Breakfast for Dinner

Oh my oh my how our gardens are growing! We have done a terrible job of taking photographs lately (i.e. by not taking ANY) and I wish you all could see the garden now compared to how it looked when we arrived. I do not have a picture nor 1000 words but if you will use your imagination a bit you will see in your mind a large gated area (roughly 1/8 of an acre) covered completely with tall green grass.. this was the state of the "garden" upon our arrival. NOW it is a beautiful space of 14 mounded garden beds, 9 of which are planted, and a raspberry/strawberry patch with bamboo trellises (grâce à Michael) and wood-chipped paths and pruned grape arbor overhang. We started planting 3-4 weeks ago and already the salad greens and fava beans and garlics are shooting up like they've got places to go. The carrots and radishes are a bit slower but I suppose that is just the way the cookie crumbles.

Speaking of cookies, we've had a crazy abundance of sweets and general deliciousness lately. A previous Lone Tree volunteer named Margaret is revisiting the farm this week and next, and she LOVES to cook as much as I do so we've had a smorgasbord of cookies and rice pudding cafe au lait and cornbread and hush puppies and real Mexican food (she is from Mexico). On top of that I baked bread, banana muffins and granola, plus Wendy left us a giant bag of dark chocolate before taking off for Austria for a couple of weeks (bagpipe gigs with Celtica). We've been so sugar crazy that one night we wanted cookies but couldn't use the oven (there is a limit of 2 hours per week to preserve propane) so we just made up some cookie dough and 4 of us went through the entire batch within a half-hour. If I don't have some sort of sugar meltdown (I don't even know what that MEANS but I still think it could happen) in the next coupla weeks I'll consider myself lucky. Oh yeah, also Margaret has made us breakfast for dinner twice now, which I have discovered is one of my favorite things.. last night we had pancakes with fruit and honey and granola and yogurt and roasted sweet potatoes and pan fried potatoes with sausage and HOLY CRAP it was so good.

Now that I've made everyone hungry I think I'll take the day off. It's rainy today and time for a day off, anyway. Maybe we will go to Wendy's dad's house to take a tour of his library (supposedly he has something like 10,000 books) and hang out and do rainy day things. But maybe I'll make a roux first...