Need Some New Ideas? Try Grilling!

I remember Shop Girl from "You've Got Mail" saying "I like to start my letters as if we're already in the middle of a conversation". I couldn't agree more. Tonight's idea came to me after I just finished off the all-time best steak that I have ever eaten in all my born days. My favorite steak until tonight, has always been the filet at Oceans Zen. No longer. As of tonight, my new favorite is the steak that Jonny threw on the grill and cooked (or shall we say, didn't cook) to perfection. It was a filet and it was perfectly medium rare and seasoned with nothing but salt. It was so amazingly tasty that I'm practically jumping up and down that there is one extra piece to fight over. It's a good thing that I'm the one who stays home during the day;-)

As much as I adore trying out new recipes, mixing up savory stews, baking fresh bread, and pulling cookies out of the oven, I am always ready for the nice break in the summertime.
You see, around here Jonny is the summertime cook. Other than the occasional chicken salad, or fried chicken, we eat grilled food all summer long.
I know that so many people get stuck in a rut and think that grilling means chicken or burgers every night. Not true.
We have, over the years discovered many different delicious foods to throw on the grill.
The more I read, the more I have found that if you can eat it, you can grill it.

Some of our first choices are burgers (done up with Dad's secret sauce) and fresh ears of corn. I have been told that you should first soak your corn in buckets of water, but I never seem to remember this trick until it's time for dinner. I have to admit to you though, that I cannot imagine how Jonny's corn can be improved by soaking it in water. It comes off the grill piping hot and perfectly juicy.
Another idea is steak which can obviously be pricey unless you find it on sail. Steaks are one thing that Jonny is always willing to splurge on being that it is his favorite food. All that he does is rub each side liberally in kosher salt and grill it for just a few minutes over charcoal. Delicious!
Here are some more that are pretty obvious;

Meats
Chicken (try a lemon butter marinade)
Pork Chops (not my personal favorite)
Salmon (make the sour cream/dill sauce)
Shrimp
Ribs (Jonny cooks them in foil for two hours and then pops them in the oven for a bit)
Sausages
Bratwursts
Hot Dog
Brisket (use liquid smoke, soy sauce, and Coke)

Veggies
Squash
Zucchini
New Potatoes
Cherry Tomatoes (not for long!)
Mushrooms (although I HATE those things!!)
Asparagus

Fruits
Pineapple (YUM YUM!!)
Bananas

There are hundreds of other things but these came to mind first. I even saw on the Today show last week, that you can grill watermelon! They simply threw it on the grill and then tossed it with some yellow tomatoes and goat cheese. It looked marvelous!!

Well I hope that this has helped you at least get your mind going in some new directions and given you some new ideas.
Tonight my daughter is breaking in the new tree house, by sleeping there with a friend. I swept it out real well, then filled it with fluffy blankets and strung Christmas lights up in the beams. If it weren't so impossibly hot out there, I would be tempted to join them!
Good night to you my friends.

Southern Feast!

Tomorrow night my favorite people in the world will all be gathered for a feast that may sound foreign to you. We are all going up to Mom and Dad's with my brother and sister-in-law and their two little ones. We are cooking up one of our all time favorite meals, that we have to start preparing for tomorrow morning.
The menu will be:
Fried Steak
Fried Chicken
Purple Hull Peas
Fried Okra
Fried Squash
New Potatoes
Fresh Tomatoes
Cantaloupe
Fresh Peach Cobbler

Have you ever see the word "fried" so many times in one menu? Obviously we are not worried about our waistlines tomorrow night!
This meal is absolutely impossible to prepare without a trip down south. Most people up here have never even heard of purple hull peas unless their frozen. I've even heard people say that they're the same thing as black-eyed peas. WRONG!!! Purple hull peas are totally different and much, much better than black-eyed. The okra is something else that is difficult to find fresh in this area. As for the tomatoes, well you northerners have absolutely no idea what you are missing until you taste a south Arkansas tomato. There is a stand in Price Cutter that claims to sell them, but they are no where near as good as true southern tomatoes. They are shaped different and instead of being an orangish yellowish color, they are a brilliant red and smell so strong that you could tell it was a fresh tomato even if you had a clothespin on your nose.
They are the only kind of tomatoes that I like to eat sliced with some salt and pepper.

The peaches are another thing that you simply cannot find up this way. I don't care if you find a booth that says "fresh peaches" on the brightly painted sign. If I were to give you a taste of peaches from the south, you would spit these northern peaches out in the dirt. I guarantee it!!
A truly delicious peach should have little red speckles mixed in with the flesh. The juices should run down your arm the entire time you're eating it. It should smell so strong that you can stand back five feet with your eyes closed and still know right where to put your hand.

I am so dreadfully sorry to make your mouth water so profusely and then rub the drool right off your chin with a rough beach towel by telling you that you have to drive three to five hours away to make it a possibility. This will not be considered my kindest post.

As per my hairdressers suggestion, I posted pictures of my house on hgtv.com and I cannot believe how much fun that has been. Constant comments for the past two days! I have been checking my email like a child checks on the cookies in the oven!!
I'm afraid I depend too much on compliments. Oh well, something else for the Lord to work on!
Good Night all!!

Molly's Antics

This is my Molly. She is doing what she often does, laughing with her sister. Molly has been one of the most interesting adventures that I have ever walked in my thirty one years. Molly was born six years after my second daughter. She was much looked forward to and much prepared for. Her room was everything that a little girl could ever dream of. We couldn't wait for her to enter our world.
And then she came.
Molly hated our world for the first year of her life. She did nothing but scream and cry. She was always demanding attention. I remember the first time she ever sat down in her bouncy seat and didn't cry for a full five minutes. We were so hopeful at that point. As beautiful as she was, I seriously began wondering if I had made a mistake in interrupting our quiet, simple little family of four.
The bigger girls really struggled with not resenting the fact that we could never go out to eat or to see a movie because Molly would scream the entire time and we would have to take turns pacing and dancing with her. These acts would never make her happy, but would simply make the screaming a little less shrill.

Finally after the longest year of our lives, she turned one. It seemed at that point, she just decided to be happy. Since that day, she has either been wailing dramatically or laughing hysterically. She cannot stand to play by herself and never can seem to get enough snuggling.
She detests wearing anything except "fancy" dresses and hates it when I insist on something "tasual" (casual).

Molly has been making us laugh now for three years almost continuously. I thought that because of the number of comments I get each time I have posted on Facebook, some of the hilarious things that she has said, that I would devote an entire post to some of the more hilarious ones.
There by giving some of you who are just discovering that you have a personality type similar to this one, hope that there will many more days of laughter than there will be of tears. Just to help you understand her language, remember that Molly doesn't say her hard "k" sound so well. She tries her doggondest, but it just won't come out so well.

I will start with my Mom's favorite. It happened last year and is one of the first truly hilarious moments of our families "Mollyisms".
I was sitting in the floor of the nursery changing one of the boys diapers. Molly walks in and says "Where is dat nudder one baby?" Being the game player I frequently am, I asked her "What nudder one baby?" She looks at me as if I'm crazy and says "You know!! Dat nudder one baby dat matches dis one!"

Another one came this spring. Molly had a friend over to play one afternoon and being little girls, there was a little drama going on. Well her friend was busy playing something else and at that moment, not feeling like playing with Molly. So Molly comes up crying to Ally, "She hates me!!" Ally ready to come to the defense of her little sister stand up ready for ultimate big sister protection and asks her "Did she tell you she hates you?". Molly in a rare moment of complete honesty, shrugs her shoulders and remarks "Well, she was finkin' it!"

My next example sounds a little violent, but if you would be good enough to consider that she has been watching "Five Mile Creek" with all of us, you might more understand a four year olds thoughts. Her big sister Meg was doing something which I am sure was not necessarily the kindest thing although I have never been told what exactly it was. So Molly comes into the living room to "tell on her". She proceeds to tell her Daddy all about it, then surprises him by leaning into him and quietly asking "Do you fint we should shoot her?"
Jonny who has a bad habit of not making a big deal out of what I consider to be huge deals, simply says that he doesn't necessarily think that shooting Meg would be the best course of action. He thinks nothing more of it until I came downstairs wondering why Molly had come quietly into my room looking through my closet. When I asked her what she was looking for, thinking she was wanting to get into my jewelry box, she matter of factly announces that she is looking for Dad's gun. (Don't get to upset. It's only a pellet gun.)

Moving right along to a more feminine example. We were walking through the Landing with Mom one spring afternoon and Molly is skipping along behind stopping at every single flower pot to smell the flowers. She starts telling Nana how "these flowers are the most beeaauuutiful flowers" she has ever seen. Nana always the teacher tells her that those are Pansies. A few seconds later we hear her mumbling "Well they loot lite flowers to me".

Our next example will make Ally absolutely blush to the roots of her hair, but must be put on here. Molly was sitting on the potty which she does frequently. If you ask her why she has to go potty so often, she will simply tell you "I'm just a heavy drinker". Well in this particular gas station we were getting to know (we know every single one between here and Florida)
she was having a little trouble. After she finally is done, she looks up at me and with a red little face asks "Was dat diarrhea?" I told her no, it was not. She then wipes her little brow and says "Well dood, tause I was feelin' a little tonstipated!"

Well my memory is failing me now and I cannot think of any other silly Molly stories, although I am pretty sure that you have read enough to give you an idea of what my life has been like raising my precious little rascal.

I am now off to tackle two huge baskets of ironing that seriously make me want to dump them in a closet and pretend like I don't own them. See you soon!

The Best Dinner Experience I've Ever Had

Wow! It has been a REALLY LONG TIME since I have posted anything on here! It has just been a rather busy summer so far. You would think that after this extremely long silence, that I would have this long list of amazing recipes for you. But alas...I have nothing to share with you in the cooking department. At least not tonight.
But I still had to tell you about the Jeppsen's dinner time this evening. Last night while I should have been sleeping to help myself get over the nasty sinus infection my family caught from a hot tub while we were in Branson this past weekend (I advise you to stay away from those nasty things!), I was propped up on my pillows reading an old book that my Mom used when she was raising me and my brother and sister. It is called "Teaching Your Children to Love Each Other" and it is a wonderful book! Anyway, I noticed that at the end of each chapter, there is a discussion question for parents and one for families. Well maybe not exactly a question, more like a discussion idea.
The idea for children struck me as so wonderful, that I decided to give it try tonight at the table.

As soon as the rather noisy prayer was over (our boys believe in intercessory prayer and insist on bowing their little heads and "helping" Daddy pray), I informed the family that tonight we would be going around the table person by person and doing two different things. First each person had to say three things that they like about themselves. Only one of those things could be about the physical appearance. Except of course in Molly's case. She proceeded to tell us how she loves her nose, her lovely eyes, her beautiful blond hair, and so on and so forth. Oh well, she'll get the idea one day.
Absolutely no laughing was permitted after one slight snicker after one of them said she likes how sweet she is. The idea was not bragging, but more speaking positively.

Second, after everyone had gone around the table telling what they like about themselves (Charlie and Danny made it rather clear that they like their ability to smear spaghetti noodles over every single square inch of their little bodies), we then started all over again only this time each person had to say one thing he or she liked about everyone else at the table.

It took the entire mealtime to finish this excercise, but as soon as we were done, I asked everyone how they felt. Everyone, including Jonny admitted that they felt so much better about themselves and were thinking so much more positively. I can't wait to read the next idea tonight. Ally even came and found me later on asking me what other questions the book had.

Funny how little we seem to notice the things that can be said to constantly make others feel less important or incapable, and it was positively wonderful seeing each childs beaming face as I told them right in front of everyone else, what I thought was so special about them.

I highly recommend practices like this whenever you get the chance. I'm so excited to see what it does as far as helping my children learn to love each other.

Well there now. That was a little longer than I expected, but as soon as we were done with dinner, I knew I had to share this with you. So long dear friends. Hopefully we can continue this one sided chat again soon!