Sylvia's Scenario

I've been experimenting with making homemade pumpkin spice lattes and I think I finally found the combination.  Instead of sugar, I used sweetened condensed milk...AND sugar.  LOL  There is nothing "healthy" about this recipe but the same can be said for Starbuck's pumpkin spice lattes but we all love them, right?  I made more of these last weekend when Lauren and Nick + family came over for dinner.  It was a damp, wet day, perfect for a pumpkin spice latte and my family loves them.  I immediately started serving them as everyone arrived.  We practiced using our new covid precautions while having people over but it's still going to take some practice, I'm not going to lie.  The good thing is that I believe we had excellent ventilation with all the doors open.  We were lucky that it wasn't that cold last weekend and the temperature was in the 60's so we didn't have to wear our coats inside the house.  If they are recommending to have your...

Today, I made pumpkin bread and apple crisp.  Can you tell I'm in a fall mood?  Actually, we are having a family dinner at our house tomorrow and I'm preparing a feast of fall food for everyone. In reality, I'm sort of bribing my family with food.  I've sent Nick and Lauren articles from the health experts on covid precautions now that the weather has turned cold and I'm not sure they are going to want to come over after that.  They are saying to avoid large inside gatherings.  Well, we must be inside because of the rain. So, they are saying if you're inside, it should be a well ventilated area like the garage with the garage door open.  Really?  Who wants to be in the garage?!  So, I decided I could actually have my family over if we opened both the French doors and have the ceiling fan on.  That is like having a garage door open but Brrrrrrr!  See why I'm bribing my family with food?  The next question, how large is a large gather...

This is another recipe that I've adapted from Hannah Freese, RD.  I am still following her  Freese Method  eating plan and am totally off of sugar now and have lost five pounds.  I'm in week 4 and if you follow her plan, you slowly start losing your craving for sugar and in addition, I now don't even feel that hungry.  I definitely feel more energized and my mind feels a lot more sharp.  For example, when talking with somebody and they can't think of the name of a person or place, I immediately know what they are talking about and I blurt out the name.  Usually, I'm the one who can't think of the right word or name of something.  I've had "brain fog" before when I had thyroid problems so I know what it's like to not be able to think of the right word or a person's name or a place.  Right now, I have the opposite of "brain fog", if there is such a  condition.  I want to say "hyper".  I think it's just because I have a...

We had a power outage two days ago from a wind storm that resulted in 40-50 mph winds so we lost power for 4 hours.  The power went out at 4:00pm, right when I was starting to fix dinner.  Bruce is still living in the basement because he's quarantining after attending his father's funeral in Iowa and is totally dependent on me providing his food, except for breakfast...thank goodness for that!  So, when the power went out, he immediately yelled upstairs "Whats for dinner?!"  This is the second time he's been in quarantine and to be perfectly honest, I'm getting really tired of trying to keep him fed.  He eats so much more than me.  He'd already eaten the leftovers from dinner for his lunch earlier in the day, plus I couldn't warm anything up with the power out.  I yelled back down to him "You'll have to fix yourself a peanut butter sandwich!"  I made myself a green salad with tuna fish.  I always keep cans of tuna in the pantry cupboards ...

I love "Before and After" blog posts.  Everything looks even more fantastic when you put a "before" photo up to show that something has been improved like I did for the kitchen  here  and the deck  here .  Last year was a major remodeling year.  It took us four years of living in this house before we figured out how we wanted to change things based on the traffic flow of people who visit.  For example, people rarely went down into the backyard, they always stayed on the deck.  We learned the spots in our house that were the most popular like our bar area that really isn't even that large.  Areas next to windows of the view were always popular.  Interestingly, the kitchen in this house is not a hangout area, although it is a very functional kitchen.  People just tend to gravitate to the windows to see the view which isn't surprising.  By the time we found a remodeler, we knew exactly what we needed to do - enlarge the deck and m...