Oy Vey

 What you see here is a tray of bagels.  The amazing thing about these bagels is that I made them...by hand...from scratch!  I would never have thought that I would ever make bagels.  I mean, they are so easy to buy!  But bagels from the store seem to us to be getting less and less bagel-y and more like a bread roll.  So when I read about making bagels on one of my favorite food blogs, I decided to give it a try.  After all, she made it sound so easy.  And it was!  They take a bit of time (an afternoon and overnight and the next morning) but really are very simple.  The best part is that they taste great...just like real, old-fashioned bagels.  They are chewy and bagel-y.  
 
We love them with a schmear of our homemade cream cheese (also very easy to make).  The only problem is that the recipe makes only 6 at a time.  I may have to double it next time.    

Birthday Cake

It was recently my birthday.  Even though I may not like how numerically old I am, I'd still rather have birthdays than run out of them!  The birthday tradition in my family is that the birthday person gets to choose what is for breakfast and dinner that day.  When I was a little girl, I always wanted French toast for breakfast and shrimp for dinner.  In those days, shrimp meant the breaded kind that came in a box.  It still felt fancy to me since that was usually the only time we had shrimp out there on the farm.   I loved it.  In fact, I still love shrimp although not the breaded kind.  I love them best sauteed in butter and garlic and fresh lemon juice tossed with linguine and some fresh Italian parsley.  In fact, that's how we introduced Peter to them recently. 

This year, I asked for Paul's pasta with a sauce of diced sun-dried tomatoes (soaked in white wine), lots of garlic, chopped smoked salmon, parsley, and cream.  It is delightfully rich and creamy.  Along with a nice salad, it was the perfect birthday dinner.  

Ahhh, but what about dessert?  I am the dessert maker in the family so I make my own birthday dessert.  I don't mind a bit and I'm always assured of getting something I like!  This year I made carrot cake cupcakes with cream cheese frosting.  I had forgotten how much I like carrot cake!  It's just the right amount of sweetness and spice and, if one is imaginative, one can even say it's healthy with all those grated carrots in there.   Yeah, right.  The fun part about the cupcakes was what was on top....candied carrot strips.  I know that sounds odd but they are a sweet and sort of classy looking top for a carrot cake.  They are totally easy to make, too.  Just use a vegetable peeler to make strips of carrot.  Make a simple syrup of 2 cups sugar to 1 cup water and boil until the sugar dissolves.  Add the carrot strips and simmer for 10 minutes.  Shut off the heat and let it sit for another 30 minutes.  Remove the carrot strips from the syrup and lay them on a rack.  I put a piece of waxed paper underneath to catch the drips.  When they are dry, put them on top of the cupcakes or layer cake or whatever shape your carrot cake is.  Very cute and different.  You will impress people with how trendy cool you are!  At the very least, you will make yourself happy on your birthday.

Hopefulness

 It is April and cold, about 40º today.  But there are hopeful signs of spring outside.  Here are a few. 




                                Daffodils and snowdrops

 Daylilies and tulips

  Dogtooth violet

Fritallaria

                               Ladybells and snow glory

Rhubarb!

                                          Snow glory

White violets




Hope springs eternal (pun intended)!

The Only Good Mouse...

I’ve talked about pests here before, namely bunnies and voles, but today I have another pest to talk about…mice.

We live in the country and mice are not unusual to have around.  We occasionally get one in the house and keep a trap or two in the basement to catch any that come wandering in.  We haven’t had one in the house itself for a couple of years, I think.  The more finish work that gets done, the fewer places there are for any critters to creep in. 

However, yesterday was a new experience altogether.  Paul was gone and Peter and I were sitting at the table, finishing up homework when Peter looked up and suddenly yelled, “There’s a mouse!”  “Where?” I shouted.  “On the counter by Daddy’s glass.”  I look over and, sure enough, there is a little brown mouse running across MY KITCHEN COUNTER!!!

I ran over to watch where it was going and couldn’t find it anywhere.  I got the flashlight to get a better look and still couldn’t see the little rascal.  I put a small block of wood at the end of the counter to stop any further progress and kept looking around.  I couldn’t see anything moving at all.  Suddenly the block of wood went over the edge and the mouse took off running down a power cord that happened to be right there.  Under the stove it went.  By the way, it was pretty impressive to watch it run down the power cord you see in the picture!

 I put Peter on mouse watch while I got a couple of big towels and blocked off as much of the exit as I could, hoping to keep it from heading out to other parts of the house.  We put a mousetrap in the area left open and waited.  Then we got the bright idea to turn on the oven to warm things up and, maybe, flush it out.  We waited quite a while but nothing happened.  Peter went to his room and put a barrier up at the base of his door.  After about 10 minutes, I heard the trap snap and quickly headed toward the kitchen, just in time to see our house mouse head into a space at the bottom of the dishwasher.  I stuffed one of the towels in front of it to block egress and moved the trap to the area under the sink, next to the dishwasher.  And there it sits. 

In the meantime, I had to remove everything from the countertop and disinfect the whole area. 

The trap was snapped this morning but nothing was in it…must be a quick little bugger.  We put a couple more traps around in hopes of nailing the invader.  I’m sorry but, at our house, the only good mouse is a dead one!

And still counting

These two smiling people are my parents.  They are smiling because they just got married (obviously from the attire) and were feeling pretty happy.  They were just youngsters at the time…truly youngsters, only 18 years old, both of them.  This picture was taken 60 years ago this month.  They celebrated their 60^th anniversary on March 9^th.  It seems fairly amazing for two people to be married that long, in this day and age, anyway.  But if you knew my parents, you wouldn’t be amazed at all. 

They are two of the loveliest people I know.  Not only do I love them, because they are my Mom and Dad, but I like them for who they are.  They are kind, generous, open-hearted people.  They are intelligent and full of good, old-fashioned common sense.

They are wonderful parents who raised three children into well-adjusted, productive citizens.  They were consistent and strict but never mean.  They are supportive of us in our endeavors and express pride in us, even now, for our accomplishments.  We never, ever doubted that we were loved.  I didn’t realize, until I was an adult, how lucky I was to have the kind of parents and upbringing I had. My friends have joked for years that I grew up in a Norman Rockwell painting. 

Their marriage is a shining example of what a relationship should be.  Of course, they’ve had ups and downs, like every couple, but they’ve weathered them intact.  They taught us by their example that it’s important to communicate with each other and to laugh together.  It’s obvious, if you are around them for any length of time, that they love and respect each other.  They are still as happy as they were in that picture.

So, I am taking this opportunity to honor them…for who they are and for the longevity of their marriage.  Thanks, Mom and Dad.

Patience is a Virtue

It snowed.  I know, I know, snow here isn't really big news but, this was significant snow...especially for the first of March.  General consensus was that we got around 14 inches in this one storm.  My neighbors across the road, who have lived here their entire lives, said it was the most they could remember in one blow.  It was amazing to watch the big, fat, wet flakes coming down and coming down and, still, coming down.

 

 School was closed.  Roads were closed.  Appointments were canceled.  It was truly a snow day.  We had biscuits for breakfast, built a warm fire, and snuggled in. Peter built a snow family in the front yard and created a snow fort from the pile left by the snow plow earlier in the day.  Our neighbor, Butch, kindly plowed our driveway so we could get out, if need be.  The snow was really deep.
 
 When the storm started, I was in a kind of disbelief.  It was the first of March, after all.  It was time for a little spring action.  Just a couple weeks ago I was finding snowdrops in the yard.  Hope was springing eternal...or something like that.  

But I have found that, living on the Palouse, March does not guarantee spring...in fact, neither does April or May, for that matter.  Winter leaves slowly, kicking and screaming, and one must be patient.  I've learned to wait another week or two to plant those porch pots, even when I'm dying for some flowers.  If I do it too early, the flowers are the ones dying and I have to start over again.  

And I was just talking last week about it being time to plant the snow peas and sweet peas, according to my past few years' garden journal entries.  I think I'll be waiting on those for a bit longer, too.  It's going to take a while for 14 inches to melt completely away.

It was as if the snow gave us permission to just hang out and not worry about going anywhere or doing anything.  All in all, it turned out to be a lovely day.

Lemon Tree Very Pretty

Lemons are an amazing fruit.  I love using lemons in recipes.  And my favorite lemons are Meyer lemons.  They are actually a cross between an orange and a lemon, or so I've read.  They do have a lovely flavor and are perfect for making desserts.  

When I lived in Northern California, I had a Meyer lemon tree in my front yard.  It was only about 5 feet tall and 5 feet wide, but it was a happy lemon tree.  One of the last years I lived there, it produced over 200 lemons!  I was making everything I could find that called for lemons...and giving them away.  


When I moved "up North" to Palouse, I brought little potted lemon tree with me.  It did really well outside in the summer but when I brought it in for the winter, scale moved in with it.  Scale is a nasty little insect that wreaks havoc on a plant.  Unfortunately, I didn't realize what was going on until it was really too late.  Scale-1, Dona-0.

So, I bought another lemon tree for the pot and started again.  This one did fairly well.  I knew to watch for the scale and found some good organic pesticide "oil" to combat the little buggers.  It worked for about 2 years.  Then, in my zealousness to keep the tree happy, I watered and watered and watered too much.  And then fungus gnats moved in.  I was able to get rid of the gnats but I killed the tree by giving it too much to drink.  Sigh...Overwatering-1, Dona-0.

Even though the trees didn't make it, we did get some lemons from them along the way, thank goodness.  So, we got to enjoy a few lemony treats...enough to know we wanted more.

Not being one to give up easily, I bought another Meyer lemon tree.  So far, so good.  It produced a few lemons, three of which actually got full sized and are ripening now.  It hasn't gotten scale, or gnats, or overwatered.  

                                                                                                                                                     
Tonight I made Lemon Budino (Italian for pudding) from the first ripe one.  Oh, my, it is heavenly...more like a lemon souffle with a gooey bottom.  One of the lemons will become Lemon Cream, which is basically a very creamy lemon ice cream.  I don't know yet what the third will be.  I have to be choosy when I have only 3 instead of 200.  What they say is true....you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone.  Boy, do I miss that lemon tree.