Simple Pleasures

Our garden continues to grow, and I see no end in sight to my amazement at it.

We’ve got hearty representatives of each of the different vegatables that we planted hanging on the vine.

It’s so doggone exciting!

Every evening I lead my wife out by the hand and we ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ over how well the garden is growing.

My daughter had some friends sleep over this weekend and I dragged them out to see. Even teenage girls recognize that tiny, baby peppers and tomatoes ‘are so cute.’

That’s not grass

We all thought our lawns were dead. They resembled straw more than having ever been green grass. I almost hated to play with my dog in the backyard. Her nails would fling chunks of the light, yellow grass in the air.

How dry was it?

I’m not sure how far below the normal rainfall we got last year, but I know the drought of ‘05 was tough on North Texas. I’ve never bought into the ‘global warming’ theory. Everything has a cycle. We had numerous grass fires in North Texas this last winter, caused by the lack of rain and dry vegatation. But, it is a cyclical thing. Nature takes care of itself. I’m sure there were raging grass fires that no one cared about hundred of years ago. We just don’t like them now, because they might burn down our house.

The rains finally did come this Spring and we are back on track with rainfall and lake levels being where they should be. And the grass? Came right back to life.

Plant a Garden

In anticipation of Spring’s new growth, I dug up about a 10′ x 10′ section of the backyard probably 6 weeks ago and planted a garden. We’re all really psyched about our pending crop harvest. We will surely have more than we can eat, so our neighbors and co-workers will have to help us. I won’t be buying peppers from Walmart all summer I hope. Here’s the rundown of what we have coming:

• Green & Red Bell Peppers
• Aneheim Peppers
• Jalapeno Peppers
• Habanero Peppers
• Roma Tomatoes
• Cherry Tomatoes
• Beefsteak Tomatoes

My first job (at 12 kids!) was working in the neigbors 100+ acre farm. I’ve got fond memories of the big garden we had at our house (in Ohio) as well as my grandparents. This is the first time for my wife to experience the difference that a vegetable fresh from your own garden tastes like.

No. I’m well beyond turning 18. It’s the losing eighteen pounds mark. Woo hoo. When I started working out, I didn’t think I could get very excited about basically working to get back to the weight I was at a couple of years ago. But, not so true anymore. It’s great to be losing pounds from my current weight. My wife is doing great as well. She only has about 6 pounds to go before she is at her lowest weight in many years. I’m really proud of both of us.

We’re on a fresh garlic kick at our house. Garlic is one of those spices that come and go for us. We’ll forget about it for a while, but then it will resurface and become a necessity, until we have another garlic lapse.

A few weeks ago I baked pork chops with soy sauce, mushrooms & garlic. It was incredible. It had a very ‘marinated in wine’ taste to it. We’ve been trying to re-duplicate it on chicken & fish.

Well, I made some more pork chops with the aformentioned ingredients again. This time I also used a packaged marinade that did indeed boast wine as an ingredient. I pull it out of the oven and ‘Whoa’. Turns out that garlic contains sulfur compounds which reacted with something in the marinade and formed copper sulfate. The result was a funky looking blue green garlic, which turns out to be perfectly safe to eat.

Tonights scale reading has me down a whopping 12 lbs since the weigh in on January 14th. It was exciting to move the 50lb incrementor down from the 250 notch to the 200 notch.