Flora, Fauna, and Food

It's been a busy couple of weeks in Suburbia and the outlying areas. First, the weekend of the 21st D and I went to Western MA for our friends' wedding at a place called Bucksteep Manor. It was a whole weekend affair beginning with a rehearsal and BBQ on Friday night and ending with a brunch on Sunday morning. The bride and groom glowed throughout the entire weekend, and surprised everyone with a fabulous waltz for their first dance (the groom really surprised us). I took the camera while D was getting ready with the other groomsmen and shot about 300 photos...mostly of the grounds and chapel, but also of the bride and bridesmaids. I would say I'm much better at photographing plants than people! Here are a few floral pics from that weekend:

Last week was calm for the most part, though I've been having a little frustration with recipes lately--finding them, not making them! First, on Thursday I had taken some halibut out of the freezer because I remembered I had seen a recipe for halibut with new potatoes and rosemary. When I came home Thursday evening (hungry), I couldn't find the recipe...I thought it was from Everyday Food, but it wasn't. And then I couldn't find it online either. Maybe I dreamed the recipe?? Anyway, I was so fed up that I bagged on the halibut for the night, but did find a recipe for it the next night.

I made a poached halibut with pepper oil and fresh polenta from Jacques Pepin "Fast Food My Way". The fresh corn polenta was really fabulous--just zip the corn off the cob, puree it in a blender, and simmer with some butter. Because we didn't have any chilled white wine, D and I decided to break into a bottle of champagne given to us by the former owners of our house. Delicious!

My next bout of recipe frustration came on Saturday. In the "Notes from the Test Kitchen" email I receive from Cook's Illustrated/America's Test Kitchen there was a link to a video for blueberry cobbler. It looked so good, so I went to find the recipe on the site. Turns out that the recipe is from a past season so you can't access it without a paid membership. I was really disappointed because the cobbler looked so good! D suggested I look in the America's Test Kitchen cookbook we own, and lo and behold, there it was! I baked it on Monday night when our friends from Long Island came to visit.

In addition to spending time in the kitchen this past weekend, I also spent time in the yard. On Saturday am, I walked around the yard taking stock of everything. Our 2 Rose of Sharon are blooming. One is a purply-pink and the other is white with a deep pink center. They're really beautiful. Then D and I cut back the overgrown rhododendron that was impeding the sprinkling of the back lawn. I also organized my garden shed, and we planted a hydrangea. As we were planting the hydrangea it began to pour, so we went inside and had some lunch. Then Mercury and I lay on the couch and watched PBS cooking shows together--just like we used to do on Saturday afternoons in my old apartment. That made her one happy cat!

Later that afternoon I noticed something slowly making it's way across the mulch in the backyard. It was a turtle that had come out of the wetlands (e.g., swamp) behind our house. D took some pictures of it and then I used a Vernal Pool guide written by Dave's old high school teacher to identify it as a juvenile snapping turtle. He was really cute! I love that we have wildlife in our backyard, especially the dragonflies that eat the mosquitoes!