Pie in the Sky

Well, not really. Pie on the table here today.

Can you believe it?

After my last post was about healthy eating?

I did take it seriously, friends, and printed out every one of your comments.

So many good ideas there--thank you!

But today is Father's Day,

and R.H.'s request was coconut cream pie.

That's our wedding china there,

Copeland-Spode Blue Bird.

I had leftover pie dough so I made a pecan pie too.

But wait, what did our daughter-in-law bake for him for Father's Day?

A chocolate meringue pie!

Three pies!

R.H. is in pie heaven and he sampled the chocolate for lunch.

I think I will freeze the pecan for July 4th

as Christy and Bryan will be here and Bryan loves pecan pie.

Have I ever showed you our vintage pie rack?

We've had it for over 40 years

and one Thanksgiving we filled up all pie pans.

My favorite vintage pie pan is the top one, "Golden Boy."

It is what I used to call our firstborn when he was a toddler:

"You're my golden boy!"

Because he had bright blonde hair.

Here's the few silver pastry forks I have and they really are nice for eating pie.

It's been a nice Father's Day.

I actually succeeded in getting R.H. to rest for once.

Here's a picture we got from our youngest son today,

a picture of our granddaughters!

Happy Father's Day!

These orange double day lilies were here when we bought the house,

planted on one side of the house.

Don't they look pretty with the Queen Anne's Lace?

I'm Trying

It's not that I don't try to eat healthier.

I've been trying to eat more fresh vegetables and lean meats.

I do best when I start preparing supper early in the day.

I turn on HGTV and start chopping.

Is there anyone other than R.H. and me who likes sardines?

They are as good for you as wild caught salmon, and cheaper.

I put them in pasta salad for protein.

I watch television and chop away,

keeping an eye on Katie Belle right outside.

What is she up to?

It's the continuing game of Catch Me If You Can.

Guess who always wins?

The show outside is even better that HGTV.

Back to my salad.

Adding fresh herbs now is only a matter of going to the front porch.

And pasta sardine salad is ready for supper.

I'm going to try red lentil rotini the next time I make this

as so many of you are having success cutting out wheat.

I don't think I'm willing to give up homemade bread yet,

but I could pass up grocery store bread.

I made Mireille Guiliano's recipe for Chicken au Champagne one night,

from her French Women Don't Get Fat book.

It was amazing with mushrooms and rice!

Even if my champagne wasn't French.

Having to fix supper at the last minute causes me the most problems.

I try.

I start some chicken breasts in the oven.

Then I wash my favorite frisee--

most people just put sprigs of this in a salad,

but I love it so much I use it for the whole salad when I find it.

I serve the chicken breasts on the greens with a vinaigrette

and the chicken drippings.

Healthy so far, right?

But then what do I put on the table?

A baguette and Irish butter.

And a big baked potato and sour cream.

Could I have given up the baguette? Absolutely.

The baked potato? 

I don't know but maybe a smaller one next time.

Some last minute healthy suppers are a cinch.

Anytime I can buy wild-caught Copper River salmon and fresh spinach,

I have no problem fixing a quick and healthy supper.

It's just those frequent nights when I have no idea what to cook,

and R.H. suggests chili dogs,

that we end up eating junk food.

And no, I didn't take a picture of that meal, or others like it.

Last minute cooking is a problem for me.

Giving up bread and pasta and potatoes is so hard.

And come Friday nights, which when our kids were young was 

always pizza and a movie night, 

guess what I crave?

It comes from this….

Yes, that's what I really want.

What do you throw together at the last minute for a healthy supper?

When I can plan, shop and begin early,

even I can fix a healthy supper.

But what are some easy last minute, satisfying suppers?

I'm just not an eat a bowl of cereal and go to bed kind of girl.

Help?

My Favorite Gardening Books

Even though the garden book title that best describes me now is this one….

I still read gardening books as if they were novels….

Think a gardening book can't be a page turner to a novice gardener? The one on the left hooked me on gardening when we bought this 1920 farmhouse and 24 acres in 1990…..

We Made A Garden by Margery Fish made me fall in love with gardening. It is the story of her East Lambrook Manor in Somerset. (There is a slightly autocratic husband too.) She wrote:

"You can't make a garden in a hurry, particularly one belonging to an old house.

House and garden must look as if they had grown up together,

and the only way to do this is to live in the house,

get the feel of it,

and then by degrees the idea of the garden will grow."

The book on the right above is The Gardener's Essential Gertrude Jekyll, and those boots on the cover are Miss Jekyll's army boots that she gardened in.

 Even now, no longer much of a gardener, I put aside this book to read one chapter again--"Flowers in the House." I can't resist putting this quote for those of us who love to picture someone's rooms….

"My house has the walls of all rooms plainly lime-whited, giving a white of delicately warm color…the sitting room, whose window curtains are of a madder-dyed cloth, and whose other furniture is mostly covered with stuff of a dull orange color, likes to have the furniture color repeated in its flowers, and is never so happily be-flowered as with double-orange Day-Lily or orange Herring-lillies (Lillium corceum), and with this it often insists on some bowls of purple flowers. This is where they show on the warm-white wall, away from the madder-dyed curtains, in combination with the cool gray-brown of the large oak beams and braces."

Can't you just picture Gertrude Jekyll's sitting room? The introduction to this book is by Elizabeth Lawrence and her book is below because it's time to turn to American gardeners. First though I have to show this beautiful book, an anthology of Vita Sackville-West's writings.

I can't say that this book was much help to me as a gardener. My house is not Sissinghurst. It is a beautiful book, a treat to read and gave me far too much lust for English roses that was impossible to fulfill.

Next is Through the Garden Gate by Elizabeth Lawrence. 

A Georgia girl who lived and gardened in North Carolina, this month by month book is a favorite. She was called the Jane Austen of the gardening world.

I also have her The Little Bulbs, found at Goodwill with the name of the previous owner inscribed. Highly annotated throughout, I imagined how beautiful the owner's garden must have been back in the late 1950s. I collect old Nashville phone books from the 1940s through 1950s and found the owner in one, with her address!

R.H. drove me on a spring pilgrimage to the house one day but too many decades had gone by for the yard to show many remains of the spring bulbs she may have planted. I was disappointed but it did give me the idea for a book I spent some time working on, picturing it as a movie with Minnie Driver starring. Minnie Driver will be far too old to star in it by the time I finish writing the book!

Next book, and I can't even begin to tell you how much I love this book: Onward and Upward in the Garden….

Probably totally irrelevant today but my fascination with Katharine S. White and her husband E. B. White knows no bounds. I think I've always been a little bit in love with her husband. 

Andy--I call him Andy and who's going to stop me? Andy wrote the introduction for the book and edited the articles in it that were originally in The New Yorker magazine. They were actually critiques of garden catalogues, and they are as interesting as best seller novels. 

Mrs. White--I call her Mrs. White--had a different gardening style from that of Gertrude Jekyll, that of no gardening style. Andy wrote:

"Her Army boots were likely to be Ferragamo shoes…

If when she arrived back indoors the Ferragamos were encased in muck,

she kicked them off.

If the tweed suit was a mess, she sent it to the cleaner's."

One thing I can guarantee from reading everything I could about Katharine S. White--
she was a character. And he was a sweetheart and adored her, I think.

She did inspire a love of garden catalogues in me and I still read them. Here is a 1930 one that I treasure…. 

There are other favorite gardening books in my collection. A book by The Old Dirt Dobber. My father used to listen to his radio program…

The Practical Book of Garden Flowers by Richardson Wright. I could read Mr. Wright write about changing a light bulb and be enthralled…

The garden book I've had the longest came with me when I got married. It's an old National Geographic Society book called The World in Your Garden.

I remember lying in bed with a horrible case of tonsillitis in the 10th grade and drawing pictures from it...

And here is the only new garden book I've bought in years,

Tara Dillard's The Garden View

How I wish that R.H. and I had found her book decades ago! 

Tara's blog is on my blogroll  [and HERE]. You're in for a treat when you visit her. Tara is a nationally known garden designer, author, lecturer, garden genius.

Right now she is moving to an early 1900 house, leaving her beautiful gardens intact for the lucky buyer, so you will be in at the beginning of her exciting new plans if you've never visited her blog. Be sure to spend some time clicking on her "Vanishing Threshold" label. It will transform your life!

Here's a quote from Tara:

"I believe in more than a beautiful landscape.

I believe the action steps of creating/

keeping a beautiful garden

are the key to a beautiful life."

And be sure to watch for how Tara Dillard signs every post and almost every comment she leaves wherever she visits. I'm not going to tell you what it is. Go see for yourself.

Added later, And a very happy birthday to our amazing daughter Christy!

This picture was taken in our picnic shelter when Christy and Bryan visited us on Memorial Day last year. They'll be back here soon for July 4th!

Interruptions

This was not supposed to be my post.

This was…

I had a whole meal planned, bought the ingredients.

A hint: onions on the table and ovenproof bowls?

There was supposed to be a quiche to go with the French Onion Soup.

There was supposed to be an appropriate picture

propped up against the wall to hide the light switch.

The little crystal lamp was supposed to get cleaned.

Little gnats of interruptions happened,

not the big monsters of interruptions that some

of you are going through.

Instead, here is another meal I fixed recently,

a favorite dish I throw together quickly.

It's from Helen Exum's Cookbook, a 1982 favorite.

It's Beef Pilau but is pronounced purlo in the South Carolina low country.

While onions and ground beef are sautéing in one pan, I have mushrooms in another.

I add tomatoes, Worcestershire sauce, herbs and seasonings to the meat, beef broth too.

Then I add rice to the mushrooms and stir for a few minutes, then add to the meat mixture.

Helen Exum then bakes hers in the oven until rice is done but I keep it on the burner.

This time we were too hungry to take pictures at supper,

but I fixed a pretty table for one for lunch the next day.

Exum's cookbook is not just a cookbook but a fascinating story about Chattanooga,

Tennessee in the 1970's and early 1980's,

with lots of pictures of Chattanooga families.

Life is not always a bowl of cherries, is it?

There are lots of interruptions, change of plans.

Has life ever interrupted your plans?

Foolish question, right?

A friend of our son's has had his life interrupted;

his and his family's life will never again be the same.

Some of you have had your life interrupted in serious ways.

I'm thinking of you, and I'm remembering that my interruptions

are just little gnats.

A Sunny Hello

Sunny says hello to all!

All of us here at Dewena's Window wish you a

beautiful Saturday.

Time for R.H. to take the hens and dogs on their walk

through Valley View.

[No photo editing on these pictures, just the way my phone caught it.]


Added 6/17/15, just found these pics I took out front at night the same week as above shots and want to include here, even if no one happens to come back and see them but me!

As you can see, we truly sit down in the valley!

Rx: Read A Book

"Read a good book and call me in the morning."

That's what I wish a doctor would prescribe

when I'm feeling a little under the weather.

Not that I ever wait until I'm sick,

you understand.

Here's a few I finished in the last few weeks:

The Pink Suit by Nicole Mary Kelby

(Fascinating, especially if you love sewing.)

A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler

(What else needs to be said, it's Anne Tyler!)

Persuasion by Jane Austen

(My favorite Austen.)

Beauty by John O'Donohue

(Read a little at a time, just lovely!)

Pilgrim Inn by Elizabeth Goudge

(Must have now read this book a dozen times since I bought it in my

doctor's office in the 1980s. Doesn't everyone have a doctor who sells old books?)

The Right Attitude to Rain by Alexander McCall Smith

(Started over in McCall Smith's Isabel Dalhousie Novels.

This is the 3rd in the series.

I take them to bed with me for my winding down book.)

But wait, there's one more book in that stack

and today I'm giving myself permission to drop

everything and lose myself in...

The Mystery of Lucy and the Dark Woods

by Diana Kosmoski

That's right, our own Nana Diana Takes A Break

has written a book!

I got mine through Amazon but I went through her blog link

just in case that helps!

Here is the link to her blog for the rare person 

who doesn't know this charming, funny

woman who is the soul of integrity.

Now, I'm going to pretend that I just got off the phone

with my doctor and he told me to:

"Read a good book and call me in the morning."

First sentence: Lucy heard her mother, Ellen, calling her.

Don't bother me, R.H.

I'm reading, I mean I'm sick.