My Casa Bella

COME IN THE EVENING, OR COME IN THE MORNING;

COME WHEN YOU'RE LOOK'D FOR,

OR COME WITHOUT WARNING.

KISSES AND WELCOME YOU'LL FIND BEFORE YOU,

AND THE OFTENER YOU COME HERE

THE MORE I'LL ADORE YOU!

-Thomas Osbourne Davis



Welcome To My Casa Bella

My Casa Bella- means-my beautiful home- but it can mean so many other things. How you make your home a home. The sounds of children or pets playing. The aroma of scones in the oven or a lilac candle burning. The flowers blooming in your garden. The home grown vegetables ready to be picked. Grandma's quilt at the foot of the bed. A fire to curl up to with a good book. Or just a family spending time together with love, laughter and a good time.





















Thursday, July 28, 2011

Gluten Free Yumminess and Redecorating

I made some wonderful, peanut butter filled chocolate cupcakes
by using Bob's Red Mill Gluten Free Choc cake mix then found a
recipe from Taste of Home website
and they turned out so good, the only thing I would do differently
is add more PB in the cupcakes, the recipe says a "scant"
whatever that means, but I'll add more,
either way they turned out moist and yummy.
DH is a peanut butter freak, and I say that in a very loving way,
so when he came home I surprised him with these.
They need to be refrigerated, so before you eat one, let it sit
out for a half hour and they're perfect.

Very tempted to have one right now for breakfast, hmmm!
I also made salmon, one of our favorite meals,
salmon has been so expensive lately so when it
FINALLY went on sale, I bought some and made
Salmon Dill
You salt and pepper your salmon, then add chopped garlic
and chopped dill and sprinkle over it.
Next you slice lemons and place over the chopped herbs
and sprinkle with chopped green onions.
Cover it like a gift

Lay it on a sheet of aluminum foil before seasoning,
after seasoning then lay another sheet over it
and close in the edges tightly.
Bake it at 350 degrees for 20-25 minutes, or till it flakes
easily

Then you have this wonderful, fresh goodness.
We had it with a BLT salad that I got from Allrecipes
website.
We were very happy!
I also decided to do a little furniture arranging.
Since I was a kid I was
ALWAYS
rearranging my bedroom, I get bored easily with the same
look,
so I rearranged our sitting area off the kitchen, one of my
favorite spots in the house.
So it went from this
To this

I feel by moving the folded table over closer to the fridge it
allowed more light to come in.
I like angling furniture, not sure what it is but I like the look
of it and I feel that sometimes, not always, it opens
up the room a bit.
So I'll live with this for a while, or if the house sells,
we have two more months from today before the contract is up
then we'll decide what to do.
Hope you enjoyed my recipe ideas and decorating ideas.



Sunday, July 24, 2011

Never thought I'd say this!

But I am SO ready for
Fall!

(picture courtesy of Photo Bucket)
Every winter, by February I was ready for
summer.
Ready to get my hands dirty, planting new
veggies and plants.
Sitting on our swing underneath our huge
oak tree.
Grilling and sitting with friends outside.
But it's been to darn hot to sit out there,
too hot to stand by a grill,
afraid of passing out
and falling into it.
I'm getting tired of watering my plants almost
every evening because this sun is drying them and
crisping up the leaves.
Need to go out and water the flowers now, sigh!

Monday, July 18, 2011

Cute but MEAN!

So how does something that is this cute
be so destructive and mean?
For weeks now we have had SOME THING
come around our back porch and just destroy it.
I keep cat food out for our one outdoor cat
and we woke up one morning to find her feeder
tossed off the porch into the cornfield.
And not just right at the edge of the field,
DEEP INTO THE FIELD!
What the heck! What could have flung that feeder
so far in there?
So DH was not happy to go in there and retrieve it.
HMMM!
So I put it away during the night and we'd see paw prints
all over our back table.
Looks like raccoon prints.
We went away one weekend and our neighbor kept
an eye on things,
fed my outdoor cat and put the food away
then one morning she came back
there to find the waterer gone!
We looked, and looked in the  corn field and it has
DISAPPEARED!
How could a Raccoon have that
much strength?
At this point we thought maybe it was Bigfoot's child!
So, I was lazy one evening and decided to put the cat food
on top of our propane tank when I came out the
next morning, there were paw prints all over
that tank and my planter was laying against it with dirt
everywhere.
It used the planter as a ladder since you could see he
kept slipping down the tank.
Now I'm FRUSTRATED!
Our neighbor offered his shotgun but we didn't want
to do that, no need, so we got a trap yesterday
put in grapes, marshmallow's and honey.
Hoping to trap whatever this thing was
and move it to another location.
Sure enough!

Hubby said the thing scared him half
to death.
He snarled, growled, tried to get at him through
the cage.
He drove him to an area in a woodsy
"neighborhood"
and the poor, scared thing was so angry, but of course
probably more scared than anything
was not happy.
I asked my hubby when he let him out, did he try to get
at him?
He said
if it had we'd be talking in a hospital because he
would of been recovering from a
heart attack!