A Little Bit Of Everything Blog

The bacon and chicken stuffing (aka dressing) and diced sweet potatoes are prepped and ready for the oven in a few hours! Finishing up the turkey and the pies first. I made myself a nice little cocoa and banana chocolate chip mug cake as a treat for working hard today. It came out extremely delicious! (Banana as a replacement for the eggs). So excited to see family and friends this evening!  Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Regardless of where you are in the world today, I hope your day is very joyful, and filled with much love and many blessings!  Don't worry about anything but in all your prayers ask God for what you need, always asking him with a thankful heart. And God's peace, which is far beyond human understanding, will keep your hearts and minds safe in union with Christ Jesus. - Philippians 4:6-7  With all of that being stated, now I will share an odd story that happened to me on a Thanksgiving long ago when I was still in college. I'd like to say that all types of ...

Something my Grandma taught me from a very young age was the value of things. And in that , was the value of money. Grandma had this amazing way of teaching valuable life lessons. She knew I probably wouldn't listen if she just explained it. I was a fairly hyper active child. So instead, she would just go about her business in a way that would make you ask questions. One of those life lessons she taught me about was an old scraggly wild apple tree growing next to the drive way. By all rights it should have been cut down. It was in the way when the driveway was plowed, a pain to mow around, and it didn't add much in looks concerning her lawn, which she was particular about. But she wouldn't hear of it. Nope, not her. She loved that apple tree. She would marvel at the fruit blossoms. Strong storms would usually shred a few branches off. One time, it's trunk was split by lightening. But it didn't come down. Somehow she got grandpa to chain the trunk back together.  Hom...

When I hear the song, "Famous Last Words" by My Chemical Romance, I immediately tear up. The reason I am even mentioning it is because last night at a Christmas light festival, I heard someone playing it. It isn't even in my usual music genre, but this song was played in the car the morning I took my cousin Shelby Thomas to her last surgery before she passed away of ovarian cancer.  Shelby was my best childhood friend.   I had never heard any songs by that band before , but this song's lyrics and chords resonated in the moment so I looked it up and listened to it on repeat as I waited in the waiting room of the hospital. I was so anxious sitting on pins and needles, this song kept me calm and centered. I was NOT created to worry and I was NOT created to fear. After finding out she had died, I never took this song off of the playlist. I didn’t listen to anything else for a long while after. Not even an over exaggeration. The meaningful Famous Last Words lyrics really ...

Just wanted to share some experiences from my haunted childhood home experiences that I’ve never really been able to make sense of. Part of me is convinced that maybe it’s just overactive childhood imagination since I haven’t really experienced anything since I’ve grown up. I guess I just wanted to post here on my blog to see what you all think and to get some things off my chest that I’ve never really been able to speak about.  A vivid experience I had was when I was probably around 10 years old. I remember I was laying on my bed reading when I suddenly got a really dreadful feeling. I looked up from the page and it looked like my room was either foggy or smoky, it was hard to tell. I stood up and backed up to my bedroom door, my hand was just under the handle when I felt a big splash of water fall onto my hand. I jerked my hand around to look at it and it was dry. I was astonished as I continued to watch what looked like either smoke or fog rising from the floor of my bedroom up ...

My Grandma's Homemade Crispy Southern Pan Fried Okra Recipe  Ingredients: 2 pounds fresh okra, sliced into 1/2"-inch bite-sized rounds 2 large eggs, beaten (room temperature) 2 cups whole milk or buttermilk (room temperature) 2 cups yellow cornmeal 2 tsp salt 1 tsp black pepper 2 tsp garlic powder (optional) Cooking oil for frying (vegetable or pork oil) How To Make Best Pan Fried Okra : Best Homemade Fried Okra Recipe This was my Grandma 's old fashioned southern way of frying okra, she was raised in Louisiana:  First, wash, trim, and slice the okra. Then thoroughly combine the already-beaten egg and the milk in a large bowl. Soak the okra in the room-temperature egg and milk mixture, never cold but only room temperature. Soak the okra for about 15 minutes (hopefully okra is already tender when bought). In another bowl, mix the yellow cornmeal, salt, pepper, and garlic powder. Heat your preferred cooking oil in a skillet (cast iron is always BEST) over medium-high heat (a...