Cause for Excitement

Excitement #1: Cool Weather finally seems to be descending upon us! This morning, Jason called me outside, and it was chilly! Right now, it is noon, and not even 80 degrees! Hurrah!

Of course, you know what that means - get the oil lamps all shined up so they can beautify our cozy winter evenings! Make sure all the blankies are clean and ready for snuggling! Get out the warm clothes, put away the swimsuits! Oh, excitement!

Of course, that also means that the pure enjoyment of one of my new favorite Dishes, the Greek Salad (Caryn introduced me to it!) is not going to be on the menu for a while (winter 'maters? ick!). So, we had it last night, and it was goood:

Excitement #2: It has potato salad over romaine lettuce, topped with onions, tomatoes, pepperoncinis, cucumbers, pickled beets, pepper slices, kalamata olives (which we were very sadly out of last night), feta cheese, and anchovies.

Mmm...

Now, before you go sayin, "Ew, anchovies!" understand that I always felt that way about anchovies, too. No more. This salad has completely changed my appreciation for the little fishies. So much so that when I went to get extra anchovies for my salad, my fingers got all fish-oily (yes, apparently we lack utensils 'round these here parts) and without thinking, I licked my fingers clean. Before I had this salad, the mere smell of that fishy oiliness would have sent my stomach reeling. Now, I'm licking my fingers as if it were chocolate pudding. The anchovies totally make the salad.

Here it is with the recipe. Double click to enlarge the picture.

De Grande, you'll be pleased to know that I photocopied the recipe at last, so I'm able to part with your cookbook now! :) I also highly reccomend using blocks of Feta and crumbling it yourself - insanely tasty.

So, when we were done with that scrumptious repast, we saw our new friend, and gave her some very old anchovies to eat.

Excitement #3: This is our new friend. She is a wild kitty (and she may be a he, but we're not getting close enough to look!) In the light, she is such an odd color of grey that she actually looks blue. So, we've named her Blue Cat. Blue, for short. Aren't we just the originalest?

Jason is sure that this is the cat he saw a few months ago, sitting under the streetlamp in the middle of the night. He thought it was a Jaguarundi, but it was probably just the late hour and sleepy stupor he was in that made the cat appear larger than it was.

A week or so ago, he saw the cat again, and stopped to talk to her (I'll call Blue a Her until we discover elsewise). They had a friendly chat, and Jason came home with every intention as adopting her as our "yard cat."

Sho nough, we starting seeing her routinely lurking around our house. We think she was searching for some more kind words from the handsome gent (Jason). A few nights ago, as Jason was eating some crab, he picked a bit of lumpmeat for her and I set it out on a plate on our back stoop. She came up, cautiously at first, and then snarfled it down.

Jason picked more lump, and I put it out. Again, she snarfed it down.

Last night, I set out some old oily anchovy fillets when I saw her milling about. She came quickly to eat them, and then spent a good hour or so sitting all kitty-like on our stoop like a guard. She licked her chops and watched the sun go down over the water.

We're happy to have a little friend (to take care of rats and snakes). She's happy to have a friend (to provide some extra food outside of rats and snakes).

Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Lavash and Fish Dinners

The Lavash Cracker right before it goes in to the oven. It was sprinkled with Paprika, Poppyseed, Caraway Seed, Sesame Seed, Cumin Seed, and Kosher Salt - in rows, as you can see.

When it first came out of the oven after the specified time, I snapped off a bit and tried it. My face twisted into something gnarlirific right then - it was more like dry biscuit than a cracker -ick! I noticed that the nice brown edges were really tasty, though, so I popped it back in the oven (which was off) and cooked it through with residual heat - adding a burst of heat by turning the oven back on to give it a good brown at the end.

The result was definitely more crackery. And delicious. Jason likened it to melba toast (I don't think he liked it as much as I did) and ate it with his soup. I loved it. But I love melba toast, so there you have it. I ate the rest of it up and proceeded to make more! :)

Leif took it upon himself last week to get a plate out of the china cabinet, a knife (his own), and a fork and set it all on a pillow on the floor. He sat on another pillow, then plopped his fish (from his fishing pole toy) on the plate and began to "eat" it. He made all the proper sounds ("mmm", lipsmacking, munching, etc.) and ate that fish with much gusto.

Enjoying a bite of perfectly prepared fish. "Mmm..."(that's what he was saying in this picture).

What a silly lad.

That's all for now!

Treasures of Many Sorts

A smattering of the Bread-making related presents I received for my birthday. Everything in the picture, including the yellow gingham towel everything is set on, was a gift. Bring on the breadmaking!

The book, The Bread Baker's Apprentice, by Peter Reinhart, is the book that DaMomma has gone wild over, and now, so have 2p and I! We're plowing through the book at the pace of a recipe per week (each recipe generally takes 2 days, some more or less) alongside Pinch My Salt. I had been borrowing DaMomma's book, but now I have one of my own! :)

The rising bucket (not sure of the technical name...anybody?...anybody?) is the smallest of many - the largest can hold a brining turkey. They're great because they're marked on the side, so you can see if your dough has doubled in size, etc. I used the small one to make my Lavash yesterday! So many uses - so exciting!

The yellow probe is an instant read thermometer - a Thermapen. I've been pining for one of these for years now. My other thermometers are so slow that by the time I get the reading, the item has already cooled down by 20 degrees! It would literally take 5 minutes or more. Recently, I used a Thermapen and I sat there waiting for it to figure out a temperature. After 30 seconds of waiting, I realized that it had read the temperature in the first two or three seconds and that I wasn't even thinking it would read that fast, so I kept waiting.

Dur-real!

So the new Thermapen is really exciting - I can use it for baking bread - the dough temp and the bread temp, and for all other things - meat, etc. And, hmm, looks like the inside of my house is 82 degrees!

The towels were a set - the blueberry pancakes one has a whole recipe for blueberry pancakes on it. I always have a towel over my shoulder when I cook, so these are great! And cute! And Martha Stewart! {swoon} :)

The Nature Table

I recently set up a nature table for Leify. This is the nature table on its first day.

We put things on there that we collect on our walks, or have collected on trips. Right now it is very sparse, but has a nice range of textures to it: the prickly pinecones, glass-smooth stones (from our Honeymoon - the only thing we brought back from our honeymoon was a bag full of collected rocks!), colorful shells, worn shells that you can see the innards, rough rocks from the road, gum balls (from gum trees), a stick from a palm tree that has tiny jagged teeth along its edges, and my personal favorite, the jar of small feathers.

Leif likes to go to it from time to time and examine the little pieces we've brought In from the Outside. As time goes by, we'll add new and different elements and it will change with the seasons. We may add in some homemade goodness (like wool, seeds from garden, etc.), too.

So, these are our little treasures that we've been excited over lately. Okay, mainly I've been excited over, but Jason is excited about the bread and Leif likes his Nature Table!

Happy Days!

The Puzzle King

We gave Leif a new little puzzle the other day, since he has been loving puzzles lately. He was so excited he shook it up and down and hollered. That blue blur? That's the puzzle.

Here he is getting a little help from Daddy.
He can generally put puzzles together the first time he gets them without any help, or with a smidge of help, like this one.

So, for his birthday (shhh - it's a secret!) I got him a puzzle that is much harder to see if that is more stimulating for him!

Piecing it together.

Ta-da!
The puzzle is a picture of the Beautiful Butterfly (Leif gasps, "It's sooo beautiful!")
from Eric Carle's The Hungry Little Caterpillar.

Cinnamony Goodness

Leif eats a cinnamon bun that I made. He may seem contemplative as he eats it, but he snarfled it down faster than you can say, "Leif Loves Cinnamon Buns!"

The outsides were glazed in yummy icing and the inside was just as wonderful as you might imagine: warm, sugary and overwhelmingly good.

Oh, it was a lovely morning.

The Cheese Plate: Small Samples of Our Every Day

Moments of Cheese occur quite frequently at our house.

A Few Short Notes Before I Get Back to the Day:

:: Sorry for the lack of bloggage this week - it has been busy!

:: Thanks to everyone who voted in my little poll. Wasn't that fun? I thought so.

:: I had a lovely birthday - which I've dubbed the "Bread" Birthday because nearly every present had something to do with Breadmaking (much happiness). The best part of the day was making a birthday cake with DaMomma - we haven't done that in over a decade! Thank you for all of the calls, cards, emails, thoughts and well-wishes, I surely appreciate it!

:: Today, we are taking a "Family Day" - a day to laze about and enjoy each other. So far - perfect. Tomorrow begins the routine again.

:: Had a scary moment the week before last: Leif "escaped" the house by going out two doors into the garage, opening the car door, hitting the garage door opener hanging on the visor in said car, then sprinting out the open garage door to freedom. I was inside (we were about to leave anyway) trying to get my shoes on. In the few short moments it took for me to complete getting them on (slip-ons, mind you) Leif had run out of our yard into the street and was in the middle of the intersection. It was terrible. As I grabbed him out of the street, a big truck hauling a boat came through the intersection where we'd just been standing.

:: Today, the latches are going high up on every door that leads outside.

:: Leif is starting to say "Blimp" properly now instead of his former "Boomp" which makes me very sad.

:: I had lots more to say, but now my mind is blank, of course. In any case, I'll be blogging away more heartily this week, so keep checking back!

Have a wonderful end of the weekend and a lovely week!

Vote Here! Photos are Below...

Which Picture of Leif is Your Favorite?

Leif Sits in a Chair

Serious Leif

Leif Sits with a Smile

Pell-mell

Leif races through the garden pell-mell.
(PS - though I've tried much, this is the first time I've obtained the moving background/focused subject - and naturally, I wasn't even trying. Some things work best when you don't try too hard!)

We enjoyed a lovely day today - a warm day full of sun with a cool breeze and just a smidge of puffy clouds in the sky. Leif and I took advantage and spent a good part of the morning out in the garden, cleaning the garden and prepping it for a new season. We rakes up pine needles that were covering parts of the garden, pulled weeds, pick out pine cones and stray debris.

Then the real work started.

We pulled up the rock edging and piled it on the sidewalk and then I began to dig and dig and dig. I dug down deep below the mulch and around a foot into the sand. I tossed and turned the mulch and sand so it became on big happy mixture. I'm hoping that it will drain better now and not become moldy and hurt the plant roots. Hopefully, the herbs will like it more. The oregano, which had been covered by pine needles for a good part of the summer (that's life when you live under a pine tree!), is doing fantastically well. I was shocked. And happy. I dug all around the Oregano, and left it there to grow. If the Oregano's happy, I'm happy.

We also took a little walk - Leify rode in the wagon. We picked up a few treasures for our little nature table.

We made dinner. We ate dinner. We thought of ways to make it better next time.

Leif watched a little 60s Czech cartoon as a treat while Jason and I talked and talked and talked. We laughed to think he might be learning Czech while we chatted about our days. Luckily, the cartoon, Krtek, is softer and far more gentle than modern cartoons. The little mole, the hero, helps everyone out in a very nice manner, with funny little noises. Leif likes it, and I do, too.

Leif has taken to an old book of mine by Gyo Fujikawa. I loved it as a little girl, and now he loves it. He asks us to read it to him every three seconds, even after we just read it to him. Like all Gyo Fujikawa books, it has great illustrations that are just fun to look at, not to mention an imaginative little storyline. We're big Gyo Fujikawa fans round these parts.

Tomorrow is another day of everyday fun: cooking (French Bread and Key Lime Pie!), cleaning, and being silly.

More bloggage tomorrow.
Guten Nacht.

Early Evening at Our House

Leif runs out to the end of the pier where Daddy is changing the bait in the crab traps and collecting dinner (the crabs, not the bait).

The grass beneath our dock.

Where's Leify? Can you find him? (and if you enlarge the photo by clicking on it, you can see his big excited grin!)

Pretty Pretty Pretty Clouds. I'm silly, I know, but I think they're lovely.

Rainbows in Wide Open Skies

Jason and Leif check the crab traps under a wide open sky.

Leif tromps through what is left of the garden: 3 Basil plants and 2 Pepper plants. The rest has been pulled and tossed into the compost pile. I pulled it all on the last day of August and haven't gotten back out there much to dig it up and mix it like I was planning on. So, once again, I'm running behind. Cool season planting, here I come (cool season planting will be a first for me, I've only ever done warm season plants!)

Jason captured a rainbow arcing over the water after a storm.

Their favorite part of the day.

I'll blog more tomorrow!

Just wanted to get something up tonight for you! :)

Happy nights.

Leif Gets to Work!

Leif rubs down the wall with a rag to remove the glue backing from the wallpaper we'd just stripped off.

On a bit of whim, I decided one morning that the wallpaper in the kitchen, the last in the house, MUST come down. So, we set to work. Some areas were tough - like around the stove, where years of steam and grime made it more difficult to peel it off. Other areas were great fun, like peeling skin off from a sunburn. I would start the pulling at the top of the wall, and when it was 1/4 of the way down, Leif would take over and pull it all the way down from the bottom. Then he pulled it out from the baseboard, and put it in a big pile.

When I did the areas where he couldn't help, like over the sink, he gathered the pieces I ripped off as they fell to the floor, and added them to the pile. So, as I pulled, he cleaned up behind me. What a help!

When we go to the part of wiping down the walls to dissolve the glue, I gave him his own rag, and he wiped away. When he was through wiping a spot, I'd come through with the scraper, and off the backing came! He did such a great job that the part he did is the cleanest part in the whole kitchen!

Jason helped a lot, too - he pulled out the fridge (and then stripped the paper behind the fridge). He also took some of the electrical plates off for me. :)

He was working hard!

Pausing a moment for a picture. See the big pot on the stove? We were cooking crabs at the same time!

He's been helping around the house a lot lately. He helps with dishes, with dusting, with vacuuming - all sorts of things!

The other day, I was doing dishes and he came in and wanted to help. He ran to get his "ladder" (one of his playroom chairs) and brought it back in. I really didn't want him splashing in the water, wasting water and time when I really had to get the dishes done.

So, I got a fresh towel of of the drawer and handed it to him, asking if he'd like to dry (he'd never done it before). I gave him a little melamine dish, and he dried it perfectly then handed it back for me to put away. I told him where it went, and he put it away. After a few plastic dishes, we were on to pots and pans!

He did a fantastic job getting every drop of water off of every dish, and then putting it away. He loved it because it was helping, and I loved it because it really was helping!

Leif has been loving puzzles lately, especially floor puzzles. The other day I bought him a new floor puzzle, since he'd mastered the old one, and it was great because it was four different puzzles in one! I heard some singing (he's been singing a lot lately, and I love it!) so I peeped in to the playroom to check on him, and I saw him doing this - singing while doing floor puzzles.

Lately, his holy trinity of toys has been Matchbox Cars, Puzzles, and Berenstain Bear Books. So you can imagine his excitement when Grandmom and Granddad sent him a package in the mail full of Jason's old matchbox cars as well as some other fun things (will show you later!)

He's been on cloud 9 playing with his "new" matchbox cars. In addition to that great gift, we've been giving him matchbox cars as incentive to not wet/mess his pants. Unfortunately, we've only given him two in the last week (gah!) but his little collection is slowly growing and he loves it!

Of course, since I picked out his new cars, I chose all vintage vehicles (the earliest they had were 60s era cars!) so now he has a great little stash of 60s and 70s cars, both true vintage and faux vintage! :) Worked out pretty well, I'd say.

More bloggage below!

Bitten by the Bread Bug

Voila! The baguettes I made the other day. They may have been, um...oddly shaped, but lawdy, were they good. They had a great flavor - better even than many bakery-bought loaves I've had (like, dare I say it - Whole Foods?).

I now see why DaMomma has been somewhat obsessed with her new bread book (which I now have on loan)...now I'm obsessed, too!

2p and I are going to be baking the same breads each week, since she just bought the book, and so we can be eating the same delicious breads at the same time! Fun! These three loaves (they're pretty thin) were all gone by the end of the night. One went down to the Stephensons' for taste-testing, and the other two were quickly gobbled with our chicken soup.

Thanks, DaMomma!

Ah, the view from our house is always gorgeous and always changing - here it is in the late afternoon as a storm passes by on the mainland!

Yup - the boy is loving sorting - must get some sorting games goin' for him! I thought it was a lot of blue - but now looking at the picture, I see that it is two different blue colors, not just one. Can hardly see that in real life!