Living Large In Our Little House



A Sunday after­noon in the city would most likely find us at our favorite Mexican restau­rant in the city, but a Sunday after­noon at Our Little House is much more fun.

Dale gets the Sunday sup­per cook­ing duties in the sum­mer, which typ­i­cally means grilled fare, or if it is cool enough, Dutch Oven Cooking.

Although Sunday wasn’t a cool day, we com­bined grilling pork chops with a cou­ple of recipes he has wanted to try Dutch Oven style.

The first is a dish we’ve tried before, Dutch Oven Potatoes in a 12” Dutch Oven, which comes from the book, “Camp Dutch Oven Cooking.”

The recipe calls for 1 – 1 ½ pounds of bacon and Dale put about 6 slices in it. He loaded it up with onions though, think­ing that would com­pen­sate for the reduced bacon.

I was in charge of mix­ing the “Charley Bread,” a recipe my hubby wanted to try because it con­tains creamed corn, a favorite of his. I inten­tion­ally left out the 2 tbs. Of sugar and 1 tsp. of salt. Sugar is not good for us here and salt isn’t either, and since most things have too much salt, we didn’t think these omis­sions would matter.

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Our Living Large blog com­mu­nity was launched two years ago this week. When I launched this blog, I envi­sioned more of an inter­ac­tive com­mu­nity that could learn from each other on liv­ing smaller, greener and a hap­pier life.

This has been that and so much more. I’m glad we con­tinue to post and share.

The norm for blog anniver­saries is to take a look back at favorite posts, but since I did that not to long ago in the blog ring post, I’ll just limit it to say­ing thank you to every­one in our community.

I am post­ing links to some of the tips I’ve writ­ten on specif­i­cally liv­ing in a smaller abode on our Facebook page. If you haven’t “liked” it yet, I hope you will jump over there and take a look.

I’ll also be post­ing new posts on Wednesday, Thursday and our Living Large Tip on Friday this week, so y’all come back now, ya hear!?

If you have a favorite Living Large mem­ory, please com­ment and share!

School is in.

I don’t have to worry about pack­ing kids' lunch, but I won­dered how par­ents pack lunches in safer and greener containers?

It isn't like they have metal lunch­boxes as many of us did.

42 per­cent of the world’s wood har­vest goes to pro­duce paper, mak­ing paper lunch sacks just not very envi­ron­men­tally friendly.

Dale car­ries his lunch in a small plas­tic cooler that’s prob­a­bly over 20 years old now, but what about kids?

I found this web­site, EcoBags, which offers a wide vari­ety of lunch bags and all kinds of totes (hint, for your gro­cery out­ings too!)

A year or so ago, close to the time we tossed the microwave, I also decided we were going to do away with plas­tic containers.

We went with the Pyrex glass (pic­tured above) and my hus­band did fine with them until last week when he did drop and break one at work while putting it into the fridge.

That also made me real­ize that glass con­tain­ers aren’t a good option for small kids (and some­times not for hus­bands), but this site, The Soft Landing, has all kinds of con­tain­ers. Some are plas­tic, but they’re also BPA free. There’s also stain­less steel con­tain­ers on the site, some­thing I will con­sider for Dale for his salads.

No rea­son now not to toss the plas­tic and go with greener and safer food containers.

Have you tried any of these prod­ucts? Have you thrown away the plas­tic con­tain­ers at your house?

The other night, Abbi, our Huskey mix began pac­ing and act­ing rest­less, as if she wanted out. I don’t allow the big dogs to roam at night since los­ing Emma, so I tried to calm Abbi and told her to lie down.

It was time to take Molly and Dakota out­side before we went to bed.

Just as they fin­ished their busi­ness, pop, pop, pop!

The dogs perked up and the noise star­tled me so that I hur­ried them into the house with­out even try­ing to assess what it was or where it was com­ing from.

“I just heard noises out­side,” I told my hus­band. “Pounding or something.”

He rolled his eyes and headed out the door, con­vinced I had scared myself with the lat­est episode of one of those ghost hunt­ing shows.

I picked up the phone and called my aunt to see if her hus­band might be out in his garage ham­mer­ing on some­thing. I doubted it at 9 o’clock and I was right.

As Dale hung out on the party deck lis­ten­ing and then moved to the cov­ered front porch, I fin­ished get­ting ready for bed.

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