RJ Treleaven

Showing posts with label Lake Martin. Show all posts

Happy September, My Lovelies! It's Labor Day Weekend, and I hope you are enjoying spending time with your family and friends.

For this edition of the Tales of the Traveling Tote, I will be sharing a few of my favorite summer photographs from Lake Martin. This is (almost) a wordless post, and I hope you enjoy my photos!

I hope you enjoyed viewing a few of my favorite photos from Summer 2024!

Please link to the other ladies' posts below.

Debbie with Miss Aurora @ Mountain Breaths

Emily with Miss Courtney Childs@ The French Hutch

Patti with Miss Kenzie @ Pandora's Box

Jenna with Miss Coquille @The Painted Apron

Linda P with Miss Lola @ Life and Linda

Rita with Miss Luna C @ Panoply

Sarah with Miss Merri Mac @ Hyacinths for the Soul

Jackie and Miss Madi K @ Purple Chocolat Home

Ricki Jill and Countess De Monet @ The Sketchy Reader (You're here!)

Jenna is hosting our giveaway this quarter. Good luck: I hope you win!

Please join us for our next Tales of the Traveling Totes shenanigans on December 1, 2024!

Until next time...

Blessings!
Ricki Jill

Tales of the Traveling Tote: Lazy Lake Martin Summer

Sunday, September 1, 2024

Happy Wednesday, My Lovelies! Although it isn't "officially summer" yet, I always feel like summer starts here in Central Alabama on Memorial Day Weekend. One of the main reasons is that school's out for summer, so I won't be hearing the school buses in the neighborhood until early August.

We will be home in Alabama all summer, so we thought it would be fun to subscribe to a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) box from Stone Hollow Farmstead. I am trying to eat more healthily while supporting a local farm. Plus, as Mr. Bookish calls it, it's "adventure eating" because each week's box's contents are always a surprise.

I wanted to share a few of the recipes I made with this week's box. I might share our culinary adventures from time to time this summer or every week. I haven't decided yet! ;P

The first photo in the post shows about a third of what we received.

Here is what I made:

We received a LOT of plums. Mr. Bookish doesn't like them as much as I do, so I decided to make him a dessert and add a little sugar to cut the tartness. Just because a pie, tart, or cobbler recipe calls for sugar doesn't mean one has to use the full amount!

I used this Plum Crisp recipe from All Recipes. It is super easy, and I will also use it when we get a few peaches.

The recipe calls for plums, flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, egg, and butter.

The finished product

I also made a garlic and parmesan cauliflower mash from the purple heirloom cauliflower. It's a crazy color, but it was so, so good. Everyone loved it! I found this recipe from The Seasoned Mom.

The cauliflower mash had the same consistency of creamed potatoes. If you want yours more like mashed potatoes, don't use as much broth.

I made a nice salad with the curly endive and heirloom lettuces. I based it on a recipe from the New York Times. Here is my take on it. It's very light for summer, and the eggs give added protein.

Curly Endive Salad With Mustard Dressing, Egg and Gruyère

Ingredients:

4 large boiled eggs (cooked to your preference), at room temperature

3 tablespoons red wine vinegar

2 teaspoons Dijon mustard

1 small garlic clove, grated or mashed to a paste

¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil

Salt and black pepper

2 large handfuls tender, pale curly endive (from the center of 2 medium heads), washed and dried

2 large handfuls heirloom lettuce (or spring mix), washed and dried

About 2 ounces Gruyère

Procedure:

Divide greens on four plates.

Chop eggs and place on top of greens.

Mix dressing: whisk together red wine vinegar, Dijon mustard, garlic, and olive oil. Add salt and pepper to taste. Dress each salad.

Using a vegetable peeler, peel cheese and top each salad with desired amount of cheese shavings.

Cook's Note: Aged white cheddar tastes great on this salad, and we also made it with a champagne vinaigrette, too.

This salad is perfect for a lite dinner, especially after a large or filling lunch.

Inspiration

Here are a few things that are inspiring me. I am still finding a few peonies at the markets (they seem to be no longer blooming in local gardens), and an Instagram Friend told me that Trader Joe's has them for sale now (I haven't been yet this week, but maybe I can go tomorrow). It has been a minute since I've painted them.

These peonies are super cool because they change colors! Both photos are of the same flower: They fade from reddish-pink to pale pink.

I'm also considering painting ducks if I can get a good photo of them.

In addition to painting, I've been enjoying drawing with the color changing pencils from Koh-i-Noor (I purchased them in Prague). Here is my latest drawing of a tulip. This pencil set is helping me get in touch with my inner child.

Some of the pencils are more monochromatic, like the green one I used in the stem and leaf. Some of the reds and purples are more polychromatic.

I'm working on the following posts for June:

Stay tuned!

What has been inspiring you lately?

Until next time...

Blessings!
Ricki Jill

CSA: First Week's Subscription Box and Inspiring Things

Wednesday, May 29, 2024

Mirabell Garden

Salzburg, Austria

Happy Monday, My Lovelies! What have you been up to this spring so far? We have been traveling, gardening, and celebrating for the most part. Spring is my favorite season, partly because we start going to the lake more often, and baseball returns.

In spring, we celebrate Easter, our anniversary, my birthday, and Mother's Day.

We celebrated Easter in Germany this year, but beforehand we attended a few Easter markets in Prague.

I will be posting about a travels in the coming weeks. Here is a little preview of what I'll be sharing:

Prague is beautiful at night. this is a scene from the Municipal House concert hall and café

Göttweig Abbey, Krems, Austria

Most of the gardening we've been doing has been the grunt work of pruning and shaping trees and shrubs; cleaning retaining walls and patios; and putting out pine straw. We also planted our containers for spring. I'll share them once the plants grow a little bit.

This is our climbing New Dawn rose outside our dining room and my art studio.

I haven't been doing much decorating indoors lately. But I have been repotting houseplants and bringing in a few blooms.

Kalanchoe and campanula

Our daughter Shelley loves to go to antique shops, vintage stores, and flea markets. Lately she's asked me to tag along with her, and look what I found in excellent condition and at a very good price:

It's a MacKenzie-Childs storage box. I use it to hold my many spools of ribbon in the art studio.

I also found this beautiful 1972 illustrated edition of Black Beauty. Isn't the cover gorgeous! It has beautiful black and white and color illustrations inside.

This book is in excellent condition. I love books with pretty covers like this!

Shelley is very good at finding beautiful things. She can enter a huge warehouse and literally find the three prettiest things in there. I'm impressed that she has such a great eye, but she gets it honestly from her grandmother who owned an antiques store in New Orleans.

We've been to Lake Martin a couple of times so far this spring. A gander was following me everywhere because I like to feed the turtles, and apparently geese love turtle food. The following weekend, he brought his entire family including his wife and eight goslings. I recently posted a reel on Instagram if you'd like to see it. Please use the link below and follow me. I will follow you back.

A gaggle of goslings

Lake Martin, Alabama

I've been involved in my regular art class this spring and a class at church.

Our class at church is based on this book: The Friendship of Women by Joan Chittister.

In my art class I finally finished the realism colored pencil book. It took me a little over a year to complete. My last drawing is featured below. I am currently painting with oil paints again. :D

I've seen beautiful art this spring, and one of the best museums we visited was the Albertina in Vienna. The painting, below, is inspiring me. I'd like to try my hand at pointillism.

Paul Signar (1863 - 1935)

"Venice, the Pink Cloud"

1909

Albertina, Vienna

I've been visiting friends and going on outings with them this spring. It's been nice getting reacquainted with childhood friends who've moved back home to Alabama. They have been blessings to me!

A friend and I enjoyed decadent slices of chocolate cake in celebration of my birthday.

The General

Birmingham, Alabama

I got a new desktop computer. My old one had issues, and my laptop completely crashed. Right now I'm not planning on replacing my laptop because I am LOVING my new desktop so, so much! Now that my computer frustrations are behind me (let's hope they stay there) I'm planning to blog more than I have been.

I've been reading a lot this year, and on Friday I will share my three favorite books of 2024 so far in my Literary Friday post. Please come back and read it because all three would make fantastic beach and/or lake reads!

Until next time...

Blessings!
Ricki Jill

Spring Shenanigans

Monday, May 6, 2024

Happy Memorial Day, My Lovelies! I hope you've had a wonderful weekend. We're still celebrating at Lake Martin with family and friends.

In today's post I wanted to share our recent redo of our main bedroom in our lake cabin. We've wanted to redecorate for a long time, and we were inspired by our hotel room in Montana. I wish I'd taken more photos of the room because it was brilliant in its decor and functionality.

What we loved about our room: The rustic wood-clad walls; crisp white linens; leather headboards; industrial lighting; and floating bedside shelves.

Our cabin is small, so we painted the walls in Benjamin Moore's Super White. There's a texture on the walls to reduce sound, and we opted not to change that. Next we upgraded our ceiling fan, and we upgraded from a queen sized bed to a king.

Rather than clad the entire wall with barn wood, we instead bought a headboard. We found floating shelving with drawers we liked a little bit better than open shelving, and Trip decided to hardwire the lights we found.

We didn't change the carpet because it's in very good condition.

I like that the headboard has random white and gray planks.

I love the little sconces with the retro shape, bulbs, and pulls.

We are enjoying the neutral bedding, and we've added white linen bedding for summer.

Our pine pieces are now sporting jaunty MacKenzie-Childs round and fish knobs.

The chests are opposite our bed, and between them are large sliding glass doors. We also installed new (blackout) white linen curtains. I forgot to take a photo of them!

The only thing we kept in the room is the vintage Mardi Gras poster. It looks even better with our new decor.

This is quite the departure from how I normally decorate because I'm a maximalist, and I love color. But that's sort of the point, for the room to feel like a little boutique hotel.

Mr. Bookish was so helpful in helping with the decorating decisions; installing the sconces, bedside floating tables, and ceiling fan; and helping move the kingsize bed up a very steep flight of stairs.

We also totally changed our porches at the lake, too. I might share them later if I remember to take some photos.

Until next time...

Blessings!
Ricki Jill

RJ Treleaven

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