We bought a bottle of martini olives   so we could celebrate the coming of 2010 in the comfort and safety of our home. I make a decent gin martini, according to the husband. However, he's still waiting for that Happy New Year martini. This is the second bottle of olives that we bought in the past six months with good intentions of drinking ourselves silly. Who wouldn't with such cute martini glasses from which to sip. (Ha! No dangling prepositions by which to chide me, Husband.)  So, what are we doing with the martini olives? Mostly, I use it as an ingredient in what's-in-the-fridge concoctions. Because they're salty, I usually use one or two. Today the olives became part of a steak marinade. Here's what I did: First, I prepared and put these ingredients in my marinating bowl: 1 tablespoon red onion, diced 3 garlic cloves, minced 1 martini olive, minced 3 branches of Italian parsley, roughly chopped Next, I added these ingredients (Note: These are all "about&qu

Dear Gentle Readers, I thought I'd let you gander at how my head looks today. :-) I really didn't think it would grow in this quickly. Here's how it looked the first day . It's funny how my head feels lighter today than it did on the day I cut it. Without the hair, maybe stuff in my noggin was able to seep through the skull and evaporate into the air. Poof. Hope it wasn't any of my smarts.

Rainbows! All I had to do was look out my window, too. Gotta love that. The weathercasters say we'll be seeing rain in our area all week. I hope so.

Miner's lettuce! The husband and I found a patch of it growing in my neighborhood. What the heck is it doing here? It was just growing out in the open between a fence and the public sidewalk. No cover of trees, bushes, or anything, which to us was weird because we thought the wild plant can only grow in the shade. We also think of it growing out in the wilds. I was not really curious about it until today. So, gentle readers, here's what I learned: Miner's Lettuce is part of the purslane family. No kidding. It grows throughout the United States. Some folks also know the edible plant as Winter Purslane , Spring Beauty, or Indian lettuce. Claytonia perfoliata for those who like knowing scientific nomenclature. Claytonia perfoliata . That would make a great title for an Italian opera. Supposedly, the plant got called Miner's Lettuce in California because the gold rush miners ate the green to stave off scurvy . According to various sources on the Web, Miner's L

I’ve been talking to the husband and the mama about changing to cloth napkins for almost two years. (Time flies quickly when you’re old. That is, older.) The husband and the mama had no objections. Cloth napkins are more economical than paper ones, as well as more than one tree would be saved. But any moves of finding and purchasing cloth napkins were going to come from me. My research was sporadic and disheartening. There weren’t, and probably still aren’t, many places to buy cloth napkins, nor were there a variety of choices of napkins. And I am very particular about shelling out money, between $4 and $5 per napkin, for something I could easily make, if I had the time. As for the mama, who is even cheaper than me, I imagined her hiding a paper napkin amongst the expensive cloth one and pulling it out to wipe her mouth when I wasn’t looking. A couple months ago, I finally did walk my talk. It was fun and a hoot putting my foot to the metal of my mom’s Singer treadle sewing machine