The Addie and Ivy Adventures

This week has gone by in a blur.  This week I made "Special Spaghetti" (homemade sauce) on my own, instead of using Ivy and Addie's cafe.  While I made dinner, Ivy played "vacation at the beach" in the living room with a sunhat and blanket.  We had our Monday Reading Party, featuring Ivy reading a graphic-novel chapter book based on the game Minecraft.  I really do not care for that book, but on our reading parties we take turns reading books, so I picked a Beatrix Potter book that I like. Our biggest activity was on Friday:  Crystal Digging.  We visited the Salt Plains in Jet, Oklahoma to try our luck...  the only lucky ones were the teens, but everyone had a good time overall.  I felt lucky finding exactly 4 shovels at $8 a piece at the Dollar General near my office - they didn't have any hand shovels, but as they say, "You win some, you lose some."  I made sure to pack the essentials the night before, knowing I would come up with more...

We've had a bit of a "hankering" for pancakes lately, so we decided that today was a nice day for it.  After we pulled out all of the ingredients, I sat by the coffee machine with the recipe book while Ivy got to do the dirt work.  I did get distracted by getting a head start on the dishes, so we forgot to mix the egg with the oil and milk, but we remembered just as Ivy poured in the egg into the dry ingredients, so we just dumped in the oil and milk and stirred it all up.  We used the Better Homes & Gardens "New Cookbook" original pancake recipe.  It was really easy and uses only normal baking ingredients, so it is not much more difficult than making pancakes from a box.  We only made seven small pancakes, but three plus two sausages were enough to fill me up (without feeling stuffed).  Ivy had four pancakes, and we still had at least one more batch's worth of batter left - we ended up freezing it to use another day. Several years ago, I ...