June 30th, 2010

My Grandma Morgan and Aunt Pat are in St. Louis staying with my parents and my mom and I decided to spend the morning at the Botanical Gardens.  I love going to the Botanical Gardens and my new favorite spot there is the home garden display.  It gives me so many ideas and I adore looking at all the vegetables they are able to grow!  They even had artichokes!  I have never seen artichoke growing before, let alone in the Midwest.

They also had a Dinoquest Exhibit.  The girls enjoyed “finding” dinosaurs.  The downside was I had to figure out how to pronounce half of them.  If I got to design a Dinoquest, I’d have alot of T-Rex’s in the mix to make it easy on the parents trying to figure out how to pronounce  Micropachycephalosaurus in a jiffy.

Sydney loved all the fountains (and loved even more I let her play in them).

Successful trip to the gardens!

Michelle was working in St Louis and stayed the night with us.  I love when Michelle comes, she’s a very easy houseguest and always fun to catch up with all the latest news, and the girls eat up the extra adult attention.  Michelle has Celiac Disease, so she can’t have anything with Gluten in it (and I was shocked to find out all the things that have gluten in them, not just breads, crackers, and pastas, but salad dressings, marinades, yogurts….it’s pretty crazy!).   Kirk’s mom had this recipe called “Fancy Pants” that Sally still makes.  I’m not sure of the origin of the name (and just asked Trent and he didn’t know either), but it’s basically a burger stuffed with cheese and cooked with a tomato sauce on top.  I’ve done a Mexican twist on them, but tonight I did an Italian twist with mozzarella as the cheese and made a marina sauce.  I also roasted some asparagus and zucchini then added it to a salad.  I also cut up some bread for Trent.

 

So (hopefully) gluten free dinner.  I’ve learned you have to look at all the containers to double check, but the only thing that came out of a container was the crushed tomatoes and they had what Michelle calls the magic words, “gluten free” clearly labeled.  I had to bolt after dinner because Julie, Dad, and I had tickets to see Wicked.  It was my 4th time seeing it and don’t think I’ll ever grow tired of being in that audience.