May Day Picnic

Our church family had a picnic yesterday, May Day, which is a national holiday here, at another beautiful part of Croatia. Isn't this a beautiful view? It reminds me of the Hobbits' shire. Our town is just as pretty, I think, so lush and green. I got to play photographer and enjoyed taking these photos. These are dear friends of ours and they are like family to us.

Some photos of my kids and their BFFs.

My daughter's pet for the day, a very hungry caterpillar.

Our dog Max photobombing our friends' engagement photos.

One of my favorite shots of the day. This happy, young couple will be married soon!

Our friends' daughter who has the prettiest blue eyes.

Trying to take a family photo is a little bit challenging with little kids. I remember going through this so many times. It's the stuff of memories.

Thanks for letting me share a little bit about life in beautiful Croatia. Do you celebrate May Day where you live?

My first cooking post - our anniversary meal!

One blessing/challenge of living in a small town is the unavailability of many restaurant choices. If we want to eat familiar foods like Chinese or Mexican (and even McD's, my girls' favoite!), we have to drive an hour to get it. I'm not complaining...at least we can find them!

Since moving to Croatia many years ago, I have had to learn to cook from scratch and make up recipes. I present to you some that I've made up that were inspired by real dishes I remember eating in America somewhere. I made this for our anniversary a few weeks ago. We had planned to go out to eat, but it was a snowy day and didn't feel like driving two hours. So, after a quick trip to the market, we made this scrumptious and easy to prepare meal!

This is what we made: Creamy Pasta, Grilled Chicken and Glazed Carrots. I also served salad and yummy crusty bread, but forgot to include them in the photo. The ingredients are listed below, but keep in mind that I usually don't measure when I cook. Thankfully, these are really forgiving recipes that are hard to mess up. I also used ingredients (I even provided links to some of the products I used) that are readily available in Croatia, so my Croatian friends can easily make them!

If you're in Croatia, the first thing you need to do is get a gas grill. :) Those who aren't from here, Croatians usually have these gorgeous stone grills that are part of their yard landscape. They're pretty, but you can't use them when the weather is bad. Seriously, gas grills are DA BOMB! We can grill even when there's a snow storm outside. Preheat your grill and sprinkle your chicken pieces with seasoned salt (or Vegeta, which I don't use because of the MSG content), pepper and garlic powder. Grill the chicken until it's cooked through. Brush BBQ sauce or any sauce you have in your pantry (we used Mango/Ginger that we found at Lidl) the last 10 minutes of grilling.

For the pasta sauce, I chopped up country ham (or this in Croatia) or bacon and brown them in the frying pan. Remove from pan.

Slice and stir fry mushrooms in the same pan with the ham drippings. Add minced garlic. Stir fry for a couple more minutes.

Put the cooked ham back in the pan and add the cooking cream/milk mix and lower down the heat. Add a cube or two of chicken buillon, depending on how salty you want it. I'd start with one and add more to taste. Add pepper to taste. Let sauce simmer until thickened.

Cook pasta (I used Tagliatelle). Pour sauce over it and toss. Sprinkle generously with grated hard cheese (Padane, Parmesan, etc.) and toss a little bit more.

For the glazed carrots, slice carrots thinly. Stir fry in a pan with some butter until tender. Salt and pepper to taste.

RECIPES

Creamy Pasta:

1/2 cup of chopped ham/bacon

500 grams/1 lb of mushrooms, sliced

1 tsp minced garlic, about 2 cloves

1/2 cup or 100 ml of cooking cream (vrhnje za kuhanje)

1/2 cup or 100 ml of milk

1-2 chicken bullion cubes

500 g or about a pound of pasta

Grated hard cheese (Padano, Parmesan, etc.)

salt and pepper

Simple Grilled Chicken:

Chicken pieces

BBQ or any thick sauce

salt and pepper

garlic powder

Glazed Carrots:

1 kilo of carrots, peeled and sliced thinly

50g or 2 tablespoons of butter

salt and pepper

I'm linking this to the Homemaking Linking party.

Birthday Carnival

Hi, all! I hope you had a relaxing weekend. I spent much working on the computer, designing future stamps and dies. I feel like I accomplished so much, but I still have lots of ideas I want to make into stamps/dies. I love my job! I have been working hard as I will not be able to do much the next few weeks. We are taking about 100 kids to a youth camp on the Croatian coast for a week. I'm not much for camping, but it means so much to my girls and there's always a need for more workers. I know I will enjoy myself. I will share photos whenever possible.

Today's card uses The Craft's Meow's Life is a Carnival and Timeless Tags sets. The paper is by Echo Park.

 

 Here are some photos from a place I visited with our friends a couple of weeks ago. I forgot to share here some photos. This place is called Plitvicke Lakes and it's one of the prettiest places to visit in Croatia. I'm so fortunate to live just a few hours' drive from here. The lakes are crystal clear and have deep hues of blues and greens. Beautiful places like this make me more in awe of my Almighty Creator. 

 

And here's my favorite photo of that trip. It's my youngest with our pastor's wife, my girls' adoptive grandma in Croatia.

What I've been up to...

I've been busy all week with some friends from GA. They came to help us organize an English camp in our small town through a local school and our church. It was a huge success with 140 kids plus 30 or so volunteers. To compare, we had 60 signups last year! We met so many wonderful kids and their parents. We played games, taught English, did crafts and had a blast! Here's a 8.5 minute slide show I put together that shows some highlights of the camp and another snippet of our life in Croatia.

Butterfly Sympathy

Hi, friends! I hope you all had a great weekend. My family and I spent it playing, cleaning the house, tending to our yard and flower boxes and hosting friends for dinner. It was wonderful to take a break from the computer and work with my hands. And it always feels good when I have a clean home and a house full of wonderful friends, enjoying our home-cooked meal. It makes me happy :-).

My card today was published in Cardmaker Magazine in May 2011. It uses Layers of Color's Flutterescent set. The sentiment is from GinaK's Fanciful Tags, which was die cut with Spellbinders Fancy Tags dies.

And here's our dinner party, which pretty much consists of the same friends every Sunday. Our dining room is not big enough, so we set up a table on our driveway when the weather permits. My oldest was invited to dinner by her friend's family, so she wasn't there. My two youngest invited their BFFs over. These men are my husbands' Bible students. The two older gentlemen are friends from church. Thanks for letting me share a little bit about our life in Croatia with you. :-)

Horsin' Around

My sweet hubby took our two older girls yesterday horseback-riding in a town about 1.5 hours away. The girls were so surprised and ecstatic that one of their dreams had come true. I had to stay home with my youngest who is still too young to go, but we had our own little party at home that included Bob the Tomato and Larry Boy. Here are some photos of their trip.


And here's my handsome cowboy :-).

And my card for today is perfect to go with these photos. It uses an image from Theresa's beautifully illustrated Farm Life stamp set. The papers are Oct Afternoon. The sentiment is SRM We've Got Your Stickers Thanks.

Some Card Patterns Cards

It's been hectic over here, but we are having a great time with our guests. They've been teaching English and computer classes and getting lots of great conversations. My youngest has the sickies, too, but I think she's on the mend now. In light of this, I haven't' been able to blog hop and visit you all lately. I know I'm missing some beautiful creations by you all.

Here are a couple of cards for Card Patterns that I haven't yet posted on my blog. The first card uses the Hero Arts Four Dolls set and Cosmo Cricket Early Bird patterned paper.

This is this week's card using a Stamping Boutique digital image. The patterned papers are Origins by Basic Grey. You have till midnight tonight to play along with this week's sketch.

Something random...Croatian life tidbit: I just answered the door to the town rat killer. It's a public service provided by the government and he visits each home to check if we have rats he could help us extinguish. Since we have a lot of stray cats around, we don't have that problem. Pretty interesting service, isn't it? Life in rural Croatia is never boring :-).