Soultan...YES you are...Lol! You are more than welcome to look at "My Page". I am Maria. I am in Virginia, USA zone 7. And I LOVE Amaryllises. Haven't you received my seeds yet? It's supposed to have my mailing address there. Now back to the topic... I did some slicing today and boy did it hurt. First mature bulb I repotted for Spring is Dancing Queen with 5 babies attached to it. The biggest one was as big as a golf ball. First I took the whole thing, bulb and soil, out of the pot. No sign of white live roots...TROUBLE. Sure enough after removing all the old soil there was rot and red marks on outer layer of mother bulb and the babies most of all. Poor little things. I cleaned the mommy and it was fine after taking out several layers of scales. The babies are just too sick and suffered the most on this ATTACK. It took me a long while in deciding wether too seperate them or not. Most of them don't have their own roots yet. Should I seperate them and avoid risking the mother to get sick again? Or should I let them be and let the mother nourish them back to health? It was a very hard decision. But as I look at the situation of the bulb, it's where the babies and mother bulb connect that the rot started maybe because they were so close together and that it didn't have enough air circulation to dry it up. So for the best of all, I had to slice the babies from the mother except for one that was growing far from the mother. Now I have four Little Dancing Queens.

Hello, Caroline. Cooking and baking been one of my things since I was a child. My dad walked me through my first baking project, a cake made from a mix, when I was ten. I was twelve, when I made my first apple pie, all on my own. My mom wasn't home at the time. She was astonished, when she walked in and discovered me taking a beautiful apple pie from the oven. This recipe was given to me by a Canadian friend. It was his grandmother's recipe. It makes a lovely presentation, and is inexpensive as company fare. It is a ground pork and onion dinner pie. TOURTIERE Pastry (I really like this pastry) 2 cups white flour 2 tsp. baking powder 1/2-1 tsp. salt (depending on your taste for salt) 1/3 cup butter 1/2 cup vegetable shortening 1/3-1/2 cup cold water l tablespoon vinegar Combine flour, baking powder and salt. Work in the butter and shortening with a pastry cutter. If you don't have a pastry cutter, you can use your fingers. Combine water and vinegar, then lightly stir them into the flour. Sprinkle your dough with flour, then knead it for one minute Divide dough into two balls, wrap in plastic, and chill for 30 minutes or more. To use, roll out each half of your dough, separately, on floured board and cut to fit the size of your pie plate. (Invert your plate over the rolled dough and cut two circles an inch larger in diameter.) I use a 9" pie plate. Meat filling: 1-3/4s pounds ground pork 2 medium onoins, chopped 1 clove garlic, minced 1 cup water 1 tsp. salt 1 tsp. dry mustard 3/4s tsp. sage or savory 1/2 tsp. thyme 1/4 tsp. black pepper 1/4 tsp. ground nutmeg 1-1/2 tablesppons white flour egg glaze: 1 egg white, slightly beaten with 1 tablespoon water. Cook ground pork in a large frying pan until it loses pink color. Push meat to the side, or temporarily remove from pan, so you can saute onion and garlic. Drain off fat. Add water, salt, mustard and seasonings to combined meat, onion and garlic mixture. Cover and simmer 15-20 minutes. Sprinkle with your 1-1/2 tablespoons of flour, sift it first so it won't lump up, and simmer for about 3 minutes until mixture thickens a bit. Fill your pastry lined pie plate with meat mixture. Cover top with your extra sheet of pastry. Flute/seal edges, cut three 1" steam slits across the top, and brush egg glaze over the top so that it will brown nicely. Bake at 400 degrees (F) for 20 minutes, until browned. Allow to cool for about ten minutes before serving. Sometimes I add some chopped mushrooms to the mix. Lorna

Heck, I don't turn up my nose at any of them, I figure there's always the possibility that I'll be pleasantly surprised, even by a site that's disappointed me before. I was thinking of these with chili... Annie

IMO they look fabulous and I'm certain they taste far better than anything off the shelf. I almost always use ground oats to make a more "bread like" (for lack of a better term) texture and to prevent oily and greasy "flat" doughy cookies and quick breads etc. Next time put them into a coffee grinder and pulse them into a powder which may be what was called for in the original recipe. Often times when people copy and pass down recipes they leave out little details such as this. If you have never tried turkish pistachios and really want to go for the wow factor you should try to get your hands on some of them next time. They have a distinctly different taste and are usually what was available when many of these recipes were created. Commercially available CA are new product and really don't taste the same. Pistachios were also reserved for royalty and that is where the term "caught red handed" came from as they were colored solely for the purpose of preventing the commoners from enjoying them.