Hey, June.

I'd like to take a moment to thank my peeps and homies, all you fabulous people who read this blog & even leave comments, I love you! And I love that I can keep connected to my friends through here, that you take the time to read even though my life can be boooring, and I don't do myspace or facebook. ;) HUGS TO YOU! I talked to my buddy Lee on the phone the other night for the first time in probably 2 years, which is ridiculous. I don't mean to loose contact, I'm sorry you guys!

I finished knitting Victoria's hat and the baby apple hat. I'll take pictures of the pompom hat later; here's a basically identical apple hat that I knitted a year ago. I've started doing a similar apple hat for Eli's birthday, but adult-sized and green with ribbing rather than a rolled brim. I bought yarn to make the Global Warming sweater, a wool-cotton blend from a brand that uses Peruvian fibers & donates money back to their community. I also started a baby onesie, based roughly on a Lion Brand pattern, but in ribbing and in some old hand-me-down acrylic I need to get rid of. It's the same blue variegated stuff I made the cabled coffee sleeve out of, so it should be good for a baby boy. (It's so weird that my bro is having a baby, and that he's got 3 stepsons! One or 2 of them might come visit me this summer for a bit while the household is adjusting to the new member).

I worked 4 days last week, (2 of the days were teaching Spanish, and 2 more this week) but still managed to get stuff done besides knitting and reading another 2 books. We planted more tomatoes (we have 19 plants now, insanity!) and did some other things around the yard. Now if only the weather can stop being schizophrenic and decide to be summer for real....
R peeled lemons to make limoncello (we threw in 2 grapefruits for fun) and I used the juice to make a pie, key-lime style. We also have the ice cream maker ready for some citrus sorbet/gelato, but it's too cold out for ice cream! I felted a sweater I bought years ago that has always been too big, it turned out really well. I also finally made my candied grapefruit peel (it took ridiculously excessive amounts of sugar), which will be great for making panforte and lebkuchen/ pfefferkuchen (I should get Vicky's recipe). We made a Thai-style roast chicken, which was really tasty, but the flavor didn't penetrate much into the meat, which was sad. Oh and we washed the car, woo.

We went out to dinner for our anniversary to the best restaurant in the area, Porta in N. Bend. It is authentically Italian (meaning not Olive-Garden-ey Italian, the chef used to work at Genoa in Portland) which inspired R to make up some fresh pasta later in the week. We had a butter-pepper-garlic sauce with pecorino, fresh basil, and prosciutto, YUM. Last night I made a bacon-shallot-cream sauce with peas, also YUM, and I made a loaf of French bread to go with it. This week we are going to try to reproduce the dish I had at Porta, a spinach & ricotta rotolo, one of the best things I've ever eaten. I was looking for inspiration for our fresh pasta and found the recipe for rotolo in my pasta book, it was meant to be!!

R brewed an Oktoberfest last night, he's only done pseudo-Oktoberfests before, because the beer is a lager & needs to be at a certain temperature, but I think he's going to put this one in the keg fridge to make a real lager. I need to go make some dog cookies with the spent grain now and get the kitchen cleaned up. The fun never stops here! And honestly, I think I sound a lot more productive than I really am!