Spring Garden

My parents sent me this great book about square foot gardening and I love it. It's an old Rodale Press book that talks about maximizing the vegetable plants in the space you have. Perfect.

An aside: I'm sure my parents dug this book up from the closet-from-hell. Does your family have a closet-from-hell? A closet that lurks in your parents' home with tons of family stuff that nobody wants to sort through? That is the closet-from-hell. Where hidden book treasures are stuffed. Thank you for the closet-from-hell.

I put together a plan for the new veggies according to Mr. Bartholomew's square foot plan which allocates a certain amount of space per seedling. One square foot per bell pepper plant but nine spinach plants per square.

On the top is my coded plan for what I thought we might plant, below is Thomas' rework for what actually got planted. We did ruby red sweet corn, rainbow heirloom tomatoes, sweet peppers, hot peppers, carrots, spinach and bibb lettuce. I can't wait until it all sprouts!

Ruffles have ridges... of chocolate!

I gave my friend Marsha a couple of the illustrious Bacon Chocolate Chip Cookies and that led to an in depth salty/sweet food conversation. She said her favorite combination is Ruffles dipped in chocolate which made us all recoil. Gross, right? Wrong. Amazing. I love trying new foods and after her reassurances of their heavenly deliciousness, I decided we needed to try them. I used this Dipped Chocolate Anything recipe from the New York Times and proceeded to cover myself, the kitchen and a few potato chips in chocolate. I snuck a few strawberries in there for good measure, too!

It's 4am and I'm wide awake. That big red patch just woke this whole house up, the weather is ridiculous as Thomas just said. The wind was so strong and was blowing the rain in the craziest, loudest way I've ever heard. I felt like I needed to go to another room to get away from the noise but there was no getting away from it. It was kind of like being on an airplane, your trapped and it's loud, but on the bright side no one was kicking my seat and I didn't have to get up so the person next to me could pee.

What are you supposed to do when you're supposed to be asleep? I'd never make a good insomniac. This storm is supposed to last for the next 24 hours and if it's anything like the first few hours I think California might just slide right off into the Pacific Ocean before the day is out.

Bacon Wrapped Chicken

So delicious! So easy. And the leftovers... so tantalizing!

It might be Valentine's Day

But everyone around here has a really bad case of the Mondays.