St. Luke Living Center
By AMELIA VINDUSKA AND SUE GUTSCH
St. Luke Living Center correspondents
We'll blame the floor-covering project of last week for forgetting to describe our craft projects in the news items. The floor also gets the blame for making us change our plans Tuesday. The plan was to make cucumber cups, which we did, and crunchy popcorn trail mix, which we did not because we couldn't utilize our cooking area.
Plan B involved two-toned sandwiches by cutting out centers of wheat and white bread slices with cookie cutters and swapping the cut-outs to have dark on light and vice versa. We used bunny (which turned upside down could have been a fish) and star-shaped cutters, carefully spread with filling, and assembled our sandwiches.
The vegetable cups required a melon baler to scoop out approximately one-half of the center of thick slices of cucumbers, filling with ranch-flavored cream cheese sprinkled with parsley. Magdalen Dvorak assisted that group, who laughed at those of us who couldn't tell if we'd made fish or bunnies!
Back in our kitchen Friday morning, Amanda and her baking group experimented by making lemon tea cookies and orange tea cookie and the result was just as delicious. This is such a great group, always ready with suggestions and willing to take a little risk.
Orange peel was used in the cookie dough and the baked cookies were topped with a sugar-orange juice mixture after baking. We doubled the recipe taken from the St. Luke Community Generations cookbook and they all were eaten by the end of the day. Once again, the wonderful aroma brought "guests" to check out the results.
Sunday's guest minister was Bethann Black of the Florence and Aulne United Methodist churches.
Father Hien Nguyen and Pat Smith of Holy Family Parish were here Tuesday morning to bring sacraments to those of their parish.
Later that morning, we may have invented a new game we called alphabet bingo. Actually playing our version we "bingoed" the first game with an E shape on the bingo card, then a T, H, and L. Although it took a little extra thinking, we helped each other and want to try it again on another game day using different letters.
Our book club began reading, "Little House in the Big Woods," the first in the series of Laura Ingalls Wilder's delightful books. Only two chapters were read as we stopped quite often for discussion and to share the wonderful illustrations of Garth Williams. If we continue to enjoy this book, we may read the second of the eight books, "Little House on the Prairie," and maybe more.
To give an update on our lone tomato plant, we should probably name Ranger, we've had rain, but also tomato worms (those large, green, juicy ones with the eyes and horns), and now grasshoppers of the large variety. The plant continues to be green and adding new foliage, but no new fruit.
