Monday, August 18, 2008

Great Photos!

Well, I have a dear friend who is a professional photographer and she came over last weekend to do what she calls a "lifestyle shoot" of the boys and their dad - a gift from me for Father's Day.  They came out beautifully!  Wow!  This isn't so much food related, except that she did get some shots of the boys in the garden but I couldn't resist plugging her here.

www.jchaney.com - you can see the pictures under her blog it is the first Sneak Peek.

Sunday, August 17, 2008

A Perfect Sunday Morning

It didn't start out that way.  Both boys woke up on the early side today - 6:15 instead of the usual 6:45 or 7.  The younger one spent his first night in his new room and big boy bed!  Instead of whining and complaining I decided to do something fun with the little monsters.  We made some monkey bread, but I took the easy way out.  I used frozen pizza dough instead of making the dough from scratch (an adventure I took at Christmas time which I will never do again - too much work!).  So I set one kid up with a bowl of buter, the other with a bowl of cinnamon sugar and I rolled little balls of pizza dough.  First we dip a ball in butter, then roll it in sugar, then throw it into a bundt pan.  Bake at 375 for about a half an hour.  Yum!  The boys loved it, and I enjoyed it with my coffee.  I've got to get my camera together so I can start taking pictures, though there's not much left to photograph at this point.

Monday, August 11, 2008

We just returned a few weeks ago from a month long vacation on Cape Cod.  This is an annual journey for our family, one I've been making for every summer for my entire life.  My boys had an especially good time this year.  At 18 months and 3 years they both really enjoyed the beach, which was great since I am WAY pregnant and wasn't up to a lot of chasing after them in super humid weather...and it was SUPER humid!  Like Florida humid.  Yuck!  

I found it a challenge to eat locally while we were there, at least in terms of produce.  We were a bit early in the season for corn and tomatoes and all of that other great local produce that you get on the east coast in August.  So we were relegated to eating Stop N Shop produce, which was disappointing to say the least.  It was hard coming from California where we had been enjoying amazing tomatoes, peaches and berries for weeks.  I also knew that my garden here in California was producing lovely apricots, tomatoes, zucchini, beets, cucumbers, etc and that I was missing it.  Darn!  

The one local product that we got a lot of and really enjoyed was seafood.  It was fun going to the fish pier at 3:00 every afternoon to see the boats come in, then heading to the market there to select our dinner.  We had wonderful scallops and tons of lobster.  Neither boy was up to the challenge of tackling a whole lobster himself, but they both helped me eat the meat, and they ate a ton of clam chowder.  Maybe next year the older one will try his hand at cracking a whole lobster.

I arrived home to a totally over grown garden and baskets upon baskets of zucchini and cucumbers.  I've been pickling every since.  We now have enough pickles to last for a few years...or to give to everyone we know for Christmas!  The tomatoes are still going strong and we're eating lots of salsa (one form in which my husband and both boys will happily eat raw tomatoes).

I love summer!