9th Birthday Family Party

 On R's actual birthday, we had her family party.

This year she wanted garlic bread, "frozen lasagna from the store," cherry tomatoes, peaches and "NO other vegetables, no salad or sides at all" for her birthday dinner. I put fresh basil on the lasagna but she picked hers off. Sparkling water and fresh raspberries in the champagne flutes.

She wanted red velvet cake with pink frosting. She examined her cake when she got home from school and said, "Hmmm, the sprinkles are a surprise. I guess I like them. I know those flowers are eatable, but is it ok if I don't eat them?"

Flowers from the garden.
I am really not good at photographing dark red in lamplight.

My brother, her Uncle D, likes to taunt her with a nickname he made up just for her. She wanted me to take a picture of her getting mad while she read the card from his family.

Some how-to-draw books, the Wolf Almanac, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by request, some more people and furnishings for her dollhouse, ("I always get Calico Critters, but I would like to branch out into people this year!") and a pocket full of grandparent cash. Such a lucky and well-loved little girl.

Happy Birthday to our sweet nine year old. Last year in the single digits.

Shrimp Flower Bento

Whole grain bruschetta; grapes; raspberry apple galette, blueberries & raspberries; shrimp on spinach with home-grown Japanese Black Trifele tomatoes and grape tomato; cocktail sauce; edible flowers (borage, geranium, marigold & nasturtium).

Charlie Has a Doppelgänger

Our neighbor friend S just got a border collie puppy named Dexter. He is four months old.

Ears! I forgot how they have to grow into those. I think Charlie's were even bigger.

R appreciated his fuzzy puppy coat.

S thinks he will be more on the brown side when he grows up. But for now it's like an optical illusion. We couldn't stop laughing.

8.27 Bento Lunch

Cheddar with turkey pepperoni; raspberries and grape tomatoes; carrots and Kashi cheddar crackers; apples, blueberries, and apple-blueberry whole wheat galette; clementine slices.

When Life Gives You Apples

Our generous neighbor B gave us all the organic, unsprayed apples from her tree that we could pick. After we got home from raspberrying yesterday, we climbed ladders and D got on the roof and we filled bag after bag after box with apples. Some of them will go to the food bank when I work my shift there on Thursday, and I'll can some and freeze some.

But today I made pies. I found this little pocket pie mold from Williams Sonoma at a thrift store over the summer. It seemed like the pies looked better when I cut out the apple shapes and pressed them together by hand, sealing with fork tines, rather than using the press. Here it is (above) unbaked, with egg wash and sprinkled with turbinado sugar . . .

 . . . and here it is hot from the oven.

I made some little free-form apple galettes, just the right size for a lunchbox.

Some gallettes had blueberries, and I made a batch of pocket pies with a whole wheat crust.

And one full-size apple galette, with some of the raspberries we picked yesterday. I dropped some pies off as a thank you to our wonderful apple neighbors, we'll eat the raspberry version tonight, and the rest I'll freeze to pop into lunches. And now I really do have a lot of canning to do.

Raspberry Picking

On Saturday we drove to Hoot 'n Howl Farm, just outside of Boulder, to pick some raspberries.



The first week of school is always hard for me. I miss my little summer companion. It was nice to have her back all day long for the weekend.

I think D likes it too.

Western slope berries. And a kind dad, who says yes when his daughter says "Would you hold my pink bag for me?" That didn't stop me from making fun of him.





The farm is a wonderful place. It seems like such a labor of love. You can walk right out into the fields and pick, following the signs for which rows are open. Then you weigh your produce and pay for it on the honor system, putting cash into a little tin can. They had heirloom tomatoes and beautiful vegetables, apples and peaches for sale at their honor system farmstand. Now R knows where raspberries come from, and what hard, hot, thorny work it is to fill one of those little supermarket clamshells. And I have a lot of canning to do.

9th Birthday Party

It has been a long summer without my camera. Since my computer was out of commission for awhile too, there weren't any blog posts. The camera was expensive to fix, so I waited until I really needed it, for R's 9th birthday party. I'm so happy to have it back. It felt like one of my arms was missing.

We had her party at our neighborhood pool.


Suddenly the sky opened up, with rain and hail.




E caught a hailstone.


I captioned some of these pictures to send to family, but I forgot to save a version without captions.

That was a nice birthday memory--a rainbow just for R.

She wanted a wolf cake, with Oreo frosting. It was so much fun to make. She gets to keep the little wolf figurines and play with them. I bought the edible cupcake toppers on eBay.


Then the girls came back to our house for a slumber party. They are picking out books from the shelves D built for me, to hold my Dad's history scholar's library. R has commandeered some of the lower shelves for her own books.

Eleven girls in the basement!

Charlie wanted so badly to go downstairs. But he has a history of jumping on sleeping heads and licking faces.

Poor Charlie!

He got a lot of love in the morning.

The next morning, they opened presents and D made chocolate chip pancakes, the birthday girl's request.

D built this rope swing for R in the backyard. It swings you right into the bushes, and for some reason, every kid who comes over thinks that is just the most hysterically funny and entertaining thing.

It was fun to have a house full of girls for one night. You forget how little fourth graders are, until they are all swarming around you in the kitchen in their pj's, telling you exactly how much butter and salt they want on their own bag of popcorn.