The Menu

FOR DINNER!

challah
home-cured olives
eggplant zaatar dip
chicken w/bbq sauce
potato wedges
coleslaw
garden salad
roasted corn
peach cake

FOR LUNCH!

challah
eggplant zaatar spread
home-cured olives
beef stew
turkey deli meat
coleslaw
corn salad
peach cake

The Menu

It's a birthday shabbos! Amirah turns 8 tomorrow (on the English calendar). So... mostly her requests, with a few of my own thrown in for good measure. :)

For dinner...

challah
lamb skewers marinated in garlic, rosemary, thyme, mustard, oil, and red wine vinegar
roasted potatoes (same marinade)
wonton soup (instead of actually making up the wontons I made little chinese meatballs and sliced the won ton wrappers into triangles; I was a little, er, short on time)
pickled beet salad
pickled cucumber salad
roasted garden vegetables (YAY!)
oyster mushroom sauté (got these at the farmers market; very meaty and delicious; we want to grow some here)
tomato basil garlic salad
meringues (supposed to be chocolate chocolate chip meringues, but that time thing got in the way again)

for lunch...
challah and salads from Friday, plus
beef barley stew
pesto pasta

and at 5:00ish...

angel food cake and watermelon for whomever shows up!

Another Week Done?

How could it possibly be erev shabbos already??? The week went by very quickly. Today we had a lovely outing to the Bluffton Farmers Market, with the mother and baby from a visiting family for good company. I got tomatoes, corn, carrots, onions, beets, red and purple peppers, oyster mushrooms (apparently easy to grow here!!), and a giant watermelon. From our own garden now we have a medium supply of eggplant, basil (large supply!), greens (large supply!), cherry tomatoes (miniature supply compare to what we want!), cucumbers, zucchini, and yellow squash. Lots of good veggies for shabbos, B"H.

Amirah was blissed out on a wonderful birthday gift of all kinds of beads and beading tools and other materials from grandma and grandpa. It was really cute to watch her unwrap each thing, with Eli by her side telling her how beautiful everything was. She was one happy girl. Her English birthday is on shabbos, so we can't unwrap presents then so we started a little early. Yesterday, she and I went out to get her ears pierced. We had a lot of fun and she loves her new earrings. After she got the first ear pierced, she looked at the ear-piercing lady, held her hand up a little and solemnly said, "Please, just give me another minute before you do the next one. (LONG PAUSE) Okay. Now I'm ready." I tried to suppress the desire to grin from ear to ear. LOVE HER!!!!!!!! :)

Database of Historical Movies

I just stumbled on this. It looks like a good resource if you're looking for documentaries and historical fiction movies to supplement your history curriculum. I noted 16 that appear to be of interest for our study of history from 1600 to 1850. A bunch won't be available on Netflix, I'm sure, and what remains may not pass the kosher test, but it's at least a very long list of potential candidates! I'm happy if we can find 4-6 (fiction/non-fiction) per year. We'll see!

In other news, DD8 is spending the night in Atlanta with a dear friend. She's having a great time and hasn't missed us one bit. :) It's nice to see her having adventures!

Today I started tutoring a bas mitzvah student! We had a wonderful hour together, studying a book called Halachos Bas Yisrael (The Laws for a Daughter of Israel). We're incorporating a lot of the narration techniques I use for learning with my kids and it was very interesting to do it with an older (almost-11-year-old) student. Loved it! Today we read the introduction, mostly focusing on women's mitzvah obligations and exemptions. Next week: morning hand washing. I feel like I have a chevrusa again (study partner) and it's very nice.

So, a good day today, in stark contrast to my decidedly sluggish Sunday. Oh, well! Now to bed so I can have a not-sluggish day tomorrow!

Garden PIctures!

Now that I've found our camera, I can add pictures of the garden!

We currently have a total of 350 square feet, and we're hoping to add another 142 square feet of raised beds by August. Our ultimate goal is 1,200 square feet of vegetables to supply our year-round vegetable needs. We'll see!

Here's what it looked like before we erased the front yard and started over. :)

Here's the whole front yard:

On the right is the raised bed with tomatoes, cucumbers, various greens, eggplant, and flowers (for bees!). In the front center is a flower bed. In the middle of that bed is part of a brick gate support that was coming loose so we knocked it down. Makes a great flower planter. I'm thinking of turning the satellite dish on the roof into a bird bath and mounting it on the brick "planter." Towards the right you can see the herb spiral that we made out of the part of the driveway we had to break up to fix a pipe.

Off of the herb spiral are four beds: sweet potatoes, zucchini, zuchinni/watermelon, and tomatoes/peppers/watermelon. Too much zucchini but it was one of the few things left that could be planted in late May! We were caught by surprise this year. I'm sure two zucchini would have been more than enough, but we have eight. Plenty to share! Couldn't just let the ground sit there.

Here's a good view of the herb spiral:


And a sideways view of the whole thing:

That's what I see out my kitchen window! I really want to take down all of the cabinets in there and add more window so I can it all better. It's fun to look out at it and very fun to eat it! We're looking forward to getting more and more done. Bit by bit. We pretty much only have Sundays to get much work done, but we've managed to get to it nonetheless. To maintain it really doesn't take long at all during the week. Maybe 15 minutes of weeding per week, and 10 minutes of my time per day to hand water and sprinkler water it. Soaker hoses are in the future, BE"H!

The Menu

What a great shavuos! Lots of lovely grownup time. Great conversations. Fun visits. Good food, though I was tired of dairy after one dinner and lunch, so we switched to meat. We mostly eat pareve during the week, with one meat night and dairy more as a garnish than a main focus. :) So... we're having a light-ish meal tonight...

For dinner...
challah
shabbos ground beef sandwiches (AKA BURGERS!) with fancy shabbos-worthy toppings
french fries
garden salad
sorbet

And for lunch...
bringing an eggplant tomato something or other
and a surimi garden salad

I might even get all the laundry and cleaning done with a menu like that. :) :) :)

And the other good news... our car is FIXED. Computer chip has been replaced and now we can travel more than 30 minutes-ish from home! :)

Good shabbos, all!!!!!

Shavuos Food!

It's been fun cooking dairy for a change! We're also out for two of the four meals, so that has made it pretty easy to prepare.

For dinner #1: OUT!

For lunch #1: dairy sushi blowout - sweet potato, spinach, tamago (egg omelet), cream cheese, krab, tempura (in sushi and not in sushi!), cucumber, avocado... YUM!

For dinner #2: challah, cream of carrot soup, fish cakes, sweet potato corn muffins, baked potatoes w/lots of DAIRY fixings, green salad with won ton strips and goat cheese balls w/preserved lemon (I think a Chinese, French, Moroccan sort of blend will work, won't it?????), kiwi strawberry tart, strawberry cheesecake, strawberry (or maybe a different flavor...) ice cream

For lunch #2: SHUL!

There's a lovely family here for a couple of months, so they'll be joining us for shavuos. Had lunch here with 2/3 of them today. They're considering moving here, so we'll have to show off the best of Savannah in the next few weeks. We need more people with young children!

Happy Shavuos, all!

Camera FOUND! :)

I have been without a camera since before pesach. I thought I had absentmindedly left it in a bag that we had taken with us on one expedition or another. But no! I was looking around one of the lowest shelves in the walk-in pantry for a cheesecake pan bottom and there was the camera wedged between the edge of the shelf and the wall. HOORAY! I've been wanting so much to take a picture of the garden at each stage for our records and haven't been able to. Now that can be done. So very happy.

And as a bonus I can FINALLY post a purim picture. :)


And a cute picture of Raizel (now 5!) that was on the camera. :)

Now shavuos can come!

The Menu

For dinner:

challah
miso soup
broiled teriyaki mushrooms
teriyaki chicken
sesame noodle salad
green salad (from the garden!) with miso dressing
brown rice
potato wedges (Amirah says it's not shabbos w/o potatoes...)
cabbage salad
peach cake

And for lunch:

all the same salads, plus
beef barley stew
surimi salad with corn and avocado (maybe, if DH gets lucky and finds a ripe one on his way home!)

No guests tonight, but a bunch for lunch. Looking forward to it!

Good shabbos, all!

Small Homes

Things like this make me grin from ear to ear.