Rainy Saturday

It is pouring rain right now and the forecast is for rain today and tomorrow. So although we need the rain it is a drag that it is happening on the weekend. But we need to do some housework and Andrew needs to do some work work so perhaps the rain is coming at a good time. All week the temperatures have been cooler so I have been extending my lunch time walk to include the Botanical Garden. I noticed that they are improving some of the walkways - turning them from gravel to brick pavers - much nicer to walk on. Since I don't have a lot of time I can only walk around the hosta, perennial, and conifer gardens. The conifer garden is overgrown, some of the paths are obscurred by large limbs so it is interesting to know that I am not the only one who has trouble with correct initial planting spacing. This week we made 2 new dishes. The first was called 'Mountain Stew'. It was very good with lots of vegetables, brown rice and kidney beans. The second was 'Indonesian Fried Noodles' which used 'Soba noodles' - a noodle made with ancient kamut wheat grain. I got to use my new wok for the first time and it worked great. However next time we make the noodle dish we need to reduce the amount of cayenne pepper - knowing that Indonesian food is typically very hot, I only used half the amount of cayenne but even that turned out to be too hot. We also will change the way the egg is used. Rather than dump in the raw beaten eggs and then stir to cook and create a creamy texture on the noodles, we will next time just make scrambled eggs in the wok and then hold them aside and combine them at the end. Being so rainy today, maybe we can try out our new pasta maker and have fresh pasta for lunch or dinner. I guess it depends on when Andrew gets out of bed and what he wants to do. He is still sleeping right now! I started work on hand sewing the binding for the quilt last night - being a little tedious I was putting that off. But it is a good activity for a rainy day so I will continue with that this morning.