blah blah blah

I keep having lots to talk about ... anytime I can't get to a computer in time to write it down. And by the time I do get to the computer, either I've forgotten the topic completely, or the oh-so-awesome-sentence-that-was-the-linchpin-for-the-whole-essay seems incredibly stupid. And I hate to be a "here's what I had for lunch" blogger, so I've been kinda silent recently.

Since I can't manage to sit down and write a whole post about any one thing, here's a partial list of what I've been meaning to tell you:

• There are billions of purple crocus in our yard, which Certain People feel we have to go and admire up close (i.e. "stomp all over with rainboots"), and which have attracted the first bees of the season.
• Thanks to Gimpy and his brethren, our backyard has become a godforsaken, ankle-deep-in-mud, twig-strewn wasteland. It's so bad that I have to rake all the twigs up, put them in a container, and put them out for the trash. I've been using the copier paper boxes that got wet when we put them in the garage after our move into the kitchen, which has the double benefit of getting them out of the garage AND being small enough that I feel like I'm getting something accomplished, even when I only have 10 minutes to work on it before Certain People wander off.
• I made a new version of vegetable lasagna last night, which was good only because I used Diavolo sauce in it. The recipe called for pretty much every vegetable that wasn't nailed down at the grocery store, and while it was good, I wouldn't say the extra effort was worth it, compared to my other veggie lasagna recipes.
• I even considered a rant about the $145 I spent on groceries yesterday, which didn't include any detergent, batteries, or diapers, so it was doubly exhorbitant. At least we didn't have to visit the bathroom while we were there.
• I made a really good pork roast for dinner tonight. I was agonizing over whether to infringe on the copyright of yet another recipe author (at Cooking Light magazine, I think, judging by the font on the clipping I'm working from) by typing the recipe in here, especially given my recent snippyness about copyright infringement from other sources. But the pork was so good! Luckily, my moral quandary was solved by someone else, who had already posted the recipe online, so I don't have to bear the burden of doing it myself. You can find the recipe for Honey-Cumin Roasted Pork with Caramelized Onions here: http://www.cdkitchen.com/recipes/recs/563/HoneyCuminRoastedPorkwith63953.shtml You totally need to click through and make this stuff ... you mix five things together, slop it on a pork roast, stick it in the oven, and come back an hour later to find dinner pretty much done. The only thing I did differently from the directions was to add a couple tablespoons of flour to the last addition of chicken broth, just to thicken the sauce a little bit. We're not big on au jus around here - we're more likely to ask for gravy you can stand a spoon up in. I didn't take it that far, just thick enough that it didn't form a flood on the plate when we served it ... and I swear, if we hadn't had company over, I'd have been licking the sauce off the plate and sucking it out of the serving bowl with a straw.