G R O W Y O U R W I N G S

Can I just say how wonderful it is to wake up in your own bed and having NOTHING scheduled for the day?

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So far today all I've done is read, cleaned the kitchen and made a bunch of stuff using our bi-weekly delivery of organic produce and (best of all!) our own homegrown vegetables from our garden.

It was totally awesome to go out to the garden and pull a head of lettuce to make our lunchtime salads.   It was a gorgeous head of purple lettuce that I combined with the organic red leaf lettuce that was delivered yesterday.   

Earlier today I made fresh mayo-less cole slaw from the cabbage, carrots, garlic, and red onion.   I tweeked the recipe a bit; the dressing tasted yummy!  It's marinating for 4 hours.  Can't wait to taste it.

I'm making my ginger liquor for my homemade ginger ale.

And later today or early tomorrow I will be heading off to our local New Seasons market to grocery shop.  Normally I *hate* grocery shopping, but I *love* New Seasons.  Have to be very careful about the cost as it's high-priced, but the fresh produce and meat departments (and flower department) are wonderful!

Man is it good to get back to a somewhat normal weekend.  The past 4-5 weeks have been a nightmare of over-activity.  75% of it has been wonderful due to multiple graduations and birthdays and other celebrations.   But my project work is overflowing, I'm about 300% booked and drowning in it.   And having my mother injure herself badly in early June significantly impacted all the family member's free time (which translates to no free time).   Good news is that she is recovering pretty quickly, considering.   And is now spending more and more time without someone with her 24x7.

Who knows I might even have the creative energy to go through my 4 weeks worth of backlogged photos.  

Plus I have to get back to going through all my old SPN con photos to pick out what I want folks to sign at Vancon - which is just under 2 months away.   Can't wait!

These are so good!

Pumpkin Cupcakes (source)

( recipe under the cut... )

Side Note:  Must be the time o'year because I'm breaking out all my old artisan breadmaking books.  I've got some bread dough rising right now to make garlic bread to go with homemade spaghetti sauce.

 I've got this great bread book that was a gift from a cousin of mine.  The Barmy Bread book.  It's this older hippy-dippy bread making book from the 70s or so.  When my cousin (my mother's generation) found out I loved making bread, she gave me me this book plus it's "sequel."  This was before the explosion of artisan bread making books we have today.  I just looked online and I guess the book must be way out of print (not surprising, it's a very unassuming, simple book.)  But Amazon does have used versions available.