Food and Rain

I am not a fancy chef. I like to vary my dinners because I would get bored of eating the same thing all the time, but I do repeat many of my standard meals. I'm pretty good with dessert. Yesterday, I made pastry for a single pie and grabbed a bag of frozen strawberries out of the freezer and a bag of frozen rhubarb, both grown here, and went about making strawberry rhubarb custard pie (no shortage of eggs).

Here it is before going in the oven. I often have too much filling, so I created a "mini pie" using the cut off bits of pastry and the leftover filling as well.

After an hour in the oven, both came out smelling heavenly.

The topping is essentially the makings of a sugar cookie, crumbled on top. The pie went along with roast chicken legs and thighs, green bean casserole, and mashed sweet potato. Sunday night dinner.

Today's meal was one of my (and my daughter's) favourites. I've written about these ingredients before, I believe, maybe in terms of tossing them in a salad. This time, they were mixed with pasta.

Sauteed in olive oil: peppers, red onion, sundried tomatoes, olives, marinated artichoke hearts.

When the pasta is cooked, mix it in with the vegetables and a good dollop of both of these:

It's just so good!

For all the wonderful warm loveliness of Saturday, today (Monday) has been nonstop rain and wind. The rain started last night. When we were having our meal, the cat came in rather damp from the rain. Our Samson (R.I.P.) was such a smart boy, knowing we would lay a towel down and he would step on it, ready to let us dry him off. Scooter, who is a different sort, needs to be scooped up and then squirms like a larva.

He looked ridiculous because he is enormously fluffy, but his head is rather small compared to the rest of him.

As I'm typing this, I can hear my husband in the room below me talking with his mom who is in a long term care home. Of course, we cannot visit her, but she seems to be in good spirits. There are no cases at her care home, but there were two workers earlier who were positive. Of course, they stopped working there and all residents were tested, all of them being negative. I can also hear the wind and the rain against the window. I managed to get grass seed down in the filled in trench areas (well, almost all of them), so the rain will be a bonus to get that grass seed starting to germinate.
Today was a holiday, so tomorrow I'm back online, posting assignments and activities for my students and waiting for them to respond.