A blog of musings, experiences and morning coffee…
Fresh from the oven, a warm Peach and Walnut Coffee Cake. It is peach season here and I am so into freestone peaches. At $4/pound, I cannot let any go to waste or get too ripe and soft. So when they get really ripe in the refrigerator, I whip out my recipe for Coffee Cake and make sure every bite of these lovely peaches is in one form or another. Give the recipe a try and let me know what you think in the comments below.
We have around 500 square feet of deck, trex decking with a solid surround and angled cap. During the lock-down we decided to start our urban gardening.
We moved here with over 30 plants. Getting them loaded into the U-Haul truck, then unloaded here and moved to our deck was no small project. Slowly over the past 12+ years, some plants made their end-of-life transition. I mourned the loss of each one. There were 3 bushes, numerous perennials and a limited number of annuals, which for some reason came back year after year when we lived in downtown Seattle (Belltown). One I mourned was a Rosemary bush that had thrived in downtown Seattle but found Burien just too harsh to live with.
Continue reading “Gardening in an urban environment (V-2025)”
Covid-19 caused us to tuck into our home and not really go out at all. While Hubby had an outpatient surgery scheduled for January 2021, that was the only risk we had to take since lockdown.
In 2020, for Mother’s Day, Hubby insisted I should not cook. We went into “Old Town” to a known restaurant (eaten there a number of times pre-Covid) and ordered a “to-go” Chicken Caesar salad. Not saying the restaurant is no longer a favorite, however the salad was seriously lacking in quality, taste and pretty much anything else you can think of (wilted, tasteless and unappealing visually). Continue reading “The Urban Gardener (V-2021)”
I love coleslaw but I have always taken the “easy and fast” way out with it, buying bottled coleslaw dressing or a coleslaw “kit” in the bag. Now I am a convert – yes, it took maybe 15 minutes to make this coleslaw dressing (and yes, I purchased a 14 ounce bag of shredded green cabbage, carrot and red cabbage, so I cheated a little).
Here’s my version of this recipe – a mash-up of several I have tried but none of which ever added up to my expectations. This one pleases my taste buds enormously.
Travel. The word can bring forth thoughts, memories, feelings. Yet, it is just a word. A six-letter word. Looking up definitions for such a word, I found many variations. As a verb, travel was defined as early as the 1300’s:
travel (v.)
c.1375, “to journey,” from travailen (1300) “to make a journey,” originally “to toil, labor” (see travail). The semantic development may have been via the notion of “go on a difficult journey,” but it may also reflect the difficulty of going anywhere in the Middle Ages. Replaced O.E. faran. Travels “accounts of journeys” is recorded from 1591. Traveled “experienced in travel” is from 1413. Traveling salesman is attested from 1885.
Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2001 Douglas Harper
Continue reading “Romance and/or Travel: the journey or the destination?”
Hubby and I have been needing to reduce calories. We do not spend as much time on the treadmill as we did before he went back to work. We try to get our minimum 5000 steps – preferring to make it to 7,500 steps on our Fitbit watches. But it doesn’t always happen. After taking off 40 pounds during the Covid-19 lockdown, I did not like that in the past 2 years I have gained back 10 of those hard to lose/lost pounds. Continue reading “A new twist on tuna salad”
This is a recipe I concocted from about 5 different recipes, none of which appealed to me. I took one ingredient from here and one ingredient from there and, voila! my personal version of shrimp scampi. Cheap vodka is ok because the alcohol cooks off before serving. We like to be skimpy with the pasta since we are working on trimming calories for weight control (hence angel hair or thin spaghetti).
Have you ever thought about the word, “charming”? I recently began ruminating on the word. Dictionary.com describes the word as an adjective:
Charming – adjective
pleasing; delightful.
using charm; exercising magic power.
Charm: to act upon (someone or something) with or as with a compelling or magical force.
COVID-19 changed our lives, and yet, those changes were already happening. My husband and I adopted an austerity program when we returned from Lisbon in June 2019. Several reasons led us to this program – a desire to retire permanently with more travel involved was a main reason. Home improvements (including upgrading kitchen appliances & a major bathroom renovation) was another. Continue reading “Our COVID-19 lockdown: gardening-cooking-exercise, Part 1”
Having received 24 ounces of rather large white button mushrooms, I took 10 of the roughly 20 mushrooms and made a great little afternoon snack for my husband and I. The stuffing can be made of pretty much anything you have in the refrigerator as long as you stick to one or two basics: softened cream cheese and bread crumbs.
