You Make Me Happy Like Pistachio Pudding

by Melissa // January 4, 2012 // 3 Comments

Hey, everyone. I hope you had a good Christmas/break/New Year. I’ve been putting off getting back into the grind, but there’s a lot going on and I need to get with it or I’ll never get everything done. First off: I mentioned it briefly before, but we’re moving in just over two months – from Arizona to Missouri – and January 1st marked the beginning of our official “packing up” time. (So far, I have packed exactly nothing, not even my Christmas decorations.) This move is going to be a real haul. Not only are we packing ourselves, we are also moving ourselves, and it is going to take us three days of driving to get where we’re going. The good news? THIS IS IT! This is THE MOVE, that, theoretically, we will never, ever, ever have to move from ever again. Ever. Boy. That sounds restful, doesn’t it? This is going to be my ninth move in the last ten years, and I’m about ready to be done.

In other news, I’ve decided to suspend the Monday link parties. My apologies to any fans of that feature, but I’ve got other things to worry about. Like the Spring issue of Crochetvolution, coming out February 1st! (Please…please don’t ask me how close that is to being ready.)

On to the meat of the post! My parents sent me some pistachio pudding mixes and a bag of mini marshmallows for my birthday last month. Why? So that I could make the dish that some call Watergate Salad or Mormon Salad, but that as a teen I knew only as ‘green fluff’ or ‘pistachio pudding.’

Kind of looks disgusting, doesn’t it? I was just thinking this would make great food for a Halloween party, where all the dishes look disgusting but are secretly delicious. I discovered green fluff at a Church potluck and afterwards zeroed in on it and filled, like, a third of my plate with it every time someone brought it. I even asked for it at my high school graduation party. Of course, I didn’t know what went in it, and I remember describing it to my grandmother as pistachio pudding with whipped cream and mini marshmallows in it. (I didn’t know about the pineapple! Crushed pineapple is some sort of magic ingredient that makes certain desserts about one thousand times more delicious.) Grandma made it for me, too, even though I could tell she thought I had gone insane.

Here’s the recipe for the real pistachio pudding.

Ingredients:
1 – 3.5 oz box of instant pistachio pudding
1 – 20 oz can crushed pineapple (DON’T drain it!)
2 cups mini marshmallows (most recipes call for 1 cup. I used 2 because I can.)
1/2 c chopped nuts (OPTIONAL – I don’t add these)
2 cups whipped cream (I was out today and so I made mine with yogurt. Close enough!)

Just stir pudding mix, pineapple, and marshmallows (also nuts, if you’re nutty) together in a bowl; gently stir in whipped cream and refrigerate for 1 hour or until ready to serve. That’s it! Yum.

Bah Baa – Sheep for Christmas!

by Melissa // December 22, 2011 // No Comments

So remember that notebook I found? These guys were in there, too.

I’m not completely satisfied with my photography here. I’ve been trying to learn some of the more complicated settings on my camera…let’s just say I’m not sold on them yet. The individual shots came out better:

And then the lamb…

Tommy and Teddy love these things because they know what sheep say and it’s a mommy and a baby. They just cannot get over that and always make sure that the two of them are close together on the tree, because mommy sheep and baby sheep clearly belong together. Maybe I should make a second lamb, so the mommy sheep would have two babies! Anyway, these two are, hands down, my favorite ornaments that I have made – and the good news is that if you like them too, you can pick up the directions in my pattern store.

Make It Fit Longer with Simple Sewing

by Melissa // December 21, 2011 // 2 Comments

You may remember a while back I mentioned I’d be doing a project that had to do with these:

What you DIDN’T see was that in the full picture those shirts looked like this:

You see, we bought those little shirt-collared rompers for Tommy and Teddy to wear to church back in April, and by this fall they’d grown too tall for them to snap at the crotch any more.

Now, normally I don’t alter clothes once they’ve been outgrown, I just stick them in a bucket for the next kid. This time it was different for a couple of reasons, but the biggest one was that these are pretty much Tommy and Teddy’s most favorite clothes ever. (Plus, unless I altered them we’d have to go shopping for something else for them to wear before Sunday!)

You can see here that Tommy is in tears because I won’t give him his shirt. You should have heard him wail when I took scissors to it! Poor baby.

Just cut off the shirt straight across above the crotch snaps. Then, turn up the hem and sew across, turn it up again and sew it down. Ta-da! If you can sew a straight seam, you can alter a romper into a shirt.

Don’t worry. Tommy and Teddy were soon reconciled to the change and they are still some of their absolute favorite clothes. Hurrah for sewing!

(Random side note: you can tell I didn’t think to get a picture of them wearing their altered shirts until a long time after I’d done it. Just look at Teddy’s face in the top picture versus the bottom one! There they go, growing up on me again!!!)

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