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!

Oh man, I'm behind again. I really love John's yogurt bottle, though, LOL. I've been super busy here, mostly with gardening. I've made my way through a bushel of poblano peppers, all of a sudden they were happy. I took a half bushel to the food pantry, gave a 5 gallon bucket to the neighbor and then began roasting/peeling/freezing for future chilies rellenos. Also got a bushel of mixed Anaheim and Pasilla and dried about half of those, then put a tray of chopped red habaneros in the freezer for future Habanero Gold Jelly. I've canned tomato sauce and salsa and catsup and Sharon's chile sauce and I'm officially over tomatoes, even though I still have this in the backyard. Again, no takers so they will go to the food pantry. So many people here have their own gardens and fruit trees and by the end of the summer everyone has garden burnout, I guess. I've also been wading my way through the peaches, Elery and I picked 3 bushels before we both gave up and said the rest could fall on the ground. I tried hard to give them away, peaches are $60 a bushel here, but they are clingstones and no one wants to mess with them, so no takers. I froze 18 quarts, made some peach butter and peach cobbler and peach crumble bars and I'm almost done with them. In the meantime, I have actually been cooking. I made black bean sheet pan tacos last night along with queso fundido: Tonight it was country style pork ribs with roasted golden beets and kale from the garden. The Princess was home and came for breakfast and she wanted crepes with cream cheese filling and blueberry topping, and it was so. She is the Princess after all. I made burgers with our homegrown beef and roasted potatoes with fingerlings from the garden as well as a salad with everything I could find that was still crunchy in the fridge: Chicken gyros which were just OK: A chilies relleno casserole which I wasn't optimistic about but it turned out to be really good: Bratwurst with potatoes from the garden, homemade sauerkraut and some cheese bread from a small local bakery: I made apple sauce and apple butter with some MacIntosh apples I got from a neighbor in exchange for some of my Red Delicious. They were very dark red and even were red in the center and they made awesome sauce and apple butter. I've never seen Macs go red inside, though. And, since we got our first frost a couple of days ago, I also had a bucket of sweet peppers to use, we picked them all before they froze. I dehydrated two quarts of them and put 24 in the freezer for future stuffed peppers: My next project? Cutting an 18 pound cushaw into bakable pieces, then packaging the puree for pies. They have become a favorite with several family members, and I only planted one plant. I got 3 squash, one was chewed by something, we got this one and one more about half this size. I'm sure I won't need any more, that should be about 20 pies, LOL. The garden is winding down, I still have to deal with the kale and have 3 tubs of leeks in the garage that need to be dehydrated. It's cooling off and although we are officially in drought conditions it seems better than when it was 90F for far too many days. I'll be planting garlic in the next couple of weeks, a sure sign of fall. Annie

It was my birthday on Thursday, and DD asked what I wanted for my birthday dinner. Lamb radiatore, I said. This is a dish that I ordered all the time at our favorite local Italian eatery, until they cruelly discontinued it, never to reappear again. This keeps happening to me. Three years ago our local brewery dropped their “Luscious Lupilin” beer, that I’ve been drinking for a decade, and have refused to restore it, no matter how much I whine and wheedle. My radiatore has gone the same sad way. This is hard. I’m old, and don’t like change. DD questioned me about the dish. We decided to use half lamb, half pork, and to use ground meat rather than hand chopping. Plenty of umami from anchovies and suchlike, not too much tomato, long slow cooking, and radiatore pasta bought from that same eatery’s little market. It was almost the same as my long lamented dish, and the next day, a bit of heavy cream into the leftovers closed the gap. Served with a radicchio salad, carmelized leeks, olives, a cheese platter, and creme bruleé. Another birthday. Sigh. But I’m creeping closer to Medicare eligibility, and that’s good, because what is happening to the ACA is making that coverage expensive indeed. SWMBO got on Medicare last year, and she enjoys taunting me about it :-(

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.