Mrs. Lloyd's Favorite

I love Olive Garden, and from the looks of things I’m not alone. When I’m in the mood for their food but not for the crowd, I make:

Olive Garden Salad

1 12-ounce bagged iceberg garden salad (I like the ones with shaved carrots and shredded red cabbage)

1⁄4 red onion, thinly sliced

12 large pitted black olives

6 mild pepperoncini peppers

2 small Roma tomatoes, sliced

1 cup herbed croutons

Italian dressing (We found Olive Garden dressing at Costco)

Grated Parmesan

Fresh ground black pepper

Combine all ingredients in a large bowl. Toss and serve immediately. Serves four as a main dish or six as a side.

Nine Patch T

During the 1800’s women made quilts to raise money and awareness for causes they believed in, like women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery. But more quilts were dedicated to the temperance movement than to any other cause. Temperance quilts often displayed blocks like Drunkard’s Path or (like this block) that used a T shape in their design. The T’s might have stood for temperance: moderation in the use of wine or beer. Or they might have stood for total abstinence. Many of these quilts were stitched in blue and white fabric, the colors of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union: “White for purity and blue for water, the purest beverage.” If I’d researched this block BEFORE I made it, I might have done it in blue and white as well. But these were the little scraps sitting on my cutting table, so this is the block you get.

Carat Cake

I brought this to a potluck last week and got several requests for the recipe. It’s embarrassingly easy to make:

Chicken-and-Rice Casserole

2 cans condensed cream of chicken soup (mushroom and celery soup also work well)

2 cups milk

2 cups rice (white works well, but I also use a mixture of brown and wild rice)

1 teaspoon coarse salt (there’s so much salt in the soup, I usually omit this)

6 chicken breasts, cut into bite-size pieces (I usually use pulled rotisserie chicken)

1 cup mushrooms, thinly sliced

1 10-ounce package frozen peas and carrots

Preheat oven to 350F. Butter a 9x13-inch baking dish. Whisk soup, milk, rice, and seasoned salt together in a bowl. Pour into prepared baking dish; add chicken pieces. Cover dish tightly with aluminum foil. Bake 30 minutes, stir, and continue baking until rice is nearly tender, another 30 minutes. Mix peas and carrots into dish and continue baking until rice begins to brown and chicken is cooked through, about 30 minutes more.

Lady of the Lake

The following passage was stolen from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, because for some completely unfathomable reason it just makes me laugh:

King Arthur: I am your king.

Dennis' Mum: Well, I didn't vote for you.

King Arthur: You don't vote for kings.

Dennis' Mum: Well, how did you become king, then?

King Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king.

Dennis: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

Arthur: Be quiet.

Dennis: You can't expect to wield supreme power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you!

Arthur: Shut up.

Creole Puzzle

“Perhaps at this beginning of a new year there is no greater requirement for us than to do as the Lord Himself said He does: ‘He who has repented of his sins, the same is forgiven, and I, the Lord, remember them no more.’ The proviso, of course, is that repentance has to be sincere, but when it is and when honest effort is being made to progress, we are guilty of the greater sin if we keep remembering and recalling and re-bashing someone with his or her earlier mistakes—and that someone might be ourselves. We can be so hard on ourselves—often much more so than on others! Now, like the Anti-Nephi-Lehies of the Book of Mormon, bury your weapons of war and leave them buried. Forgive and do that which is sometimes harder than to forgive: forget. And when it comes to mind again, forget it again.” – Elder Jeffrey R. Holland