I’ve never before seen a Christmas cactus put out a single bloom, but there you go. Even one is something to be thankful for.

(BTW: After you come to the conclusion that IKEA’s ceramic and glass 365 food storage dishes kinda stink (especially when the seal comes off the glass lid and refuses to go back on), you’ll realize they make great planters!)

You don’t have to love the style of something to adore how it works. This is brilliant, and I will totally be ripping off the idea at some point in my future, albeit in a slightly less fussy faux-traditional fashion.

(Apologies for my lazy catalog ripping - I’d ripped it out simply to remind myself to post it, thinking that surely I’d be able to find a cleaner image online. Not so!)

One of the highlights of my kitchen experiences was the moment I mastered a basic pad Thai sauce. Life changing. Or at least palate changing!

My recipe base came from Not Eating Out In New York. The hardest thing about it was sourcing palm sugar (Vietnamese grocery) and tamarind paste (Indian grocery). Once I managed that, it was pad Thai any time I wanted! The more often you make the recipe, the faster it’ll get for you. These days it takes me only as long as it takes to grill my chicken or tofu. That’s faster than I can go pick up take out or have it delivered. The key is buying everything prepared: my chicken comes cut up (”pollo para tacos” at the Hispanic market), my bean sprouts are bought in just the amount I need, the cilantro I destem but don’t chop, and I don’t use the red peppers.

A mere 8 oz. of noodles makes a lot of pad Thai - enough for at least three or four entree sized servings. Having this for lunch the next day at the office really elevates the work day.

It is with this recipe I mastered my fear of too-much-cilantro. There’s really no such thing. When she says use half the bunch - use half the bunch!

I’ve had my ice cream maker for a while now, but I’ve only ever made apple cider sorbet and a Coke slushie in it. Let me say I have now seen the light.

I was craving sweets last night so badly I’d paced the kitchen six times before realizing it. I resolved to make ice cream, since for the first time in ages I actually had cream in the house. But a quick survey of googled recipes showed me all the things I didn’t have. Like vanilla beans, half and half, and, it turns out, fresh milk. Oops.

I started eliminating recipes based on ingredients, starting with eggs first, as I didn’t feel like adding twenty minutes of stirring on the stovetop to the length of my payoff. Then I eliminated the vanilla bean recipes (keeping vanilla extract recipes). Then any that required large amounts of milk.  Somewhere in the middle, I started sourcing recipes that called for powdered sugar, ’cause I happen to have a ton that needs to be used up. I ended up with a recipe that looked really good…except for the quart of half and half it called for.

In the end, I made up my own recipe. And you know what? Hit it out of the park. Either I’m amazing, or ice cream is hard to screw up. Probably the latter.

It’s a vanilla ice cream base with chopped peppermint bark stirred in. I’d been saving a box of the stuff in the freezer, a gift from Christmas, for precisely an occasion such as this. It was worth the lost space. You can use crushed starlight candies or peppermint extract along with chocolate chips, if you like.

Harry and David peppermint bark!

Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream
(serves 6)

1 1/4 cup heavy whipping cream
1 cup evaporated milk
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1/2 tbsp + 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup finely chopped peppermint bark (put it in the food processor)

Combine the first 4 ingredients in a bowl and whisk until the sugar is dissolved. Place bowl in freezer until mixture is very cold, but still liquid, about fifteen minutes.

Churn according to ice cream maker instructions.

At the soft serve stage, add peppermint bark and continue churning until well mixed.

Like browning chicken, churn longer than you think you need to. I took mine out when what was on top looked like melting ice cream.

But as I was scraping out the bottom, I realized what texture it really should have had. So, keep churning!

After the ice cream gets too thick to continue churning, transfer it to plastic lidded container and freeze until hardened, usually about four hours.

It was my bedtime long before the four hours of hardening were through, so I had to content myself with a few delicious licks of the spoon last night.  But I got ice cream for breakfast this morning.  Oh yes.

I’ve been using these $15-back-when-I-bought-’em folding chairs from Target as dining room chairs for a long time. Say, four years now? They’re fine and all, but eventually they break, and now I’m down to three, plus two sets of random chairs that definitely don’t go together (projects. of course. sigh). So when I volunteered to host a foodie meetup dinner at my house for twelve, I took a look at my seven mismatched chairs and decided they would not do.

Off to Craigslist.

Here’s what I came back with. They kind of remind me of the Tivoli at Crate and Barrel, but more curvy. And a lot cheaper.

They’re going to be RED. Hopefully by June 1st. Stay tuned for their transformation!

I found twelve (12!) free daylilies on Craigslist. Craig, I love you.

image by Joel Dinda

Dug up the weeds out of this strip of dirt and ’tilled’ it with a shovel as deep as I could get (it was pretty hard). The soil quality wasn’t very good, so I raided our community compost bin for something a little richer to cut in to it.

The daylilies go in.

And then get trimmed, per the advice of the lady who gave them away. I read online that helps the plants focus on getting their roots established instead of feeding the leaves. Don’t know if that’s true or not. (Seems like the trauma of having the leaves cut off would make the plants focus on regrowing the leaves?)

At any rate, there they are. When I can get my hands on some newspaper, I’ll paper down the bed and mulch it. Let’s see what they do.

Twice this year I’ve gotten up early on a Sunday and done some scrambled baking before having to go somewhere.  Lucky me, part of this past weekend’s recipe required a homemade ‘baking mix’ for which there were lots of leftovers.  Now I have a stash of already-started oatmeal blondies for future usage.

I was googling recipes late Saturday night looking for something I could make the next day that wouldn’t require a trip to the store between then and 8 am the following morning (basically everything that called for chocolate!).  Naturally Martha Stewart swooped in to the rescue.

I found the recipe via Vicarious Foodie.  The orginial MS version (and a link to other baking mix recipes) here.

They came out perfectly.  Would you expect less of Martha?

The De Anza flea market happens the first Saturday of every month. Liza organized a bunch of ladies in our Meetup group to go to last weekend, and I’m so glad she did! I’d never have the discipline to battle the crowd by myself, but knowing I’d be meeting other gals made it easy. I was oh-so-good and didn’t buy anything but lemonade the whole time I was there…until the last ten minutes, that is. Then I suddenly had to have two different things! But between the two things, I only spent $12, so I’m still okay.

Gorgeous cloisonné style tin that has my two favorite colors and was screaming my name from ten feet away. I saw it and knew I was buying it, no matter how much he said it was going to cost.

This pendant surfaced from the bottom of a very tangled heap of jewelry. I dug around in all the boxes, just out of habit, but really didn’t find much I wanted to buy, at least at the prices being asked. Then this showed up. I was almost afraid to ask, “How much?,” as it seems if they know you really want it, they can up the price on you (I hate tables of unmarked things for this reason).

It opens up so you can put whatever you want in it…

…So I’m going to cycle through my favorite handmade papers. I love being able to change out the contents when I get bored, or to color-match an accessory. I’m also thinking butterfly wings would look amazing. I’m going to be on the lookout at the park all summer now!

The farmer’s market in San Pedro Square runs 10 am to 2 pm every Friday, May through December.  It is primarily targeted towards all us poor folk stuck in our offices downtown wanting something nice to do during our lunch breaks.  I adore that it’s an urban market and a lunch oriented one - I wouldn’t like to have to drive out to the suburbs on the weekend just to experience this.

Flowers are a lovely splurge for the home and the ones I’ve bought at this farmer’s market tend to last longer than ones bought from the grocery store. I tend to go less for the showy blooms and more for the muted, interesting textured branches and filler flowers. In addition to being cheaper, they last longest.

Local delicacies: stuffed and dried olives, marinated pre-peeled garlic cloves.

A new item this year: freshly made pasta! I am determined to spring for this at least once this summer (it’s a pricey treat, $6 a pound).

My most favorite splurge, if I’m feeling flush on a Friday, is this man’s spiced almonds. Bliss!

Organic tomatoes, lookin’ mighty fine.

Organic oranges to the left and an apricot hybrid to the right for which I can’t remember the name. Aprilums or something random.

I see heavenly summer drinks in this picture.

This stand sells delicious, filling tamales. They’re some of the cheapest lunch food available at the market (for those days when you only have $10 and you want to get as many fruits and veggies as you can, but you’re also starving). They were $2 each last year, and I’m glad to see the price hasn’t yet gone up. Buy early, as he always sells out.

The Clay Oven always has a tent out, accompanied by a portable tandoor where they make fresh naan for the wraps they sell. I think that’s so cool.

Gourmet mixed butters. Too expensive to buy, but great to sample and get ideas for DIY.

The same stall, but the cheese end of it. The pesto jack samples had people sighing aloud in pleasure. Also pricey ($5+ per small block), but I could see treating yourself to a crusty loaf of bread from the adjacent stall, a fine block of cheese, and a bottle of something bubbly, and taking the rest of the day off to go have a picnic!

Started my summer garden last weekend! Pulled off the mulch and landscaping paper of last year, turned over the patch with a shovel, and then smoothed it out with a rake. I’m longing for some sturdy attractive edging, but it’s not in the cards. After the bed was prepped, I laid out a soaker hose that runs the length of the plot, and then covered everything with landscaping paper - the kind that draws water down, but doesn’t let it evaporate into the air, and also blocks weeds. The soaker hose will be attached to a timer that turns on in the early mornings for half an hour or so. After I get my plants laid out, I’ll then cover the paper with mulch to provide sun relief (the paper is black) and weigh it down.

First plants that went in are heirloom tomatoes bought from Bountiful Gardens. I bought one for sandwiches (Cherokee Purple), one for sauces (Amish Paste), and one for sun-drying (Hillbilly). I’ve never grown heirloom tomatoes before and I’m excited. Here’s hoping they’re not overly susceptible to diseases I don’t know how to manage. (Resistance to disease, unfortunately, is one benefit of the highly cross-bred tomatoes you buy at the store that I do really love.)

I’m trying to start my garden while spending as little money as possible. Which means I need to find some plumber’s tape somewhere in the depths of my toolbox or I’m screwed! Meanwhile, my drippy faucet is going to water the plants I put in this container. I have a hard time with container gardening - it’s not conducive to automatic watering systems, so mine wilt and die as I’m terrible about being consistent. The bell peppers I planted in this pot last year only turned out two measly peppers for this very reason. But this year we’ll try something different.