Of Food and Nature

Yes, I've been painting, but today my mind has been mostly on food and the garden. Today was the delivery day for our organic produce, plus, last weekend we received a whole lot of organic nuts, seeds, rice and dried cranberries. One of our wonderful neighbors is organizing organic bulk orders from local coops for quite a few families and it's been wonderful! The food is of such great quality and the prices are very low! So, yesterday, I made a tasty wheatberry salad I saw at the blog Beauty that Moves, which you can find here. It was simply delicious!!
In the afternoon Daniel was out in our backyard planting some flowers in window boxes under the old windows the previous owners left on the fence. I can't wait until the flowers grow a little and fill in. I'll take another picture then!
Do you notice how it looks like fall in our yard?
Every year, we are fascinated by this. A lot of live oaks grow in this area (and our back yard), and they only shed their old leaves when the new ones start growing in the spring. So, in the spring we are constantly raking leaves (What am I saying?! Daniel is constantly raking leaves!). Also, when people burn their dead leaves in their yards, it smells to us of fall and the coming winter and makes us dream of apple cider and morning frost. Somehow all of this doesn't go with temperatures in the 80's! I wonder if we'll ever get used to that...

This morning when I was watering our vegetables, I had to take a picture of our jasmine in full bloom. Just by keeping that little window open, our whole downstairs smells of jasmine - wonderful!!
I also noticed this beautiful spiderweb while watering (click on it to see more detail). I don't know about you, but there are some things I will always be awestruck by, and the perfection of spiderwebs is one of those things!
And finally this afternoon I found my way back to food and made a batch of muffins loosely based on the great recipe I found here at a great blog called 30 Bucks a Week, although I had to make quite a few changes. I didn't have dates, so I used all dried cranberries, I used lemon zest instead of tangerine zest, I added some vanilla extract, and used ricotta cheese I had in the fridge instead of yogurt. Still, they turned out beautifully and taste delicious!!
Off I go to my little studio so I'll have more art to post very soon!!