Don't you just love phlox? I'm definitely going to have to get a few more of these - I'm thinking they'd make a nice border to the brick walk leading up to the house.


Today's first order of business is the warm weather foods ideas - great ideas, people, but we need recipes! I've had several e-mails with some truly yummy sounding things on the order of salads, soups, grilled items, but no recipes. I'm still willing to compile a little booklet so I'll give it a few more days to see what happens.


Second, I bought some strawberries yesterday. I'm determined to get this jam thing right - last year's was pretty loose and so I tend to use it warm as a sauce. Homemade jam made without commercial pectin tends to be much softer than the commercial variety, but I'm looking for a bit more firmness this year so I might cheat just a bit and add some of Pomona's Universal Pectin, which is much milder than the more mass market brands but still gives you that slightly pulled together texture that you really want in a jam. Hopefully the jam thing will happen tomorrow - it's not supposed to be too hot, so it should be a good day for canning.


This morning after soccer we headed to the Downtown Mall, which isn't a mall at all but rather a pedestrian shopping/leisure/lifestyle area, to pick up my Father's Day present to my dad. We're giving him John Grisham's latest, signed by the author himself. Apparently, Mr. Grisham has a relationship with this local independent place and is rewarded with huge posters of his grinning mug in the store's windows. Strange, but nice - especially when someone you love enjoys his books. As long as Grisham remains as prolific as he's been lately, I'll never run out of gift ideas for dad.


As it turns out, today was the Dogwood Parade and the parade route skirted the edges of the Mall. The Boy Wonder was thrilled to see bagpipes for the first time, old fashioned fire trucks and horse-drawn carriages. As we left he said, "Mommy, I don't think I like parades. But I like this one. It's the bestest. Can we see it again?" Next year, kiddo.


I've got some beautiful tuna steaks for dinner tonight. I'm going to get the grill doing for the fish and make a sauce-y thing out of roasted tomatoes, balsalmic vinegar and olives, with the whole mess served over Moroccan couscous. I have a clear idea of the taste I'm heading for - rich, somewhat salty, sharp and sunny - and will let you know how it turns out. I'll need some bread and a nice crisp, light white wine and dinner will be complete (with homemade lemonade for the Boy Wonder - so I can fool myself into thinking he's getting vitamin C and that it's "healthy").

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Spring has sprung in Charlottesville. These beautiful things live on my front steps, where they make me quite happy.


We've managed to accomplish quite a lot in the last week, despite the rapid approach of the end of the semester (we can gauge how close we are to the end by my husband's mood - the worse it is, the closer we are and this morning he was just miserable - happiness should arrive again in early May). The garden bed that used to have hostas in it is now cleared and ready for its next incarnation and the herb garden and just needs its dirt. That's one of the funny things about home ownership and gardening - buying dirt. When you were young, did you ever imagine that you'd actually buy dirt? Cool clothes, lots of make up, books and airplane tickets, sure, but dirt? And not just dirt but top soil, compost, peat, mulch, sand and on and on. I do compost, but that only supplies a small fraction of the inputs we need to be able to grow anything at all in our very dense red clay.


Today is not supposed to be as hot as the last three so I'm planning a day of errands with the Little Diva. I need new oven mitts - I've come perilously close to burning myself too many times - and some of those summer-time bobo sneakers. The Boy Wonder also needs sneaks, but I'm becoming disheartened at our inability to find some that don't scream "made in China by happy Folun Gong volunteers". I guess it never hurts to look. Anyway, I'm also hitting the library, the kids' consignment shop and maybe the new needlepoint shop to see what they have. Tonight will be dedicated to work-for-pay activities. One of my clients needed some writing and she thought of me - yay! It's very nice to have that kind of relationship where we trust each other and she knows I'll get the job done quickly and well.


I am actively soliciting ideas for warm weather cooking. We had chicken ceasar salad for dinner the other night (made with that pre-cooked and sliced chicken breast stuff) with bread and it was really nice. The night before that I made a big tray of nachos, which we drank with lemonade. Very simple and easy to clean up. Last night, however, I broiled up some chicken breasts that had been marinating in a kind of chipotle sauce. It took, what, 10 minutes to broil them but the kitchen was H-O-T. (Which reminds me, I need to check out our propane situation for the grill.)


Send your ideas for easy cool kitchen meals to me at HotWaterBath and I'll compile them to share with our little readership. Be sure to include your name and your approximate location so I can give you due credit. Many apologies to our friends in the southern hemisphere who are heading into winter - I haven't forgotten about you and I hope you'll send one of your favorites, even if it's not something you're making at the moment.

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Central Virginia is hot today, with an expected high of 88. We usually hit our highest temps in the mid-afternoon so this morning was dedicated to outdoor work so we could get as much done as possible before things got too warm. We became a bit uncomfortable around 1, so we had lunch (fruit salad and peanut butter crackers) and are now putting the Boy Wonder in for rest time (not nap time, as he repeatedly points out because he's "too big for naps").


I'm pretty pleased with how much we've accomplished so far this weekend. The Boy Wonder and I planted radishes, mesclun and bunching onions in the one small raised bed after spreading peat and compost over the layers of newspaper and kitchen waste and then moved on to putting some flower containers together for the front steps. I pulled out two rather anemic roses, some creepy groundcover thing (the main job of which appeared to be sitting around looking ugly) and a huge stand of distressed looking irises (which didn't bloom last year and showed no sign of doing so this year). At our house it's perform or get out.


Since the green area we euphemistically refer to as a "lawn" is really just a mix of rough weeds, we decided to be proactive and create a little 5 X 8 space near the patio to be a soft play area for the babe. First we mowed the weeds down as close as possible and then overseeded with some grass that we've been assured can handle our region's extreme wet/dry cycles. Because grass can continue to grow even when it is cut short, we'll do that through the summer hopefully killing the weeds while allowing the grass to take a good hold. Since we operate on a great deal of theory around here, all I can say is, "We'll see".


The big project for later (when the sun begins to fall and the air becomes more comfortable again) is to complete the Great Hosta Removal of '04. I really don't like hostas and I have a bed that is just covered with them. Out. Out. Out. Getting them out takes some doing, though, because they've filled this entire 2 X 8 bed and they're all connected under the soil. So I'm chopping, pulling and twisting their moist little alien bodies a bit at a time - I took almost an hour to clear a 2 X 2 area and I'm guessing I'm looking at another day of hard time before I'm rid of them at last. Once they're gone I'm going to just go with bedding plants through the summer and put in some bleeding hearts and lilly of the valley for next spring.


The final project is to lay the landscaping fabric down where I want the herb garden. This is another long and narrow space, maybe 3 X 10. I've promised myself that I won't spend a dime on plants until I've sketched it out and decided what to put where and how much of any given thing I need (i.e., want). In other words, to do the job right. I know I want a couple kinds of basil, some cilantro, a few scented geraniums, two or three mints, thyme, rosemary and lavender. Then there are things like verbena (which I love), catmint and a host of others.


If you have or wish to have an herb garden, what would you plant? What would you leave out? Why?

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