I gave away my last fish wallet card a while ago, so I went looking for a replacement. The Blue Ocean Institute has up-to-date information about environmentally sound seafood, and provide a little wallet PDF to print out and carry with you. Luckily, most of the good stuff is in the green. The only thing to stop you from enjoying some nice calamari is that squid are so darn cute!
Mag is concerned that this blog is more interested in food and cooking than in pets. Here, you can see her contemplating some mushroom stroganoff, wondering if it may be part of some larger culinary conspiracy.
Sometimes when Mag needs some private time to think about weighty issues she visits her reflecting pond.
At other times, she finds frank and open dialog with her colleagues is more productive.
Eventually, she decided that she and 'Dolon should sniff around the competition a bit more.
The jury is still out. Too many pictures of food? Too few pictures of pets? Additionally, there have recently been allegations about fluff posts cobbled together around unrelated images, prostituting both pets and cooking to feed the blog's own need for attention. Mag's research into these serious issues continues.
I tried a new French-y bread recipe for dinner tonight, to go with some sweet potato and cabbage soup. The bread is not nearly as simple as a normal French loaf, containing vinegar, sour cream, and ginger in addition to the expected ingredients.
Here are some photos of the final stages of the raised bed. A nice man came and took away a check for a lot of money, but filled our tarps with 2 yards of mulch and 2 yards of composted soil for the bed.
The bed wanted to eat about one and a quarter yards of dirt.
And eat it did, wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow. Eventually I ditched the four-wheeled plastic monstrosity pictured here (NDM started using it to lug mulch around) and switched to a real wheelbarrow, and boy was I glad I did!
Finally, the bed had eaten all it could. Since then we've had a couple days of good rain to settle things in, soI probably have a few more wheelbarrows to top it off for winter. Then, no more yard work for the year! Yay!
Of course, if I find I need to top it off with even more dirt, Mag's trenching service has me covered.
NDM put in some flowers in our front yard that bloom pretty late into the year. She presumably knows what these plants are.
I like them because they are pink and purple and last for evvver. She's also put in some colossal yellow flower spikes that also probably have a name.
I noticed this really pretty yellow, white, and black spider in the bushes by our front door when my parents visited this weekend. It was neat enough that I broke out the real camera and the real macro lens, which I normally don't mess with. After I butchered some shots I made my dad lie on his back and take some good ones. Above is the spider's hood; the shot below is its undercarriage.
It appears to be the female of some species of Argiope orb web spider.
My parents helped us whip up some stuff for dinner last night. We had seafood enchiladas with a side of undeconstructed taco salad. (See, because normally, we make this kind of separate, layered, deconstructed taco salad, but last night I tossed it all together, so, well... So it's taco salad.) Hopefully I'll feel industrious this week and also put up the enchiladas on the Kitchenarium -- allthough this is a recipe I'll have to pry out of NDM.
I really love taking this things out of the oven. They look so inviting all snug together in their little baking dish!
For desert, we made ad hoc rum balls. Actually I think more butter schnapps was used than rum. Here are my mother's hand posing while sugaring a finished rum ball.
Last night we made some spaghetinni alla puttanesca for dinner, along with some tomato & bocconcini salad and a bit of generic salad. I'll try to put the recipe with additional photos up later this week.
