Simple Pleasures of Homelife Lately

Hello, friends! First of all, I want to thank you for joining me on this new site! My time the past couple of weeks has been spent more behind the scenes as my website manager and I have been working to fix some minor glitches. Everything seems to be running smoothly now and I’ll be back soon to give you the official “new home tour”. For today I thought I’d quickly post some photos from life at home lately. With our schoolyear starting we’ve mostly been at home which is 100% fine with me, haha, so that’s what I have to share today. I’ll warn you now—it’s all very random!

It’s still hot here but there are pockets of relief throughout the week when it’s actually quite pleasant to be outside. I’m enjoying my front porch for lunch or just a little break during the day.

This time of year, my outdoor plants and flowers begin to look really sad with the heat and lack of rain. I love to make flower arrangements for inside my house so I’m using what few flowers are left in the yard and mixing with grocery store flowers.

Aldi has $4.99 bouquets, and their roses are usually nice, especially after bringing them home and giving them some love. These coral ones caught my eye a couple of weeks ago and they looked so pretty with hydrangeas from my yard. Aldi also has some good fall candles and the one above is called Crisp Apple Amber. I admit, I mostly bought it because I liked the woven straw wrap, but since getting it home, I’ve enjoyed the aroma so much. It’s fallish and sweet, strong enough for the scent to carry throughout the room without being too heavy.

Moving on to food! As I said before, we’re home a lot these days so most of our meals are at home. Restaurants are just so crazy expensive, and the quality isn’t even that good anymore, so my family actually likes eating at home better. That means when we do go out, it’s a really nice treat!

The pork chops above were rubbed with a mixture of ground Lapsang Souchong tea leaves and spices. These particular tea leaves are smoked over a fire pit, so they gave the rub a smokey flavor. I topped it with pineapple mango salsa–delicious! I’ll share the recipe soon!

But our favorite meal lately was a BIG treat! Last Christmas a coworker of my husband’s had gifted him a gift card to a butcher shop that sells the most amazing steaks. We used the gift card on Labor Day for some filet mignon that my husband then grilled and they were too delicious for words! I added the baked potatoes, roasted brussels sprouts, and sautéed mushrooms. We didn’t even need dessert with this meal.

As for my sourdough journey, I’m having so much fun learning and experimenting. I’ve had some successes and some hilarious fails!

I’d been playing around with scoring and the wheat pattern was getting better with each try. I guess I got a little too ambitious and tried a sweater pattern—of all things! Y’all. What was I thinking? The dough was too relaxed and with just the first couple of scores it started spreading and sagging and looking so hilarious!

Besides the scoring I’m also working on the more important bread qualities such as bubbles, crunch, taste, and bounce back. Needless to say, I’m baking a lot of bread trying to get everything just right, but my family is happy about that.

With all those practice loaves, we’ve had bread for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacking. This could be dangerous!

My husband recently told me that any night I just want to serve bread and cheese, he would consider that dinner. I’m a lucky girl! I will probably take him up on that!

Besides the crusty loaves, I’m trying dinner rolls, pizza dough, and breakfast foods. This week I hope to make sourdough cinnamon rolls.

Homeschooling started back for the year, and it was time for me to revamp breakfast. My girls never could eat breakfast while they were teens; it made them queasy (I was the same way about breakfast as a teen, so I understood). So, for the last several years I’ve just kept our breakfast foods to simple options like toast, granola, yogurt, fruit, and cereal. However, I told my son that I would bring back the hot breakfast this year if it would motivate him, get those brain juices flowing, and give him a more productive day. He accepted. I made sourdough waffles one morning and he told me he could take on the world after a breakfast like that, haha! I told him that was great, but he only had to take on math for the time being.

PEACHES! We eat up all the peaches we can get our hands on during the summer! We stopped at Peach Park to grab some peaches on our way to visit our Birmingham friends one day, and while there we saw the peach poundcake pictured above and got one to share with our friends. So tasty with fresh peaches and whipped cream!

We also enjoyed fresh peaches on yogurt and salads all summer.

Ok, time to move on from food, haha. Let’s talk about the pets. Barney has been my walking buddy some mornings and he’s kind of bad. He doesn’t mean to be. He’s really so sweet, but curious and strong and therefore he pulls a lot.

Liberty still walks with me too (Joel and I swap out) and she’s just so happy on our walks. Her little bottom just wiggles the whole time and it’s so cute.

Floyd is still the self-declared king of the house. He can be a little smug one minute but then loves to snuggle and give hugs the next.

And then there’s sweet Pumpkin girl. She comes into the bathroom each morning while I’m getting ready and sits on the scale to watch me put on my makeup. I’ve decided to adopt Pumpkin’s attitude about the bathroom scale. She covers the numbers with her skirt of fat and declares, “Ha! The scale is my throne!”

After I’m ready, before I leave the bathroom, she meows for me to open the linen cabinet so she can hop in and take her morning nap. Oh, the things we do for our pets.

Outside the guys have been taking down some bad trees. One Saturday they cut down 3 trees in our woods and the following Saturday they chopped the trees into firewood for the winter.

I’ve got some strong, strapping men!

You know I can’t do post like this and not include a sunrise photo. I take a picture with my phone every morning when I walk because every sunrise is a little different from the morning before. Isn’t God so wonderful to give us a morning show to wake up to!

And we recently had a rainbow on our street!

One of our favorite things we’ve been enjoying at home right now is a new upstairs den. I’ll show more photos soon but for now here’s a sneak peek. All cozied up with blanket, a latte my husband made me, and some episodes of Andy Griffith. Life is good.

Well thank you for hanging in there with me and my many random moments from our life at home lately. I’ll be back again this week with a recipe and some updates about my blog.