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Stephanie says

Exbury Azalea

March 22, 2014

Spring arrived; the early flowers are blossoming.

This bergenia is a riot of color!

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Tastes like Chicken

September 16, 2025

Jim visited brother Dan in Palau mid 70s and came back with some wild stories of these gloriously beautiful tropical islands. The ones that stuck with me are pretty much food related, go figure. There was an open-air movie theatre in Peleliu filled with wooden benches for seating. Rats were bold enough to scavenge food whenever, so movie viewers kept their feet up on the forward bench. Hamburgers were served with a cabbage leaf for greenery, there being no iceberg lettuce on the island. He met our friend Virginia there, she was maybe 13. That girl took down fruit bats with a sling shot, a treat for her grandmother. They are a large bat species with a two-foot wingspan. She’d spot a roosting fruit bat hanging upside down from a tree branch, pop a small rock into the slingshot, eyeball the angle and let loose. She had incredible aim. She’d nonchalantly balance in a squat to husk a coconut wit...

Ethel strikes back

August 24, 2025

Grandma was a teacher and she drove the 18 miles from Powers to Myrtle Point every school day. It’s a pretty drive on a narrow road that hugs the hillside high above the snaking south fork of the Coquille River, past high pastures and a few scattered houses. One day there went Ethel on her morning commute when she noticed “Howard Post” boldly painted on a large rock embedded in the hillside. She kept going and there was another one. Then another one. For a stretch of several miles young master Howard took it into his adolescent brain to spray paint his name on many, many exposed boulders in the hillside. My grandmother’s solution to this embarrassment was to buy her own can of spray paint and on the way home that day, wearing a dress, (she wore only dresses then,) she stopped the car and over-painted every “Howard Post” she could reach. It took many years for that paint to fade.

Pasta ala Norcina from America's Test Kitchen

March 13, 2014

I’m a fan of America’s Test Kitchen on PBS. Any recipe from their site that I’ve cooked has turned out beautifully. The great thing is they do all the testing and tweaking so all I have to do is follow the recipe. At least the first time. A recipe for sausage and pasta recently aired. I limit pasta in my diet these days, but every once in a while I’ll indulge. And this recipe looked so good I made a mental note to cook if for Terry, being certain he’d love it. Then a friend who’d suffered a serious illness was released from the hospital, and here was my opportunity to give this a try. I doubled the recipe, filled a large casserole for my friend, then one for Terry, and had enough left just for me, me, me. And it is superb! Four fork review from all who were treated to this dish. It's not real pretty but the rosemary spiced sausage makes me forget that. Serves 6 White mushrooms may be substituted f...