Grocery shopping

This week's installment of Weekend Cooking is a collection of questions. How do you shop for food? Do you go once a week, twice, more often? Do you plan your meals and buy accordingly, or do you just have a vague idea and buy things thinking you might use them?

I am prompted to ask because I seem to be throwing away too much produce. When I buy watercress and some leeks, I'm positive I will make soup, but somehow the days fly by, and they must be thrown out. It is wasteful, and a bit embarrassing to be so cavalier with food that I am lucky enough to be able to buy. I must change the way I shop. I looked back on the blog and found that just a year ago I was talking about sort of the same thing. Really? How long does it take me to learn, to try a new way of shopping?

Homemade popsicles

When the kids were little we used to make them yogurt popsicles from yogurt and frozen orange juice. I decided it was time to make them again. Not just for the grandchildren but also for Tom and me.

Just two ingredients - frozen, concentrated orange juice and vanilla yogurt.

I emptied the frozen juice into a bowl and let it soften. Then I mixed it with half a quart of yogurt using a hand whisk, added to popsicle molds and put them in the freezer.

Today I ate one, and it was delicious. No artificial colors or flavors, no pesticides, just purely good food. This is a perfect snack, or even a lunchtime meal.

These particular molds have a cool little straw for when it melts.

Please do visit Weekend Cooking for more food related postings, or to add one yourself.

Now this is a library Brian might like!

More about it here.

Today's picture/house painting

The last time we had our house painted was thirteen years ago, and that was just the front because of a special occasion. The rest of it had been peeling away for decades! We are so very pleased. We hired two young guys and they were done in a couple weeks.

Back side of the house, before - it had been scraped at this point

and after

We went with a darker gray, painted the porch ceiling which was just wood before, and decided to change our Tomie dePaola doors for a red that we love. 

Libraries

I thought some of you might get a kick out of this clip from New Tricks.



Then he and his wife go to The London Library. They walk in and he says, "This is heaven." Later he tells his colleagues: "No racks of CDs or DVDs. No misery memoirs. It smells of books."


 A little addendum. At the end of the show, in which Brian was almost killed in the library, he says "I've had it with libraries. They're full of weirdos. This is the way forward (he holds up an e-reader). Linked to the internet, it allows me to access the world's literary culture from my own armchair. I've just downloaded The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin."

Today's picture/Indy, Campbell, Hazel