...6.9...Over the Weekend...

...we started off the weekend with tofu scramble and toast...vegan bacon bits and Violife cheddar on there too...

...and then we got the shopping out of the way...

...a pretty small weekly shop...just the usual stuff...I snapped up a 48¢ loaf of Italian bread...I love it when they have the "We Baked too Much" cart out...

...and I got to try a new Poppi...Punch Pop...

...I stopped at Subway and got veggie subs on the way home...such a treat for me...the Man is not a huge fan of Subway for some unknown reason...

...I picked the very first handful of green beans...

...aren't they gorgeous...

...I'll just save them in an empty cereal bag until I have enough for a potful...at this rate it won't be long...

...I also picked the very first handful of blueberries...we ate these right up...but going forward I'll save them like the beans until I have a couple of cupfuls...

...I made another batch of Toby's Tofu Dip...I am obsessed with it...so good...

...I made the Mediterranean Pasta and Beans recipe I'd been wanting to try...

...it turned out perfectly...the recipe says to top it with vegan mozzarella...which I have...of course...but I tasted it and didn't think that it was necessary so left it off...

...and to go with it...I picked some chard from the Square Foot Garden...I'm amazed it's still producing with the weather this hot...but it's still pretty perfect...

...gave it a bath...

...and sautéed it in Earth Balance...it really shrinks a lot...

...so delicious...

~Wishing you a lovely start to your week!

...6.7...Dinner and a Movie...

...for Dinner the Man made his delicious French lentils...and we had some air-fried sweet potato, pita, cucumber and tomato with it...

...and the Movie was Tokyo Story...it was good...I'd read wonderful things about this movie...Roger Ebert did a review of it in 2000...so a pretty recent review for a 1953 film...

...it is just a movie about some people...of course...and it's definitely 'slow' by today's standards...there's little to no action...and the camera is almost always stationary...

...what have you been watching lately?...

~Have a lovely day!

...6.6...Friday Update...

...in this post ...1.19...New House Update...a year and a half or so ago...you can see where we insulated the garage doors...

...well over time...with the doors open those panels have to be held in place upside down by those little plastic tab thingies...

...and some of them have fallen off...all of the ones on the row with windows for some reason...maybe because the windows protrude into the insulated space or something...and a few of the others as well...

...so I made a really thin sort of 'crochet hook' out of wire...

...and I can barely squeeze it through behind the stanchion supporting each section of door...but I loop a piece of masons twine...a long wearing nylon non stretchy cord...and pull that through the very small opening...and then you can tie one end of the twine with just a square knot...

...and good thing I was a Boy Scout...because I know how to tie a Taut-line Hitch...which we used all the time when setting up tents and tarps in camp...it is what it's name says...it's a knot that you can tie on an already taut line...and then you can even make it tighter...

...so I just made an X over each panel...

...and I did that about a dozen times...

...and now when the door is open the panels definitely cannot fall down again...

~Wishing you a lovely start to your weekend!

...6.5...Delicious Vegan Food we ate...

...this was so easy and delicious...

...I just took an accidentally vegan yellow cake mix...and instead of water...I added a cup and a half of orange juice...I need the extra liquid because I'm not adding any eggs...I did add a quarter cup of oil though...and then I tossed in the zest of 2 oranges...and that was it...

...it rose up nicely...but it took about 50 minutes to fully cook in the pretty bundt pan...

...the nervous bit...hoping that it leaves the pan cleanly...YAY!

...I may have dusted it when it was still a little bit too warm...because it melted in a few spots...

...this was the perfect summer cake to have with a cup of tea...and it was so simple to make...

...what delicious food have you been eating lately?...

~Have a lovely day!

...6.4...W.I.P. Wednesday...

...this is going to be the Porcelain Sweater Project...

...and it started a long time ago...the date on this photo is 2.1.25...and I was sitting outside on a sunny morning drinking tea and winding balls of white cotton yarn off of the spools where they had been stored in a tote for years...I...mean...years...

...the Man's Mamaw had given me these 'spool ends'...way before she died in 2014...

...it's actually the same cotton thread that she used to crochet this tablecloth for 'her' dining room table that we used for years...and now is happily at home with the kiddos in Alaska...

...it's a fairly thin 2-ply cotton...and I think it may actually have been intended as a weaving yarn as searching the interwebs for something similar gives that result...

...and I'm thinking of pairing it with the yarn from my Heliotropic...from way back in 2013...I did love the pattern...but not wearing the top so much...as I almost never wear it...ok...I never wear it...and it's a shame to have all that beautiful yarn in a sweater you never wear right...

...I'm thinking that the addition of the neutral beige thread will tone down the brightness of the white...as the pattern is mostly knit in shades of off-white...and I really don't want too stark of a contrast...

...so I got to unraveling...and it was kind of a huge project...

...it was a little bit sad...frogging is not my favorite thing to do...

...there was a lot of yarn that I wound into a huge ball...

...and then since I'd held the yarn double for the Heliotropic...that all had to be separated into single strand balls...

...and I wound up with a lot of yarn...I'm not at all worried about the linen...but I am hoping that there's enough of the white...I can't find anyone except Immy Lucas who has made it using cotton...

...so then it was time to start swatching...

...and I really like the sort of mottled effect of knitting with these two different weight and different coloured yarns...

...I did a swatch with just the white...and got gauge...and the white is just a little bit too see through as well...I was thinking that I could do some sort of tea dye to get it a shade more off-white...

...but I think I'm going to need the stability of the linen there as well...cotton has a tendency to 'grow' with wear...

...so that's what the white part of the porcelain sweater will look like...

...and I went to Joann's on one of their final days and got a lovely royal blue cotton...and a crochet thread to go along with it to make the right gauge...

...more to come...

...what's in your workbasket?...

~Have a lovely day!

...6.3...Tuesdays with Julia...

...we made the Vegan Crème Plombières à l’Ananas...

...I've made a few other versions of this simple dessert...this one sort of reminded me of Pineapple-Upside-Cake...

...and all of the particulars are over at The Vegan Version...

~Have a lovely day!

...6.2...Over the Weekend...

...we started the weekend with a big breakfast...I made the copycat just egg...but I wanted to use up some of this vegan cream before it goes out of date...

...seems to have worked just fine for this scramble...

...and I made some sausage patties with TVP and vital wheat gluten...

...and I made extra because I wanted to freeze some...

...it was a pretty perfect breakfast...

...the sauerkraut has spent 3 weeks on the counter...and that's when the Man says that it's ready...so we moved it to the fridge...

...we had a few packages to send to Alaska...someone has a birthday this month...

...and then it was time for the shopping...

...not much of note...a couple of new drinks...still water...and coconut water...

...and I just found these few things still in the bag after I'd taken the photo...nectarines...pretty hard right now...we'll see if they ripen...

...and then the big project for the weekend...which was power washing the driveway and sidewalks...

...it's kindof hard to see the difference when it's wet...but it really does look amazingly clean now...

...we went for a steamy walk on the riverwalk...

...we were in the shade the entire time...

...and right beside the river...you can see it through the trees...

...but it was just so hot and muggy...

...there was this neat walkway right down to the water...you could probably carry a kayak down it...

...but I've never seen anyone swimming here...and there's no deck or path at the river's edge...so it was sort of an odd stairway...

...I ride past this community garden every day on my bike...it's behind the church so I'm guessing it's for their members...

...but right past it was this sign...

...so of course I stopped an got a couple of things...I only had a dollar in my basket...and I'm actually pretty surprised that I even had that...haha...I had already just bought local squash at the grocery store...so I got us a couple of ears of very local corn and a cucumber...

~Wishing you a lovely start to your week!

...and I think that I'm FINALLY all caught up with the posts that didn't have any photos...I'm glad to have them in their places though...

...4.19...Dinner and a Movie...