grace grits and gardening

ramblings from an arkansas farm girl

What Every College Freshman Needs to Know

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Tis the season of high school graduation. My Facebook feed is filled with pictures of fresh-faced graduates and proud parents. What an exciting, bittersweet time for the entire family. Even though it’s been thirty-four (yikes) years since I graduated from high school, I remember the feeling. Freedom. My unwritten life could finally begin.

What Every College Freshman Needs to Know

via morgueFile

 

In a snap, my own children donned caps and gowns and graduated from high school. How did that happen so fast?

Even though they grew up in a different place and time, I did my best to prepare them for college. So far, they haven’t moved back home.

Here is my list of thirteen essential skills for every college freshman. What would you add?

  1. How to Make Decisions. Your helicopter parent won’t be flying off to college with you. Make decisions, but don’t be afraid to change your mind.
  2. You are NOT a Rock Star. No matter how talented and brilliant you were in high school, you will be surrounded by many, many over-achieving freshman in college.
  3. Because you aren’t a Rock Star, you won’t be drafted by the NBA. Take time to learn who you are, but choose a major wisely. Preferably something that includes a paycheck when you graduate. If you graduate from college with a large student loan, will that job on the backend cover it? Ever?
  4. Learn to do laundry and clean a bathroom. Do both regularly. You weren’t raised in a barn, or maybe you were, but let’s keep that a secret.
  5. Understand how to budget money. It truly doesn’t grow on trees. No one (parents, government, professors) owes you anything.
  6. Work hard. It still may not be good enough.
  7. Not everyone will like you and that’s okay.
  8. Don’t be a know it all. Listen more than you speak. But speak up in class occasionally.
  9. Go to class. Simple.
  10. Meet your professors. They can be your biggest allies. If they don’t know your name, they can’t.
  11. Don’t worry about being best friends with your first roommate. But do be respectful of one another.
  12. Be careful and smart. There will be lots of temptations. The world is full of crazy people. Don’t be one of them.
  13. Call your mother. She misses you.

what every college freshman needs to know

Happy Graduation! Happy Summer!

Grace Grits and Gardening

Farm. Food. Garden. Life.

Musical Pairing:

Unwritten, Natasha Bedingfield

photo session with a garden hose

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I had a photo session in the garden yesterday with my photographer/gardener friend Jerry (Jmac Images). I needed a head shot photo for various blogger events (or so I’m always told), so I bit the bullet and “posed”. Awkward for me. Just ask Jerry.

Until I put on gardening gloves and grabbed the hose. Then it was fun.

Here are a couple of my favorites.

Grace Grits and Gardening - Playing in the water

Talya Boerner -POP sign

I love the way Jerry captured the garden in the background, the Promise of Peace sign, the blue sky.

Watering my tomatoes…

grace grits tomatoes - my plot at Promise of Peace

It was a fun afternoon!

Plus, I discovered another ripe strawberry. Bonus.

grace grits strawberry

Grace Grits and Gardening

Farm. Food. Garden. Life.

“Water is the driving force in nature.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

How NOT to bake a Strawberry Cake.

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We have many traditions in our family including Nana’s strawberry cake recipe. Since my birthday always happened during our Fourth of July trip to the lake, Momma (or Nana) baked a fresh strawberry cake at home to carry with us. (No one wanted to do real cooking at the lake.) Even after driving through the Ozarks, waiting in line at the ferry, and stopping in town for groceries,  the cake was dreamy and luscious. We gorged on it all week.

This weekend, (daughter) Kelsey and I messed with tradition. For (son) Tate’s twenty-first birthday, we decided to tweak the recipe. Since we both love to cook, we thought it would be fun to try something new. We researched on-line recipes. Only a 4.5 star recipe would do.

Clearly, we weren’t right in our heads. Why mess with perfection? (Our excuses—I’d been cooped up too long in the house writing, and she’d just finished law school finals.)

The recipe we selected looked wonderful. It contained strawberry preserves and fresh strawberries and cake flour and vanilla bean paste. Plus there was buttermilk. Buttermilk means serious baking, y’all.

And oh my goodness, the batter. We licked the spatula and most of the bowl. Best batter ever. Light and fluffy.

We were feeling smug about our new and improved strawberry cake right up to the moment we tasted the finished product.

how not to bake a strawberry cake

What a complete waste of calories. The cake was dense and flavorless, more like a bad grocery store bundt cake than fresh homemade cake-cake. The frosting was all wrong and not sweet enough.

It wasn’t Nana’s cake.

strawberry cake debacle - sometimes it's bad to mess with tradition

Not even close.

If Nana was watching (and of course she was), I’m sure she was thoroughly entertained by the whole birthday cake tasting debacle. The birthday boy pretended to like it. The rest of us gagged a few bites down. Kelsey had to cleanse her palate with a plain strawberry. (It did leave a strange aftertaste.) My sister’s boyfriend said it tasted like Nestle’s Quik strawberry drink from back in the day.

Even with a less than stellar cake, the day was a success because it was spent with family. We’ll be laughing about our cake experiment for a while…

Luckily we still have Nana’s 5-star recipe. And with my birthday only fifty-two days away, I know we’ll get the real thing soon enough at the lake. Momma will see to it.

Nana - queen of the strawberry cake

Nana – baker of the best strawberry cake…

Grace Grits and Gardening

Farm. Food. Garden. Life.

P.S. Today as I went back to review the recipe we used (trying to decide whether or not to call it out on my blog), I realized we chose a 2-star recipe! Not sure HOW that happened after reading so many 4 and 5 star recipes. Like I said, we weren’t in our right minds. This whole thing would have been avoided had we read the reviews. So be sure to never make the Country Living Fresh Strawberry Cake. It’s anything but.

“The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you’ve got to have a what-the-hell attitude.” ― Julia Child

Musical Pairing:

Carry on Wayward Son

Food. Farm. Garden. Life.

THANKS FOR READING!