7 posts tagged “home”

My sister Nancy is cooking for me, waiting on me and making sure that I don't over do it like I did yesterday, so today I resisted the perpetual urge to "do something" and just laid low. I watched two movies from bed, both wonderful little films about quiet lives. Both perfect for being home and taking it easy after being under general anesthesia for a couple of hours and a shorter than expected hospital stay.

I highly recommend them both, if you like quirky little human interest films with wonderful performances. I liked that both films had people expressing things they couldn't in words through music (drums in "The Visitor" and singing in "Grey Gardens").  

If you're on Netflix, feel free to add me as your friend to see if we like the same movies.

 

I must be feeling homesick, but where is home? Home is mostly certainly here in California, but most of my family, with the exception of my daughter, live in Minnesota and are having an Easter meal at my sister and brother-in-law's place today in Minneapolis.

I have a big dining room table and plenty of room to host holidays (especially since emptying my living room of almost all it's furniture). But there's no family here in California for Easter and my friends are with their families.

I miss making holiday meals for lots of friends and family.

So I've been cooking this weekend. 

On Friday I made a cauliflower, garlic, lemon saffron soup but just tossing things together from the kitchen. It was delicious. 

On Friday night, I watched several Mark Bittman "Minimalist" segments on that I download on TiVo and woke up on Saturday inspired to go grocery shopping with an actual list and cook some more. Deborah, Cassie and Laurel were coming over Saturday evening and my aspirations to make several things got the best of me, because I started several things, but never finished anything before they arrived. (At least I had plenty of wine on hand!)

Plus I couldn't find the chickpea flour I needed for the main dish I wanted to make and roasting beets resulted in me not wanting to get my hands red cutting them up for the salad I was planning to make. So we ended up eating the fresh bread and yummy cheese that Laurel brought and I added some hummus and olive spreads and served what remained of the cauliflower soup...and kept pouring wine.  

But today I decided to put all the inspiration and shopping to good use and after a trip to Whole Foods for the right flour, made Bittman's "Tortillitas with Shrimp" and a roasted whole chicken with gravy. I didn't get to completing the beet salad recipe, but I did find a pair of rubber gloves so I could peel and slice them up for later in the week. And the house does smell like a home.

I posted some mobile photos earlier to give some of you a sense of fall in northern California. That inspired me to take some more photos around the house to get back to documenting the ordinary moments of any ordinary day. I am also going to start doing the daily (okay, periodic) gratitude reflections again too. There is much about my life that I am grateful for and much that I want to put down just to remember.

I noted how the leaves turn color here, despite people's misperception that California is only palm trees and one non-stop sunny season. There is clearly a sense of spring, summer, autumn and winter. It's more subtle, but it can't go unnoticed. But even approaching winter, while leaves fall off the trees and some plants go dormant, like the mulberry bush below (yes, I presumably have a mulberry bush), some things are just starting to bloom and flower. My first year in San Jose I planted poppies in the backyard in after New Years and was so happy about it, I couldn't stop smiling and laughing thinking, what would people back home think of planting into the frozen ground in January?

I put up some Halloween decorations for the first time since moving to California. Wow, it's hard to believe that it's been four Halloweens since I made this move west. It's probably weirder still for people who know me well to hear that I have not opened up those six large orange bins of decor, costumes and ghoulish make-up in four years. I didn't put up much today, but I did buy two pumpkins and put up a couple of spooky fun things out front, including a "Haunted House" sign. I've not seen any ghosts, but AB and Deborah think there are some up here in Menlo Park.

 
Lastly, now that the kitchen is done, we can cook again. Trader Joe's makes it so easy too. I bought some frozen Halibut, thawed it, painted it with lemon infused olive oil, sprinkled citrus fennel seasoning on top and broiled. Then after two minutes in the microwave, we had some lovely lime coconut Thai rice as a side dish also courtesy of Joe the Trader . A leftover salad from ordering pizza last night and presto, dinner is served.
We did not feed the gorilla.
The recycling people did not come today as they were supposed. They were schedule for today and AB set it all out last night for them to take away the latest load of packing materials; boxes upon boxes and bags upon bags of paper that served as wrapping for fragile stuff in the move. This is the third load and there's still more to unpack. I want this mess gone, I wonder why they didn't come today?

Okay, bored with my ordinary life post about leaves, seafood and recycling yet?  What do you expect? I should write about my love life? Or life with a teenager who's exploring what it means to have her own love life? Nawww...I've gone rather stealth with all that for the moment. But I will close this post as I opened it, I have much to be grateful for and so do you I'm guessing.    

Now the boxes need to be unpacked and my favorite cook needs to be here, then it will be complete.

This bathroom is being done surprisingly fast. It needed to be gutted.

That bag of parts from last week, turned into this.

Thanks to a little repair help from a friend.