A Little Fun, a Little Terror

Sometime this past winter I wondered if it's possible to make one's own hot dog and hamburger rolls. It seemed logical that it could be done, but I'd never heard any of my bread-baking friends say they'd done it. I kept telling myself to check allrecipes.com to see if I could find a recipe for them, but I never seemed to get around to it.

My procrastination paid off when my Idaho niece wrote a post in her blog about making hot dog and hamburger rolls and recommended highly the recipe she'd used.

I made them one day last week, and mercy, they're good. Easy, too, thanks to my trusty bread machine. To add a little more nutrition to the recipe, I threw in a cup of Lola's Fixins (a mixture of sunflower seeds, poppy seeds, sesame seeds, caraway seeds [which I leave out. Don't like the flavor.], rye flour, whole wheat flour, wheat germ, old fashioned oatmeal, potato flakes, and corn meal) in place of one of the cups of white flour, and that worked well.

We're at last getting a great spell of warm, sunny weather, so my two vegetable gardens are finally in. There's my usual garden, which I've been planting here every summer for ten years, and the new, little experimental garden, which Ken prepared for me this spring. We want to see if we get better results from the new location, which is sunnier. I always plant tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, green peppers, spinach, beets, and various squashes, but I've never felt that the "usual garden" yields as well as it could. I used to grow mountains of green peppers at our former house, for instance, but now I'm lucky to get 2-3 peppers per plant. The tomatoes do fairly well here, but I can dozens of pints each fall and would like to can even more. We'll see if the experimental garden does well.

When I planted the tomato plants this year, I tried a little trick: I put some banana peel in the bottom of each hole before setting the plant in it. I've read that banana peels are great for tomato plants. I know they're good for roses and have been amazed at how one puny little rose bush has done so well in one of my flower gardens. I give full credit to the banana peel buried with the roots.

My final fun item for this post is a great pasta recipe which appeared in a recent issue of Parade: Plum Tomatoes and Artichokes with Penne. Um-ummm. So good. It's quick and easy, too.  
And finally, here's a little terror for you, if you're as startled by snakes as I am.

I was puttering in the front yard on Sunday, watering the tomato and green pepper seedlings mentioned above, and turned to walk into the garage. Lo and behold, this fella lay at the base of the kitchen steps. It set me back a few years, let me tell you. I'll never outgrow my fear of snakes, not even harmless ones like this one. I can't even handle looking at photos of snakes.

Ken coaxed the snake into a trash can, then carried the can down our woods road and set it free (the snake, not the trash can). I hope it likes its new digs and won't be back here any time soon.