Quote of the Day: John Gunther
All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast.
-John Gunther
There’s nothing quite like starting the day with a good breakfast. I’m not picky about what I eat for breakfast except that it can’t come from a box and I prefer it to be warm. We don’t go for cereals or other pre-made things, if we’re looking for a quick breakfast a piece of sourdough bread toasted in a cast iron skillet with some good pastured butter is our breakfast of choice. We also like scones for quick grab and go breakfasts.
Once or twice a week we enjoy a breakfast featuring eggs. Whether a hearty “farmers” breakfast as they’re called in diners around the country. Eggs, bacon, potatoes, toast, sometimes mushrooms, and onions as well. Sometimes it’s an omelet and sometimes simply scrambled eggs. Every now and then I’ll whip up a breakfast pizza!
In the winter we love steaming bowls of oat groats topped with nuts, crystallized ginger, cinnamon, raisins and some maple syrup. We also enjoy warm coconut rice pudding on occasion.
Lately we’ve been eating sourdough pancakes a few days a week since we have such a bounty of maple syrup in the pantry from the 2011 sugaring season.
No breakfast is complete without a cup of coffee with raw milk. This is of course my favorite part of breakfast!
What’s a typical breakfast for you?
Share this:
Breathing a Sigh of Relief
Yesterday, Mr Chiots and I spent most of the day cleaning out the garage. It had gotten a little out of control. Since we’re going to start building our little teardrop camper soon, we needed to tackle it first. We have a large side workshop attached to our garage which was packed full of stuff.
We moved everything into the main garage and then moved the stuff we wanted back in, organizing as we went. Mr Chiots has a workbench and area on on side for all his tools and other stuff, and I have one wall devoted to gardening. I also have 3 shelves on which I store my collection of terracotta pots, burlap, row covers and other gardening supplies. All of these benches were here when we moved in, I added the shelves above to this area. I simplly added a coat of paint to make everything look clean, it’s not the best, but it’s usable (it is the garage after all).
I’ve been collecting vintage galvanized trash cans and putting them on a wheels. I use them to store vermiculite, potting soil and anything else I buy in bulk. I like that they roll right under the bench and out of the way!
Everything is neat and orderly now and that makes me happy. We should have plenty of room for working on our projects and finding things should be a snap now!
Share this:
Quote of the Day: Hippocrates
Let your food be your medicine
and your medicine be your food.
-Hippocrates
I was thinking about this quote yesterday as we were eating lunch. Mr Chiots has trouble with allergies this time of year and he hates taking antihistamines. We’ve been working on finding an herbal or natural treatment for them. He’s currently having great success with a homeopathic treatment, even better than he had with his regular medicine. I had just read this article before lunch and when I looked at my plate I realized we had incorporated a lot of the recommendations into our meal.
We had a big salad for lunch with honey grapefruit vinaigrette topped with, walnuts, dandelion blossoms, violet blossoms, and chives. All of the local pollen from the flowers & honey, the quercetin in the chives & garlic, the vitamin C from the violets & grapefruit are supposed to be really great at helping ease allergy symptoms. Now this is a tasty beautiful way to deal with those pesky allergies!
Do you have seasonal allergies? How do you deal with them?
Share this:
Ode to the Dogwood
Each year we wait patiently for the dogwood trees to burst forth with their display. Some years we get a big wind storm right as they’re coming out and we miss their graceful blooms entirely. Every couple years we have the perfect weather and they bloom profusely.
This year is one of the good years. The trees on our property are blooming beautifully, thanks partly to the perfect weather and partly from my efforts to improve the soil around them.
In our area they are plentiful along the edges of all the woods, they produce seeds and propagate freely. I’m constantly pulling baby dogwood trees out of my flowerbeds. We have two very old dogwood trees and a handful of younger ones as well, all of them of the native wild variety. One of the oldest ones is in rough shape and may need taken down one of these days.
Dogwoods are such graceful trees. I love the way they look against the sky, the open airy feel, the curvy branches and the creamy white blooms. They are one of my favorite spring blooming trees!
What’s your favorite flowering tree?
Share this:
Inspiration and a Busy Weekend
On Friday afternoon the FedEx man delivered a large box containing 450 bare rooted shrubs. You can imagine what my weekend entailed. I was filming most of the day Sat, but was able to plant 10 shrubs in the morning. Yesterday I planted another 50 more. Looks like I’ll be digging a lot of holes this coming week! I’ll tell you a little more about this hedge when I can get some more photos (this is only half of the plants that arrived).
Last week I posted about inspiration at the Your Day blog. Head on over there and let me know what inspires you.
Did you get any gardening time in this weekend? What did you do?
