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Baking day

It’s cookie baking time. What else are you going to do on a rainy day? I am searching for the perfect, chewy oatmeal raisin cookie. This batch is good but not chewy enough and lacking in something I just can’t put my finger on. Some elusive spice.

I found the recipe on AllRecipes – more and more I find I’m getting my recipes online rather than pulling out my cook books and looking them up there. The best part of online recipes is that they are usually rated and reviewed. You can get some really good suggestions from the reviewers that the original poster of the recipe hadn’t thought of.

The reviews that crack me up are the people that totally mangled the recipe because they didn’t have all the ingredients on hand and then they give the recipe a poor rating. "I didn’t want to mess with making a bechemel sauce so I used canned cream of mushroom soup instead. And I hate shrimp so I used leftover hamburger. Even so this was really awful. 1 star." Excuse me ~ you don’t get to rate the recipe unless you make it properly from start to finish first.

What did turn out yesterday was Ina Garten’s portobello mushroom lasagna. Only I didn’t use portobellos. And I added chunks of turkey. And I still give it 5 stars.

Smokin!

So this morning I’m watching my cooking shows and Rick comes into the room right when there is one of those diet commercials on – where they show several women in their underwear talking about their "smokin’ hot bodies"

I tell him my friend’s theory that they actually start off with thin actresses – take the ‘after’ pictures then have them gain 25 pounds for the ‘before’ pictures.

He looks at me and says – "Now come on. If YOU had a sm……" I could just see the panic in his eyes – there was no gracefully getting out that one.

He is taking his smokin’ hot wife out to lunch if he can get his foot out of his mouth.

Almost Spring

There isn’t much evidence of Spring yet on our property except for the camellias and the daffodils blooming their little hearts out.

I did a walk about this morning and everything is still sleeping. The lilacs (Yes! I have lilacs in California – I’ll do pictures when it does something) are just beginning to bud. My roses are starting to get some new growth. I really need to weed the bed and fertilize. Guess I missed the boat on dormant spraying.

The berry bushes are out of control. They are uninvited guests and they totally take over. Those are berry bushes on either side of the pathway. We had the start of a burn pile one Summer (when you can’t burn) and by the Fall it was completely covered with berry bushes.

We need a guy on a tractor to just come in and level them. It’s like our version of the Kudzo vine. Don’t stand still for too long or you’ll go missing.

I don’t quite have Spring fever yet – I need a few more days of warm weather then I’ll want to spend every waking hour and every last penny at the nursery, buying up new annuals to plant.

Having a larger piece of property is so labor intensive. And most of it hard labor that I am useless for. Honestly – I’d be one of those lurid headlines "Husband lifts tractor off of unconscious wife." "Woman missing for three weeks found on own property. Survived by eating berries and grubs."

I’m more the small, manageable raised bed type of gardener. Give me a cutting garden and a picket fence and I’d be perfectly content.

Bleshoo

So I made it out of my snozzly fog long enough on Thursday to hit up an antique store. Or emporium. What do you call those places that are hundreds of vendors under one roof? This particular place calls itself the Antique Trove and there is one in Roseville and one in San Carlos. Both convenient to me depending on what day of the week it is.

Today it was San Carlos. I tend to get overwhelmed in places like this and that old expression ‘can’t see the forest for the trees’ begins to make sense to me. I need a purpose otherwise my eyes can’t rest on anything except the alarming number of old furs for sale. So even though I was kind of kidding the other day about looking for handkerchiefs that’s exactly what I went in for.

I made one pass through the place. There was a woman following close behind me that wasn’t adhering to the antique emporium etiquette protocol. First of all those booths are all about the size of a small walk-in closet and are jammed packed with Aunt Enid’s old fox stole and a ton of very expensive, tippy, breakable things.

There’s barely room for one person so the polite thing to do is to wait for the person ahead of you to take a look around before taking your turn. This woman is probably one of those people that get super duper close to you when you are at the check out line in the supermarket. It’s not like her jamming her cart into your Achilles tendon is going to make the person in front of you check out any faster, right?

Anyway – I believe there is a post in here somewhere – oh yes. So I made one pass and was going to take my consumptive self back out to my car when I decided to just walk through again quickly. And wouldn’t you know the second or third booth from the front door had a great selection of hankies that I just flat out missed the first time around. I bought two single ones and at the very bottom of the heap was this old box and it had a set of three handkerchiefs that had never been used. Jackpot.

I have no idea what I’ll ever do with them. They are too pretty to blow my nose on. I may try incorporating them into pillows or something like that.

*Bleshoo ~ when I was little that’s what I though people said when you sneezed. I think I was about 24 before I realized it was actually bless you. Same with next door – which I thought it was next store which made no sense but I went with it. My people need to learn how to enunciate.

Easter

Well I never made it to the antique store yesterday – perhaps today. Instead I went to downtown Los Altos and walked up and down Main Street while the rain held off.

I was looking for Easter decorations and Cover Story (where the bunny with the bomb came from) usually has a good selection of Bethany Lowe, Nicol Sayre type things. I overheard the owner telling another customer that Easter decorations don’t do as well as the other holidays like Christmas or Halloween (not technically a holiday but you know what I mean – it’s a decorating opportunity).

That kind of surprised me – I think the Easter things are really adorable. The eggs are Wendy Addison and the Easter cart and boxes are Nicol Sayre. How cute are they?

My niece used to work at Cover Story when she was a teenager and she said that they had a big problem with shoplifters. Someone actually came in and stole a big old rooster. Now how do you sneak something like that out? Whenever I’m in there I feel like they think I’m a shoplifter so I spend the entire time trying to look as honest and trustworthy as I possibly can. I’ve never shoplifted a thing in my life so I don’t know why I feel almost guilty for something I have no intention of doing.

I’m giving up guilt for Lent.

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