JenMarie's Cafe

Tonight, the hubby’s laptop is out and working, so I have time for a quick post.

I took my daughter to cheer practice on the bike. If I take the back roads out to the high school where the practice is, it’s mostly country roads, with very little cars. So, we were able to enjoy the early evening. It was a nice ride, with the temp dropping to a wonderful 75 with a breeze.

I’m surprised at how relaxed the girl is on the motorcycle. She really loves it. She’s not nervous and doesn’t monkey around. It’s fun to have a little partner back there with me. I have a fun picture of us on the bike. I’m not sure if I’ve posted it before or not. I’ll double check and try to get it on here if I haven’t. She’s just too cute in her helmet.

At work, we had a lady from our Geneva office come visit. She brings chocolate with her when she visits. So, naturally everybody loves it when she visits. *hehe* It was my first time meeting her and she was very nice. I guess over there, the chocolate is naturally a higher quality, and what she brought was grocery store chocolate, but man was it good. I didn’t realize that they had good dark chocolate, too. Although, they call it black chocolate. Who knew?

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I’m finally close to getting my own laptop. Seriously. And when I do, I’ll be able to post again, you know, like more than once a week. I’m not sure I’ve even got in that many lately.

I hope I haven’t lost ALL my friends out there. It’s been a weird transition and I miss posting all the time.

I actually have tomato sauce on the stove right now nearly ready to go into a water bath canner. I really wish I could have shared that with you all. It smells wonderful. We didn’t get too many tomatoes this year from our garden, even though we had TONS of tomatoes. The heat this summer just about killed all of our vegetable plants. And we watered nearly every night.

My parents were a little more vigilant and their garden is better than mine. They brought down a nice box of tomatoes that I peeled with the help of the fireman and we cooked them down with diced onions, green bell peppers and celery. I’m about to throw them in the water bath canner to finish them off and we’ll have about 10 pints of yummy wonderfuly flavored stewed tomatoes.

They’re really good as a base to casseroles or pretty much anything. Sometimes I like to add ground hamburger meat and black beans and just eat it like that.  Sorry for the lack of pictures, I’ll be back to my old self, full force after August is over.

Promise.

This last weekend, we had our annual block party and had sloppy joes. My parents came down for it, they like our neighbors.

We had two big crock pots full of sloppy joes, one sweeter, one more barbecue/spicy. We had one side of the street bring sides and the other bring desserts.  We always provide the meat and table service, then everyone tosses a few bucks in the donation bucket to defer the cost of that. It generally turns out great. And since we did it a little later this summer, it wasn’t so horribly hot. We hung out all afternoon. I love days like that.

We’re planning on doing it again in October with chili and desserts only. I think I’ll do a cider crock pot.

How are the rest of your summer’s going? We’re almost done with summer and fall is my all time favorite part of the year.

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