Homemade Sausage and Kale Sprouts

This post is dedicated to my niece, "J".

We had a phone conversation today and we shared things we love to do and a few things we are enjoying in the moment.

"J" loved her delicious oatmeal for breakfast and is enjoying having one of her older sisters/husband come home for a visit.

She loves math and is breezing through her fractions.  She also loves to read and is currently enjoying Laura Ingalls Wilder books.

I'm celebrating that "J" came into my life.

"J", I said I would send photos of my breakfast.  But then I took it a little further as you can see.

And I look forward to our call next week to report all the fun we had this week.

I have some amazing people in my life.

I am also fortunate to have a grown daughter who among other things, likes to research.

She's generously shares many things she learns and today I'm specifically thinking about healthy food.

It just makes sense to primarily eat fresh food without artificial preservatives.

We like breakfast meat around here, so I set out to make my own sausage with the most pure ingredients I could reasonably obtain.

This is my favorite "go to" cookbook.

This is the recipe:

You can see I made a note about the cinnamon.  Some of the children said it was too much and requested it be left out.  However, I like it. When they aren't around, cinnamon goes in.

Last night I made up a batch so it was all ready to go for breakfast this morning.  Rather than patties, I just made it crumbled.  It's so easy to warm up that way and add it to an omelette.

This morning when I went out to the garden to take out the crushed egg shells (great calcium for homegrown tomatoes), I found, much to my delight, a big patch of volunteer kale sprouts just to the right of the path.

  I took a handful to apply to the top of my breakfast.  Yum!

And right there beside it is a bunch of peppermint coming up.  It is so invasive, so it's going to have to be taken out.   But some will be turned into tea...and bath herbs too.

 I did not have my camera with me so I went back out after breakfast with the camera and picked another handful of kale sprouts for my lunch today.

Breakfast:  Egg, Homemade Sausage, Kale Sprouts.

And another batch cleaned and drying for lunch:

And just because it's so beautiful even when we are having a spring rain I had to take a photo of the very welcome green grass, daffodils and service berry tea just beginning to blossom.

Basket Weaving and Birthday Tea

For awhile now a plan has been in place to weave baskets on a certain day.  The reason being that it was spring break and our family members who are students could be included without skipping school.
 
A fun time was had by all and it wasn't all about the baskets.  We laughed and enjoyed the time.  Taking a hand crafted basket home at the end of the day was a bonus.

So that I may respect the privacy of others, I'm including a photo of our basket party without heads:

Inside my picnic basket I now have a smaller basket to hold a bottle of olive oil, a bottle of flavored vinegar and a travel cup.  I usually take a salad on a picnic (and to basket making class) and those bottles/cup used to roll around a bit in the basket.  No more, I've made a basket customized for the task:

Here is the basket I finished the week before, though this is the unfinished version of it.

And the one before that which was from my mother's birthday:

And now that we have family visiting from another city and a birthday is coming up, it was fun to prepare for it the day before and arrive home from basket class to have a birthday tea party waiting in the fridge.