Call for recipe requests and submissions

We stared a new blog today. We've often talked with family about collecting family recipes, and Janette and I have long lamented that we haven't kept better records of meals we've prepared and particular recipes that have been kitchen standbys.  This blog will be our solution.  

We're adding our favorite, frequently made recipes, and we're going to try to post all the recipes we use when we have some cooking event, like visits to Idaho or our anniversary dinner last month.

Hopefully it will be easy for us to keep up, easy for us to use, and enjoyable and useful to you as well.

We'll unveil it in a little while, after there's a small library there.  In the meantime, please please please send us meals you remember and would like recipes from.  We'll take requests. And please send recipes!  Send recipes!

Oh, and a chicken update, too.  They're bigger, wandering the yard more adventurously, and more difficult to get a movie of them all together.  You can see from the new movie that they are more mobile and independent.  They're like a gang of young teenagers.

Joshua Turns 14 -- OMG!

I swear it was just the other day that I was holding Joshua as a one-week old baby and realizing that he was the most beautiful baby boy ever born. Well, I don't know how it happened, but he just turned 14 -- he's still beautiful, but a LOT bigger.

We got him an electric guitar so he won't have to play the broom anymore. It'll also give him something new and exciting to do over the summer. He's very musically inclined and I'm looking forward to hearing him play real soon.

Joshua asked his mom for tickets to LOVE - the Beatles-based Cirque du Soleil show at the Mirage - and they took us along. The music was great, the acrobats were phenomenal, and we had a really good time. Happy Birthday, Joshua!

End-of-Spring Blooms and Two-Week Chicken Update

Some of the photos taken last weekend when Mike and Lauren & family were here showed the yellow blooms on the palo verde.  I thought I'd update the garden photos here, and, while I'm at it, show the growth of the chickens.  If I don't catch them weekly, we'll miss it, they're growing so fast.

Through the arch of the courtyard entryway, you can see the blossoms on the palo verde so thick their actually weighing the branches down.  They're thicker this year than the previous two springtimes.  At the foot of the tree are the pink mexican primrose, and the already fallen palo verde blooms edge the walk. The trumpet vine on the left is beginning to flower. The color is most striking from inside, looking out the windows, but I couldn't get a photo that did it justice.

So, below is the back yard, taken from almost the same spot as the photo at the bottom of the page.  Apart from the copious yellow blooms on the palo verde, you can see that the tree itself has grown about a foot in two months.  The early blooming penstemons faded quicker than previous years, and they're mostly gone, except for the one species I can't remember (not firecracker, Parry's, or suberb...) that's just started blooming now.  

The Indian blanket flower (gallardia) has really come on, and the mexican hat has grown almost three feet tall and has lots of "hats."  The mesquite in the corner, though you can't see it, has begun its springtime growth spurt, and has added a foot or two to its limbs.  The lantana is beginning to

 take off, too.

We've picked some more tomatos, our first of the "Better Boy" variety and Romas.  There's blackberries getting black and strawberries getting, er, red out there.  In fact, we picked the first strawberries just tonight.  Ok, though these first ones weren't grocer's quality.

Finally, for the grandkids and nieces and nephews, here's the chicken update.  They've doubled again in size. The best photo to give scale is the one we took Saturday with Roxanne, who was holding El Pollo Loco last weekend in the last post, and who holding her again in this new photo.  That's the same chicken!  A week ago it was a perfect fit in her two cupped palms, and now El Pollo Loco is a relative giant.  You know, that might've been KFC, it's tough to tell from that angle. I think the chicken update this week will be a movie.  They're doing chicken things: scratching, drinking water, eating their feed and the little bugs they like to scratch for.

That's all the news there is (if you call it news).  It's gettin' hot. From now until fall it will be 100 degrees.  Hope it's not that hot where you are.

The Oklahoma Meachams Visit Vegas!

We had a great long weekend with Mike and Lauren and Noah and Will visiting.  They stayed at the Aliante Hotel, just on the other side of the highway from us.  They loved it (hint, hint, for you who haven't visited yet...).  Lauren took this great photo of the boys sleeping poolside at the hotel.  Now that's a Vegas vacation.  They also did awake things like visit the Shark Reef at Mandalay Bay.

Then they stayed with us.  They loved that, too (hint, hint, again, for Joshua, Taylor & Natalie, Mom & Dad, in case my first hint wasn't clear enough).  Roxanne and Joshua were staying with us, too, so it was a full house and a lot of fun. We made dinner a couple nights, featuring risotto, a salad with our first attempt to make pan fried goat-cheese cakes, halibut, leek and potato cakes, steaks, and a jasmine custard made with jasmine flowers Roxanne and I picked ourselves from the backyard.

The kids loved the chicks. It really was nice timing for them (the chickens) to arrive early, just in time for them (Noah and Will).  Here's little Will with El Pollo Loco, who he gave nice little kisses to.  Will is a reserved little boy, who was very tired and not feeling well from his travels, and his only smiles for us in the first couple days were actually for the chickens.  He was really pretty excited about them. 

And here's Noah with KFC.  Noah liked to hold the chickens, and he was actually pretty good and still pretty gentle in catching them.  He made sure they all got attention and good holding time.  Speaking of KFC, we've been asked a few times why we would name a pet chicken "KFC."  The answer, which we give in a whisper so no chickens overhear, is so she doesn't find out she's a chicken.  You can recognize KFC by her bandit's mask around her eyes.  You can recognize Noah by his supreme cuteness.

That's Roxanne with El Pollo Loco, who, despite her initial dominance of the pecking order and crazy behavior as a hatchling is now the smallest and meekest of the two-week old chicks.  But she's still the smartest, being the first to figure out new environments and follow her strong chicken instincts in scratching, enjoying dust baths, and other such chicken things.  You can recognize El Pollo Loco from her pretty brown head and back.  Roxanne is easily recognized by her big beautiful smile and intense niceness.  She was great entertaining Noah, and they had a lot of fun at the park around the corner.

Finally, that was Joshua with Chick-Fil-A.  Chick-Fil-A is the easiest to recognize: she's the blonde one (and she's Roxanne's favorite).  Joshua, likewise, is easy to distinguish.  He's the 13-year-old who's almost as tall as me and always looks either sleepy (in the morning) or hungry (the rest of the time).  

There were LOTS of great photos from hiking at Red Rock and such, and I couldn't pick from them to post here.  I set up a shutterfly site so you can download ones you want (I think there's some gems there for you, Mike and Lauren, though my favorite is yours at the pool that I stole for the blog).  Here's a link to our shutterfly site. Here's a link to Lauren's shutterfly site, for good measure.  There's some great photos there.

Postscripts

The chickens grow FAST. Even if they would sit nice and still like they did for the first pictures we took, there's no way all three would fit in my hands.  They have more than doubled in size.  For the kids out there, we'll be posting a chicken update regularly to show their development.

Brotherly coincidence

Michael and Lauren and their little boys left this morning.  We'll post details and photos later.  In the meantime, one bit of intriguing information we learned:  Mike and I both have songs from Miles Davis Kind of Blue as our cellphone ringtones.  He has "Freddy Freeloader" and I have "So What." 

How many of you have Miles Davis ringtones?  I'm guessing, most of the Meacham boys . . .

Big Surprise! Little Chicks!

They're here! They weren't scheduled to arrive until the end of the month, but they're here today!

I had a 9:00am meeting today and turned my phone on silent. After the meeting, I found that the Post Office had left a message saying the chicks were waiting to be picked up - 2 weeks early! I made a mad dash to the Feed Store and picked up supplies then headed off to pick them up. They were chirping all the way home and I couldn't wait to get them out of the box. I was so excited to find that they were each colored differently. It should be pretty easy to tell them apart.

They're living in the small guest bathroom for now and will probably need to stay indoors for the next 3-4 weeks. They need temperatures of around 90-95 degrees so we've set up a heat lamp over the box they're living in. We'll all probably be glad when they can move into the casita, and it should be nice and warm outside a month from now. In the meantime, I'm looking forward to cuddling up to these little fluff balls.

The names?  It's the poll's choice and ours, too.  The dark brown one (who seems to be the one at the top of the pecking order) will go by the name El Pollo Loco.  The blonde one will be Chick-Fil-A.  And the mottled one is KFC.  That's clockwise from the dark little head in the top of the photo below.