Adjusting to a new way of cooking

For the past two years, I have been urging my husband to try to lose some weight but he resisted.  I am thinking now in retrospect that maybe my nudging may have caused him to resist.  Trying to put myself in his shoes, if someone urged me over and over again to go on a diet, I probably would have resisted out of spite.  The fact is, though, we both need to lose serious amounts of weight.

Last week, all of a sudden, my husband started to change his eating habits, which left my very frustrated when it came to cooking meals.  You see, he has been eating low/lower carbs. This left me with a dilemma, however.  I could not make what I have routinely been making for dinners without leaving him deprived, so I have decided to try to eliminate a good amount of bad carbs  from my diet as well and to do that I need to change up my cooking habits.  After scouring the internet, we came up with a recipe of Broccoli, mushrooms, ham, and cheddar baked with eggs.  I changed the recipe up by decreasing the eggs to only 6 instead of 12 and I probably had only about 3 cups of chopped broccoli instead of the 4 the recipe called for.  This is what we had for our supper this past Sunday night and it was delish!  A definite keeper to add to the recipe box.

I forgot to get a picture of the complete casserole, so snapped a shot with a few pieces missing.   

On a side note, the one nice side effect of watching "bad" carbs is that we find that our appetites are somewhat suppressed and we don't crave all those snacks as much.  This way of eating worked very well for him about 15 years ago when he lost a great deal of weight, but unfortunately, he has put it back on over the years, so of course I will be encouraging him in this once again.

A wedding present better late than never

The wedding was December 2012.  The quilt was finally completed in February 2015.  It's my design.  The piecing of the top was the most fun.  The machine quilting was what gave me fits and was the reason I kept putting off finishing the quilt.  First the tension was off and then the thread kept breaking no matter what brand I used.  I had to work in a two or three hour spurts and then when I got frustrated, I put it aside for a few months at a time.  I originally wanted to hand quilt this quilt, but I was on a deadline, so I decided machine quilting would be quicker.  Lesson learned - stick with your gut instinct.  I should have hand quilted from the beginning and would probably have been done much sooner than the 2 years 3 months.

When completed, I once again was able to love this quilt.  After all was said and done, it turned out beautiful.  It was such a nice feeling to have it completed.  I hope it will get many years of use. 

Life is about change

Let's face it, most of us don't like change.  We like knowing our daily routine and hate it when life throws us for a loop.  It's been about 1-1/2 years since my last blog post and there have been a few changes in those two years.   My oldest child moved out.  He could have stayed here forever, but he decided it was time to experience life on his terms.  The younger of the two boys got his driver's permit and got a part-time job and is looking ahead to his senior year of high school next year.  Changes for me?  A milestone is just ahead for me in a few months - I'll be the big 5-0.   That's a change that has snuck up on me.

Do you ever sit back and go back to those days when you tried to imagine your life as you got older?  I do that a lot lately, but funny thing is that I never actually had a picture of what I thought life was going to be like when the kids were grown.   

Another change is the name of my blog.  I was never really happy with the name I chose before.  I never wanted to focus solely on sewing since there are many pastimes I enjoy.  The new name makes me chuckle.  You see, my name is Jennifer, but the day of my wedding my priest couldn't remember my name.  Let's just say he was past due for retirement.   He called me Philomena.  It's one of those funny things I think of from time to time.  I love quilting and sewing.  I have always loved to experiment with cooking, and recently I've been conquering my fear of baking bread with yeast.  Thus, the new name...

Welcome to my blog - Philomena Quilts, etc. where you never know what topic might come up.