Roasted Butternut Squash

roasted eggplant, sauteed turnips, and salad.

Fried Chicken

with brown rice, and roasted cauliflower and shiitakes.

Sugar Cookies!

My daughter and I made these while the bread cooled. One of her jobs was to scoop the cookie dough and plop it into my waiting fingers, to be rolled in pink sugar. She would ready the scoop, hold it out, and say "one scoop, ready to lay!"

Pane di Altamura

This bread was well underway before I read around on the internet and discovered that I, like many others who tried it, had done almost everything wrong. Most importantly I used readily available semolina flour, when apparently what one wants is a much finer grind available only in Italy, or at least not readily here. Nothing daunted, I went ahead and baked. I haven't tasted it yet, but feel in any case that it is no small thing to have produced a loaf that looks as nice and smells as heavenly as this one does.

Scrambled Eggs

with fried okra and shiitakes, and green beans.

V2K!

The Enthusiast has just passed its 2000th unique visitor mark (since I installed the counter a few months ago). Thank you to all who visit!

Second Verse

much the same as the first: chicken stew over brown basmati rice, with masses of okra (home-grown and CSA).

Chicken Stew

With onions, ginger, butternut squash, collard greens, peanut butter, and a haphazard melange of cumin, turmeric, and cinnamon. Over brown rice.

Fritatta

with brown rice and red peppers, with beautiful pale green and purple-speckled pole beans.

Spiral Pasta

with butternut squash and mustard greens.

Whole Wheat Sourdough Miche

Delicious, delicious bread. But I confess to tearing up when I took it out of the oven because I can't, no matter what I try, get it to burst and split in the oven like I see other people's loaves doing. Eating a few pieces of it cheered me up a bit.

For dinner last night we had lamb chops, okra, and curried (disgusting, watery, flavorless) acorn squash.

Sweet Potatoes

with okra and salad.

Grilled Salmon

with quinoa and wilted arugula.

Hawthorne

Oh how I love a scarf! This is a very popular pattern right now, and it's easy to see why: it requires only moderate effort for pretty results. Now if only it weren't in the nineties every day...

Scrappy Sourdough

I planned to make my usual whole wheat version, but realized I was low on whole wheat. Instead I ended up with 200g whole wheat, 100g rye, and 200g bread flour. Delicious, and not so different from what I planned, as it turns out. I was without oven power for about a week, and I really missed the bread. Thank goodness everything's working again.

Lamb Chops

with okra and homemade bread (see above).

The Best Darn Sweet Potatoes

I've ever had. They came from the farmer's market, and I don't know what made them so different from the usual, but I had two and wished for more. We had them with okra and salad.

Curried Squash

with fried potatoes, scrambled eggs, and salad.

Grilled Salmon

with quinoa and sauteed mei qing cabbage.

Leyfi Sweater

This sweater was a fast knit, because it has a large gauge. (Gauge=stitches per inch. Confusingly, the fewer stitches per inch, the larger the gauge, but you can see how it's faster; if it only takes four stitches to make one inch of sweater, as here, that's a lot fewer stitches over all than say, six stitches per inch. The "large" refers to the size of the stitches themselves.) Anyhoo, I'm happy with it, though I shortened it by a couple of inches after I took this picture. The color, by the way, is a combination of the two yarns (one a thick, clear poppy, the other a thin variegated purple and green) that I held together as I knit.

Seared Tuna

with okra and brown rice.

Coconut Curry

with butternut squash and field peas, over brown rice. With the first CSA salad since the spring!

Curried Acorn Squash

with okra and fried potatoes. Dinner is so strange; sometimes I labor and plan and it all looks like it's going to be great and then it's just ok. And then, rarely, as last night, I throw it together with moderate hope and it turns out to be *sublime*.

Chicken Hash

sort of: leftover roast chicken, brown rice, and wilted arugula.

Baked Sweet Potatoes

with okra and scrambled eggs.

The Pirates of the Caribbean I, II, & III

Yo ho, yo ho, Johnny Depp as a pirate for me. I still remember the joyful shock of the first movie. I heard that they were making a movie about a ride at Disneyland and laughed for two days. Then it turned brutally hot so I went to see it in the theater, where it turned out the air conditioning was broken—and I didn't even notice, because the movie was so much fun. To say that these movies are better than they have any right to be is not saying much, since they have exactly no right to be any good at all. But there's Johnny, giving the performance of a lifetime, surrounded by an excellent supporting cast (hi Mackenzie Crook!), working from a witty script, wearing eyeliner that should have been nominated for an Oscar all by itself. I hear they are making part IV; I may not see it in the theater, but I'll gleefully add it to my DVD hoard.