Rainy Days, Garlic, Soup, and Stuff

43, overcast this morning.. Light rain later.. yesterday was nice, about 50 after a rainy morning. 

Larry is starting to paint the living room today, so i am trying to stay out of his way as best I can. So, a big pot of soup is cooking and I am painting furniture in the kitchen.

Not much news here. I have been a homebody since Wednesday and enjoying every minute of it. I have cooked, sorted drawers, wandered in the gardens, and painted. It has been nice.

Yesterday I made these cookies from an old recipe someone posted on Facebook. Called digestive biscuits with the measures in ounces so it must have been a British cookbook. It was a bit of work converting it, and I have to say the end result was disappointing, very bland. They were much nicer when I spread a little blackberry jam and made a sandwich cookie with them. Do you have a good recipe for digestive biscuits? I would like to try again.

I also finally chopped up the rest of our garlic from last year, and put it in olive oil to store in the fridge. It was beginning to dry out and some of the cloves were sprouting, so now they are put up and ready to use easy. 

Larry went to the store Saturday to get chicken feed, and surprised me with these. Aren't they lovely? Made my day.

Outside, the flowers are really coming on. It is so good to see them after this gray, rainy winter.

Black history month is coming to a close here in the US. One thing I particularly enjoyed was hearing classical music by black composers. We are lucky in our state to have a young composer named Matt Jackford who hosts  a two-hour program on public radio. I enjoy his program very much, and have learned a good bit. Today he played a beautiful piece by a black woman composer, Florence Price. Think of the challenges she must have faced, in a time when female composers, much less black female composers, were not welcome in the classical music world. Another program, Performance Today, is also a classical music show, and there i heard pieces by Chevalier, a black composer who was a favorite of Marie Antoinette,  and about whom there is now a movie in the theaters. 

I like music of almost all kinds, so I was delighted to hear music from Wales featured on the radio program Thistle and Shamrock.  We were lucky enough to visit Wales in 2016, and feel a connection to that small country. We were both pleased to find we both had a small amount of Welsh blood in us too, when we did our DNA tests. 

As you might have guessed, I am a regular listener to radio, particularly public radio. We don't watch TV here, just movies on a DVD player, so radio is our main entertainment,  I guess you could say. It suits us well, as who has time to sit and watch TV? Not us, except in the evenings when we can pop in a movie. We just finished watching the series, Jewel in the Crown, set in the last days of British rule in India. A good series, and I learned a good bit about the history of that time period. 

I managed to unpack all our finds from Wednesday and got them sorted to where they will go: booth, ebay, or keep. Here are my probable keepers. These are all Early American Pattern Glass, and were found for as little as 25 cents, up to $22 for the tall apple green celery vase on the left. The whole lot was less than $30, and just imagine, all of this glass is well over 100 years old! 

I use a lot of my old glass, because I love the way it looks and feels. This goblet, for instance, has tiny etched stars all over it, that sparkle in the light. This one has not been positively identified yet, but may be as old as 1874 or so.

Well, back to the kitchen I go. The soup is smelling awfully good.

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.