no foolin'
on the first, I drove to The City and watched one of my theatre friends from Grand Hotel performing in this Sondheim musical, in which I've also performed.
on Sunday I made brunch - orange ricotta and berry filled crepes!
I stayed in the bay area for work and to attend a team meeting celebratory dinner. I'm certainly not going to turn down an excellent meal that someone else is hosting! while I'm not a huge fan of all seafood - we enjoyed a seafood tower appetizer - and the two other times I had oysters I didn't care for them, we did have my favorite shellfish - lobsters and shrimp - and the champagne mignionette dressing made the difference with these oysters. and the steak with truffle butter was amazing!
Easter weekend, we're starting the garden. Craig had the putting green installed on Friday. the garden wall took about a week before that, and it run three sides of the green along all the fence lines.
This tool has been making things easier.
this will be sunflowers and snow peas. should be pretty!
Easter dinner of honey-baked ham, and I made curry yams and steamed asparagus, and reheated some of Craig's risotto. it was a great way to end a great day of planting, renewing. while planting, I had listened to the online Easter service from the Christ Church Cathedral in Victoria BC. what a lovely inspiring message!
it's 5 o'clock!
another brunch experiment... I made crumpets! our mom made them once when we were kids and never again, so I always thought it must be labor intensive or time consuming. it was only a little of both so I can see me making these again.
my favorite cajun vendor stopped making my favorite etouffee mix a few years ago, so I'm still trying to find another mix for when I don't want to make it from scratch. this one is a famous brand, and instead of seafood I made it with beef and andouille sausage. it was pretty good! the bev is a hurricane look-alike made with vodka and a fruity mixer.
I signed up for another work cooking break with our cafeteria head chef. for Earth Day, we made a plant based salad bowl, but I added Nashville hot shrimp so we had a little more protein. and Craig just loved the Green Goddess dressing which apparently isn't available in stores any more. this may have been our first meal around the fire pit!
using up the last of the Easter ham, and eating the last of the lentil soup that I had made with the ham's bone.
another virtual cooking opportunity, with our truffle shuffle and Next Level Chef Tucker. this was her pan-seared scallops with tabouleh salad. of course, it was phenomenal.
since we started planting on Easter, we've had a few more plants appear. it is so exciting to see new life spring out of our planters.
sunflowers and snap peas, next to and behind the fountain. the sunflowers came in my souvenir tin of bird and bee seeds from Monticello, so these are very special founding father seeds!
Craig had scheduled a golf game so I picked a movie that I wanted to see that also opened that weekend. Chevalier is about a composer, swordsman and lover who was nearly erased from history by Napoleon. he was also the illegitimate son of a slave and a landowner who rose to great prominence in France before and during their revolution. it's an incredible true story, and this movie is a beautiful, funny, infuriating and eventually uplifting telling of his story. I got a tasty bev, the Showtime, to enjoy for my Sunday brunch matinee.
for Admin Professionals Day we were treated to pizza and had two of our execs come in to give inspirational talks. Then near the end of the hour, our CEO surprised us with a quick drop-in, a group photo and a few selfies!
