I'm back from dinner. It was great visiting with our snowbird friends and we talked for over two hours. We were neighbors when we both lived in the boonies and they moved back to Ohio shortly after we moved. We went on a cruise together with others from the neighborhood and had so much fun with them once. So now we e-mail and get together once a year :-( Dinner--not so good. I ordered the fettucini alfredo with bacon-wrapped sea scallops. The salad that came with it was very good,the scallops cooked just right but the alfredo was disappointing, to say the least. It was a big plate of angel hair pasta with a huge glob of alfredo sauce out of a jar. Ick, ick, ick! What could be easier than alfredo sauce? It's just a little butter, cream, garlic and lots of parmesan. They had little rolls that came with the salad that looked a little like those biscuits at Red Lobster, but were floury and dry. Now I remember why we don't like to eat out. Harry had fried oysters, baked sweet potato and hush puppies. He said on the way home it wasn't very good, but if it's dinner time I swear that man would eat plastic! Guess we won't be eating there again any time soon!

sleevendog, your meals always look fresh and healthy, but those tomatoes, yum. I'm just waiting for mine.... John, my single year of high school French class 53 years ago is not serving me well, it took me a little time to puzzle through that menu, LOL. The only bao I've ever had was frozen from the freezer section of a local grocery, that one looks much nicer and fluffier. Jasdip, I hope it's cooled off a bit there. Here it was nice for a couple of days, now it's back up to above 90F tomorrow. In Michigan in June!!! It's just not supposed to happen, ugh. And yet, I still cook. (grin) Today we had peanut butter chicken with rice and roasted asparagus, and strawberry shortcake for dessert with what are probably the last berries this year as the groundhogs keep eating them the minute they get at all red. We've been having salads regularly because I had a lot of various leaves in a raised bed, until the same blasted groundhog decided to just chew on everything. It wasn't actually eaten, just nibbled, walked upon and chewed to pieces, so it seems I'll have to buy my leaves until I can trap the whistle pig. It's also burrowing under the foundation of the house, so it's got to go. Anyway, other meals were some sauteed shrimp with more asparagus and some chickpea salad: Southern style blackberry cobbler with ice cream: Amanda's lunch of a cheese omelette, some gluten free toast and fresh strawberries on a day when she was here visiting: Salmon patties and air fryer potato slices, with some more asparagus. Oddly, nothing seems to want the asparagus, but it's nearing the end of the season for that. Biscuits for breakfast, baked in a "pone" instead of individual biscuits, Elery made these and we had them with eggs. A nicely rare high heat roasted sirloin tip, sliced on the slicer for sandwiches: Panini made from the above beef.... Penne with home canned tomato sauce and garlic bread: I picked some broccolini and "Fioretto" cauliflower from the garden, the purple Fioretto is very colorful and tastes more like cabbage than cauliflower. We will process meat chickens in the next couple of weeks, so I'm trying to make more freezer room, that seems like a constant endeavor. I had the "leaf" fat from the pig we got from a neighbor and so rendered two "almost" pints of lard: I know there were others, but I sure don't remember what! Annie

Ooh ohh, I get to have leftovers from last night's dinner: Garlicky Chicken with Lemon-Anchovy Sauce (NYT). Omg, just divine. It's a Melissa Clark recipe with a 5-star rating and almost 11,000 votes. It's so quick and simple, how can it be so good with such depth of flavor? Mine looked just like the photo. Anchovies are really most amazing. I use fish sauce a lot in most of my savory dishes, but this was the first time I tossed 5 anchovy fillets into the pan with my chicken thighs. They're miraculous. And smashing the garlic resulted in sweet creamy garlic.

I started making a big pot of soup with one of the beloved helpers many days ago. I got too tired to finish it and thought to toss the veg and star over today with two of them. It was all perfectly fine. Maybe a little dry at the top of the container, but you'd think they were prepped yesterday. So I put the container of royal corona beans which had been soaked for a full day in water, then in packaged beef broth in the fridge all this time. I forgot about the salt in the broth. The beans are technically cooked now, but didn't soften. Anyway, I started by boiling them in the 4 qt. pot, which was on the stove clean, to start them cooking and making sure that the broth was okay after sitting. By the time I'd chopped up the bits of other veg which had been cleaned only, I was not thinking about the big pot and giant cabbage, but that my 8+ cups of veg would fit in the broth and bean pot. I just dumped them in. A couple fennel with stalks and fronds, three red and three yellow beets, a couple pf leeks, white and green up to the fibrous part, a couple of black radishes and some water. The beef broth had plenty of flavor beyond the salt. I'll add spices while reheating if I feel like it. Lunch was bi-color sweet corn on the cob, artichoke with a sour pickle sauce, cot-on-candy apricots and gingerbread. And one of the beloveds warmed up a serving of M&C from the freezer. But the picture is the soup. It looks the same now, but cookeder.