Where on Earth Have I been?

Goodness gracious, friends. It's been a week since I last posted! My sincere apologies for staying away so long. Would you like to know what I've been up to?

Adam and I wandered into this desolate location a couple of Saturdays ago. That little food stand you see is Speed's Hot Dogs, home of the WSJ verified World's Best Hotdog. They aren't kidding, man. Observe:

The wiener itself weighs in at about two pounds. Add a toasted bun, chopped onions, mustard, ketchup and relish and HELLO GORGEOUS. But... next time we'll split one. We ate these at 3:30 pm, and for dinner, we had water. Oof. Let's talk about vegetables now, shall we? To work up an appetite for the giant snawsages, we did some container-garden prep work. That is, we cleaned out pots, mixed up dirt, spraypainted some stuff, and planted the hardiest veggies in a giant half-barrel planter.

Squeee! Chard sprouts! Aren't they precious?

And spinach, but it looks like grass to me. Good thing I labelled it.
I think the bok choy is the cutest. I thinned out the sprouts after taking this photo, but that's sort of all I know about gardening. I'll keep you posted at how things go with my hardy green plants and also how they go with these guys, who I have less confidence in -

Those are cherry tomato seedlings. Behind them are about 5 kinds of hot pepper seedlings... We'll see how this turns out. I'll be out of town from May 28 - June 6 (Portland + Seattle + Vacation = can't. wait.) and I plan to actually put these in pots as soon as I get back. If they don't take, I'll get seedlings. I'm trying to keep my expectations low for my first year of container gardening. What's that? You come here to talk about food? Ooooh, ok. The day after the hot dogs, we had Salades Nicoises - hard boiled eggs, tomatoes, olives, baby taters, green beans and tuna on a bed of arugula with tarragon vinaigrette. Adapted from this recipe at Simply Recipes, and it was great.

Oh and we made pasta from scratch. I'll have to talk about that later because it was a great experience, but look! Shrimp scampi on home-made fettucine!


I am sorry not to have a recipe for you today, but there are things going on behind the scenes here and I have been quite distracted. Don't get too excited - it's just that I finally bought hungrybruno.com and am wading through the process of doing more than having it redirect automatically to blogger. Daunting, I tell you.