Thankful Sunday--July 22, 2012

I am thankful that Ward had a good backpacking trip in Yosemite National Park and is home again safe and sound.

A Few Sights From His Trip.

Typical dusty trail

Lower Lake Ottoway

Red Peak Pass

Nevada Falls

Vernal Falls

Home again.

Food Waste Friday and True Food Confessions

It's time for Food Waste Friday, when the Frugalgirl encourages us to post pictures from the previous week of wasted food from our household. This accountability hopefully will help us to be more careful with our food and maybe save some money.

Also, I am using this public forum to encourage us to eat out less which includes better meal planning. 

This Weeks Food Waste 

No waste this week, or at least that's what I say. However, my friend says that I wasted an egg on my frying-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk experiment. (Did I mention that it's really hot here?) I consider the egg part of my entertainment budget, and pretty cheap entertainment at that. 

This Weeks True Food Confessions

Some of the cooking that we did this week.

Now onto how we did this week with our efforts to eat at home. We did well. The only time someone ate out was when Wally and Theodore had breakfast at the local diner while they were waiting on the car to be fixed. Our success can attributed to our menu plan and our determination. We found it hard to not stop somewhere on the way home from work when we were tired and hungry, but we didn't.
 

Grilled cheese and sauteed kale. This was tasty.

Of the things we cooked this week, there was an old favorite and a new favorite. Our old favorite was meat loaf based on the recipe from Quaker Oats box. Our new favorite was a grilled cheese sandwich based on a recipe from Cook This, Not That! by David Zinczenko and Matt Goulding. The sandwich included dijon mustard, bacon, granny smith apples, and cheddar cheese. We will definitely have these again.

Next week still needs a menu. There can be a few carryovers from this week and hopefully, those will get us through until there's time to work on one. See you next week for the next installment of True Food Confessions.

Egg Frying--Part Two

You may remember that a couple weeks ago, we tried to fry an egg on our driveway to test the old saying, "It was so hot, you could fry an egg on the sidewalk." The experiment failed. All that happened was that we got hot, and the egg dried out and attracted ants. According to the internet, we needed to supplement the blacktop and sun with foil and a magnifying glass to be successful. That was the only way we could generate enough heat to reach 158° F, the temperature needed to cook an egg.

Well, I thought we were done with our experimenting until I heard that it was Fry an Egg on the Sidewalk Day. I took that as a sign that we, Theodore and I, had to try again. We were so confident that it would work this time, Theo and I discussed whether or not we were going to try also to fry bacon to go with the egg. Well, no such luck. Even with the magnifying glass, all we got was a raw egg and really hot and sweaty.

I'm done with this experiment and I'm moving onto something else. Really. Unless we get a better magnifying glass, and heat the egg up to room temperature first, and ...

Our Second Attempt at Frying an Egg on the Driveway

A Second Look, July 18, 2012

The extreme heat was back this week along with humidity. Meaning, I spent most of my time indoors. However, I did venture out to take some pictures of butterflies because this week found the arrival of  swallowtails along with variegated fritillary. They joined the cabbage whites and skippers that have been around for awhile.

 Also, I found a monarch caterpillar. We'll see if it can turn into a butterfly before a hungry bird has a tasty snack.

See the butterflies I found this week during a Second Look.

Black Swallowtail Butterfly on Tiger Lily

Black Swallowtail Butterfly

Skipper Butterfly on Cone Flower

Tiger Swallowtail Butterfly on Tiger Lily

Flying Tiger Swallowtail Butterfly

Variegated Fritillary Butterfly

Variegated Fritillary Butterfly on Coneflower

Cabbage White Butterfly on Purple Sage

Monarch Caterpillar on Milkweed Leaf

Everything old is new again.

Recently I was looking through a box of old books and found one that caught my eye, A Paragrapher's Reveries by Mary Wilson Little. The book was published in 1904 and is full of pithy little sayings. I wasn't sure what a paragrapher was; however, I learned that it was a person who wrote paragraphs or fillers for newspapers. I also found that what I thought was an obscure book was available in many different formats and sold practically everywhere. This made reading the yellowed pages from an original copy even more interesting to me

Here are a few fillers copied from the book. Some of them may seem outdated and some of them are very applicable today over 100 years later. I'll leave it to you to decide which is which.

--The penalty of success is to be bored by the attentions of people who formerly snubbed you.

--The woman who sits up and cries because her husband is kept very late at the lodge doesn't bring him home any sooner, and only makes her nose as red as his.

--Quilting bees are going out of fashion. The women who can sew are dying of old age.

--Jack Frost makes a capital artist, but his pictures lack warmth.

--It's difficult to see why lace should be so expensive. It is mostly holes, and holes are not expensive.

--The pain caused by a bee sting can be instantly relieved by jumping in a mud puddle.

--In the trials of the canning season preserve your temper when you can.

--Happiness is the well-balanced combination of love, labor, and luck.