A Community Service Opportunity, 2 Project Meetings, and a Birthday!!!

It's another full day!  Hang on to your seat belts and enjoy the ride!

Woke up early to the sound of "Happy Birthday" as we made a yummy batch of chocolate chip pancakes for our now 8 year old!  Edward was happy to start his day with breakfast in bed.

Then we hopped into the car and headed to one of our favorite community service opportunities....feeding the veterans at the VA clinic.  Each month we try to make a healthy snack for the patients at the clinic.  Most o he time the patients are asked to fast before having blood work done so we are there to give them a little boost before heading home. 

Today we prepared 50 tuna salad sandwiches and another member brought fruit and cookies.  We had a big group today to help (7 members and 4 adults) and it was a good thing.  The clinic was very busy and the sandwiches and other food was gone within an hour of serving.

After a full day of school, we arrived at our first project meeting.  We were excited to learn about taking good portraits from a professional photographer.  However, before we did that we took a look at the assignment for the last month. We discussed what liked about each of the photographs and then chose our overall favorite.  This month, Sean had the best photo:

Our portrait expert was Shay and she did a great job of covering basic photo skills.  She even taught us a neat trick to stabilize our camera without a tripod, making a string attached to an eye hook screw large enough to go into the tripod insert.  It really helped the boys and I to brace our camera for a shot.

We then went outside to grab a partner and take some portraits.  We had a lot of fun finding the perfect spot for the perfect picture.

But as they say in the south...We ain't through playin' yet!

We gathered everyone back inside for a food workshop.  And so begins our second project meeting of the day.

Brenda kindly showed us how to make scones.  She set up in the kitchen window area and explained how to measure and mix the scone recipe.  She added a little history to the mix as well.  Then popped them in the oven, allowing us time to hear Christi talk about ratio cooking with several recipes with a little help from her friends (Becca and Jaron). 

One of our members wanted to try her healthy snack recipe out before submitting it for the county food show.  We got to be her guinea pigs...yummy!  She can pick me to do that anytime.  Then Christi started the second part of the meeting with a roux (butter and flour cooked then milk or broth added to create sauce)...then a Beurre Manie (equal parts butter flour added to sauce for thickening)...then ended with creating vinegrettes.  She finished just in time for us to pull our scones out of the oven for tasting!

A quick clean up the building and we were on our way home to make a birthday dinner (Somehow we found time to make a strawberry cake from scratch earlier in the day!).  We made it by the skin of our teeth and enjoyed ourselves along the way! 

Time to crash and burn because we have another full day of 4H tomorrow!