Recent Favorites:

Apartment Therapy the book - we will be doing the "cure" starting this week!
Strauss Family Creamery Plain Whole Milk Yogurt - "tastes like pudding"
Red Wine-Mustard Vinaigrette - perfect for warm weather salads
Veggie plants from the Tomato Man
In My Kitchen Garden blog, very inspirational!
I like this Rebecca Normal Silver jewelry

Update: Sacramento Region's Bike Commute month. So far I have commuted a total of 21 miles or a total of 7 days home and back. I am aware that it doesn't sound very impressive but I live in SUV central, it's very subversive!

This is a great page about raising chickens, including about butchering! I do not think I have the guts for this but I wish I did. The girls are here! Eggs should start coming in October.

Now that I have upgraded to flickr pro I just don't know if you guys will be able to handle the cuteness in my life! I am truly blessed. Cheesy but true.

By popular demand! Ok, only one person asked. This is the baby Wesley Snipes (some people call him DAYWALKA). Actually he's about a year now but we still call him the baby and he still acts like it. He prefers sparkle balls to the Total Gym but my sister thinks he bears quite a resemblance to the movie star Wesley Snipes. He is easily one of the cutest cats you will ever see. Please note the white puffball on his tail.


This is a more accurate representation of Wesley Snipes' head. He has a very small head.

Last night I made a soup that I was immensely proud of while cooking. It included:

Homemade chicken stock that I made using the leftovers of an organic free range bird that we roasted;
Ranchogordo flageolet beans which I made on the weekend and have been loving this week;
zucchini that came in the box last week from Capay which I caramelized for maximum flavor;
rosemary from my garden

I think you see where I'm going with this. Could the ingredients be anymore fresh or local, should I not feel like an extreme goddess of the hearth?

It tasted like you took your Thanksgiving stuffing with a ton of gravy on top and whizzed it up in the food processor and ate it as a soup. And not in a good way. It was edible, but pretty gross. And for the warmest day of the year so far it was not exactly refreshing.

Very nice Spring weekend, we:

Painted my new room 'manilla tint' sounds horrifying but it looks like pure sunshine mixed with butter.

Shelled, and shelled again, and ate fava beans. Yum.

Tried to get chickens two more times to make a total of three. I don't remember this being so difficult before. Also, apparently you cannot arrive two hours late to an auction and expect to win anything.

Made the heaviest doorstop of an attempt at sourdough bread ever.

Planted berrgarten sage, golden sage, chives, italian parsley, fernleaf dill (sorry Julie), and only one sweet basil plant.

Used my thriving mint to make a spritzer. It was very spritzy.

How wonderful:

Between the overripe berries, the outdoor showers, the droning of the bees, the wisteria-covered arbor at sunset--are we really going to pretend that gardening is not an inherently lascivious activity?

Notmartha bought a house and I am jealous. Even though we are really settling into our space and have some fun projects coming up I can't help but envy that feeling of liminal stage and extreme clean slate.

In other news May is the month of the Eat Local Challenge and the Sacramento Region's Bike Commute month. I am declaring it my own little hippy party month.