Good morning.... Delightful to see photos of Miss Mae and company this morning! Everyone is looking so happy! All that waiting rewarded. Really nice to see the light in the eyes and the beaming smiles after the year that you all have had. The little one is so serious! lol Reminds me of our DD when she was born who had a serious look on her face in many photos. She looks like she is deep in thought. Look forward to hearing about your homecoming when you are rested Gardenbug. :-) Julie...glad to hear you are getting busy with the garden. Sounds like you are going to have a great vegetable garden this year. Sorry to hear DD has knotweed to deal with. I guess I will think of that next time I am complaining about the minor weeds in my garden. Mary, what cuties! lol Very enjoyable story about Betty and Henny. My favorite is the amber colored one. .... Congrats to Annie on having her braces removed. I bet she is gorgeous! Marian...your Tommy is just so funny. I can just imagine the conversation he had with you. I wonder where cats have developed this dislike of water? The big cats in the wild have to put up with rain and I've seen some photos of tigers swimming. [g] A fox sighting! No chance of me seeing any of those in my semi-urban location. Lucky you! Saucy...that was the name of the book I was trying to come up with! No, I haven't read it. I have seen the title at the library and left it on the shelf thinking I might have to face the reality of how much my home grown vegetable crops actually cost me. I prefer fantasy over reality much of the time. lol You're having a vegetable garden this year, aren't you? ..... I discovered a patch of Poison Ivy the other day too. I thought we got rid of it last year. I continue to try to get rid of a weedy Campanula that is in the garden too and it just keeps coming back. .... We can't work fast enough here either. I was out looking around yesterday and I'm falling behind. .... Congrats on another new swarm of bees! I think you are really good at this bee keeping thing. :-) Woody...I was just checking the brick edge around our sitting area and it is disappearing under the grass. I have tried to cut corners I guess and in the end my efforts have been wasted. So you can consider that as you work hard installing your edging right. :-) Kathy...I love that Penstemon. I bought a similar one last year called 'Pike's Peak Purple'. It is coming up looking fine and can't wait to see it bloom. Your blue is so pretty, I will have to look for that one too. As far as I'm concerned, you don't have to ration the photos you post. I love to see some every time you post. I'm in a lull in our garden right now and not caught up with mulching and cleaning so photos are in short supply. When you have as successful a garden season as you are having, it would be such a waste not to take a gazillion photos!! .... Oh, and so sorry to hear about Dodger's disappointing news about Manny. I am hoping that the rest of the team can rise to the occasion. It would serve Manny right, for them to get along fine without him! Woody and Kathy....I have the same kind of soaker hoses. Sears from recycled tires, I think. Plus the quick connect on all my hoses. What did we do before those were invented!? It sounds like you both are doing about what I have been doing with mine. I leave mine on for hours though Kathy in the heat of summer. Could I really get away with less? It never looks like they are getting enough water. I wish I could fill 100ft at a time Woody, that would cut my efforts in half. Chelone...Hurry it up willya! I'm waiting for work on the curtains to begin, so the tables have to get finished tout de suite! Gee, if 12 hour days would just stop interfering. :-) Ok...I need to cut this short too. I'm missing the FB defectors too. :-) Drema...very sorry to hear about dreaded deer in the garden and a woodchuck too? Horrible! Looking for a visit from Sue with news of how the renovating is going. Will check back later I'm sure... pm2 'Avalanche' Lilac, chose a rainy day to open and I took a photo between drops....

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY Kathleen and Joe. I'd love the salad and the cake. I really enjoy your blog too, lovely table settings, food and a glimpse of your family. Do you remember several years ago, before you started your blog, posting a simple spinach gratin (you might not have called it a gratin) on GB? You might have just posted what you did as opposed to a more formal recipe, but I remember trying it and we loved it. All I can remember is chopped spinach and egg, and that I subbed baby chard for the spinach. Several computer crashes and failed searches for it in the GB recipe search, have left me thinking I can never make it again. If you have any clues for me I would really appreciate it. Last night I used the suggestion that Metaxa posted on the Montreal Steak Seasoning thread and mixed some MSS with about a tablespoon of soy sauce, a tablespoon of oil, and added a tablespoon of lemon juice and put it on two shoulder lamb chops, leaving them covered on the counter for about an hour before I grilled them. I also grilled zucchini planks and pear wedges, separately and made a simple tossed salad with a Sherry vinaigrette and that was dinner. Everything was good. Lee

Ann_t, I've considered it but it isn't worth it for us. The Costcos are not close to us and driving to areas I don't normally visit aren't worth my time/energy/gas. I enjoy cooking but not every day. Our budget is generous for going out and that's what I most enjoy. I LOVE chicken fried steak! But it is possibly the worst thing in the world for you, LOL. Restaurant versions are okay, but The Real Thing is dynamite. I wrote up my mother's method one day, when I was doing a restaurant review of a cafe that did a decent chicken-fried steak we liked. My younger friends and family have never had this recipe, so I included it in my email as a humorous touch. BTW, I do not claim this is an authentic Southern Recipe. This is just how my JapAm mother made it when we were growing up in Chicago, after she learned it from the Mississippi AfrAms in our neighborhood: *The Traditional (e.g., home-cooked) Chicken Fried Steak Yes, this is another thing my Japanese-American mother learned to make from Southerners (Mississippians transplanted to Chicago, hence our familys love of sweet cornbread and really good fried chicken from the legendary Harolds in Chicago [you can look up Harolds Chicken in Wiki]). It can be eaten for dinner or breakfast. Or lunch. Or....well, you get the idea. Like most Southern food, it goes best with biscuits. Real biscuits, the kind made with white lard and even whiter soft wheat flour, rolled and cut with a biscuit cutter (what do you mean, youve never seen a biscuit cutter?!?) and served hot out of the oven with lots of butterc. Definitely not the fake Pillsbury-in-a-can stuff. To the day she died (at age 84), my mothers idea of heaven would have included a hot biscuit dripping with butter. Start with decent-sized pieces of beef, well trimmed of fat. Bottom round is ideal. The mechanically tenderized "cube steak" is sheer laziness and has the wrong texture. Traditionally the pieces of bottom round meat are pounded thin with the edge of a heavy china plate (okay, my mother did use a traditional meat mallet instead). Never, under any circumstances, do you use a wet batter. Never, ever! The egg and the flour do not mix together promiscuously in a bowl; this is a worse heresy than a mechanically tenderized steak. As you are pounding the steak pieces thin, you sprinkle them generously with seasoned flour. The flour, up to a cup or more, is pounded into each steak. "Seasoned", BTW, means salt and pepper. Thats it, no garlic (powder) or onion (same). Just lots of the evil white Mortons. Heres where you get a split between the thin batter-fried and the thick batter-fired recipes. My mother was a thin batter advocate, so she fried the steak after pounding it with the flour. The opposing camp sets out a beaten egg and a pan of more seasoned flour. The steak is dipped in egg and then in flour again, making a thicker batter coating. Either way you do it, next you fry the bacon remember I said there was another whole level to this dish? The bacon doesnt actually appear anywhere else in the recipe, so you probably just nosh on the crispy strips which youve fished out of all that bacon-y, salty, greasy artery-clogging saturated rendered fat. If you happen to have rendered bacon fat on hand, why are you reading this recipe? You already know how to make this. While youre chewing and swallowing bacon, you fry the steaks really crisp in the bacon grease. This is where most restaurants fail. Its bad enough they use some kind of healthy polyunsaturated oil but to make things worse, they dont cook it long enough to really get it dark brown. Drain them on newspaper in a warm oven, while you toss leftover flour into the pan to soak up the bacon grease of course you dont drain any of the fat out, why would you do something so silly when thats where all the flavor is stirring and scraping for a few minutes to cook the flour. Then in goes the evaporated milk whole milk, not that ridiculous reduced fat stuff just enough to make a thick gravy that holds in nice clumps on the spoon. Not glue-y, just very thick. Some people make a thin gravy, but not in our house. Oh, and more pepper, too. Serve with two fried eggs. Or maybe three. Or better yet, eggs and biscuits so you can chase all that yummy gravy around the plate to sop up every bit. Real biscuits, the kind made with white lard and even whiter soft wheat flour, rolled and cut with a biscuit cutter (what do you mean, youve never seen a biscuit cutter?!?) and served hot out of the oven with lots of butter handy. After that, you go clear out an entire field of cotton, or chop down every tree in the forest, for the next eight hours straight (as youve already worked five hours before lunch). The discovery of statins to lower cholesterol is obviously Gods way of saying that every American has a right to copious quantities of salt, fat, and cream, three times a day. Also sugar, but that goes into the coffee, tea, and peach cobbler.

The paint color on the lower half of the wall is just a very light lavender. The upper half is more purple. I actually mixed the lavender myself, by adding a little of the purple paint to some white paint. The fake tile (sheet vinyl) floor came from Linoleum City in Los Angeles. I looked and looked and looked for that vinyl and Linoleum City is the only place that sells it. I called a salesman there and asked about it. He said they had a unique contract with Tarkett (I think) to produce this product and he didn't think it was sold anywhere else in the country. Their number one client is Hollywood. Set-building people buy it by the roll to use on the sets. The sheet vinyl creates the look of early 20 Century hex tile floor in a jiffy. :) The light fixtures and medicine chest are reproductions. The light fixtures came from Rejunvenation Hardware and the medicine chest came from Van Dykes Restoration hardware. All these years of writing about old houses and I finally got to use some of the resources I've been writing about. Thanks for all the nice comments. Rose Here is a link that might be useful: linoleum city link