away, I did a lot of re-filling of stuff.  It was like everything was out all at once.

I buy a lot of organic ingredients in bulk, so the black pepper was re-filled, cinnamon, homemade vanilla, and the sugar canister needed refilled (I do not bulk buy sugar).

Speaking of homemade vanilla.  I keep this in a box in my closet, and when I went to retrieve the vanilla, I saw a tincture I started in 2021 and completely forgot about it.

The tincture has sage still in the vodka.  Is this still good to strain, or should I toss it?  I guess that year it was super crazy, so I completely forgot about it.

Most of the rainy day was involved with baking, but my wonderful husband went upstairs and helped me move the things, so I could paint more flooring.  

 

Whew! Crazy Hours End! ~ Extreme Clean/Renovations Update ~ Garden

 

We made it through it!  My husband had to work 14 days straight, with a switch to 2nd shift, and that was hard for the both of us.  It has finally come to an end.  Now we can get back to our home projects and have the evenings to ourselves. 

I literally have several lists going right now.  I figured, when this schedule is back to normal, I have options on what we do next, ha ha!

I have been painting the upstairs sub flooring with odor killer paint, and have one room more than half done.  We are super excited to get this job done, so we can install flooring.  I should the larger room's flooring painted in 3 days, 4 tops.

We have purged many boxes in the last two weeks, donated quite a bit, and our trash bin filled up as fast as it was emptied.

I have just a few more boxes to go through, but they are larger boxes.  The bedroom/closet are almost done.    We haven't talked much about door paint color yet.  We'll pick up paint swatches next trip to town.

On the garden updates:

- planted 16 new asparagus root starts, put short fencing in around to hold straw in place (for now)

-planted about 10 new rhubarb (temporarily in a grow bag)

We are to get 5-6 days of rain starting today.  I wanted to get these planted before the rain.  

What needs done in the garden:

-dig randomly growing red raspberry sprouts and re-home them, they are coming up in over in the vegetable garden where I have the original asparagus bed.

Gardening indoors:

-planted a basil and cilantro plant, because I have been terrible with seed starts with everything going on here lately.