Stephanie says

Hang left at the Rialto Bridge to our 800 year old hotel, modernized of course but I’d bet those fabulous marble floors are original judging from the wear pattern. The Venetian glass chandelier is beautiful. Drifting to sleep in the wee hours, windows ajar, sweet song of women walking past rises to my room, opera in high and clear voices. Hauntingly beautiful. So I'm a little fanciful. Yeah, and I guess its opera, its Italian, good enough for me. Molto bene.

Fall temperatures got me and Jim thinking it was time to fire up the hot tub. Too hot to hot tub during summer so we shut it down a couple months ago. Assessing drain and fill time I took a quick inspection - popped open the lid, expecting the green furze of algae. The water was clear except for a substantial amount of little droppings looking stuff littering the depths. Another look around and I spotted toads lurking on the lip of the tub, little bitty toads, maybe two inches in full extension. Ah hah, Sherlock, that’s toad turds at the bottom of the tub. Teeny toads with huge bowel movements, proportionally speaking. Toads, the amphibian equivalent of mice, flattening and squeezing themselves into incredibly tight spaces. Then having to void. I detected a toad politeness order in their world. When they do their business, they hop off the lip and swim around the pool dropping toad turds, eyes averted, into the calm depths of the calm tub waters while the non-swimmers swivel their eye...

I’ve been cooking merrily away in preparation for my daughter’s visit. (She recently moved into a studio apartment so is bringing whatever she can load into her wagon to store at Mom’s Freebie Storage.) We both love Apple Betty but I decided to make use of some other autumn fruits and made this Fall Fruit Crumble. It went together easily with one substitution, lemon zest instead of orange zest. I was sprinkling on the topping which seemed very buttery when I realized I’d forgotten to add the ½ cup flour. Gees, Louise. The topping went back into the food processor along with the flour. I forgot the sugar in pumpkin pie once so we topped it with big dollops of very sweet whipped cream and it was just fine. This recipe is very good and not too sweet. Fall Fruit Crumble 2 ripe pears, peeled, cored and sliced 1 apple, peeled, cored, and sliced 2 cups fresh cranberries, rinsed 1 teaspoon orange zest 1 tablespoon cornstarch ½ cup granulated sugar Topping (recipe foll...

“West with the night” by Beryl Markham, published 1942 This is a fascinating biography of growing up in British East Africa, now Kenya, at the turn of the 19th century. At age four, she and her father moved to a farm in 1906 where he trained and bred race horses. Ms. Markham carried on the family tradition before becoming a pilot in the 1930s. I’m reading along, enjoying her tomboy exploits on the Dark Continent, when I come across a reference to Lord Delamere. Now why do I know that name? The names keep dropping, “Blix” the Baron Bror von Blixen, Denys Finch Hatton, Isak Dinesen. Oh I get it, “Out of Africa”. I loved the movie and the book although the people didn’t seem real. Yet somehow the connections in this book made all these people alive to me. Gees, they’re all out there hunting big game and racing horses and they all know each other. Baron von Blixen was a great white hunter, who led safaris in search of big game. That got me to wondering if he and Gus Peret were acq...

Cooler autumn weather is perfect for making jams and jellies. I juiced green grapes from the arbor and made pectin-free jelly. My decades old candy thermometer broke in the recent move and the new one is very, very difficult to read. Standing over a bubbling pot of boiling jelly, angling my head this way and that to get a reading on the steamed up and clouded over glass is irritating. I will be buying a digital model. Yield: four half-pints from 4 cups juice. It’s too hot in season to make spattery peach jam. Regardless the size of the cooking pot, very hot splatters erupt out and burn unprotected skin on impact. I wear a red plaid flannel work shirt, rubber gloves and wield a long handled wooden spoon as personal protective equipment (PPE). 2-1/2 lbs frozen peach slices yield three half-pint jars and one sticky kitchen floor. And now for the taste results based on one toast slice spread with grape jelly and one toast slice spread with peach jam: The grape has a soft gel and ...

Moved hanging baskets from the porch into the sunwindow in an attempt to over-winter. Looks pretty good for day one...

The long awaited London vacation. I am normally a fearless flyer preferring small planes to jets. I take delight in the bumps and dips of flying into cloud updrafts and wind storms. I love the two-seaters, the six-seaters, the 32-seaters, but I hate flying over the ocean at night in a jet. What, if the plane goes down it’s better to see one’s impending doom as the ocean gets closer and closer while at least one passenger channels a hysterical Shelley Winters straight from one of those awful crash movies? It isn’t really that image that worries me, but sleepless with nothing but long hours to idle away I eventually contemplate my mortality. This is usually triggered by the screech of metal on metal, which jolts my body into a black surge of terror, and my mind runs rampant with the probability of metal stress in the aging jetliner where I’ve entrusted my life and limb. Was that sound from some component necessary to stay aloft, say a wing, searing off rivet by rivet? It all seem...