Recipe of the Week: Hot Chili Cheese Dip

This dip is embarrassingly easy, but always goes over well, especially in the cooler months when guests tend to gravitate toward warm comfort foods. I like it because it is a change of pace from the typical cheddar or Velveeta-based dips. My mom gets the credit for the recipe, and it's the main reason I have always had a "half pint" size crockpot in my cabinet.

Hot Chili Cheese Dip

Ingredients:
1 can chili (with or without beans)
1 9-ounce package cream cheese (regular or low-fat)

Directions:
Mix together in a small crockpot and stir a few times as the cheese melts and the chii heats up. Serve with corn chip "scoops" or sturdy tortilla chips. The recipe can be doubled or tripled for a crowd.

It's really that easy - heat, eat and enjoy!

Happy snacking,

Moving: Uprooting the plants

Despite the dearth of gardening activity at our home over the last few years, I am at my core, a gardener. And I have a slew of perennial plants around here, many of which will stay, but a few are going to make the trek to the new house in the next few weeks.

Among the take-alongs are my water lilies and Louisiana irises. Poor babies, the Louisiana irises have stayed a little too dry in their current home under a huge magnolia, but I suspect they will love being at the water's edge of the pond when I move them (as soon as they're through blooming.)

The new hanging baskets

I'm also taking some hydrangeas and shade plants, plus a peony or two to add to what's here. The rest of the plants will stay where they are unless/until we sell or rent the house and then I'll take one last trek through the beds to see if there's anything else I want to dig and take.

In the meantime, the porch was crying out for hanging baskets, so I took some time on Saturday to put together new baskets with plants I bought in Jackson the week before, and got them hung. They will be full and lush in a few weeks, I hope! Several containers will move into place this week.

Mr. Official is also determined to move the greenhouse. It needs new doors; well, it really needs a whole new front unit. It was a casualty of our sidewalk construction around the same huge magnolia tree a few years ago.

(For the record, in a contest of greenhouse versus skidster going full speed in reverse, the greenhouse will lose. Every time. Especially the second and third times.)

It will be nice to have the greenhouse when we move, but taking down and putting back up?  Not so much fun.  Hopefully we can get it down and then wait until fall to rebuild it.

Happy (trans)planting,

Time to lighten the load

The move-in date is upon us.  This week has been a frenzy of back-and-forth trips getting bathrooms, kitchen and closets set up and ready to move into.  The furniture gets moved tomorrow.   After that, I will have to look at the remaining stuff and make tough choices. I'll be honest, the urge to purge is upon me.
I have torn away my clutter blinders and I'm looking with clear eyes at all the S.T.U.F.F. we have accumulated since we moved to Tennessee almost 11 years ago. Added to the moving van load o'stuff we hauled here with us. It's embarrassing to consider how much stuff we have.  (At least we never broke over and permanently rented a storage unit.  But that's only because we let it pile up in attics and the shed.)

But enough is enough - it's not all coming with us.  The new shed is smaller.  The new walk-in attic is fanTABULOUS, but it is not big enough for all this stuff.  And even if it were, WHY would we take it all? My vow is we are going to move lightly (figuratively speaking of course.  Because all that pottery is heavy!)

I have two litmus tests I am administering to decide what stays and what goes:
1.  If it is not loved and/or used at least once a year, it's not going.
2.  If we haven't used it since we moved in here, it is absolutely, positively, not going.  

The superfluities can be sold, given away, recycled, tossed in the trash, burned...I don't care - but they cannot enter our new abode.

Of course, every rule has exceptions, and since there were two rules, we have two exceptions:
1.  My wedding dress, although I'm even debating that one...swimmer girl is not keen on its 1980s style; and
2. Mr. Official's baseball cards.  I just hope he doesn't rupture a disk hauling them down and up the stairs from one attic to the other.

Happy moving,