Back To The Drawing Board

I've gotten repeated requests for healthy recipes, so I'm going to start listing them here as I have time (and photos). Most of these are not purely of my own invention; I usually have gotten the starter recipe from someone else's blog and tailored it to fit my own lifestyle/tastes. I will give the link to the original site, if there is one, along with my version. I know how hard it is to sift through all the info and recipes online; and how much harder it is to find recipes that actually taste good. I've had quite a few disasters in my kitchen and have wanted to cry and give up on multiple occasions. That said, here's the first recipe: GREEN SOUP I like to make a nice big batch and freeze what I don't eat right away. Then, whenever I want lunch (or a simple dinner) I pull some out and I'm good to go. I use heavy cream or half and half instead of milk to cut out the amount of sugar in the recipe; however, in allergy season, I don't mind using raw mil...

St. Patrick's Day. After the parade, my daughters decided it was too hot for anything else besides a swim in their kiddie pool. So after I backed out the car, lowered the ladder, climbed the attic, found it, cleaned it, and filled it up, my eye fell on our blueberry bush (in a pot).  We bought it last year and it grew all of 3 berries, none of which we got to before the birds did. I'd been watching this thing spring back now that winter was nearly over for a few weeks now, and it's fascinating. I've never seen so many colors on one plant. I realized that now was the perfect time to capture those colors before they changed into something else. I did a quick wash over the whole thing in a warm yellow. Then I blocked in a few basic colors - cool yellow and warm yellow on the plant, then some burnt sienna and cool blue below it where the bottom of the pot was in real life.  I don't know what made me do it, but I decided to define the area so it was more like the pot, ...