I too am grateful for everyone on this forum, I have learned so much and have loved seeing everyone's beautiful roses. I did finally make it to Chamblees and came home with 2 DA, Evelyn and Golden celebration. I am very excited to watch them grow and I decided also on a SDLM and a pink Don Juan along with some cl pinkies. I have grown roses for years but didn't pay attention to names etc....just picked what was pretty to me. Now that I'm older I am interested in learning more about roses and this forum is the place to be for that! Everyone is so knowledgable and has great advice. I will admit I fell victim to the beautiful DA catalog, my husband calls it my rose porn :), but I am glad I was able to learn about other roses and open my mind to other choices. I do hope I love my DA's and am already thinking of other roses I want for next year. Thanks everyone for sharing all your pics and advice!

The first food I remember making was Roly-Polies when I was about four. It wasn't until about a year or two ago that my cousin discovered this snapshot of me making them. I'd roll out the scraps from my mother's pie crust between two sheets of waxed paper. Then I'd spread it with peanut butter and cinnamon/sugar, roll it up, slice, and put on a cookie sheet for my mom to bake. As an only child, I was my mom's sous chef (tipping beans, whipping cream, decorating cookies, etc.) and I learned a step at a time, always thinking it was fun. All the women in our family used to congregate at my aunt's house in the summer for a week or two of canning and freezing vast amounts of food for the year. I started as a tomato and peach skin peeler. My dad and two uncles had boats so cleaning fish and picking crabs was the beginning of my seafood cooking education. My friends and I used to make little stoves out of potato chip cans and coat hangers and have simple cookouts on them. We'd also wrap potatoes in clay and roast them in a bonfire while we were ice skating and things like that. My cooking skills progressed so that when my father was killed when I was 12 and my mother went to work full-time, I made most of the dinners for us. That's when I started experimenting with different kinds of soups and stews that could be heated up and eaten at any time. When I was 16, I acquired a stepfather who was a wonderful cook (although a little heavy on weird stuff like souse and blood pudding that I'd never seen made before). Around then, one of the grocery stores offered a 12-volume set of the Woman's Day Encyclopedia of Cookery and WOW, did my culinary adventures shift into high gear! We'd have a dinner of dishes from Denmark, followed by English jam tarts the next week. I was fortunate to have a roommate for my first college apartment who knew how to cook just about anything. While our classmates were eating ramen noodles and hot dogs, we were having tasty meals on the same budget. We also used to prepare venison and other game dinners for hunters at a set price per head, which was our first commercial cooking venture. So that's my youthful culinary history. Cooking has always seemed to be interwoven with other activities in my life but rarely played a major role in it.

Thanks, everyone. Elery just loves the location, the pond, and the fact that he can't see any cows from his front window, LOL. I told him that a house can be fixed, but a location cannot, so remodeling it is. Dcarch, visit anytime. (grin) Let me know when you're going to be in Michigan and I'll give you directions... Cathy, that goes for you too, but if you're going to help remodel I have just a couple of rules. No color, neutrals and wood only, and no useless decorative crap for me to dust! The front room finally has my tall ceilings and lots of windows, so I intend to keep some empty space in there, while Elery is already planning on filling the built in shelves with "stuff". I suggested putting doors on them so I don't have to see anything on the shelves, but I don't think he's going for it. (sigh) I'm going to look at kitchen cabinets Friday, we've been looking and frankly, no matter who builds them, they all look pretty much the same to me, so I'm going with well-built, I guess. I don't want "rustic" as I don't think my kitchen needs to resemble my barn, but that's as far as I've gotten. Well, I actually am leaning toward antique white, but Elery wants woodtones. I do get double ovens, replacing the current wall oven, and the ovens are electric with a gas cooktop, so it's the best of both worlds, I think. Ann T, it IS perfect that it adjoins the farm and it adds 24 acres, so I could feasibly fence off about 10 more acres of pasture if I can get some of those darned Christmas trees out of there. Peppi suggested contacting local contractors and telling them I have mature trees, so that, along with the cut-your-own tree project, might get rid of some. I think I'll teach The Princess and Her Brother how to make evergreen wreaths and garlands, they could maybe make a few bucks selling some of those. Of course, Elery already has some of the property "staked out" for deer hunting, so I can't interfere with that. Tricia, unfortunately, unless I fence the front yard, I won't be able to see Copenhagen, but at least I can walk up the path a few hundred yards, open the gate and I'll be right in HIS front yard, i.e. in the pasture. This is the view from the living room window and, coincidentally, from the kitchen window: Annie

While I've been baking bread and challah (brioche type dough) all my life, the only yeast pastries I've made often are hamentashen in a sweet version of my mother's challah recipe. Last week, I had this sudden thought, "Pumpkin babka!" This has been a great year for pumpkins. So instead of figuring it out myself, I searched for recipes on the 'net, and found a chocolate with pumpkin dough, and one more like what I'd had in mind, which was pumpkin-pecan filling in a rich, soft dough. I usually have great results with blog recipes, and I was sleep deprived, so even though I reviewed the ingredients before saving the recipe, I didn't actually read them through for quality. BIG mistake! I don't know if it's meant to be a sabotage (the comments were useless, only discussing the pretty pictures in the post). It sort of reads, to my bread self like it was partially scalled with oopsies. I've done that scaling a recipe for myself in my head, without writing it down when I was tired. I don't know, for sure, but looking back, it also doesn't match the instructions in the demonstration. It's, um, whack! There were plenty of places where I had warning signs and should have stopped and read it over and quit, but I didn't. I was tired beyond thought. When I started the first step, and it said 2 1/2 TBSP yeast to 3 -4 cups flour, I should have stopped. I just figured she meant teaspoons, and adjusted accordingly. Then I read the gigantic amound of sugar and salt. I always adjust those to taste anyway, so I kept going. When it said 8 eggs and half a pound of butter, I just figured she knew something I needed to learn. Um. No. The result, as you who bake know, was a glutinous cake batter. I added about a cup of flour and ran it with the dough hook and let it "rise" (not that any rising was happening). Good thing I've learned so much about high hydration baking. I poured it out onto the baking mat. There was enough gluten development at this point that it didn't spill away, just made a stable lake. Much as I would have liked to use my big steel bench scraper, one can't on silicone, but a big bunch of cast flour on it, scrape up some goop with the small plastic bench scraper and push it over, led to a more stable mound. Still too soft for even a stretch and fold, but holding its shape as a mound. I covered and let it rise. And it did! And when I heavily dusted with more flour, it was manageable and rolled. It was too soft to twist nicely, but enough so that the middle has a nice distribution. You can't see the layers, though. The dough was still too soft and smushed together. And it was so soft that the outside was almost burning before the inside was done, and the corners were dry because of that. The filing was good. That's a keeper. So is the butteriness of the dough. The end result was fine eating, though not exquisite. I think if I added a little extra butter to the hamentashen dough it would be more like what one needs, and I think more filling proportionate to the dough. I had been surprised that it didn't call for toasting the pecans, but they came out great from raw. Because of the restriction I put on the excess sugar, it's really good with cranberry sauce! While chatting, i mentioned it to the Thanksgiving cousin, and that I'd put the second loaf in the freezer. She asked me to bring it, but I don't know if anyone ate any. At least I don't have to find someone to feed it to! Which is why one tests recipes ahead. I also tried to make the handkerchielf rolls. I don't think there's any saving that one. I mean, they're rolls but they have a kind of gummy mouth feel, and that's after I overbaked them a little! Nasty. The recipe was designed to sell the baking dish. I'm thinking I could rescue them with custard. Pumpkin bread pudding is in the offing. Maybe with a cranberry hard sauce. The worst breads make the best bread puddings!