rachel's continued ramblings

was just chatting about recipes w/ a friend and realized that i have talked about this recipe, even photographed a bowl of it, but haven’t ever posted it on here. what a shame, because it’s one of my family’s absolute favorites! i got the recipe from my betty crocker cookbook, and it’s one of the first things i ever made for dave and i after we were married. i even have the date written down next to the recipe and a smiley face, indicating we liked it. =) i actually don’t mess with this recipe too much, so here goes… i usually make a double batch so i can freeze some and still have leftovers. it freezes really well, so it’s a nice thing to have on hand. 1/4 cup butter 1 large onion, chopped 1 clove of garlic, finely chopped (or pressed) 4 cups of cooked chicken (chopped, cubed, shredded, whatever – sometimes i just throw in a couple of the cans of chicken they sell in a 6 pack at costco, if i have them on hand and don’t have any cooked chicken handy) you could also use turkey 3 cup...

the last two years that we have lived in this house, i’ve loved having a garden. although it’s a pain to dig out all the weeds and all that, it’s great exercise, fresh air, a little time and space to think. there’s something about digging in the dirt that puts things in perspective. i love watching little sprouts poke their leaves out of the ground. i love watching nature do what it’s supposed to do. i love that my veggies are free and picked within hours of eating them. BUT, i’m kind of in limbo this year. this is the time of year when everyone i know is talking about weeding and transplanting and compost and seeds and fresh lettuce and stuff like that, and i’m totally feeling left out. you see we’re moving. we’re not exactly sure when, and we’re not exactly sure where, but very likely in the next couple of months. at any rate, i’m not going to go to all the work of preparing and planting a garden that i won’t be here to harvest. so i’m frustrated at not having a garden this year, not...

so, i bought some yeast a couple of weeks ago. i got this bee in my bonnet about making bread. i was going to do it. i checked out books. and every day since then, i’ve been chickening out. i’m not sure why. something about the unknown… especially when it comes to timing and stuff like that. anyway, earlier this week, angie posted on her blog that she had made some homemade pizza using a recipe from the book, animal, vegetable, miracle which i am currently reading as well. and so i was inspired. i’ve been wanting to make our own pizza for awhile now… getting to papa murphy’s on friday afternoons/evenings is just a hassle and it’s gotta be cheaper to do it yourself, right? besides. then it’s better for you – knowing what you put into it.  and so, not to be outdone, here was tonight’s pizza: i have to say, it was QUITE yummy. i didn’t really have any issues with the dough either. it did what it was supposed to do. of course, i deviated from the recipe a little bit – i CANNOT leave ...

the subject of shorts has been wandering through my mind today for a couple of different reasons. first off, layla decided this morning that she needed to wear shorts in order to ride her bike. there are only two little pairs of shorts in her drawer that i have placed in there with her leggings – in order to be worn under dresses or skirts, so we avoid ‘i see london, i see france’ incidences. so she tells me this morning that she NEEDS to wear shorts and she knows she has shorts in her pile of summer clothes (which i have been slowly going through and adding to her closet (or the too-small pile) as the weather has improved. so she goes and grabs these shorts (all the $4 target shorts they sell every year in every color/pattern you can imagine). i’ve been dragging my feet about those shorts because they just seem so SHORT! i didn’t buy them, they’re hand-me-downs, but she’s had that style of shorts in years past. well, now it’s kind of starting to bug me how short they are. i guess she’...

happy birthday, sophie! my dog is 14 today, so i thought i’d do a post in honor of her. i haven’t talked too much about my ‘first baby’ on here, probably because i have 3 others that do more interesting things, at this point. mostly i complain about her shedding all over the place. so here, more or less, is the story of sophie. 14 years ago, she was born as one of 15 pups in her litter (or something crazy-huge like that). her father belonged to a friend from church, a chocolate lab, i believe. pretty sure her mother was a black lab, but as it goes with labs, you can get any of the 3 colors from any combination of parents. as breeding tradition goes, they got to choose ‘the pick of the litter’ to keep. well, they had enough dogs already, i guess, and didn’t intend to keep her. this friend worked on music with my mom at church, and brought said pick of the litter with her one day when she was REALLY little. my mom fell in love. i was home from college at the time, and she came home and t...

apparently, i haven’t had a lot to write about lately. i’m bored with posting my meal plans. it might return someday, but right now i kind of cringe when i think of posting another one. anyway, here’s a general hodge-podge of dapelo family life, as it is right now. enjoy! here’s shane petting an alpaca at the alpaca farm we visited when we were in hillsboro a little while back. alpacas ROCK! then we have micah, bowling with paint bottles. my kids are nothing, if not creative. what you can’t see in the picture is that he was throwing rain boots at them, in place of a bowling ball.   that same day, layla decided she was going to bob for apples. well, apple, i guess. using her teeth didn’t work so well, i guess, so she decided to use her feet. then there’s micah and his creative outfit. i believe what happened is that he got one shirt wet, so i changed it, and then set the other out on the deck to dry. later, he found the shirt and decided to put it back on… i think he’s a little c...

we all have dreams. things we ponder when we’re doing mundane tasks… things that pop into our minds when we’re doing something, or eating something, or partaking in something that just doesn’t seem quite right. i probably have more of these than most people, because it seems i analyze things more than most people. i don’t know. maybe other people just don’t talk about it as much as i do. i’m always thinking, researching, checking out books or googling things. there are things that bug me about life, and so i try to figure out how i can change them. i had a whole big long rant on here, that i just deleted because these are my things. my issues. i think by putting them out there, it’s just spewing negativity into the world and there’s too much of that already. it doesn’t matter WHY i feel drawn to these things, it doesn’t even really matter that i am. but this is my blog and i can write about what i want. you can read or not read. you can agree or disagree. you can comment or not comment...

so this is a freakin’ miracle! this is a project w/ less than a 1 week turnaround time between when it occurred to me to do it and having it complete and FUNCTIONING! this is SO not me. at any rate, the dresser that layla and micah have been using is not exactly functional. it’s attractive… but falling apart. meaning that the second drawer fell out every other day if layla pulled it out a little too far, the third drawer completely fell apart and the bottom fell out of it (after about 400 times, we finally just pulled that drawer out), and the bottom drawer was stuck half pulled out. so yeah, not exactly functional. that, and it was only a 4 drawer (actually 3) dresser being shared between 2 kids. a little less than 4 years ago, less than a week before we moved back here from ohio, we found a dresser on the side of the road. it was posted as FREE, so we grabbed it and threw it in the moving truck. it was not the most attractive dresser, but all of its moving parts were functional. ...