There's No Place Like Home

One of my biggest fears is natural disasters. I'm especially afraid of tornadoes. As I write this, I'm sitting in my basement, all bloody.

I came home from work today with the hope of taking a nap. I'm exhausted for a variety of reasons - work, PMS, not getting enough sleep because our weather alarm kept going off last night. I spent a good chunk of the night in the bathroom with the window open - listening for a calm before a train sound.

Tonight, I just wanted to sleep. It was rainy today, but it was also sunny! As soon as I turned on the TV to see if Barack Obama had picked a running mate, Derek said it would be like this:

Take cover if you live in Indiana, and hey Erin, in Maineville - get yourself and your cats into your basement. NOW!

Of course, I obliged.

If you know cats, you know that herding them is an exercise in futility. One cat is pretty easy to get into the basement, two is so-so, but three is a bloody mess. Cleo has asthma, so she was all - do I really have to move out of my bed? It's so inconvenient... Indy is a fraidy-cat, so when he saw the basement door, flashes of last night entered his mind, and he started crying. (At least he didn't pee on me like he did last night).

Then there was Agile Allie. Man, does she need a pedicure! After she wriggled her way free and escaped my grip the first time, I found her, tried to wrap her up in my shirt, but she still managed to reach around and get me good.

I finally made it to the basement, our power is still on (hence the wireless connection to blogger), the TV has switched from weather to Extra, and the kitties are starting to look like they'll forgive me.

After the storm's blown over, I'm going to pour myself a glass of wine, give the kitties some Whiska Lickens treats as a bribe to love me again, and get out the hydrogen peroxide and bandaids to treat all the puncture wounds on my back and shoulders.

I'm a little tired of this weather!

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes

I've been busy. Very, very busy. Something, God knows what, motivated me to plant a gazillion tomato and vegetable seeds this year. And after a couple months, I had to do something with ALL OF THEM... The seed tray above is just one tray of seedlings. Imagine me having FIVE of the same, all full of plants ready to be transplanted! Every year, around the same time (dark, dreary January), I find myself craving a fresh tomato. About that same time, I start receiving Seed Catalogs from the Marketing Wonders of the World. My favorite is from Burpee. Every year, new varieties of georgous plants appear in the first few pages. Some of them are tomatoes. The new one that caught my eye this year was Italian Ice. I love tiny, bite-sized tomatoes, and this one sounded like heaven! And it's white - I've never seen a white tomato! I had to have it.

Another thing that I had to do this year was buy disease-resistant seeds. I've been using the same plot of land, year after year, to grow tomatoes. You're not supposed to do that... I said to myself - I'll just put fresh topsoil, compost and manure (yes, cow poop) on the plot. That didn't work either. For the last few years, my tomato plants developed diseases beyond my control. This year is going to be different. Almost all of my tomato plants are highly disease-resistant. Not critter-resistant. That's an entirely other pain in my bum.

All of this to say that I over-bought with the seeds. I think I ended up with about 13 different types of tomato plants, onion, herb, eggplant, pepper and some flower seeds. My teeny greenhouse was overflowing with seedlings! This picture doesn't even do justice to the quantity of plants that overtook my deck, which is not pictured. Roman is threatening an intervention if I don't control my obsession soon.

There's something so rewarding, though, about a teeny-tiny seed developing into a ginormous plant with enough fruit to feed a family. The idea of that keeps me growing these things year after year. It's soothing to play in the dirt and see what grows.

This year, though, I wanted to do something special with my plants. In a couple days, I'll post what I did. Now, however, I have to get ready to meet friends for dinner.

I'm Getting A Dutch/French Oven.

I just need help picking a color. I have a favorite, but I'm afraid it may be dated in a couple years. Somehow, I think all the color options may be dated in a couple years.

A ton of recipes I've read call for cooking on the stovetop then moving the food into the oven. I have no tool that can accommodate these recipes. The straw that broke my back came a week & a half ago while trying to make baked beans from scratch. The recipe said it made four servings, so I tripled it. Now... dry beans expand. A LOT. I ended up using three of my Corningware dishes, and I had to tend to the beans very frequently to make sure they stayed moist in the oven.

According to Cook's Illustrated, the best one to get is Le Creuset - the 7.25 quart one. They're pricy, but from the reviews I've seen, they'll outlast me.

So now, the biggest decision of all... COLOR. Cast your votes on the following:



BLACK









CARIBBEAN







CHERRY RED









CHESTNUT








COBALT







DIJON









DUNE








FLAME








KIWI





Ok. Vote!

Hello, Sprout!

I love Spring. Not only does it mean more exposure to sunlight, but it means the beginning of the growing season: flowers, trees, fresh vegetables. It's a rebirth of everything that went dormant during the winter, including me.

Those of you that know me know that about this time every year (since about 2000), I start a bunch of flowers and vegetables from seed. There's something soooo wonderfully fulfilling about putting one teenie-tiny seed into a peat pellet, watching it sprout, and then reaping the rewards of an entire summer-full of fresh vegetables. From one little seed!

I also plant annuals, including coleus and wave petunias, which start as such tiny little seeds (smaller than a pinpoint) and yet grow into ginormous colorful plants. The petunias are particularly difficult to germinate, but this year, I think I may have discovered the trick... Due to an unseasonable frost last week, I brought my seed trays inside - away from my outdoor mini greenhouse, put them in our half-bath, left the lights on and brought in an additional three-bulb lamp. The seeds LOVED it. Even more seedlings emerged in the small, warm room. So many that I'll be able to transplant them into new little peat pellets to create even more plants!

So seriously, if you want any plants, let me know. I'm going to have more than I can handle. And if you give me a dollar (or more!) for every high-yielding plant, I'll donate it to Give the Gift of Sight.

Picture of the Week

Here's the fam. Those of us that could got together Sunday. The occasion was that my cousin Ben is taking off Wednesday for the Army boot camp. He entered the Reserves last week with the rank of Specialist. He was assigned to the 100th Division Army Band at Ft. Knox. That's him towards the middle left with the Army cap on. Somehow, I do believe that he won't get sent into combat. He and his dad made good arguments to the fact.

Family's important to me. And I think I'm probably the unofficial family photographer. Every time we all get together, we take a group photo, and I think I've trained them all to sit still for me for about two to three pictures. :)

As I've mentioned previously, I love to cook. For this event, I got to make some pork barbecue, corn bread, baked and green beans. Roman made some cookies for desert that were REALLY good.

Everybody had a good time - as we typicaly do when the family gets together.

We all wish Ben the best.

New Cookbook!

I love to cook. I don't have a lot of time to do it, but when I do, I really enjoy it. Most of the time when I cook a meal, it's on the weekends when I have more time. Last weekend, I cooked barbecue pork in my crock-pot because Roman brought me some awesome barbecue sauce from his recent trip to Memphis.

The crock-pot recipes I have feed an army, so we had friends over to help us eat it all (Molly, Jason and Xavier). I also made cornbread for the first time. I was amazes at how easy it was to make! I made it from a recipe out of the cookbook that Molly gave me for Christmas. The book was on my amazon.com wishlist because Jackie recommended it to me. And I LOVE it. I read it periodically and learn more and more about cooking technique. Something I never learned growing up.

I admit that I love reading recipes as much as (or more than) I like to cook. I recently went to Half-Price Books and hit the jackpot. I found Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill cookbook for $10 and Nigella Lawson's book, "Nigella Bites" for $10. I think that both of them are incredibly talented, and I was so excited at my find.

We were visiting family today, and during the drive, I was able to finally read Nigella Bites. I love her style! I've seen her shows on Food Network, but this is the first cookbook of hers I've owned. It definitely won't be the last. Her writing style is so friendly, and her recipes are so easy and yummy-sounding. I can't WAIT to try them!

Simply said, I'd highly recommend this cookbook to anyone who likes to cook. I'll eventually write more about her recipes that I try. But if you're anything like me and are a cookbook junkie more than you even cook, this is one to get!

"I Have the Blue One?"

I had so much fun coloring Easter eggs yesterday with Xavier and his mom & dad (Molly & jason). Anyone that knows Xavier remembers his "blue" phase from about two years ago. No, he wasn't sad, rather everything to him was the color blue!

"What color is that [red] baloon, Xavier?"

"Boo."

"What color is the grass?"

"Boo."

"What color is your daddy's hair?"

Trick question. Daddy doesn't have any hair. But it was still, always to him, boo.

Xavier still likes his blue, and these days, he's added Dash and bowling to his favorite things. So yesterday, it came as no surprise that he really wanted to hold that blue egg before it was dry.

"I have the blue one? I have the blue one? I have the blue one?" he said repeatedly as soon-to-be-four-year-olds will when they think they're not being heard. He got so upset when he was told no and stared so longingly at that egg.

I think he finally got over it and moved on when he saw his mom blow-drying a plastic wrapper around an egg. It was funny to see him with the hair dryer, watching the egg roll all over the table. He laughed and laughed and laughed and finally forgot all about that blue egg.