Entertain Me Or Else

This didn't exactly start out as a masterpiece of color.
Years ago, I tried to make Chicken Vindaloo. It turned out terribly. I used lots of onions and garlic and spices and somehow, it still wound up tasting like paste. I never figured out what I did wrong....

Once, Brother #2 and I were eating soup.
"I wish I had some bread to go with this," I mused out loud.
He fixed me with a look.

I think this is the last bouquet of the 2017 gardening season.
Last year, I remember being sad when gardening season was over. This year, I feel differently.
I will miss being outside all the time, and I will miss seeing the excitement of watching a green, growing thing begin its life and become something beautiful. The depths of January are a pretty bleak time of year here in Minnesota....

Plums!
I'm slowly working my way through Anne Byrd's "American Cake" ("slowly" because I don't want to wind up enormous). I saw the recipe for Lois' Original Plum Torte last spring and was interested in it because I haven't made much with plums.
Supposedly, the New York Times started running this recipe in the 1980s and was asked to reprint it each fall, when people had more plums than they know what to do with. The story is that the newspaper wanted to stop printing it, so one year it ran it...