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I'm impressed. I expected my new found skill of bread baking would be a bust today. I expected the bread to be hard as a rock and totally unable to be eaten...Not so. The bread, wrappped in tin foil, stayed perfect. It's as fresh today as it was yesterday. Husband requested a grilled cheese sandwich with tomato and he said it was the best grilled cheese he had ever eaten. Grilling the bread brought out the flavor of the lemon even more then when it was baked yesterday.....I also sent a message to the Sullivan Street Bakery to see if there is any other variations I can try...It's always fun to make something you never thought you would be able to do and actually have it be a success....Next week Giada's homemade ravioli!!!

We love bread....only problem is they just don't know how to make good bread in the South. Me and the husband in the past have tried our hand at baking our own and it just seemed like more work then we were willing to do. We're not into work.....So I was curious when a Williams Sonoma catalog came with a recipe for no-knead bread. It looked wonderful and sounded very easy. While in Jersey I picked up a LeCreuset dutch oven, compliments of the Princeton Merchants Association where I won a $100.00 gift card. The recipe calls for a 2 3/4 qt. size oven and everyone I talked to said this would be too small to successfully bake the bread. Even the wacky store manager at our local W&S agreed that I needed atleast a 5 qt. to get the job done. And she should know because, as you have to hear every single time your in the store, that her husband is not only a lawyer but he's also a "master baker".....I listened to no one....I got the 2 3/4 qt. size and it worked perfect...

I enjoy going out to lunch....period. I especially enjoy going with my best food buddy from Ohio. We share the same love of good food, talking about food and everything else connected with food. We love to go to LeMadeleine because you can sit there for hours, long after you have finished eating, and they never ask you to leave. Miss W. always gets excited....yes you do.....when I get a desert and offer her some. Today we finished off a lovely meal with a "mini" chocolate mousse.......Le Madeleine knows that women have to have that something sweet to complete the meal experience, but they also know that we really shouldn't be stuffing our faces with cake.....We also realize that the more you eat the more you gain....Miss W. thought about dieting and then, being very serious, came up with the perfect excuse...she actually said...."I would go on a diet but I'm afraid I will lose my identity." it has something to do with everyone associating her with food. I h...

Our babysitting duties are coming to a close. The daughter and family are due in from Paris in the morning and I'm happy to say we managed not to burn down the house or lose the damn cat...As I write Miss Kitty is cuddled up along side me on the couch.....I can only assume that she likes me because I feed her......Plus I only said bad things about her when she was in the other room...In her defense she is very cute, although kinda stinky, and she appears to be pretty smart...I know what your thinking....she's falling for the cat. No, not really...she still has claws and I've never heard her hiss but I'm sure if provoked her hissing mechanism would kick in...We've enjoyed our little Jersey vacation....we spent the week looking at historic homes in hopes that we'll live in one some day soon and today husband went over to Hopewell to test drive a Lotus...he insisted I go along when he took it for a test drive and the dealership almost needed a crane to extract me f...

I have never minded doing things and going places alone....I'm probably one of the few people that can actually sit in a resturant and eat by myself.......so when I saw that there was going to be a "Girls Night Out" event on Palmer Square I signed myself up......We love Princeton and we were thrilled when we heard daughter had bought a house there. In town babysitting the cat....see previous post, I went looking for entertainment for the week we would be here alone...Tonight was shopping fun "ladies style"......food was involved. Princeton is one classy place, as not only did they have pre-shopping goodies for all the ladies but they had SHRIMP!! Big jumbo shrimp, mini-quiche, pasta salad and lots of cheese, crackers and fruit......I got myself a nice plate of a little bit of everything and then chatted up some of the local women...because everyone knows that I will talk to anyone that looks at me crooked...The best part of the whole night was getting to spend t...

But the big question is...."why would you want to?"........Today we drove up to the old homestead. Everytime we come up to Jersey we take atleast one day to go see where we grew up...We usually make our first stop on Sycamore Street, my childhood home and then our home after we married. The house still looks great although I would have kept it yellow.....We then drove downtown.....Yikes is about all I can say. To say it looks like a war zone is giving it credit. When we were growing up I would take the bus from St. Georges Ave. into town on a Saturday afternoon. We always went to the Woolworths and then to Swedes for a tuna sandwich and a coke. Well forget Swedes....all that's there now is a dirt hole in the ground.....Half of Main Street is gone which is actually a good thing considering what the other half looks like. As we drove down Cherry Street, where I held my very first job paying $1.00 an hour at the little book shop, we realized why we get strange looks when peo...

We are on day 4 of our cat sitting duties....Now, anyone that knows me knows that I'm not fond of cats. We are dog people....This stems from a childhood trauma between me and a Siamese....story best left untold. But when daughter calls and asks us to cat sit we are on the next plane....Miss Kitty is some fancy French cat that cost more then our first car so care needs to be taken. Oh, she's cute enough and I must say that we don't see her for 90% of the day......ofcourse, that leads to me being on edge all day long that somehow she has gotten out of the house when we weren't looking....I can't count the number of times since Friday that I have said to the husband "Where's the cat?".....this brings me to this morning....She woke me up head butting me to tell me she was hungry. I figured this out after she followed me into the bathroom then back into the bedroom and down the stairs into the kitchen. She loves to jump up on the counter where she again tri...

Yesterday we took the Junior Fam to the airport for their long awaited trip to Paris....Having more nerve then we ever had they took along Miss B...... Flying in business first class they were whisked away from check in to a special security line and Miss B acted like a seasoned traveler. We were 2 very proud grandparents as we stood off to the side and watched as they went through security and out to the gates.....I kidded for some time now that me and the husband would walk back to the car for the ride home and find Miss Baby strapped into her car seat in the back seat......but baby goes where mom and dad go....and after talking to daughter today after their arrival it seems baby did terrific on the flight. In the meantime we are baby sitting Miss Kitty and enjoying being able to eat Jersey food again.....We have already hit up the White Castle, the White Diamond and on the schedule for next week is Stewarts Root Beer and some clam chowder down on LBI......Also on the list is some of...

Let me begin this by saying...."this could only happen to us"....We live in the South and on occasion strange and unexpected things happen. Tonight was one of those nights. I went into the bedroom around 10:00 and was swarmed by a gaggle of flies...More flies then I cared to count. Now, this might not seem odd but there was no apparent point of entry. They just showed up, un-announced. I started to swat which kinda pissed them off. The more I killed the more appeared. They hid in the lamp shades, behind the mini blinds and on the ceiling. I sprayed, I swatted and I broomed. Forty five minutes later there were alot of dead flies....I called for backup and the husband helped to clean up the dead carcases....I then had the brain storm to go buy "fly strips"...Well what? I wasn't about to go to sleep in a room that was invaded by killer flies. So in comes the famous "Midnight Run".....this goes way back to our Jersey days when for excitement we would go ov...

Twenty some odd years ago we moved to the Crime Capital of the South....We bought a lovely new home and with that new home came brand new grass....it was even green. Three Golden Retrievers, a Great Pyrenees one little black dog and a Sissy later we ended up with.....well....dirt. We can't lay the blame on Sprite, Gunther, Isadore, Boo and Buster....We place all the blame on poor Sissy....she was an overweight, thyroid deficient, mother of 9 pups, lost the will to live when she turned 3, Golden. Sissy (aka Cherry Coke) would see Gunther, father of said puppies, enter the room and she would sit down at record speed. Those puppies really did that dog in. All the other dogs had no trouble climbing the steep flight of stairs from the deck down into their concrete run. Sissy wanted no part of those stairs. So we had to let her out the front door onto the front lawn.....She was such a good dog she never once tried to run away or chase after someone walking by. No, she was in a permanent ...