Recipe: What To Do With Subpar Tomatoes

Alot of our first tomatoes are turning up like this.  And on top of that, the first tomatoes you pick don't usually win any medals for flavor.   In addition to all that, Lovable little ol' me left 3lbs of our first crop of tomatoes outside to finish ripening all day long when's ident).  When I returned home they were soft and mushy...in other words, cooked.   How tragic!   The stuff we grow ourselves is practically sacred! so tossing those tomatoes out felt all kinds of wrong.  So, Georgie and I finished what the sun had started;). We cooked them into a yummy sauce!

Here's how it turned out:

Rancher Sauce: to be eaten with fried eggs, refried beans, ranchero cheese, avocado, corn tortillas and sprigs of Cilantro., or spread into a quesadilla, o serve it with sautéed squash, onions and zucchini seasoned with Mexican spices and served over Rice (this is how we ate it the first night...a yummy surprise!

Chop hip up the tomatoes, add 2 onions, 3-4 cloves of garlic, and one jalapeño, seeded, switching it up according to your tastes, and toss it into a food processor.  Once it is blended up to a fine texture, hear some canola oil in a large pot or pan.  Sauté your purée on med-high heat until your sauce is quite thick, (no water puddling  on the top).  Add salt to taste.  I added a little bit of sugar because my tomatoes weren't very naturally sweet.  Let it cool and toss in the fridge or freezer for later use.  

Unlike those tomatoes, this sauce was really yummy and will not go to waste;). 

And just this morning my neighbor gave me this huge, huge bucket FULL of fresh chard!  Fun day in the kitchen;), just how we like it(at least the girls in this family;)

Georgie Girl

georgie girl

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

Our Georgie spent the entire last school year learning Italian language and culture, so we're spending the entire mornings of our summer days at home learning English. Those vowels sounds are confusing (because in Italian they are different) and sitting at  a table inside while the sun is shining outside is HARD!  

               In her journal she writes 10-12 lines about all of the places we have visited.  And I am usually impressed with what she remembers, what stands out to her and the way she chooses to write it.  Most of the time she writes in third person which makes a lot of sense when you consider that she is always imagining herself somewhere else as someone else...in some kind of dream world;) 

Georgie loves to be silly and play which proves as a distraction with summer school work.  But all and all she's pretty good.  Sometimes she gets really into her writing.  And sometimes she ends up over on the couch like this:

Frustrated!

On top of all the English work she is catching up on, she has a mountain of Italian summer homework.  Two 75 page workbooks to be exact.  Georgie loves doing the math, is good at it and does it all independently so I am rolling with that!  We haven't even started the Italian reading/language homework yet!  Too much work/not enough time yada, yada, yada!

Not at all to our surprise, Georgie has discovered a love for swimming this summer.  She went to Italian swim camp in June and reported that she loved swimming laps.  So we signed her up for the swim team on base. Mimi says she has a lot of potential.  More importantly than all of that, she loves it.  She has so much fun being in the water.  She is now swimming laps with swim team 4 days a week and attending Grest (Italian summer camp in our town) every afternoon, all done after we spend our mornings doing homeschooling.  She is one busy little girl!

Dropping Georgie off for swim camp, Italian summer school camp (going on now)and swim team has left me proud and cheery every time.  Georgie has no fear!  I consider the social anxiety that comes along with starting new things with kids you don't know , especially in the situations where you don't completely speak the other kids language, and marvel that Georgie is not a ball of nerves.  Because she doesn't speak the language entirely she has, 2 or 3 times, come home from school or camp discouraged because no one will play with her and sometimes the girls are even mean.  Even though she has told me this through tears before she doesnt' seem to have let this effect her opinion of herself.  She seems to know who she is and doesnt' feel any pressure to hide that person. I really admire that about her.  

When Jake was here he articulated something that I always wanted for my kids..something I hadn't been able to put into words before.  Jake said that he wanted his kids to know that they can do hard things.  And I feel the same way. I am so proud to see that Georgie takes to that confidence quite naturally.  And its a joy to watch.

Happy Summer Georgie girl!  

Italy ♥

Italy ♥

Summer air in Italy is sweet perfume

Jasmine

For all these years I have been missing out.  I've heard the word Jasmine thrown around in reference to flowers, a girls name... but in all that time I didn't know what the Jasmine flower was, what it looked like or where it grew?  And saddest of all, I didn't know what it smelled like.  Oh how much I've missed.  Why are more people not talking about this vine?  The smell of this stuff here blows you over like an Oklahoma wind.  I smelled it in the air one morning in the first days of June and I wondered what in the heck that glorious deliciousness was.  As the next few days came it became more and more potent.  When I finally found an Italian to tell me what in the heck that was and what flower it was coming from I  began noticing the bushes everywhere.  Literally everywhere.  And now, I can't imagine our final homes front walkway or back porch not covered in this stuff.  Wherever Joey finds a job one of my first questions will be, does Jasmine grow there?  If not...no way;)  And I'm barely joking.

Lavender

It's July now and the Jasmine flowers are shriveling and diminishing in their potency.  But never fear, our lavender is swooping in to save us!  These beauties line our driveway.  I just received 100 empty sachets from amazon to fill with these dried babies and lace our house (and yours...want one?) with their fresh scent.  I planted Lavender in Oklahoma and in San Antonio and guess what happened in both places?  Yes, they died.  In all my prayers I pray that there's no specialness here in the soil that the West coast or Utah doesn't have.  Because this growth potential is the key to A LOT of my happiness here.  Wait until you see pictures of my tomato plants!!  I am soooo excited!

 Hydrangea

And even though these flowers (one of my favorites) aren't nearly as perfumey, I can't forget to list them here because they grow so beautifully in our area:  Hydrangeas, or in Italian, Ortensie.  Every yard has them (except ours of course, so I've planted two...we'll see if my black thumb can kill them:) 

 With all it's imperfections (and it's paling in comparison to glorious Austria) Italy can grow some goods.  And it makes me so very, very happy.  

xoxo

Ashley

Ju-B

☛ Ju-B ☚

I know, I know, if you're on facebook you've seen it, if you're on Instagram, you've seen it but I had to post it here too...because, dear family, this photo means a lot to me.  When I saw it on my phone, (Joey took the photo), my heart kind of melted at the sight of her, my Juliet, so bright eyed and confident that the entire world surely loves her.  And immediately after that I felt happy and relieved and proud of myself...(yes, of myself) that, in fact, how I feel about that perfect baby of mine called Juliet, at least sometimes, actually does show through.  Despite all the whining I do about having three kids in Europe, despite all the grumpiness and intolerance that I show toward her (and the others) that tortures me every night as I lay in bed, at least sometimes, surely she can see that I absolutely admire and adore her.  I had no idea that it was so obvious...but, here at least, it is isn't it?  I want to blow this picture up large and hang it in our house as a reminder to myself that they know how much I love them (as parents, don't we always want to be sure?) and a reminder to her how much we adore her.

And that's the end of that devote'!:)  But here's a little more about the funny things that Juliet is doing right now:

Juliet loves to laugh.  If you're laughing she will laugh.  And every part of her seems to understand exactly what you're laughing at.  I like to think that her happy soul is looking for any excuse to spread its happiness...that's how idyllic, Juliet is to me:) 

At almost 3 years old Juliet still loves to be held.  She hardly walks 5 steps before she's angling her walk toward my feet, her head still looking forward and her arms outstretched up to me.  "I want a hold you."  I trip over her almost every time.  It drives me bonkers.  But when my patience is thick I press her head into my shoulder, which usually drives her bonkers, in which case I stop but in the case where it doesn't, she lays on my shoulder or giggles into my ear while I kiss her head all over.  

At night she must be read a story.  And she'll cry "Mommy...Mommy" over and over again in the same loud but calm tone until I come in to put her blanket just so, over her body.  If Joey has read her a story she tries to manipulate me into giving her another one and visa versa.  

In the morning her curls are frizzy and all over the place. And with her chubby tan thighs, her nightgown, her baby blanket all wadded up in her chubby arms and that face...we can hardly resist her when she tells us at the crack of dawn, "I'm hungey mamma."  She says it just like that in the cutest little cherub voice.  

She's taken to missing her baby days lately and sometimes talks baby talk.  She grunts and groans and searches high and low for old pacifiers.  If she finds one, she's sucking on it until one of us takes it away.  

She has an opinion.  She knows exactly what she wants and she shouts it loudly.  She talks sooooo loud!  It's absolutely exhausting!  And sometimes cute;)  

If Juliet could watch a movie from dawn to twilight she would.  She loves to "watch a show".  Jack Jack Attack (the short film after The Incredibles) is her current favorite but she'll sit with us through big kid movies too.  

The other day for some wierd reason we were talking about belly buttons with Isaac.  Isaac lifted his shirt and was looking at his.  Juliet said, "Isaac, you're belly button is coming unbuttoned."  We cracked up.  A few seconds later she climbed up to Isaacs ear and whispered, "Isaac, you're belly button (volume increasing now) is FAT (yell)!"  

A few weeks ago she had a really late nap.   That night she could not fall asleep so I let her stay up with me and eat a bowl of cereal while I finished up the dishes.  She talked my ear off.  I kept asking her, "are you ready to go to bed?"  "No, mama, let's keep talking."  So finally I asked her if we could move t into the living room and sit on the couch.  Right next to the sofa I have a fairly large porcelain figurine of The Buddha that I bought recently.  After I bought it I told her how sad it would make me if she broke it.  I told her that she was not aloud to touch it at all..only look at it.  So, we're sitting there a few weeks ago and she began asking me if I would be sad if she broke it. 
"Would Isaac be sad?" 
"yes." 
"And Georgie?" she went on and on about it.  After a few minutes of this she said in her very grown up voice, "Well," she smacked her lips prissily and while her face was turned toward me her eyes looked off to the side, "I haven't broken it yet, but somebody is going to hit it with a bat."  

And that's our Ju-B!

xoxo
Mom

Living A Story

I have decided to set some goals around here and give our blog (and my life) a little more sense of purpose.  After all we are living in Europe and there is a little more to this life that I want to remember than,"we went here, then we did this and then we did that"...it's getting boring and when I think about what I want us to remember about our time here, the wrote travel is not it!   In order to up the game  in these parts on photo shooting, real family journaling, and improving my international cooking skills through observant travel I am planning on beginning 3 "series'" if you will. This is purely for my benefit, no blogging goals or plans to make the blog public again at all but I want to look back and feel like I really did something with my time here...that I learned and I shared and I absorbed and took advantage of every moment.   So, here's the deal:

Once a week: I will post something that one of us is loving about Italy right now.  These posts will be titles, Italian Love, so if you're not interested (again, this is more for us) than don't read the ones with this title.

Once a month:  I will write a letter or an update on each of the kids...something they have said or are doing or what we are loving about them right now. One post each month about each of the kids. 

A recipe:  I am very observant when it comes to food.  I love it, I think about what I am going to eat next before I have even finished the current meal and I remember food from the most random occasions. On every trip I come home with a new food that I want to try and replicate here at home. Why in the heck not blog about it!  It will be good for me!  The title, Food Travel will appear after every trip and on other random delicious occasions.

I have had reservations for sometime about blogging anything other than mundane family updates because we share this with only our family, mostly males who could careless about any of this other stuff. So, if you see the title of "Italian Love" or "Travel Recipe" just don't read it!  This is about me pushing myself, giving myself a little sense of purpose and actively choosing to live a better story!  Feel free to ignore me!  

Xoxoxo

Ash

A Distinct Night Marked by The Sound of Heavy Breathing

Our Chicken Experiment:

A Failed Success      

This is a story about the end of an experiment, an experiment that had been going relatively well until something got hungry, wildly hungry.  Back in April we purchased six, four month old chickens from a nearby farm vendor.

The kids were excited from the very start, treating our girls as pets that they named, held, stroked, chased, and played with from the time they got off the bus until dinner time every single day.   When we arrived home in the daylight, they would run straight to the chicken pen in the back.  Isaac surprised me with how comfortable he felt holding from day one.  When they were initially jumpy and scratched he persisited.  He manhandled their little faces to show us the intricacies of their little beaks, learned to toss them over the fence and watch them "fly" and even took some turns cleaning up chicken poop.  

Georgie just loved being near them.  She also carried them around but she seemed mostly to love involving them in her fantasy farm land, showing them off to friends and harvesting their eggs.  She was the first one to the pen in the morning (6:30am sometimes people!) and the pen was the place we called her in from at dinner time.  She had her favorites and knew them all by name.  Her hen was named Shelly.  The chicken named, Softee, pooped on her friend once and she says she never cared to carry her again!  Softee had been deemed a pooper!    

(these are not actually our chickens...but my friend Daniela's.  But I wanted pictures to make it more interesing;)

Juliet terrified the poor lady beasts but not because she didn't love them.  She grabbed them by their feathers, by the neck, the feet, anything she could get a hold of when she wanted to hold them and they ran from her, oh how they ran!  And when one of us was around to place one in her arms it would usually scratch her by accident and she would immediately drop it flat on its face or its belly.  She asked me 3-4 times a day to take her out to administer this little treatment to her beloved chickens;)   

The kids and I took to watching their pre-laying behavior on a few Saturday mornings and laughing our heads off.  They get this frantic running and squawking thing going on, running back and forth from one end of the pen to the other.  They raise their poofy butts higher in the air, put their head down with crazy determination and RUN!   And, of course, because of their wide set, shortish legs it all happens with a waddle.  It's hilarious!  The kids loved it!  (and so did I...:( And when they are done laying, they come out from whatever place they've chosen for privacy, squawking over and over again with their head held high and proud, telling the world what they just did.  It's really, really cool to watch! 

While We Were Away

So, anywho, onto their sad, sad end.  When we returned from Lake Garda and went immediately to check on the chickens we saw the feathers...feathers, feathers everywhere.  (there was not a bone or a bloody gut in sight...the sucker had eaten EVERYTHING!)  Within seconds our neighbor, Aldo, who had been checking on them while we were away, came to tell us that two of our hens had been eaten by "un Volpe"(fox).  Gasp!!  Georgie buried her little head into my stomach and cried;(  Overall the kids handled it better than I would have expected.  But we all felt sad, disappointed and unsettled.  Aldo told us that the fox would be back that night and that we should be sure to lock them in the coop (something we hadn't been doing) and maybe place a few rocks in front of the door to secure it.   With crossed fingers, we did as he instructed.   

The Second Night

I stayed up late that night, peering out the upstairs bathroom window to check on the hens.  At 11:30pm  I heard it breathing....heavy, heavy, loud breathing that sounded just like a gigantic pig.  I went for a flashlight and shined it out there.  I couldn't see anything but I was sure that it saw my light and went away because the breathing sound disappeared.  Confident that pigs only ate vegetables and worms I kept trying to wrap my brain around how a fox could possibly make that kind of a noise, or maybe it was a wolf?  I spent at least an hour on google trying to find out what kind of predators lived in Northern Italy.  I read articles about the reintroducing of wolves and bears into Slovenia in 2002, I read about bear sightings near Belluna and Udine and I figured that, as wild as that sounds, it could have been a bear.  When we awoke in the morning we found our 4 remaining hens had laid 2 brown eggs and were alive and well.   But the big tub we'd had full of chicken feed (with a secure lid on it) had been busted into 3 pieces and all the food was gone!   We ruled out a fox...20 pound foxes can't break plastic tubs!  But whatever it was didn't get at our chickens so we felt a little relief.  

The Third Night

But not enough to sleep soundly the following night.   I awoke 2 times before I was finally awoken at 2am by the screaming of chickens.  I will never forget that sound.  Hearing something die did not sit well with me...I could never be a hunter or slaughter my own food, this I now know!  I was shaking all over and I still hear that sound in my head sometimes!  I grabbed the flashlight, ran down to the bottom floor and stood at the back door.  I heard the beast through the door, chomping and breathing and ripping and chomping and blahhhh!!  There was a part of me that figured, "the job has been started, let the beast finish or else I'll be cleaning up half eaten chicken guts...eeeewwww!!"  But the curiosity got the better of my fear and my disgust and I wondered if maybe he'd only gotten to one hen.  Maybe I could save the other 3.   I opened the door and walked out.  I heard it still, breathing and chomping but I couldn't see it.  I shined the flashlight toward the pen.  I saw not even a shadow.  The breathing stopped.   It growled at me in the lowest and deepest of animal growls.  In that moment I became convinced it was a bear.  I stood for a few more seconds that felt like minutes, stepped out a bit more, hoping that I had gained enough weight while in Europe to scare it away and then returned inside to wait for the morning.  I spent the next two hours searching google, yet again, for the possibility of bears in our area.  The sounds had convinced me but bears?  here?  I knew any Italian I knew would deem me crazy if I told them what I believed.

As It Turns Out, It Was A Cingiale (Wild Boar)

Georgie woke up early the next morning and, after a peak out the window, came to my room.  "Did you see the chickens?"  She had seen that the chair and rock we had placed in front of the coop door had been turned over and the door itself had been ripped at the corner seams.  There were no chickens running about.  All of them had been killed and eaten.  In someways it was a relief.  The whole event, from beginning to end, had felt more unsettling to me than I ever imagined chicken death would, mostly because I felt helpless as to what to do to save them.  For the 2 days that we waited and stressed and discussed possible prevention I just felt terribly out of control to be able to protect something that I was in charge of.  To worry about them every night for the next two years because of our inadequate pen and coop that we weren't willing to sink more money into felt like a bit of a nightmare!  I finally mustered the guts to go out to the pen around 10am.  It wasn't as bad as I had expected.  There were, of course, feathers, everywhere but for a slaughtering-of-4-animals-in-the-night it was a remarkably clean job.   I found two little bloody hearts (how ironic:(!!) a foot and one or two other gutsy spots but all in all it was mostly feathers.  I began looking for proof that the animal was a bear. After looking around it became obvious that it had entered from under the crappy fence that Joey and I had put up (we thought we did a good job but it has slowly come unraveled and loose at the top and bottom).  I felt sure that a bear couldn't fit under the fence, so, my first hypothesis was surely wrong.  I found a chunk of really course hair on the fence that looked like it could have come from a fox or a wild boar.  So, again I returned to google, and there I made a discovery that made it all make sense:  Wild boars are indiscriminate eaters.  They'll eat anything, including chickens.  We have seen evidences of a wild boar all over ours and our neighbors yard and we have seen one walking across the road when we came home late one night.  I listened to wild boar sounds on youtube and the sounds all matched up.  It was a Cingiale.

In the end, we deem it a failed success.  On the short term our excitement over egg hunting and chicken ownership lasted for only 2 short months.  Six animals that we were responsible for died.  All that work, the hope, the anticipation...we are still so disappointed!!   But on the long term we tried it, we learned a lot and we know that we enjoy chicken owning!  We know that in the future, more time and more money need to go into our final, safe and secure coop.  And we know that as we plan for that endeavor, because of our positive experiences here, it is worth it to us.  In the meantime we'll join the ranks of countless others who buy their eggs from the grocery store...cue Charlie Brown music...wah, wah, wah! 

xoxo
Ashley

p.s. And now we have a bunny!!  Best pet every!!