Back in the Saddle

Sorry for the two days of radio silence, I was exceptionally busy and then extravagantly tired so my fingers never made it to the keys.  Now you get the full report.  Brace yourselves. (not really)

The best part of the last days was what I made for our supper the other night and there was

enough for 2 nights' worth of suppers.  It's Curried Shrimp with Garlic-Basil-Coconut Rice out of an old-ish Weight Watchers cookbook.  The recipe called for some sort of prepackaged rice mix but I figured it'd be full of salt and other chemicals we can't pronounce so I just added some minced garlic, a few chopped leaves of purple basil, and a couple tablespoons of toasted coconut I happened to have in the freezer to some long-grain rice and cooked it up.  The shrimp itself couldn't be easier, you just thaw and peel a pound of raw shrimp (I patted it dry before the next step), sprinkle it with 1/2 tsp. of curry powder, spray it with a little Pam, and saute it in a teensy bit of olive oil.  Then add a couple cloves of minced garlic, saute some more (about 5 minute in total), then dump in 1/2 cup low-sugar orange marmalade and 2 Tablespoon of water; stir until the marmalade melts and it thickens a bit.  That's it.  You're supposed to garnish it with cilantro (didn't have any) and a lime wedge (forgot).  It was to die for and it didn't even lose its flavor overnight.  This recipe is a keeper.  Steamed broccoli on the side too.  Yum.


My able assistant and I picked not-the-last of the tomatoes yesterday.  It amazes me that there are still tomatoes ripening into the first week of October.  The plants are looking a little ragged but the fruit is still ripening and that's all Durwood really cares about.  One brash chipmunk sat on the step right outside the patio door to eat half a cherry tomato and then left the other half for me to step on and track into the house but I outsmarted him; I avoided it and threw it into the nearby flower bed.


I got a surprise in the mail on Thursday.  It was obviously a book but I didn't remember ordering a book.  It was the book part of the Great Stash Giveaway prize I won last week.  A Stash of One's Own by Clara Parkes.  It's a collection of essays about stash owning, stash loving, and stash letting go.  I vow to make time this weekend to delve into the pages.  The yarn hasn't arrived yet but I'm hopeful that it comes soon.  I can't wait to paw through and and get it all spread out on the floor so I can start playing with it and dreaming what to make with it.


Today is one of those gray overcast days that threatens rain every minute.  It was drizzling when it finally got light and one of the knitters said last night that it's supposed to rain for the next three days.  Ugh.  Guess I'll be hiding in the basement sewing and cutting.






Durwood was lucky enough to see a Red-bellied Woodpecker at the feeder this week but all I saw was this little Downy Woodpecker, a tag-team of Bluejays emptying the peanut wreath as fast as they could fly, and I managed to capture a photo of a chickadee at the birdbath.  I have very few chickadee photos because the little critters are so quick.  I barely catch sight of one before it's gone, long before I get the camera up and ready.  So it's not a fancy bird picture, just a hard to get one.





I laid out Sudoku Long Strip #2 when I got to Friday Night Knitting last night and was dismayed to discover that it's shorter than I thought it was.  I knitted on in for a couple hours and it's definitely longer.  Today I'm going to count the garter ridges in Sudoku Long Strip #1 to see for sure how much farther I have to go.  I'm bound and determined not to work on another project until this @$#%& strip is done.  Therefore I haven't been knitting much...😀

October 7--Vincent van Gogh, Mlle. Gachet in the Garden at Auvers-sur-Oise.  Millie looked at all the shades of green in her garden.  The basil was bright yellow-green, the tomatoes were all the greens from the palest barely-green to the green-turning-orange of the ripening fruit.  She loved the silver green of the nasturtium leaves trailing away from the chartreuse of the sprouts of the second planting of leaf lettuce.  The cabbages were a whole other spectrum of green in each orb.  The Swiss chard claimed the darkest green for its leaves but it defied convention by coloring its stalks in shades of red or yellow.  Arnie said they were having "sauteed showoff" when there was chard on the table but she always won a blue ribbon for it at the Fair so she made sure to hush him just in case next season's Swiss chard grew up drab and all one color.

Isn't superstition funny?  The weather's funny too.  I ended up closing up the house this morning and switching the a/c back on just to get the 75% humidity out of the house.  The air conditioner is on.  It's October.  Will we all be in bikinis for Halloween?  Eek.
--Barbara