Archives
28/04: Going to the temple..
I know its about the bride and groom, but look at these flower girls!!!!
28/04: Taking Off
It’s April 26th, and Tory, Lizzie, Zoe and I are all on our way to Utah. We woke up early, at 4:45, and Tory and I were inching along like zombies, but Zoe was a ball of energy, doing rings around me and Tory and literally jumping up and down. As we left in the grey early morning we heard the roosters calling out, and we were greeted by a thin cold frost that blanketed the car. Perhaps it is our last frost. I hope it is. Luckily our vegetable garden has yet to send up any sprouts (aside from lettuce and asparagus), and my tender little seedling are stretching their necks up out of Stoneyfield Farm yogurt containers on the mud porch. While we are gone we are expecting a shipment from White Flower Farms – blue berries and lilies mostly, they should fare fine until our return.
23/04: The perfect Omelette
With a step up in egg production our ice-box over floweth. My answer? The perfect omelette. I have a griswold cast-iron skillet that I bought at a tag-sale a couple years ago, it is now perfectly seasoned, and every time I use it I give it a little pat and pronounce to Tory - "I love this skillet". Find a skillet like this of your own to love, thats the place to start. Next I take a few thin slices of white onion and breakup a couple of pieces of prosciutto and brown then - next you take three eggs from your friendly neighborhood barred rock hens. break in a bowl and whisk briskly with a fork (make them nice and airy). Pour the eggs over the browned onions and prosciutto. grind in some pepper and adds some sea salt. when the omelette begins to sollidify (you can pull up the edges and tip the pan so the egg cooks everywhere) sprinkle bits of goat cheese and marinated sun dried tomatoes. when the cheese melts fold, slice and serve. Very tasty, but my cholesterol is probably going through the roof.Spring continues, I have my first asparagus after planting last spring, the miniature cherry is blooming, Tiger Lilly Unicorn is sitting on seven eggs, and the rains have returned once again to beat down on our tin roof.
15/04: Saturday
Breafast at Gumma's is a treat the girls love, blueberry pancakes with lots of syrup and pancakes smothered in Gumma's own jam - it starts a weekend out well, particularaly when its followed by an egg hunt. The local Hospital has beautiful grounds, with geese and a big pond, and every year they have an enormous egg hunt. 10,000 eggs are cattered across the lawn, and at 10am exactly the race begins, it took just 68 seconds for all the eggs to be gathered. Our girls gathered quite a few in their pink wicker baskets, and the rest of the morning saw a smiling lizzie running about in a chocolate induced stupor. We spent a lot of time outside today, putting in a lot of plants given to us from a friend who is losing part of her garden to an extension on her house; globe thistle, lillies, hostas, white shata daises, and dozens of other plants. I also planted potatoes and onions and we continued to remove part of the tree from our now much more sunny vegetable garden.
11/04: A weekend at home -
Tory and I had a book signing at a small store in Argyle that promotes local products. The store is called Moseskill, named after the rive that flows through the village and under the stone arch bridge in town, it also used to pass through one corner of our property near the village of North Argyle. The signing went really well, we sold every book we had, and saw a lot of people I had not seen in quite a while, including my old Sunday School teacher Lois, who sells baked goods at the shop. I have known her my entire life and she never seems to change. She is a local in a larger sense, she spent her first four years in West Hebron until her father was killed by a team of horses scared by headlights of a passing car. She spent time in surrounding towns until settling on a farm in Argyle.The cool saturday morning was spent splitting wood with Dad. In the afternoon, when it warmed up just a bit, we went to visit the Websters, whose sheep are lambing. The Websters have the most Idyllic place I know, a charming little house, tucked away on a dirt road with high stone walls, pastures and craggy rock outcroppings. a the sheep all wear bell brought back from Switzerland, and the rang playfully to the girls delights as he called them in with grain. there were six or eight young lambs, that frolicked around the girls, jumping and dancing. The girls giggled with glee.
Also in the afternoon we put up Dad's windmill - at last. with the help of a felled sapling chained to the bucket of the tractor. The exercise nearly ended in tragedy, but in the end the windmill slipped smoothly over it's post and the blades of Dad's new contraption are rotating, though not really providing anything but amusement (he's still working on making a generator out of microwave magnets).
