Sewing and Baking

Good morning, my friends. Well, I said I was going to get into trip preparation in earnest, and it started yesterday. Somehow a switch got flipped in my brain, and I convinced myself it was time to put thinking into action.

My first stop was to use some things that have been hanging out in my freezer. I baked some cookies. These will be for taking along in the truck. We often eat something like a protein cookie or a Clif bar when we don't want to make a stop for lunch. These cookies are made with nuts, dried cherries, and oatmeal, and so they're a little like a granola bar in texture. And if I'm being honest, these are pretty much the only cookie I make any more. They're really good. You can find the recipe right here. 

I've used the Paprika app to make this a "for two" recipe as well. If you want to make just two cookies, one for you and one for you, the scaled down recipe can be found here. For yesterday's baking, I made the amount that made sense for the ingredients I had on hand. I want to bake another batch, but I need a few things from the grocery store first.

Also on yesterday's baking agenda, I baked these Lemon-Blueberry Oatmeal Muffins for our pre-breakfast morning snack. A few people have asked about this "morning snack" business. Mike and I are early-risers, although we don't usually get up at the same time. We're usually up during the 5:00 a.m. hour, but we're not ready to eat that early. Breakfast isn't until around 9:00, and so this little snack can tide us over until then.

This was a new recipe, and they're good. I'll add them to the list of breakfast snacks. The little sprinkle of turbinado sugar gives them a nice little crunchy topping. I added all the blueberries to the mixture rather than sprinkling any over the top. (That sounded messy to me.) We liked these. They're not too sweet.

While I was doing all the baking, I also washed four loads of clothes. That was on top of the four loads of bedding I washed the day before. Speaking of bedding, I managed to get that RVSuperbag all put back together single-handedly. Yay me! Now the bed in the camper is put back together and ready for the first night of our journey. We'll be in Bellingham, Washington, by then, and we'll cross the border the next day.

Finally, I could get to work on my quilt binding. It's clipped all the way around now, and I stitched about one-quarter of the way, turning the first corner. My goal is to turn one corner per day, which would have me finishing this up on Monday. 

Smitty was too tired to help.

Smitty was hogging her favorite quilt, and so Sadie spent her afternoon in his corner shelf on the catio. Two can play this game.

Today I'm going to bake some Jumbo Breakfast Cookies. This is another alternative to Clif bars, although we'll be taking Clif bars along too. That will mean the end of my trip baking for the time being. I still want to make another batch of the cookies mentioned above, and I want to make some breakfast burritos. There's at least one trip to the grocery store in our future before we leave.

 Aside from that, all the foods we'll take across the Canadian border will be leftovers frozen from days gone by. Probably I have enough of that stuff to get us all the way to the Alaska border. Some of it will start out in the refrigerator where it can thaw, but that also allows me to fit even more in the freezer. And there is a lot of it. I'm a world champion at freezing leftovers. Like so many things, they're out of sight, out of mind, and completely forgotten...until these trips. That's when they are a Godsend.

Have you heard about The Quilters? It's a Netflix documentary, and only a half hour, but wow. It was such a feel-good story and very powerful. We all need a little more feel-good right now, I think. So I can highly recommend it. You can watch the trailer right here. (If you can't see the video, then click right here.)

Finally, it was cloudy day yesterday. Mike was gone for the afternoon and evening. I had plenty to keep me busy, especially opening and closing the door for the in-and-out kitties. At one point, I happened to look out the living room window and noticed how beautiful this rhododendron is. You can still see the blooming dogwood over its right shoulder too. The flowers were a bright spot on a gray landscape.

Okay, so today is going to look a lot like yesterday. Probably, I'll finish the Le Jardin embroidery project this morning, and then I'll want to move on to the redwork kitty piece. I still need to trace it, so that will be on today's agenda. I'll get a little more done on my quilt binding, and I'll do a little baking. Whatever else will depend on how much time I have left. My packing list is printed now. Time grows shorter.