Food Friday: Crepes!

One of the reasons that I enjoy cooking is that it involves the completion of a project.  Much of my professional life is about works-in-progress and while it’s incredibly rewarding to watch adolescents mature and learn more about the world and themselves, when 8th graders walk out of my daily world and into the 9th grade, they are incomplete.  Even completion of high school is not quite the finished project whereby we can measure our success.  That measure comes later, when students succeed in college and move on to professions that they find satisfying and meaningful.  So a big part of my job requires that I make peace with the notion of works in progress.

Cooking is about completion.  From start to finish, a biscuit is mixed, baked, and then it’s complete and ready to eat.   Much of my cooking is the daily business of putting breakfast on the counter and supper on the table.  I work to vary our choices but in the end I am cooking a lot of the same things.  Days off and holidays give me a chance to make foods that require more time or are otherwise special.  I enjoy those completed projects a great deal and I’m often on the look-out for something new to cook.  

Enter a Good Friday holiday and this crepes recipe.  I saw it earlier this week and thought "I should make that someday." Someday was this morning and it came together just as the instructions said it would, a feature of the Simply Recipes website that makes it my favorite cooking website.  I mixed the batter, poured some in a buttered pan and watched it settle as the edges browned.

I flipped the crepe over (it was easy!).

And behold my new superpower.

That’s happy!

Daffodils & Peonies

I’ve been documenting the larger of my two front yard flowerbeds, the one that faces north and east.   On the other side of the front yard, there are mostly bushes.  I’ve planted a few bulbs and a Mother’s Day peony that T gave me a few years back and this side of the yard gets western light, so the blooms tend to arrive first.  Though the morning this picture was made was chilly and the daffodils were cuddling to keep warm, they have bloomed.  The second patch is close to bloom.

Early shoots of the peony are also present.  I’ll have peonies for Mother’s Day.  

That’s happy! 

Front Yard Flowers on Monday: Week Seven

We had a gloriously sunny weekend and the next few days promise more warmth and sunshine.  Blooms are on their way!

Dogwood Sunday: Week One

When I lived in the South, dogwood blooms usually opened by Easter; often in advance of Easter Sunday, and Southerners saw the blooms with the x-shaped color in the center as a symbol of Christ and his rebirth.  In my experience, Southerners often see poetry in the otherwise small details of everyday life and I always found that characteristic charming.  It was in the South that I first learned to appreciate the beauty of seasons and dogwood blooms always jog those memories.  Easter is next week and while there are a handful of dogwood trees in bloom on my daily travels, most aren’t quite there yet.  My dogwood is working toward flowering, but from a distance it retains the stark appearance of Winter.

Up close, the promise of flowers is present in the tight buds.

The week ahead has a forecast for sunshine and warmth; an explosion of blooms and blossoms are on the way.  For the next few weeks, I’ll make a picture of the dogwood each Sunday, and I’ll use the photos to track Spring’s progress.  That’s happy and lovely!

Real Life Texts with T: Future Plans edition

The backstory: I am teaching JT how to drive and it sometimes requires the patience of Job.  He’s a careful and cautious driver, but he’s still 17 and driving in the most densely populated state in the nation.  Anxious moments happen.  After a rough go at parking, I texted T to explore my options.

Me:  Today in Peter Pan driving featured an argument over parking.  An infant is easier.  I am looking to trade.

T:  We are not trading for an infant.  We are seeing this thru with Peter Pan and we are going on vacation to Yellowstone once he is in college.  Infants don’t like Yellowstone so that’s how it has to be.

Sounds like it’s back to the parking lot for me.  

Presidential Prospects

Over Spring Break, T and I took a day and drove a couple of hours north to Hyde Park, New York, where we visited the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library and toured his home, Springwood.  At the house, we saw FDR’s tidy boyhood room.

This room came to mind when my nephew C and his friend K came to visit.  I can’t speak for his home, but the room C slept in while he was at my house suggests that his housekeeping isn’t up to presidential standards.

Of course, this is JT’s room, so I am not exactly in a position to judge.

But K’s bed making skills suggest some serious presidential prospects.

My sister KO and I clearly need some guidance.  Sara Delano Roosevelt is no longer of this earth, so KO and I will look to K’s mom, who seems to have some mad skills.

April Front Porch

Around here, mild Winters can sometimes result in a slow arriving Spring, as has been the case for the last few years.  A big snowstorm in March, just days before the official arrival of Spring, had me nervous that this year would follow the same routine and that Spring would arrive in an agonizingly slow fashion.  

In mid-March, our Spring Break was rather cold and we’ve had a great deal of rain since then but it’s been accompanied by some sunny days in the 50s and 60s.  This week’s forecast looks quite promising for more of the mild sunlight that will set us up for verdant blooms before this month has ended.  My April front porch is ready to show the way, with plenty of fresh white flowers and a cheery purple ribbon on Flopsy, my cast iron bunny.

Easter is next week and I love the look of this wreath on my front door, so it stays for April.

The bunny flag is keeping time with the breezy days.

This month, I replaced the front porch lights with a string of Edison bulbs.  I love the look of these bulbs and in the evening they provide a warm and welcoming light for the porch.  I’ve had them for a few months and was excited to finally hang them up; they light up as lovely as I imagined.

And that is really the theme for my feelings about Spring, I think.  In the Winter, I thumb through my garden catalogs and imagine how lovely Spring will be.  Then it arrives and it’s even nicer than I imagined.  That’s happy!

Front Yard Flowers on Monday - Week 6

There’s been a rather copious amount of rain of late.  But there’s also been enough sunlight to get things going.  Around town, the forsythia are starting to bloom.  In my flowerbed,  have a cheery patch of crocus from bulbs I planted last fall.   They bloom early and set the stage for the flowers to come.

Everything else is coming along nicely and in the next few weeks there will be plenty of flowers for me to admire.

College Boys

My nephew C and his friend K flew East for their Spring Break and made my house their evening rest stop after daily trips on the train into New York City.  Most evenings, they were home in time for supper and our amusement, as these boys wrest everything they could out of the city, walking miles and miles every day.  They had a list of places and things to see and they visited both obvious landmarks and locations and also random places along the way.  My favorite story was hearing that they stopped by the New York Public Library, had a look at the famous lions, and then went inside with their books and read for an hour.  They enjoyed that so much, they made a trip to visit the Brooklyn Public Library for the same purpose.  Perhaps it’s because I am a big reader or perhaps it’s because they are 19 year old boys and such an hour seems unexpected, but I found that charming.  On Saturday night, I cooked up a fried chicken supper and T and I joined them as they polished off a good deal of food.  Then C, K, and JT watched basketball and offered the smart-ass commentary that I have come to expect.  

That’s happy!

Old Man Tree: April 1st

Careful readers will likely recall my steadfast pledge to spend at least some of Spring Break tearing the poison ivy off of this tree.  The break started promising on this front, with a sunny but cold day.  Then we got nearly a foot of snow and the cold weather to go with it and just like that, the poison ivy earned itself another month of life.  I have got to get after it this month, hopefully before the business of serious growth takes hold.  

And it is surely taking hold.  Though yesterday was cold and rainy, there have been enough warm days combined with the snowmelt and rain to give the grass the fresh green hue that signals Spring is about to take command.  Old Man Tree had some buds that fell in the rain; that's the signal that my tree will begin to green up very shortly.  

This stage of Spring has an expectant air to it that I always enjoy.  The anticipation of the splendid blooms that are on their way fills me with gratitude and excitement.  These branches will look quite different in just one month's time.

That’s happy!