When life gives you lemons....

Life did give us lemons. Lots and lots of them. These lemons were so ripe that some of the seeds inside were starting to sprout. When life gives you lemon seed sprouts, add dirt, water and just stir.

A lemon bath.

Ok, so life didn't give us lemons..... our neighbors did. They acquired them from the tree of a friends house while helping them move. Here, John poses with some fully grown lemons in front of OUR lemon tree........ if you look really close, you'll see that ours have a way to go until they are ready for a bath of their own.

We wasted no time in getting those lemons to the chopping block . While making our breakfast of oatmeal and cantaloupe slices we also managed to SQUEEZE in some lemonade preparation.

We decided the best way to preserve all the excess juice was to freeze the squeeze ice cube style for single serve use later.

Keoni and his sugary elixir...... all the necessary ingredients for:

The Best Lemonade Ever

1 3/4 c. sugar

1 1/2 c. lemon juice

8 c. water

* In a small saucepan, combine sugar and 1 cup of the water. Bring to boil and stir to dissolve the sugar. Allow to cool to room temperature, then cover and refrigerate until chilled. Remove seeds from lemon juice, but leave pulp. In a pitcher, stir together chilled syrup, lemon juice and remaining 7 cups of water. Mmmmmmm!

The neighbors also brought us this GIGANTIC sunflower head from their Dad's house. Thanks again!

This flower head was super spiky. Not as fun as the last one. But somehow, we are still motivated to pick the thing clean. Food is like that.

Yup. We love our little Tonka truck. The kids made backing up sounds the whole time... beep, beep, beep.

Feeling totally inspired by the green smoothies workshop of this week, James pulls together as many free ingredients as he can find into our little smoothie maker. Apples, beets, sorrel, frozen grapes, lemonade and a little hope. Those beets really do give it color!

Lookin' good! Turns out though, that our little smoothie maker that (almost) could, is NOT a Vitamix. Our smoothies had to be....... well....... chewed a little bit. But the flavor was great!

It's that time again kids! What time?....... TOFU TIME! Yeah!

This soy curd basically takes on the flavor of whatever you put it with.... so marinating takes under an hour. At less than a dollar a pound, this is our go to protein source of choice.

Aleli tried out a new recipe which we later adjusted to taste a bit. The book said it could be used as a taco filling as well, but we had it over brown rice. To the above left: this is what bad tofu looks like. This block was accidentally frozen on the top shelf of our fridge then defrosted, frozen, and so forth till it looked like one giant brittle, punky sea sponge thingy........ not pretty! Good thing we had a couple pounds of good tofu on hand.

After dinner, we popped up some kettle corn for the road and headed out to the park for some live Reggae from the Upstream Boys. We had a blast dancing around in the half dark, meeting up with friends and munching on homemade snackies.

On a tip from a work friend, we drove out a town over to a store called WinCo. It was suppose to be a little like Costco but without the membership cards. We had never been before, but were told that there were great deals to be had. So we wanted to investigate for ourselves. There were carts for days and the biggest Jug-O-Corn Oil we've ever seen. Kai almost slips a disc just trying to pick it up. That's a lot of corn!!!!! We also found Mac-n-Cheese for .50 cents a box and Koolaid packets for .10 cents a piece (the best prices we've seen on those items to date).

Aleli and the kids check out while James bags up our purchase for the day. We came in with $18 (three days worth) and spent just under that.

Exhale. We stayed in budget and on task in that huge maze of food and products...... a herculean task sometimes with lots of tired kids. These groceries should help round out our meals for the next few days. It's always fun trying out new places as well. Learning, always learning.