Im obviously not the blogger in this family.

Turns out, Phil is a much more reliable, if not much more entertaining blogger than I am. Who knew???
I guess it works like this. He gets to write the stories and random facts that keep people coming back to our blog, and i get to keep those people informed on what is actually happening in our lives.  So what is going on exactly?... Well we're both working, and that about sums it up.  Being back on my feet for 8 hours a day pretty much takes care of my energy level for the other 6 or maybe 8 hours that I am awake,  and well,  you all already know what Phil has been doing with his free time.  Really though we haven't been doing a lot of anything. We've gone to a couple movies (at $1.50 a ticket for only slightly dated titles!), to the art museum, and visited less than a handful of new restaurants.  I go to the farmers market once or twice in a week which is always exciting, there's so much beautiful produce it takes me at least 30 minutes to get in and out again with two peppers and a tomato.

As our car is slowly but surely falling apart, Phil has taken it upon himself to do what he can to keep it safely running for as long as possible. His Saturday afternoon was spent changing the break pads and recharging our, long dead, air conditioner.  Mind you it was an afternoon of scattered thunderstorms, so part of my afternoon was spent standing over him with an umbrella while he worked on the car in the rain. The result of our team efforts... the breaks work!!! the air conditioner worked long enough to get us nice and chilly on the way to a rainy night game at the Durham Bulls Stadium, but decided not to work anymore on the hot morning drive to church the next day. But really... it's nice having no air conditioning in your car in North Carolina, it's like a visit to the sauna every time you go somewhere...every time you go anywhere.

Yesterday (Sunday) I made a Strawberry Rhubarb Pie, one that looks similar to this one here --------------------------------------->
but minus the blue and black berries, and up a few notches on the delicious scale.... in hind sight i should have just taken a picture of my own pie.
If you live in Minneapolis you should be able to find this very same, super delicious pie (the one that i made) at Lucia's. If for some reason they have changed their recipe its a crying shame.
SO in order to make this pie I was forced to go to Whole Foods, because apparently rhubarb doesn't grow so well in the South and is not as readily available as in the northerner parts of the country. Another crying shame, because my rhubarb had to travel all the way from Washington! It was still delicious, but its the principle of the thing. By the way, if you live in Raleigh, don't go to Whole Foods on a Sunday afternoon, I could barely get around people with my rhubarb stalks!

I learned two things from my pie yesterday. 1- just because some little trick works in the work place doesn't mean it will work the same way at home with non-industrial products. aka the plastic wrap that holds up to oven temperatures at work is not the same as the plastic wrap that you have at home which will indecently begin to melt around your baking beans in your pie shell immediately upon encountering the heat of the oven. 2- it is less than safe to travel in a car with a hot fruit pie on your lap, as the acceleration of your car from 0 to 35mph is apparently, to your pie, more like a ride on Wild Thing, than a  taking a Sunday afternoon drive.

Those two lessons were learned with no harm done to the pie or to me, thank goodness.


I found a recipe for doughnut muffins today! I would have made them right then and their if it weren't for the 4 loaves of quick bread that i had already produced. Phil wanted to have something to take to his "Welcome to the New Lab" celebration, so i made banana bread and zucchini bread. His request, but that leaves the two of us a lot of bread!
I plan on making the doughnut muffins sometime in the near future, as there are not many breakfast treats that i enjoy more than a good cake doughnut. I'll pass on the recipe if they turn out as good as the recipe says they will.

Enjoy the work-week folks!

~Christie