I'll let you know as soon as I find it. We just got back from our first holiday in four years. The teen I had lined up to garden for me backed out at the last minute, so the weeds ran rampant. It's 3200ish square feet of mess. :( From what I can see, the corn is doing phenomenally. Tomatoes are on track for this time of year and I even have some Black Krims just beginning to colour. I'm going to pick our first snow peas for a stir-fry tonight and the regular peas will probably be ready to start picking sometime this coming week. The onions are doing okay; the older starts are above the weeds, but the younger batch are struggling. I have almost 300, so I suppose I can lose a few. The younger rows of carrots are really struggling and being shadowed out in places. The broccoli has headed already and they're depressingly small. I'll clear the weeds and hope for a good crop of side shoots. Cabbage is good for once! There are flowers all over the runner beans and some of the bush bean varieties; the pole beans are on schedule (growing well, but no flowers yet). Beets are great. Winter squash vines look good, but I can't get in there yet to know if there are fruit yet. I see some zucchini from a distance. The carrot I have for seed has heads that should flower soon. I can't see the peppers; they're probably a loss. Celery looks like it's loved all the rain and considered the weeds to be mulch, of sorts... lol. Parsley is behind, but okay. I forgot to note the state of the celeriac, but it should likely be in the same state as the celery. The kids have at least one fruit so far on their Racer pumpkin and the vines on my Fairytale are pretty nice. The Orca (dry) beans are terrible as are most of the potatoes. That part of the garden doesn't drain well and far too much rain settled there for far too long. Spinach was just finishing before we left; got lots, though! Haven't gotten to the cukes to check on them yet. The rhubarb looks odd; I think my neighbour may not have picked as evenly as I do (we have six huge plants, so I asked them to please take some). Asparagus has ferned out nicely. The garlic is gorgeous; this is my first time growing it. :) But the fact remains... I can either garden or camp in the summer, but obviously not both. :(

You are convincing me that I need to purchase that book for myself! I think vegetable recipes probably lend themselves to "process" over "recipe" because of amounts and such. Stretching our brain is a very good exercise and I need to do it more often! The pictures are lovely and glad you are happy. Boy, I was lucky to you as a partner!

It's hard to make generalities about over 1 billion people, lol. But I have found that there are many, many Chinese families who don't stir-fry at all, or do it very seldom. Not every American family eats burgers and hot dogs, either, for a local analogy. I guess if others judged American culture by TV ads and billboards, they would think we all lived on a daily diet of McDonald's Big Macs! But in general, many Asian cuisines do have a "triple path". There is home cooking; there is restaurant cooking; and there is banquet, or feast, food. I was talking to my Hong Kong-born Chinese-Portugese DH a few weeks ago, and he (finally) remembered to tell me a story about one of his uncles who died over 15 yrs ago. This uncle was famous in the family for making the Chinese broccoli with oyster sauce, or ho yau gai lan as it used to be spelled (I'm terrible with the new spellings, sorry). I've done this dish, and it seems very simple. Blanch the gai lan, stir-fry it quickly, drizzle it with oyster sauce. What's so hard about it? DH told me his uncle was so meticulous and painstaking about doing this dish, it was intimidating even to just watch him. Every cut had to be a precise size, the water had to be just the right temperature, the timing was down to the second. The wok had to be heated for XX number of minutes with just enough oil but not too much; the tossing and last-minute steaming done always the same way. In six decades of eating, DH says his uncle's gai lan remains the best. And every time, because he was so exacting about it, it was always perfect. But it was a lot of work, done to ensure that nothing was left to chance. He very seldom made it, in fact. Just the news that there was going to be a party and that Uncle had promised to make his gai lan, was enough to make everybody, even reluctant-to-socialize teenagers, show up for dinner! Oh, and outside of the gai lan, hardly anyone in DH's family, all 200+ members in Vancouver BC, stir-fries. Most of them don't even own a wok, which is interesting because otherwise they've kept their HK culture intact very assiduously. Unlike the American relatives, all of whom by the second generation barely remember their Cantonese, all the Canadian relatives speak Cantonese at home, so that even the fourth generation little kids are bi-lingual.

Hey Amanda--taking a break from sanding--I'm almost done for tonight! My patio does back to those windows which are two sets of little sliders and, yes, the screens come out and it'll be perfect to serve from! We removed the sliding doors but have FOUR sets of french doors on that back wall -- one set is within two feet of where the big sliders were. You can't really tell from my before pic, but the other side of the DR doorway, where the coffee bar/refrigerator is now, was the laundry behind sliding doors. There was also a sliding door pantry opposite the sliders. The microwave is in a cabinet above the coffee bar. I have a little one because I just defrost or reheat coffee in it. My fridge is a 30" Liebherr which is plenty big for the two of us. We have a freezer w/ little fridge in the garage for overflow. I would definitely want your all fridge/all freezer if my 4 kids were still at home. I will post more pics in a day or two. Plumbers come tomorrow! Once I get some water in there I'll give it a spit-shine & be somewhat photo ready!