our famous somali

check out my husband's old tutee*. this is only 1 of like a million recognitions that he's gotten over the years. but it's cool.

click here to see the video.

baldman tutored aden starting when he was in middle school and up until high school. but a year or so ago aden basically fired baldman because he didn't have the time in his schedule anymore, what with extra curricular activities, multiple tutoring sessions a week, and his major social life. chris was only a little crushed at that. he quickly got over it though because he really knew that it was a sign of how great aden was doing.

*is that what you call a person who's tutored?

updated: i took out the video because it was annoying that it started automatically every time you opened up the page.

the bees are coming!

today i had my second of three beekeeping classes. i'm proud of the fact that i made it to and through the whole class today because i've been sick for 1/2 the week and today i have no voice and a very runny nose. yuck. but by the end of the class today i was jazzed and not thinking about my cold because i have ordered all my bee equipment and my bees, who arrive march 31. yippee!

weird waldies

over the years the waldies have had fun with taking photos with their macs.





now that we have one we can join in the fun!

i love mushrooms

a few weeks ago baldman dug a fire pit for us in the backyard. he got the inspiration to do this because of the movable fire pit we borrowed from a neighbor for our last party. since then, the spirit of david reid and his legendary fires has been egging my husband to do something a little more permanent. so he did this.



we've not spent a whole lot of time out there, but we've lit it a couple of times and really enjoyed it.

this weekend i got the inspiration to use the fire pit to grill some mushrooms. yummy! so for dinner tonight we had oven-baked baby potatoes with spices and olive oil, spring garden mix (some from our garden) with homemade rosemary and garlic vinaigrette topped with grilled yellow and red peppers (on sale at publix this week!), and grilled portobello mushrooms (and for baldman a morning star farms chick patty because he doesn't like mushrooms.*) we put the mushrooms/chick patty in between 2 slices of homemade bread and smeared rosemary aioli on it. here's a closeup of the veggies cooking.



oh, and the dinner was amazing!

*my husband is a weirdo. for the record, he also doesn't like ice cream or popcorn. the popcorn and ice cream i can generally partake in on my own with no problem. the mushroom thing is hard to avoid because i usually cook for the both of us. every once in a while i try to sneak it in a recipe where he can pick it out. but on a very rare occasion i've just got to go straight up portobello. yea!

oh, by the way

hope you all had a happy hallmark greeting card valentine's day.

*thanks, fuzzy for the link to these sick valentine's day cards by jj

food declaration

check out the food declaration here and sign to endorse it.

here are the first few lines of the document..

we believe that a healthy food system is necessary to meet the urgent challenges of our time. Behind us stands a half-century of industrial food production, underwritten by cheap fossil fuels, abundant land and water resources, and a drive to maximize the global harvest of cheap calories. Ahead lie rising energy and food costs, a changing climate, declining water supplies, a growing population, and the paradox of widespread hunger and obesity...

preparing for spring

i love this time of year because i start planning for my spring garden. and what's best about that process is that at this point nothing has gone wrong yet. when i sit down and map out my rows of tomatoes and eggplants, i can just see how beautiful everything is. and for that minute i have the most beautiful garden in the world.

also, to add to my food-procuring hobby, this year i'm planning on taking up bee keeping. that's right! i'm going to be a hobby beekeeper! i took my first of three saturday-long classes last weekend with the sc mid-state beekeepers association. i think i'll have two hives which will support around 30,000 bees in each hive! yikes! but if this goes well we'll have some yummy local honey to harvest. cool, huh!?

awesome-looking food website

i love food. i also love to eat. good food. and the look of food is part of what gets me. sometimes it's just so pretty.

that's my preface.

a fellow-foodie at work came into my office this afternoon and said she had a way to repay me for working this saturday. and she gave me this web address to check out. i generally trust her on all things food-related, so i wasted no time looking it up this evening.

having first seen this website only minutes ago, i can't vouch for the actual tastiness of the recipes, but they sure look good, don't they? every single one of them.

like this one.

and this one.

and this one....

i could go on.

i'd say that having access to these recipes will be worth working an hour this saturday.