Today's Glamour Shot

Here I am in all my sartorial splendor! The scarf is barely noticeable because I knotted it up. I really like it and I think that I might wear it again. It was comfy, like a necklace made of soft shiny cloth! The rest of the outfit is pretty much the sort of thing I wear all the time - cords and a cardie - but my red shoes are pretty skippy. AND in other news, I am wearing makeup! True it is just a tiny bit of eye shadow, bronzer and lipstick. But I felt like a shockingly painted lady all day.

Above the makeup, the red shoes and the scarf, my finest fashion detail is the addition of my Godzilla Attacking London socks. These are obviously not socks that attack Godzilla in London, but socks that depict me riding Godzilla to London. There is no picture of London, but the colors and such make me think of London. So since there appears to be a volcano in the distance I can only assume Godzilla and I are going from Pompeii to London. As you do...

Tomorrow is the fanciest of all the outfits. I am so excited! Just you wait and see...

The Gaa's Scarf Challenge Continues!

So yesterday (okay, it was like five minutes ago, but I was pretending it was still Monday when I wrote it...) I posted the outfit of the day. I did not suspect that today's outfit would make me look like the bad guy from Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame. But you never know when you are going to end up looking like the bad guy from Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Sometimes it just creeps up on you...

Surprise!!

We shall see how it goes tomorrow. I am thinking it might be pants! How very modern and exotic.

Introducing the Gaa's Scarf Challange!

I was looking at an old post from a now defunct blog and was reminded that my plan for my fifth decade was to get pretty. Well, I am into the sixth now, having forgotten that lofty, lofty goal. I did purchase some makeup by accident a few weeks ago. And I will probably wear it at some point. But I haven't done much with my style or, well, appearance.

This isn't the best quality picture I have of Grampy and Gaa, but I love the way they are looking at each other.  They did that a LOT! Best in-laws ever!

 

 

On Sunday, I was visiting my father-in-law, my favorite gentleman over 50 who has never been married to my mother, and he gave me a little pile of scarves that had belonged to my mother-in-law, the kindest mother-in-law in the history of mothers-in-law. She was very stylish and I can only assume that he had offered them to other members of the family and they said, "You know, we're fine, but Barb could really use a little styling-up. Let her have them." So, even though I don't know how to scarves, I took them.

Sunday evening is my night to put out all my outfits for the week so that I only have to think of clothes every seven days. It save both me and my clothing significant stress. I had brought up the little packet of scarves and decided that rather than choose my outfits based on which comfy socks were clean, I would use the scarves as fashion building blocks!

And so I present ' Gaa's Scarf Challenge. (Gaa is the name that my mother-in-law went by with her grandchildren. And as you can imagine, it came about because my niece Yvonne said, as an infant, "GAA!" and so Gaa yelped, "Did you hear that? She said my name!" And since her actual name was Lillian, which sounds very little like Gaa, she changed it to Gaa.)

The challenge is quite simple, I have to wear clothes this week that kind of match each other and theoretically match the scarf of the day. For most people, this wouldn't even be a challenge. But there you have it.

 

The scarf for today is this lovely maroon number with a fleecy brown undercarriage that does, in fact, match my skirt. Take that life-long fashion impairment!

Farmshare #3

Isn't this pretty? Strawberries, garlic curls, summer squash, broccoli, cabbage, scallions, cheese (monteray jack) eggs and rosemary foccacia.

Here's a little more...

Yes, of course I began to eat bread and cheese immediately. 

My pal Janie came with me to pick up the food and we decided to make dinner based on what we got. So of course we began with strawberry pie! You can see the recipe here, albeit with blueberries. 

I chopped up some peppers tomatoes and cukes here and just drowned them in balsamic vinegar. 

Oh the carnage!

This didn't take long...

We ended up making quiches. We made bacon for the carnivores.

And a beautiful broccoli and Swiss that was quite delicious!

Oh How it Gets Away From Me!

 Oh just look at it! The first cheese of the year. It was a goat cheese and quite delicious when heaped on the rosemary foccacia and studded with strawberries.

We also got lettuce, cilantro, some leafy stuff and kohlrabi. All of these things will come in handy later!

But first - have you ever poached chicken breasts? It is so easy and then you have all this chicken breast around just waiting for an excuse to eat it! Rachel Ray (who I can frankly, take or leave) had an article with 10 different chicken salads that I decided I was going to try all summer long. Well, I made one of them (pics below) and fell so in love with it that I still haven't moved on to the others!

Well, first of all, I learned that Kohlrabi is just a giant friendly tentacled radish. So in he went to substitute for his puny friends. 

He looks nice all chipped up doesn't he?

Then the chick peas, cuke and cilantro joined him in lemon juice and olive oil - a little cumin sprinkled over and we are all set!

Now here is where I get crazy. I didn't mix all the salad with the chicken. I know! An iconoclast, but here me out. 

Well, here is a bird's eye view of the bit that I did mix together. And it was quite delicious. 

And I cleverly stored the salad part and the chicken part in separate zippies because (spoiler) I ate the salad a lot faster and then had a ton of chicken left over to sprinkle over salads and make into sandwiches and such. So handy!







The other thing I did was make a big container of Mango Chicken Cous Cous. A recipe from my friend Heffer who is in England, so the recipe is in English. Which is a pain. But at a certain point you remember that a courgette is a zucchini and move on with your life.

So apparently I didn't take any pictures other than those above. Which is too bad because it is kind of a pretty process! First you make a marinade - olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, cumin, ginger and cinnamon. The measures given are 3T for the oil, juice of one lemon, 2 cloves garlic 1t.cumin and 1/2t ginger and 1/2t cinnamon. But I don't measure anymore. I know what I like.

Then you make some cous cous. The recipe asks for pine nuts and mint and stuff, but if you use the pine nut far east cous cous, it is all in there.

Marinate your chicken for an hour or more, grill it. Brush the rest of the marinade over the veggies and grill them. OH! THE VEGGIES! Eggplant, summer squash, peppers, red onions. Slop them and grill them...

Then you chop everything up and put it together and add the mango. You can get a mango and chop it which is nice when the grocery store has mangos and they are ripe. But I found that market basked carries those little cups of mangos!

Oh look! I forgot I took this. That little cup is handy, I used to add more oil and some chicken broth to the cous cous to add moisture, now I just drain one mango cup and don't drain the other and it is perfect! I always have a vat of this stuff in my fridge to eat in the summer because it is full of veggies, nutritious and delicious cold.

Must get back to real life, but I will post last week's share soon!

Busting Up the Chiffarobe!

The next post will be vegetable related, I promise!

I know I am two weeks behind. And this after a pretty lame last post. But here is a treat that will impress you. I cut up the horribly large sofa that was in no way going to ever leave our living room in one piece! And I did it with no power tools at all. Making me pretty amazing.

I will warn you that at the end you can't really tell, but the beast is in two parts which I hauled to the dump and now we have chairs in the living room and it is strange and wonderful and new! I will post pictures below.

 Here is the empty space - and not a bad empty space like in a song from the 70s, but a lovely empty space that I filled with an end table and some chairs!

 Here is my beloved acclimating himself to a chair a whopping 5 feet from where it used to be! He managed to rally and now enjoys the benefit of a cross breeze between corner windows. Damn, I wish I had thought to keep my chair there...

 I impulse purchased a new TV stand. Don't judge me. I am on a roll...

 No before picture as usual, but suffice to say that it took a while for me to make my little back porch hideaway look this awesome.

I even cleaned the work area. It won't last but for now it looks lovely!

Next project - Frank's desk.

Back and Better Than Ever!!

So the first Farm Share rolled around and surprised me. Sadly, I wasn't feeling well, so I didn't make the most of it. As a matter of fact, I didn't even take my weirder greens (kholrabi, again??) and rhubarb because I knew I wouldn't even use it.

This is the stuff I brought home. There was some spinach and lettuce and broccoli and a delightful tomato. But the stars were the strawberries. So fresh and delicious. Loved them!

 Okay, that's it. Didn't cook a damned thing. But since I have all this space and haven't posted in forever, I will show you my non-sedentary home improvements. First of all, the bathroom.

The bathroom used to open to a beautiful view of the toilet with a bunch of tile that chopped up this already small room into tiny pieces. 

Now, the potty is discreetly tucked behind the shower, the vanity is stunning and the glass walled shower opened the hell out of the place!

I have to say the M.F. Goodwin & Company is absolutely amazing.

 Now as far as the yard goes. You may remember how much I have always hated this shrubbery~

Good Lord, it just took over the whole front of the house.

This bed I just cut back. No biggie...

This is the showpiece. Shawn assures me that I will be able to climb those tomato plants like beanstalks (the magical kind) in no time at all. 

And I have lots of basil.

Because basil is the best. 

So there will be lots of tomatoes, basil, eggplants, cukes, peppers, zucchini and lettuce (not shown because I just planted the lettuce and zucchini yesterday) and I will be getting pea pods at some point. 

 This is my bed of weeds according to Shawn and my friend Farmer Brian. It is supposed to be wildflowers from this place my mom loves in Texas, but they assure me that this is shameful and should be eradicated. We shall see what happens here. I will post farm pics as well as farm share pics until I lose interest and it all turns to dust!

See you in a few days!