Chocolate-Dipped Fresh Pineapple and Easter on the Farm

 One of the family care packages of Easter treats, dropped off while we're socially distancing... and blowing way too many hugs and kisses from the car!

This is a new favorite, and it isn't hard!

You have to love pineapple and chocolate, but of course this can be done with any fruit. Inspired by chocolate-covered strawberries, we loved the dipped pineapple flowers in Edible Arrangements... but since they're about $70 or more, we wanted a way to have this amazing bit of goodness without the cost.

What you need:

Ripe pineapple
Ghirardelli Dark Chocolate Melting Wafers

I like to get greenish pineapples and ripen them on the counter for a few days.... leaves at top should pluck out easily and pineapple should have a golden tinge. This guy wasn't as brown as he looks here...

Cut off top and bottom, then quarter the pineapple into four long "spears".

Pineapples have a hard "core". That needs to be sliced off because it's kind of hard and nasty and that's why pineapple rings have a perfect hole in the middle... Then the skinning is easy. Take a sharp knife and just slip it between the prickly skin and the softer fruit, kind of shimmying it along. Leave some pineapple on the skin because you don't want prickles in your fruit!

Then slice the spears into bite-size pieces and blot them with paper towels to dry the fruit a bit. Otherwise the moisture of the pineapple juice can seize the chocolate.

Melt chocolate in microwave or over a small pot of simmering water.

I may have forgotten to get a picture of that. What????

SIGH.

Then dip each piece into the chocolate, then place on foil-covered cookie sheet to harden and cool. Store in refrigerator.....

These are delicious treats, and your family and friends will be like so very totally impressed that they'll think you're not as crazy as they used to think.

(That might be a more personal thing than I should share, darlings.)  :)

And then the dining room countdown to Easter was successful, although I made the decision not to repaint the pretty rose trim right now. I needed to get back to normal and I can do that in the fall. The paint's here!   REMEMBER THIS?????

Here's what it looked like for Holy Saturday...

 I love it.... It looks fresh and clean and organized again!!!! Now there was NO ONE HERE to have Easter dinner or collect Easter baskets or to do our annual Easter egg hunt....

And I hadn't had time to re-hang the lace curtains. You know us Irish gals and our lace curtains!!!!

I found this quilt at an antique street of shops in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania... When we drive to North Carolina I make sure to stop and look for one thing for the house, nothing major... but just a reward for not spending $600 to fly to NC. :)

And those bookshelves have my cookbooks on one side.... And a whole bunch of Ruthy books on the other. It took a visitor to coax me into doing that. He looked at those shelves about four years ago and said, "Why don't you have all of your books here? Why aren't you shouting this from the mountaintops?" And I realized he was right, so thank you, Greg!

And while there were no Easter visitors at our house, we took treats to a whole bunch of folks on Easter and dropped them in garages or on steps or in yards....

 Easter-toned sugar cookies (some of these got packaged and mailed to Dallas and got there in two days, yay USPS!!!!!)

And these were the kinds of treat packages folks found.... some baklava, cookies and a bucket of treats.

I watched Mass on Saturday night live-streamed from St. Leo's Church in Hilton... and then the Pope's Mass in the wee smalls, and how odd it was to see Pope Francis celebrating Mass in an empty basilica. A beautiful Gregorian chant choir of about 9 or 11 people.... all spread out in the very big choir area.  And a handful of people on a half-dozen benches, more or less... and that was it.

And it was still beautiful, because Easter Sunday isn't about the church. Or the celebrant, priest, minister, pastor.

It's about our faith, the faith of the people. Simple folk, like you and me, the believers who hope and pray and aren't afraid to sacrifice. Which is what we're doing right now, isn't it?

And if you think I'm always stoic, I'm not. I've cried.

I've wept for all those people dying alone... no loving hospice, no beautiful faces of family, no one singing them to heaven with beautiful hymns... And those loved ones, getting that phone call, not allowed in to say goodbye.

Yeah.

I've cried over that.

I've wept for missing all this time with my grandkids. To wave to them from the yard... to have them come help on the farm and not come in the house. To have an empty church and an empty house on Easter...

But then I mop my eyes, smack myself on the cheek and say "Woman, get over yourself! It's temporary, for heaven's sake. Now get to work because idle hands are the devil's workshop."

And for whatever reason, it helps!

Sometimes we are our own conundrum!!!!

Wishing you all a happy and blessed Easter week!

Multi-published, award-winning author Ruth Logan Herne hates social distancing even though she knows it's an old and very effective way of thwarting a viral spread because that's what saved a lot of lives in 1917 and 1918 and they didn't even have a fancy name for it! She's holed up in the farmhouse in WNY and working on a new Guideposts' cozy mystery and scrambling to find farm materials for mum production because who knew Coronavirus was going to mess up availability??? (Although she has her seeds, so she's happy about that!)  Friend Ruthy on Facebook, follow her on grumpy old Twitter or stop by her website ruthloganherne.com... or email Ruthy at loganherne@gmail.com

Dining Room Disaster

Just so you know: My intent is to not leave it this way.

My goal is to have it beautiful by Easter.

Mind you, no one will see it.

That's okay.

We'll take treats and filled eggs and drop them off at grandchildren's homes and then their moms and dads can videotape them enjoying them.

We'll go to services online.

We'll have something wonderful for dinner.

And we'll pray for all the sad and sick souls dealing with this virus. Because that's exactly what God would want us to do.

But in the meantime, when I realized I was going to be quarantined for fourteen days, and that my son's job as a substitute teacher ended with the closing of schools, I got the brilliant idea of painting the dining room.

So Beth and Zach got me everything I needed at Home Depot. I even let them pick the colors...

And so it began.

I discovered Zach doesn't like painting.

Farmer Dave only does it when I force him to, and he's been sick, so I didn't have the heart to be mean. Besides, he did the big family room last year.

So I tackled in. First, the room was all based around this:

I found this chandelier online at Great Windsor Chairs, a cool furniture store in Pennsylvania and my youngest boys bought it for me ten years ago.... When i saw this lamp, I knew how I wanted the room to look. Like springtime, all year, but with colors that I could also use for fall and Christmas. No one cares about summer, who is inside during summer??? No one!!!

So this week I cleaned the walls, moved furniture, scrubbed baseboards, painted baseboards, cut in around all the edges in this room, then painted the walls.

PHEW!!!!!

And I wrote a lot.

So that was good because no one pays me to paint!!!

But I love painting.

I do not love the MESS....

But I find painting peaceful and rewarding, which is good because there's always something to be painted!

Table is one of my dumping grounds......

I realized I need to coordinate all of my electrical sockets/switches. I got matching wall plate covers in white wood, but the outlets need to be changed. And two of the switches are black.... So that's a bad combo.

I will order them and get that taken care of next week.

 Mindy, remember going through all this? It's like a mom version of the Never-Ending Story!

Today I'm rolling the ceiling. It's funny, you don't realize how quickly a ceiling 'grays' until you put fresh paint on it. Zach cut in around the ceiling, and I'll roll it and we'll have two major parts done.

THEN THE FLOOR.

We move all the furniture out of the room and paint the floor.

Then we move all of the furniture back into the room.

The bookcases are a puzzle to me.  I'm not sure if I want them white or yellow. I've already painted the scalloping yellow, but I'm wondering if a bright white might not make the yellow stand out better, rather than submerge it all into the one tone.... I welcome your thoughts, and I might test it out to see what I think.

I probably won't get the rose-toned trim done before Easter. That's okay. I can live with that until next fall, because once farm season stops, no one worries about the inside of the house. There's just too much to do outside!!!

But that's what I've been up to this week, getting this project underway and feeling good about how it's coming.

The mess will disappear and I will love this room again, but right now it's a jumble... which means I've got my work cut out for me!

Wishing you all a safe and happy and healthy weekend. God bless you!

USA Today Bestselling author Ruth Logan Herne is often tackling projects and then guilting her husband into helping with them. She figures she's helping him avoid a life of inactivity, and it's the least she can do for him.  Find Ruthy's books at retailers and Amazon.com (and her newest book just released yesterday!!!! HOORAY!!!!) friend her on Facebook, follow her on the unfriendliest social media ever, AKA: Twitter or visit her website, ruthloganherne.com.

The Great Dining Room Experiment

Downton Abbey started up again this week. I caught the promos and was reminded a lot of the action occurs in the Abbey's dining room. The dining room with the big long table that seats fourteen on a quiet night and more with added leaves. Come to think of it, the servants table fits at least that many.

Yep, I was more interested in the dining room than the plot. Mainly because one of ManO's Christmas gifts was my promise to serve dinner in the dining room, starting with the new year. We eat breakfast in the kitchen nook and family dinners there too (not as many breakables for kidlets). But our empty nest dinner time had dissolved into catch as catch can in front of the television. Never good.

Most of my friends have turned their dining rooms into something else, like a sitting room or library...sigh. But we have a lot of heirloom family pictures and furniture. It's more of a museum really. But ManO loves it and loves eating in a formal space. Maybe he's got a title and hasn't told me he's really upper crust.

Regardless of whether he has been hiding that he's an earl or a lord or even a baron, I decided, after our tough 2014,  I would do more things to make him happy and this is a big one. Eating in the dining room. We are going to give it a go for one month to start and I'll report on what we've learned.

Excuse the naked table. The cloth is getting washed. The table was ManO's parents first table.

ManO is doing things to make me happy in the new year too. We're going back to separate offices and hobby spaces. Some of my friends share very successfully but many thought I was nuts to share in the first place. Movers are coming in to flip our furniture and create two separate spaces out of our current study downstairs and hobby room upstairs...using only the furniture we have to create a better ergonomic space for me and a temporary space for him until we add the infamous train room. Thank goodness I am married to an engineer.

Every complicated change needs a plan. De-cluttering rooms of furniture is tough.

With the house turning upside down, I needed an easy way to get through the week meal-wise. I settled on turkey meatballs. ManO and I swore off ground beef after one fast food lunch included grease dripping down our arms as we ate our hamburgers. Grease ISN'T the word...a la the musical...in our house anymore.  The great thing about turkey meatballs is they are easy, can be frozen and are versatile.

Turkey meatballs

1 lb ground turkey
1 egg
1 teaspoon salt , to taste
1/2 teaspoon sage

Form into balls using a cookie dough scoop

Space on foil lined pan or broiler pan

Bake at 375 for 25 minutes, turn, and cook for ten more minutes until browned. You can serve them right away or cool, freeze them on a parchment paper covered cookie sheet, then pop them in a freezer bag until ready to use. I cook the frozen balls straight from the freezer at 400 until thoroughly heated.

Meal #1: The first night I fixed Turkey Meatballs with spinach and garnished with Parmesan cheese. Just sauteed the spinach, plopped on the meatballs and sprinkled with a bit of cheese. Flavorful, low carb and easy.

Meal #2: The meatballs were covered with spaghetti sauce and served on black bean spaghetti.

Meal #3: I'm ready for the next blast of cold air with meatball soup. All it takes is chicken or turkey broth (one cup per serving), veggies and appropriate spices.  It's a toss up for me about if I want to go Asian or Italian inspired. If I go with the first, I will add bok choy and bean sprouts along with a dash of ginger and gluten free soy sauce. If I go with the second, I'll use spinach, canellini beans and Italian seasoning.

That should get us through moving day on Thursday. I am so glad we are just going between floors and not having to move outside. It's going to be cold!

So, are you making changes in the new year in your home or in your diet? Do you use your dining room or do you even have one?