Farewell Friends

I'm off to a land of tall pine trees, and running rivers. I'll be spending a week sunbathing and reading and being read to, swimming in the swimming hole and jumping off the big rock into the deep water. There will be cousins to catch up with and time for a solitary walk or two. We're headed to the Qualls' Nest for a whole week!

While I Was Looking the Other Way

It's almost like my garden burst into full bloom over night. For the past couple of weeks I've watched as buds appeared near the leaves of my plants. I've seen the cosmos sprout out of its tiny seed, and when I went out to water my garden this morning I noticed that my small garden is bursting with color. The clematis covers the awning on our porch, the ranunculus has unfolded its first blooms, and my bell peppers and tomatos promise to bring me a bounty of fresh salad material.

I have never had a garden that grew quite so well as this one is growing. There is definitely a plus to living in oregon, the plants grow.  

The Cookbook Challenge: An Update

The cookbooks arrived and I am very pleased with the chocolate one. I have already made several of the recipes, the results have been wonderful. After looking through all of the recipes in the book, I am beginning to wonder if perhaps a year would be a better length of time in which to make all my chocolate desserts. At one recipe a week I could be finishing up next July!

I have decided not to work through the salad cookbook because, well, the recipes just don't look that appetizing and you lose some of the joy of cooking if you don't like the thing that you make. So that is that, the salad cookbook will join the pile of books to be brought to the used book store, maybe someone else will find the recipes more appetizing than I did.