Ellie@Home by Nicole Kapise-Perkins

With all kinds of weird and wild plants!                Someday I will have a lovely kitchen garden bursting with tomatoes and zucchinis and sweet potatoes, with overflowing urns of herbs lined up along a patio. In the meantime, I have an 11x11 plot in the community garden down the street from my apartment, as well as some pots arranged along my back steps. I’m still aiming for the tomatoes and zucchinis and sweet potatoes, and I do have a pot of herbs happily blooming at the top of the steps. Gardening is relatively new to me; my grandparents had a huge garden when I was a girl, but by the time I was a teenager they were living in an apartment and they had given up gardening, though my grandmother’s begonias and geraniums were always stunning splashes of color on her windowsills, and her window boxes danced with pansies and petunias. The house that I grew up in had the occasional flower patch, but never any vegetabl...

Litha: Light and Laughter : It is the time of light, laughter, and joyful abandon. It is Litha! Let us celebrate with ruby-ripe strawberries and twinkling fireflies and achingly-pure blue skies reflected in chilly streams and sun-warmed ponds. I tend to get giddy this time of year; maybe it’s the child in me that hasn’t grown up yet, or perhaps the Kitchen Witch who is so exc...

    As everyone who reads this blog has no doubt figured out, I am not the most organized person on the planet. I used to be very organized, on time for appointments, early, even, kept my house tidy, knew where important papers were, and never ever lost the kitchen table. Then I had children. And started working. And went to school. And then my organizational skills went the way of the Yangtze River dolphin.    Early last year I decided to jump on the bullet journal bandwagon, more to see what it was actually about than as an organizational tool, and being me got sucked right into it, filling up a notebook with all kinds of stuff both useful and useless, and then barely used it. Not as effective as I was led to believe a bullet journal was. There's a catch, of course. One actually has to USE a bullet journal for it to be, well, useful.     I have been known to fill pages of items to be done and then only cross off two. Trying to balance schoo...

   Hello, hello, and happy Thursday! I am in my office, enjoying a lovely view through my window, wishing I was out there instead of in here , and thoroughly envying my eight year old, who will get to enjoy unlimited nice-weather access all summer, beginning next Friday. Lucky monkey.    Sadly, I can't let his entire summer be all fun and games, partly because his father, older brother, and I are all working full-time, and his sister not only works full-time but lives an hour away, so he won't be able to live at the park of the beach (which he would LOVE), and also because we need to make sure he avoids the dreaded "Summer Slide," the loss of learning that affects many elementary-age children over the summer break. My boy has some difficulty with his reading, writing, and spelling, so my husband and I are being extra-vigilant this summer. As well, he has recently been diagnosed with ADD; we want to not only keep him on a steady learning platform, but encourag...

So, Tuesday's dinner. It was indeed a win, with everything cooking up just right, and tasting oh so good; even Littler Son ate all his dinner.  Here is the recipe from Well Plated by Erin: Baked Lemon Chicken Easy, healthy Baked Lemon Chicken with garlic, rosemary, potatoes, and asparagus. Everything cooks on ONE pan. Delicious and perfect for busy weeknights! Yield: 4 servings Prep Time: 15 minutes Cook Time: 35 minutes Total Time: 50 minutes Ingredients: 1 pound baby red potatoes, cut into 1-inch pieces 3 tablespoons olive oil, divided 2 tablespoons chopped fresh rosemary, divided 1 teaspoon kosher salt, divided 1/2 teaspoon black pepper, divided 2 pounds thin asparagus, tough ends trimmed and discarded, cut into 2-inch pieces (about 2 bunches) 1 1/2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken breasts or thighs, cut into 1-inch pieces 1 teaspoon garlic powder 1 large lemon, juice and zest (you should have about 1/4 cup lemon juice t...

          Wednesday has been established as “Game Nite” in our house. All of us here are gamers to some degree—I am the least-immersed of all of us, playing Dungeons & Dragons, table top games, and the occasional round of Magic, the Gathering (Badly, I might add. And I can’t play video games at all, despite the fact that I was a Pac-Man master at six). Husband and the boys D&D, Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh, and video game like pros, and I am happy to say that Littler Son is just as likely to pull out a board game as he is to switch the Wii on. Older Son is 21, so if he wants to park himself in front of his television for hours there’s really nothing I can do about it except throw socks at him from his doorway.                 I wanted a time for all of us to slow down and spend time together. Everything has been in an uproar for nearly a year, and we needed some windin...

     Yesterday I was supposed to write an entertaining and somewhat informative post about the marvelousness of one-pan dinners, but when my husband and sons picked me up from work at 4:00 yesterday they were all famished, so instead of going to the grocery store and then home to write my post and make my one-pan dinner, Husband made a beeline for the Wagon Wheel in Gill where we had an early dinner (or late lunch, depending on who you ask. If you’re ever in the neighborhood, the Portobello Burger is awesome: loaded with roasted red peppers, goat cheese, and garlic aioli…mmmm. The two boys are rather fond of the Cowboy Burger, which is layered with cheddar and piled with onion rings. Husband likes everything.)      Once Husband & Sons were fed we went grocery shopping, and so last night’s dinner has become tonight’s dinner, and so forth. Glad I didn’t write the dinners in on the calendar yet! Truth be told, dinner has become somewhat of a...

   Hello and happy June 1! I would wish everyone a happy summer, but technically it's not summer yet, and the view outside my office window is less-than summerish: gray, rainy, windy...actually, it is quite the proper summer-storm type of morning...    Anyway, June kicks off one of my favorite summertime events: the Highland Street Foundation's Free Fun Fridays. From June 29 to August 31, museums and parks across Massachusetts offer free admission (these are scheduled days; not every Friday). Last year my husband and I visited the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; this year I hope to bring our son along, as he's now old enough to make connections between the history he has learned in school and some of the exhibits (I can see us being in the Egyptian art section for hours...).    If you are in Massachusetts, or planning to visit, check out the link below and see what kind of offerings are available for a Friday spent browsing a museum or listening to the symp...