101 Things Update: March 13

This past weekend, my parents took my brother to a basketball tournament, so my sister Chloe came to stay with me.  We decided to tackle some projects from my 101 Things in 2014 list, and ended up accomplishing 5 of them!  We didn't take great pictures, because I was pretty tired from oral surgery still, and we decided to focus more on hanging out than taking great pictures.

First up, we tackled the two homemade soda recipes:

25. Lemon-Lime Soda Syrup

and  Number 55: Italian sodas with homemade syrup

First we made a mess:

We used a 2L bottle of sparkling water for both of these recipes:

(We also ate TimBits!)

We made a pomegranate syrup for the Italian sodas, but it wasn't a very syrupy syrup.  And it took a lot of syrup to make it taste good.  We'll probably try again in the summer with strawberries.

Next up was Number 57: Try a new thrift store.  We actually tried 3, and I'll share more about them in another post.  It's a rather lengthy review, and if you're not local, you probably don't care at all.

Number 59 was to make homemade English muffins.  The particular recipe I have pinned to my board is apparently super secret since you need special permission to access that blog.  Instead, we used this recipe:

To be honest, we didn't follow the recipe exactly.  Our butter and milk were not at room temperature, which is probably why after an hour of sitting in a warm place, the dough had not risen at all.  We turned the oven to warm for a few minutes and then let the dough sit in there for a while, which helped, but Caleb did mention that while these were tasty, they have a very different texture from store-bought English muffins.  I'd like to try again properly and see if that changes the texture.

68. Go to the Butterflies are Blooming exhibit at the Frederik Meijer Gardens.

We happened to go on the 2nd Saturday after this event had started, so it was crazy busy.  I took some more pictures that I'll share later this week, but we're thinking of going again during the week when it's not so busy.  Here's one picture I took through some lens fog. :)

Love and Flour,

Leah Joy