Let's start over with some Kale!

So I merged my old "A farmer's recipe" blog into my very own
Four Leaf Clover Tales blog... I was making things MUCH to
complicated by having 3 different blogs...

So from now on, we will have tales and tastes in one easy blog
and books in the Little Miss Bookwurm blog!!!

Here we go with ounces instead of grams...

Boerenkool met Nootjes en Brie / Kale Hash with Cashews
and Brie

This is a GREAT recipe for a Dutch Dish that has
been used by grandmothers, and grandmothers
grandmother before that! We still eat it since we moved
to The States and every time I'm in the store the clerk asks
me if i am going to decorate something. Nope! I'm boiling it
and eating it all! You should see the looks on their faces!

Now you can try for yourself...

For 4 people:

- 26.50 oz of kale (Walmart/ Kroger have great Kale)
- 2 pounds of potatoes (Idaho's will do great)
- 150 5.5 oz of Cashew nuts (unsalted)
- 200 7.25 oz of Brie (Walmart has great President Brie)
- Salt
- Milk
- Butter
- Olive oil

Preparations:
Peel the potatoes, give them a good wash and divide them
up in equal parts. Wash all the kale and take out the hard
nerves. Wash them again.

Put the potatoes in a big pan and fill it up with water so the
potatoes are covered. Put on top of the potatoes the kale.
Add a bit of olive oil and some salt.

Bring the potatoes and the kale to a boiling, turn the heat
down and let it slimmer for about 20 minutes until the
potatoes have gone soft. Make sure the lid is on the pot.

You can add some salt to your liking and a little bit of butter
so the water in the pan doesn't overflow. Yes, that really
works! Use some cooking spray or butter to grease
the oven dish so the hash won't stick to the bottom.

Cut the brie in little slices of half an inch. After +/- 20 minutes
pour off the water in the pan with potatoes and kale. Mix
with a mixer the potatoes and kale and add a little bit of milk
and butter to make it more "mushy".

Mix in the Cashew nuts with a spoon and put the hash in the
oven dish and spread the slices of Brie on top of it.

Now put the dish in the preheated oven (about 350 degrees)
for about 15 minutes until the brie has melted.

Serve the hash with some nice sausage or meatballs and gravy!

Yep, let's try again and enjoy your first Dutch Dinner...

Mouse hunt in granny pants

I was almost asleep... You know, right at that point were you feel your entire body come at ease...

With a sudden shock i realise there is somebody besides MY BED! And no I'm not dreaming and YES i should be all alone. O my gosh, there is somebody besides my bed...

And then realizing all in a couple of seconds, I'm defiantly not dreaming, i defiantly should start wearing granny pants and pj's (if there would be a crazy man besides my bed, it's less attracting to wear granny pants, i hope) and i defiantly hear something creepy but it's not a man! I turn over to turn on the light and there on my dresser is see a tiny mouse playing hide and seek with my clothes.

Ok, freak out time has officially started, although it's not a scary man but a little tiny mouse.

So I'm watching this little bastard running over my dresser back and forth, climbing up and down and trying to sneak under my bed, i don't think so buddy!  So I'm trying to think of a strategy to catch this little intruder. As a real girl supposed to do, i call my husband and tell him we have a little problem in the bedroom, and ask him if we have some traps. Turned out we did, which is a good thing but that meant me getting out of bed and putting on something, which is a bad thing.

EVERYBODY knows if you have monsters in your bedroom, you stay IN BED! That way they can't catch/grab or attack you...

So after some serious consideration i got out of bed, put on some granny pants and got the mouse trap. We had a little bit of left over sausage and i figured my little mouse would like that. So i set the trap, used some sausage as bait, crawled into bed and waited...

And oh my gosh, two feet away (maybe four feet, but it felt really close) comes my little mouse, so cute, and headed right for my trap!

Haha, got you you little bastard...

At the same time i was hoping i would catch him, i was also hoping that that trap thing would snap really fast so he won't feel nothing, AND thinking that i really can't watch this because it is so mean!

The little mouse grabs my sausage and takes off to a safe place underneath the dresser. No snapping of the trap, no me freaking out about killing a little, really cute, mouse. Just utter amazement. That little bastard stole my sausage!

After Bastiaan got home we tried to catch him but no luck (which wasn't a surprise, he just had lunch) and we set some more traps the next day but so far we haven't caught him yet.

Hopefully he went to the neighbors, maybe he can score some more sausage there, cause he's not getting it from me no more!


...

It's just not that easy

I’ve always been a very impatient person.

That is why I like painting, cleaning something that
is really, really dirty, trimming hedges and so on,
you see immediate result! And I need my immediate
result fix every now and then to keep my sanity.

Well, getting cancer kinda messes everything up,
even my immediate result fixes.

Somehow I lost them completely! Not that I don’t
trim hedges anymore or paint something that doesn’t
really needs to be painted, but it’s all the small things
that life’s all about that I do not have any control over
anymore, and somehow I cannot find the patience to
see the end results. So now I start to wonder if I’m
losing my sanity as well…

In America people LOVE their pills….. pain pills,
sleeping pills, energy pills, concentrating pills, anti-
depression pills, diet pills, making love pills maybe
even more then they love their shrinks, or dr. Phil.

It is truly unbelievable all those pills that an average
family has in their cupboards. I do not like pills. After
one and a half year of many, many pills and don’t forget
the chemo, I am sick of pills. So I think I’m not going to
tell anybody, that well, maybe things aren’t that dandy.
First thing they want to do is sent me to a shrink or get me
on some fabulous cheer me up pills!? And I do not want
either.
Live can’t be that bad, cancer is gone, farm is still
here (bank didn’t take it yet), have a great family and I
can look at my horse every day. What could there possibly
be to bitch about.

So I figure I must be stuck in an after chemo, pick
your life up, and get over it fase.
Makes things a bit harder when you are an impatient
person, I just don’t want to wait for it!

I just want to go back to normal, right now, where I
am the nice blond who chased her American dream,
always being positive who laughs at and with people,
doesn’t worry about every little single thing that goes
wrong, doesn’t feel that she has to change the world
and doesn’t feel like shit every time she yells or gets
angry with somebody for some silly reason, and that
happens often lately…

I did some research and apparently the chemo I had
does mess up the way you think, behave and act. Well
I have to believe I can change it back, somehow the old
me must be still in here and I should be able to grab it
and pull it back out. Just haven’t gotten there yet.