Ks Are Wild

Both kids had stints with growing pains nightly this week.  THey took turns.  I was very sleep deprived and very grumpy the next day.  I’m never grumpy during it because I remember what it felt like.  I still got them even into high school.  THinking back, my parents were saints.  My mom massaged ben gay into my calves until her fingers and arms fell off and I was close to sleep and my dad would sit with me in the jacuzzi at 2am.  They were wicked painful and there ain’t no faking them.  I’ve got my routine.  First, rub Ben Gay like substance on the area(S).  Cover legs with adult sock so it totally covers the stuff up and they don’t touch it and then touch their eyes.  Next I try heating pad on top of that.  If that still doesn’t work maybe some ibuprofin (and a movie at very last resort for distraction).  But man!  Both of them.  Back and forth… That sucked.

Last night we ordered vegetarian chinese food.  Always nice to not have to cook or shop for the items or plan the menu.  Plus it’s yummy.  I never knew tempeh and tofu could be so good.

As of today, it’s a one week countdown to Kosette’s 5th birthday and her very first birthday party.  I have been very busy with the party planning and the house and yard prep.  I have been painting my windowboxes, patio furniture, spray painted a rocking chair I got in San Diego, bathroom cupboard doors, toy chest of drawers, trellises, and a big chest I plan to use as a bench by our entrance.

The kids played outside in the back (the front was off-limits as our neighbor was having a garage sale and the cul-de-sac was too busy for them to play in or near).  THey explored with sticks, and beat all the flowers off of my lilac and my snowball bush.  For your amusement – when asked what he’s doing, Kellen replies “Nothing.  Playing with my big dick.”  His word for stick.  But now he’s got Kosette saying it that way!  And when he was with a group of mixed age kids some little girls of 8 or so years couldn’t contain their giggling at that.  That one plays with lots of dicks and he loves to beat things with them and poke them in holes.  Yep – there I went too far.   A gong just went off.  But I couldn’t resist.  Giggle.  I’m just as bad as the 8 yr. olds.  Kosette nearly deadheaded all of our chive blossoms (and we have many plants).  I found a Pacific tree frog the size of my thumbnail that they enjoyed in a peanut jar terrarium Kham made for them.

Kham edged our garden and beds with cut up limbs of alder off his project that just would’ve gone to waste (slashed and burned).  We strung it with thick, hemp rope that Ray, Kham’s dad, had given us a gigantic bundle of years ago left over from a rocking horse carpentry project.  I plan on tying random scraps of ribbon and sewing trim all around to further delineate it, like they do at the Renaissance Faire.  Pretty flagging.  It’ll make me feel better having 10+ kids running all around our backyard soon.  And it’ll make me feel more justified for yelling at the kids when they step into the potato patch.  They are old enough now, there is simply no reason for their dismay and forgetfulness.  I swear, between them and the cats clawing it all up, it’ll be a wonder we get anything of any crop.

I plan on taking a break this week and seeing the Sex And the City movie with my neighbor/friend, Herma.

The air is starting to be perfumed with roses around here.  I’ll really have to start posting pics soon.

And for a future project, I’m planning on doing a mural on the closet doors in the kids room.  I think I want to do naturalistic toadstools/gnome homes, shadows of tree limbs, a moon poking out behind its branches…And I am going to paint a Tolkien quote on their wall this week.  Busy busy.  Lots of painting.  It’s a regular ol’ painting palooza around here.

This blog is only a few days old and I’ve already skipped a day. But I feel okay about that because we weren’t inside much. The kids played outside while I weeded then laid newspaper/cardboard over the veggie garden pathways, outlined them with salvaged stones and stumps from Kham’s worksite, and then mulched them with about 4 inches of straw. Kham helped the neighbor do a Home Depot run and then borrowed his ladder to string more cable for our hops vine. That’s right, I said MORE cable. That’s because our golden hops has already outgrown by nearly three feet the 15+ feet we had between the ground and the roof before the end of MAY! It looks awesome though. The chartreuse against the eggplant color paint really pops and breaks up the dark expanse. Exactly how I pictured it. That makes the aesthetic outcome deeply satisfying. Kham cleared and weedwacked a buffer of the “forest” from our fence line.

We broke in the newly cleaned bbq by grilling up some bratwurst with grilled onions, dijon mustard, and worchester sauce on a toasted french bread rolls. Throw in a beer, salt and vinegar chips, hardworking people and we had quite the bingefest. We lacked the crucial pickle though. Bummer. I want to make that my Memorial Day Holiday fare tradition. It’s still weird to not be at the Renaissance Faire for the weekend. And there was nothing better than a banger with a Hornsby on a hot So. Cal. day with all the white fluffy seedpods flying through the air and driving everybody with allergies nuts (not me – I’m one of the lucky ones – so far, so good with the kids on that front too). It makes (the food) me think of Kalani, my brother, and miss our times sitting on hay bales, dusting the straw from our mugs for our first drink of the day. Good times. The scent of straw in the garden probably helped me with the memory trigger too. Throw in some sandalwood oil and Nag Champa incense, sweat, and people who haven’t bathed for a day or two and then you have the scent of Ren. Faire.

We had a lovely dinner at The Robinsons – Kosette’s friend, Sophie, who lives just 2 minutes away, her parents, Michelle and Patrick, and their 2 yr. old Mac. Kham and I figured out that we hadn’t socialized at someone’s house (neighbor’s aside) for about 1 year and that was a rare single occurrence moving away party. A good time was had by all and we still managed to get the kids home and in bed in time.

Today I cleaned the house from its 3 day weekend of neglect and abuse, worked on Kosette’s 5th birthday party invitations (more on that later), took the Jetta in to get a quick looksy about a potential cracked head and low coolant/potential leak (more on that later), and went to a meeting of about 10 people to renew and rewrite her IEP as she’s transitioning from Preschool to Kindergarten this fall. And tomorrow I’m going to take Kosette and Sophie to school (I drop Kellen off at Michelle’s for a change of pace for him and an hour and a half of free time for me) and then renew our car registration and return to a weekends worth of outside play and work laundry. Whoo, hoo. No more Dancing with the Stars tonight. Boo Hoo! Kristi Yamaguchi won – Yay. Enough for today.

The day is wearing down and the kids are fed and in the bath. It was a very pleasant day in all. I started by taking Kosette and her best friend, Sophie Mai, to the Farmer’s Market. Despite dire warnings of thunderstorms and rain all weekend, it was a very temperate, sunny day; the PERFECT day for planting those summer vegetable starts. And you can tell that everybody else had the same idea because there was no parking for the market (so we skipped it). You could see everyone leaving with their box flats of tomato, pepper, and eggplant starts.

You see, here in Corvallis, Oregon (Zone 8b) in the Willamette Valley, it is a big gardening area. It is a lush and beautiful area with fantastic summers that are pretty dry compared to the rest of the year. We really can get late frosts up to May 15th as the last average frost date so people are really risking losing their crops if they plant out too early. Everybody’s chomping at the bit, waiting for the soil to warm up enough to get them into the ground. Some use a lot of different inventions to push their date earlier like wall-o-waters and frost blankets and cloches… But when that date finally rolled around and it was the weekend, we had a CRAZY hot spell 33 degrees warmer than the average 60′s. Yep, 99degrees. In May. What is this, LA? The people who did plant out early/on time lost much of their stuff do to the heat. It crisped everything! It did a lot of damage to my landscaping that’s for sure. Even the stuff in the shade. Without the springtime plants fully leafed out it caused the premature death of spring plants and damaged emerging summer ones. Long story short, we lost one good weekend of gardening which is a lot of time to lose in the growing span of tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant that are heat/sun lovers. And today, especially with it being a holiday weekend, everybody was trying to make up for the lost time; myself included. After the failed market trip, I took the girls to the library and checked out a bag full of fairy themed books. Then I came home, painted their faces with my old makeup to look like fairy butterflies (pics to come another day) and THEN saw to my gardening.

Gardening during a breezy, perfect, sunny day while drinking a Weider’s cider and listening to A Prairie Home Companion – I can barely think of anything better. Kosette brought me lots of bugs and slugs to show me. She’s an excellent bug wrangler and handler. Very gentle and respectful and not caught up in the stereotypical ignorant yuckiness many of her gender have. W e love it. Now if only she’d be so nice to our 3 cats or her little brother.

On to my veggie garden…This gets long and detailed so if you are not interested in gardening or fresh veggies then I suggest you quit reading here. It has become my main hobby/passion so much to the point that I now have a new life goal of becoming a Master Gardener like my Auntie Alice back in Illinois. I’m sure my blog will be highly gardening/plant focused as it is something I do and think about a lot. However, I will be sure to categorize it so you can skip through those if you don’t find it as UTTERLY FASCINATING as I do.

In a smallish plot we erected long-lasting trellising structures of cattle panel fencing and t-posts to grow as much vertically as possible and maximize our space. We have a 8ft+ tall, 12 ft. long, 4ft wide tunnel of the fencing that we bent. I’m going to grow a ton of beans, cucumbers, and melons on that. More shorter cukes are planned to climb sunflowers. Peas (what’s left of them after our cats did their business scratching around in our fresh dirt) are growing on chicken coop wire. I have two bunk bed frames I salvaged from someone’s curbside tied to t-posts for wintersquash. Then there are 3 rows 8ft. long sections of cattle panel with 3-4 tomatoes to a section. Then a row of eggplants buffered between bush beans and a staggered peppers row. I also have potatoes growing atop cardboard and covered with straw. As the green leafy part grows up and out and just cover most of the green up again with more layers of straw. It worked really well last year and meant that I could harvest all through the season and potatoes were barely dirty because they didn’t have any contact with the dirt. Best of all, I didn’t have to dig them up to harvest them. I also have a couple of squash plants planned and all the smaller stuff. But more on that later.

The 11 different types of tomatoes I have going in our garden this year are as follows: (Note most tend to the acidic side which is how we like them.)

1. Ceylon (descriptions combined from other websites):

A tomato like you’ve probably never seen before, these small, ruffled red fruit are unique in appearance, but distinctive in flavor also. Their taste is rich and assertive, slightly sweet with a bit of zing added in. Only about 2 inches across, these flattened scalloped tomatoes appear in great profusion, perfect for cutting into halves for a salad or using on plates as a garnish. This unique reddish-orange heirloom has a nicely tart flavor and produces copious fruits on indeterminate plants. Indeterminate. 72 days.

2. (the standard around here) Sun Gold Tomato:

65 days. Sun Gold’s fruity or tropical flavor is a big hit with everyone who tastes it. The bright apricot-orange round globes are 1 1/4 inches across and are borne on long, 10-15 fruit, grape-like trusses. The vigorous indeterminate vines produce equally well in the field and the early spring greenhouse. Plan on setting up your lawn chair between Sun Gold and Sweet Million for blissful snacking. F1, F2, V…Very sweet, bright orange cherry tomatoes taste not just sugary but also fruity and delicious. Vigorous growers, these tall plants bear long clusters of fruit. Try these for a real taste treat, you won’t believe you’re eating tomatoes! Indeterminate

3. Mexico Midget According to Seed Savers Exchange, Mexico Midget is simply “one of the best”. These tiny, 1/2″ fruits really pack a punch. The flavor is intense and tomatoey. Very prolific plants continue producing throughout the entire growing season. .. an incredible flash of rich tomato flavor, great for salads or selling in pints. Indeterminate, 60-70 days from transplant.

4. Green Zebra

Green 1½ – 2½” fruits with various shades of yellow to yellowish-green stripes, sweet zingy flavor. Very productive plants, sure to be a best seller at farmers markets’ and valuable in the restaurant trade. Introduced in 1985 by Tom Wagner of Tater Mater Seeds. Indeterminate, 75-80 days from transplant.

5. Jaunne Flamme (or Flamme)

Beautiful apricot-shaped heirloom from France. Great for drying, retains deep orange color. Excellent bitey flavor. Very productive, fruits borne in clusters and weigh 2-3 ounces, about the size of a large apricot. Indeterminate, 70-80 days from transplant.

6. Black Krim

Named for the Crimean peninsula in the Black Sea. Slightly flattened 4-5″ globes with dark greenish-black shoulders, turns almost black with enough heat and sun. Excellent full flavor. Indeterminate, 69-90 days from transplant.

7. Kellogg’s Breakfast

Obtained from Darrell Kellogg of Redford, Michigan. Large beefsteak-type fruits are 1-2 pounds, juicy and meaty and truly orange in color. Delicious rich flavor, and a good producer at Heritage Farm. Indeterminate, 80-90 days from transplant…Lovely pale-orange color on 1 lb. beefsteak type fruit. Tomatoes have very good flavor and are quite meaty with few seeds. Juice has the same bright color as orange juice and is delicious. Heirloom variety. Indeterminate. 80 days.

8. German Red Strawberry

This German heirloom produces large, red, oxheart-shaped tomatoes that are shaped like a much larger strawberry. Plants yield an abundance of meaty, 3-inch wide by 3 1/2-inch long fruit that can grow to 1 pound. Shape of fruits can be inconsistent. Copious amount of delicious, robust, “old-tomato” flavors with a lingering sweetness.

9. Tigerella (Kham’s favorite last year)

AKA Mr. Stripey) – Highly productive, English vine that produces beautiful, silver-dollar sized, round fruits with red-orange skin with golden-green to yellow jagged stripes. Red-orange, juicy flesh. Brisk, tangy (tart) flavor.

10. Caspian Pink

Originally grown in southern Russia between the Caspian and Black Seas. Thought by some to be “Queen of the Pinks,” these prolific,1-2 pound, globe-shaped, pink-red beefsteak tomatoes that rival brandywine in popularity and flavor. One of the best known and best-tasting Russian tomatoes. This tomato is perfect for cooler climates. …Russian heirloom variety from the area between the Caspian and Black Seas. Large, pink beefsteak fruits average 10 to 12 ounces with a plentiful set and fairly early maturity for a tomato of this type. The sweet yet rich flavor is outstanding and has prompted some tasters to compare it favorably to Brandywine. Unlike Brandywine, this variety has regularly-shaped foliage. Indeterminate. 80 days

11. Ananas Noire

The name of this tomato is French for black pineapple and that is because it arose out of a planting of Pineapple Tomato in a Belgian garden. While its fruit is the same 1 to 1 1/2 lb. size as the Pineapple tomato, the color and flavor are totally different. The exterior is dark purple and green with pink-red splotches and a touch of yellow, while the inside is bright green streaked with pink. The hues bleed into one another reminding one of a piece of tie-dyed fabric. Flavor is special too, sweet yet rich and delicious. Expect large plants and heavy yields. Indeterminate. 80 days…Our most exciting new tomato this year, it is wonderful in every way. This unusual variety was developed by Pascal Moreau, a horticulturist from Belgium. The multi-colored, smooth fruit (green, yellow and purple mix) weigh about 1 1/2 lbs. The flesh is bright green with deep red streaks. Everyone loves their superb flavor that is outstanding, being both sweet and smoky with a hint of citrus. The yield is one of the heaviest we have ever seen! Be the first at your farmers market to have this new classic….85 days. Also known as Black Pineapple, this is one of the most interesting tomatoes we offer. The skin has shades of green, purple, orange, and yellow. Bright green flesh has bursts of red streaks that will definitely add intrigue to your vegetable platter. The lip smacking flavor starts out sweet and ends with the perfect amount of tang. What’s more, the sprawling indeterminate plant yields a tremendous amount of 1 1/2 pound fruits.

On to the Eggplants:

1. Fairytale

Fairy Tale is a petite plant with extraordinary productivity. The decorative miniature eggplants are white with violet/purple stripes. The fruit is sweet, non-bitter, with a tender skin and few seeds. The elongated oval eggplants can be picked when quite small at 1-2 ounces, or they can be left on the plant until double the weight, yet the flavor and tenderness remain. Fairy Tale eggplants are recommended for marinating and grilling whole. The harvest can begin in just 49 days from transplanting. The petite plant reaches only 2-1/2 feet tall and wide, perfect for container gardening. An eggplant has not won an AAS award since 1939, so Fairy Tale is truly an exceptional new variety.

2. Hansel

Hansel is a 2008 All-America Selection that offers many advantages over comparable eggplant varieties. The fruits may be harvested as small as 2-3″ in length, or as long as 6-10″. They are non-bitter regardless of size. The glossy, dark-purple fruits are borne in finger-like clusters and display a contrasting, dark green calyx. Hansel grows to be 25-36″ tall and can be planted in small garden spaces. Although the average days to maturity is only 55 days from transplant, Hansel bears high quality fruit over a long harvest season.

3. Ichiban

61 days. Solanum melongena. (F1) Plant produces heavy yields of high quality 9″ long by 1 ½” wide dark purple eggplants. It is so dark purple that the eggplants are almost black in color. Very flavorful and tender. Excellent for Oriental dishes. Also great for grilling and roasting. Performs well even at cooler temperatures. Excellent for home gardens and market growers.

4. Blackhorse – I can’t find a thing about this on the net. How often does that happen? There’s even a term for that, coming up with two unrelated words on google with zero results. It’s pretty hard to do evidently. But the lady at the Farmer’s Market swore up and down that it was a Japanese long, cylindrical type like Ichiban. We shall see.

And lastly, the Peppers:

1. Purple Belle (Capsicum annuum var. grossum). Novelty grown for Kosette. If purple is her favorite color than by dangit I’m going to grow purple bell peppers, pole beans, potatoes, and basil so long as it gets her to eat more veggies.

2. Chocolate Sweet Bell pepper. 78 days. 2.5 inch by 4 inch tapered pods with blunt noses. In color not in taste.

3. Gypsy F1 Hybrid Sweet bell pepper. (Capsicum annuum var. cerasiforme). 58 days. The fruits are yellow/green turning to red when ripe and very thick walled. A wide wedge shaped pepper, 6-7 inches in length and tapered at the point. Resistant to TMV.

4. Fish Pepper A rare African-American heirloom pepper, from the Philadelphia-Baltimore area. Variegated leaves. Pendant fruit are 1.5 inches plus, conical, green and white striped, turning orange with brown stripes, finally to red. Fairly hot. (Capsicum annuum)….Very unusual and ornamental pepper plant is variegated both on the foliage and the peppers themselves. Both leaves and fruit are striped with creamy white and green, with the peppers eventually turning orange-red. Very hot fruit, 1 to 2 in. long, was used to season fish and shellfish in the African-American communities around Baltimore and Philadelphia back in the 1930′s and 1940′s. Plants are attractive enough just to be used as ornamentals, but peppers are prized for use in cooking. 75 days.

5. Anaheim Also know as the ‘New Mexican Chile,’ this moderately pungent fruit is deep green, but turns red at full maturity. Very smooth peppers are 7-1/2 inches long and 2 inches wide and borne on tall, productive plants that offer good foliage cover for the fruit. Tobacco mosaic virus resistant. Excellent for canning, freezing or drying. 75 days

6. Guajillo [gwah-HEE-yoh]. Meaning ‘little gourd’. The Guajillo, Cascabel (Rattle) or Catarina (Ladybug) chiles all belong to the group known as the Mirasol chiles. The Guajillo from Mexico is a beautiful russet red, translucent, thin-walled dried chile, measuring between 10-15 cm in length and between 2.5-3.25 cm in width. Most chiles grow hanging downwards (pendant). Guajillos grow upright, earning themselves an alternative name Mirasol (i.e. looking at the sun). Its delicate flavour makes it a favourite, especially for colouring, in all forms of New World cooking. Heat level is 2-4. The Guajillo, (which is related to the Pulla and the Costeno chiles), and the Catarina chile have long shapes. The Cascabel chile has a cylindrical shape; the seeds come loose from the placenta when dried and produce a sound like a rattle, which gives it its name.100 days. (Capsicum annuum).

7. Lipstick Pimento

This variety called Lipstick is a sweet 3 1/2″ long dark ruby red pimento type pepper that tastes great! Perfect for all types of cooking because of its sweet flavor. Prolific, easy to grow and delicious! Great for salads, roasting, stuffing and pastas too…73 days
This shiny red, top-shaped fruit is among the very best of sweet peppers. It delivers an intensely sweet flavor many people prefer to bell peppers. Great for salads, baking, roasting or freezing. High yielding and early maturing even in cool summer areas.

8. Corno Di Toro Giallo (Yellow) A tapered yellow sweet non-bell pepper with a mild heat. (Capsicum annuum). 70 days. Italian Heirloom pre-1920. Its name means Yellow Horn of the Bull. Prolific plants set continuously. 5-6 inch long, thick walled, spicy fruits turn from yellow-green to red-orange when ripe. Also known as Yellow Bull’s Horn Chile.

9. Sweet Italian 70 days. Produces a heavy set of 7-inch long, conical, thick walled, very sweet peppers that turn red very quickly. When fully ripe the fruit is amazingly tasty and great for making sweet pickles. Perfect for munching or in a salad….

Yep, with this blog post, consider my cherry popped. Or is it resoluted when you make it your New Year’s Resolution to do it? Whatever the case, there were many reasons for it such as avoiding the repeat phone conversations, emails, and mass emails. However, there were a couple of main reasons that kept me dragging my heels.

For starters, I wouldn’t consider myself or my life an exciting one, to write about or read about. There are many days when the kids are finally asleep and I feel my day is just beginning. When asked how my day was, or what I did today, I often become befuddled at the complete lack of any actual accomplishments besides general transport, care, and feeding of my children. I sometimes joke that I chose to let the kids live on to adulthood, at least for one more day, so all-in-all I’d call it a success.

The other major negative feeling I had regarding myself blogging was that it feels pretty self-involved and egotistical to do it and say – “Hey everyone look at me! See what I’m doing (or not doing as is so often the case with this procrastinator) and note what delightfully random and somewhat deranged thoughts I have!” I mean, I love reading others’ works, but it’s different when it’s you out there. My brother-in-law, Chris, and his wife, Sarah both blog and I often think “J.C.!*&$^#*($” (Yes, I swear a lot; even in writing.) The normal 24 hr. clock doesn’t apply to these people, who have 4 children all under the age of 8 by the way! They have a new home that they designed and built from scratch together, she is a wonderful writer, a fantastic cook and baker, and she owns and rides horses, is a very involved mom, sews many of their clothes, handmakes many delightful presents, are active with their church/community/family/and friends… It always makes me realize that I watch entirely way too many movies through Netflix.

Okay, enough negatives, here’s the MAIN reason why I’m committing myself to write/post something daily: (There, I just put my goal in writing so I can be held accountable.) I’ve noticed a drifting of me from family and friends and me away from me. Does that make sense? I’ve had a lot of major life transitions in the past 5-7 years: gotten married, moved away from my home state of California, and had two babies. And I find myself conversing with people from my past, in the past tense. “Remember when….?” I find myself telling the same old stories to people here in Oregon and thinking, “Wow, I really need to get some new stories.” I desire to build up those relationships with more current shared experiences and knowledge. And that goes for myself too.

Nearly 5 years after having my first baby, and with the other having just turned 3 and entering the potty training stage, I’m finally able to contemplate my answer to the “Now what?” question. And reevaluate who I’ve become because there’s no doubt that I am very much changed from becoming a mother and moving as often as we have. For now, all I’ve been able to come up with is that I love being a stay-at-home mom. They drive me crazy and I love my alone time BUT I feel like I’m where I need to be and doing what I should be doing…for now. It works for me. If I got the itch to do something else, then Lord knows Kham would be behind me 5,000% (he’d be more excited than me, frankly).

With my reasonings being excessively and perhaps unnecessarily explained, on with the blogging shall we? Or is it I? Man, I’m out of practice writing. The Type A in me has a really difficult time with the verbal diarrhea, barely, if at all, editing nature of email and blogging but I just won’t do it if I don’t do it that way.

So, the name of my blog “Ks Are Wild” – Not only is it a play on our initials, K.S., but I have been known to respond with that when people hear that we both, already having K names (Kham and Kari), purposely chose to continue with the K naming tradition of my family and name our kids Kosette and Kellen.

I chose this visual background wordpress theme “Forbidden Forrest” because:

a) It seemed WILD and unruly like in the title

b) it seemed organic

c) green like Oregon and plants (both things I love and am surrounded by)

d) it reminded me of the book/musical WICKED, which I love, and which seems a little bit Wicked to go with something so visually dark and unusual

e) it made me stop in my tracks when searching over 1,000 different themes (I kid you not – for hours I looked at themes because I’m the Type A type that likes to assess all my options before I make a decision).

f) it was just a bit disheveled like my purse, car, garden, home interior, life and therefore a bit of a reflection of me – but in a lovable way right?

Well, I guess this is it for today. I’m sure the look of this will evolve as I figure things out.  Besides pick a background and favicon, I have done no design or layout alterations.   And I’m sure I will include lots of links, photos, and video clips in the future. I almost feel like the second I hit “publish” and send out the mass email to people saying I’ve started the blog that I’m having a housewarming party or inviting an exchange student into my home. In that case, welcome to the Casa de Kari. Oooh! Maybe I should’ve named it that instead. Nah!

Off to prepare for an in-person houseguest – Morgan, one of Kham’s coworkers. She’s vegan and I’m making a vegan potato leek soup. I got the recipe off the internet from Alton Brown. I made it just last week with the dairy. We had it hot the first night then served it cold the next with slices of sourdough, a pinot grigio wine, and a salad with a white wine vinegar base as a dressing. Both were great. The cold version felt more substantial and seemed more filling. Kham liked the cold version a bit better. I think I liked it better warm. So, I’m making it again tonight to truly compare while I still remember the tastes well enough to make a fair assessment.