We tried mango and coconut -- the latter was the favorite. By the way, canned mangoes are quickly surpassing their fresh counterparts in my estimation. They're guaranteed ripe, they taste identical to fresh, and they keep for months on the shelf. Any time you want a mango, pop open a can and fish out a half. Not fresh or local, but so gratifying when you need an instant hit of the tropics in a recipe.
Aside from lots of our friends having to recover from the awful storm yesterday...today is perfect. We were lucky enough to keep our power, and as you know already from Tara's posts to Twitter and Flickr, we lost half of the roof on our two story barn. It got downright scary for about five minutes yesterday, so I have no problem chilling out today and taking it easy.
Here's how the day has shaped up so far...
- Friends over for a lunch BBQ
- Swimming with the boy
- Cold drinks in my Adirondack chairs while sitting in the sun
....and we will be ending the day by going to see The Dark Knight. Does it get better? In case anyone was still wondering, no...no I will not be moving back to NJ anytime soon. :)
Remember my post in April expressing inappropriate love for my mandoline? Now I think I love it even more.
I entered the photo above in the 7 Nights foodie photo contest -- and I'm one of the finalists! Go vote:
http://www.7dvt.com/hotshots-finalists
You know which photo is mine...
Trevor and I played a rousing game of extreme pick-up sticks the other day. In extreme pick-up sticks, you're allowed to attempt to startle the other player with yells or make them laugh and shake the sticks.
The set was from the dollar store and the instructions on the package didn't match the set. It said that green sticks were worth ten points, but there were no green sticks. Red sticks were worth three points, but every stick had a red stripe on it. We made up our own scoring and proceeded to scream and laugh through three games. Then it got out of hand and the sticks became poking devices, which is when we were shut down by the feds.
When we picked up baby Norrin from a nearby farm, we asked for a male cat (having heard that two females will fight). The farm owner took a cursory look at Norrin's rear end and pronounced him a male, and for the six months since then, we've been calling Norrin "him."
We started to get suspicious around the time that Miley went into heat. Norrin copied all of her wailing and writhing -- albeit less enthusiastically. And when we brought them to get fixed last month, the verdict was clear: two girls.
Now that we've been calling Norrin by male pronouns for several months, it's hard to think of him as female. So we've continued to say "him." I asked Norrin and he doesn't mind.
This is one day's harvest from the garden. Who can eat this much lettuce in a day? We're trying.
The blueberries and raspberries were part of a fruit salad for the Isle La Motte Annual Flotilla picnic. The cucumbers turned out to be fairly bitter. This is apparently a well-known problem and especially common in Burpee Picklers, the variety we planted. The bitterness can be peeled off with the skin or pickled out. I hear that Dave has a pickling recipe all picked out.
Today, the zucchini (plus others from subsequent days) is going to make it into a zucchini pie.