Wow!!!

I am feeling like one very lucky duck today! I won a giveaway of an absolutely gorgeous piece of art from Paper Napkin Poetry. Yay! :)

Thank you *so* much, LibbyQ!!!

Summer Cooking

I will confess that summer is my least favorite season. I usually just do my best to ignore summer and go to the beach whenever I can to get away from the heat. But I have to admit I've been really enjoying some things so far this summer: the gardenias have been blooming - I brought a few indoors and they smell great. The flowers in the garden are blooming. The storms that roll in in the afternoon and sometimes cool things off. I have extra appreciation for the huge selection of delicious fresh fruits and veggies, from the blueberries we've picked at a local farm to the fresh corn, tomatoes, etc. we've been having.

I found some yellow pear tomatoes at the farmer's market recently (our yellow pear tomato plant unfortunately died because of all the rain we got earlier in the season) and made a simple tossed salad with them, adding some mozzarella, a little fresh purple basil and parsley from the herb garden, a tiny bit of sea salt, and a little bit of good quality extra virgin olive oil and balsamic - it turned out so good!!!!
I can't wait to go to the farmer's market Saturday morning and see what we can find! :)

So I may not be happy about the heat but at least there is lots of yummy food in the kitchen.

A Better Pound Cake

So after I raved about that sour cream pound cake (quite a deviation from my usual whole grain lower fat recipes) a friend mentioned that there was a recipe in a magazine with a similar recipe but with a few changes. So I (in the name of scientific research, mind you!) baked the new recipe, which swaps the sour cream for cream cheese and makes a few more changes. It turned out even better, so I looked for it online and I'm sharing the link. Enjoy!

Summer Is Here

I've been going to the farmer's market every Saturday for the past several weeks, just loving all the veggies out there. The garden is moving slower than first anticipated, we had 2 1/2 weeks of rain after 6 weeks of drought so the extremes didn't agree well with some of the veggies, though the eggplants are completely unruffled by it all. :)

One of my favorite treats is fresh sweet corn steamed right on the cob. That really says summer to me!
Coming soon: I found a recipe that beats the sour cream pound cake I posted earlier. So hold on tight and get your mixers ready!

Alternate Winner

Oh, Sarah S! I did not hear back from you so I'll have to pick an alternate winner for the giveaway.
Random.org picked number 14, Mikaiya, who loves lemon scones with clotted cream with her tea. Being lunch time, I could totally go for some of those right now! So please Mikaiya, send me your shipping address so I can send you the little package.

Thank you again to everyone who participated and left such sweet comments (both literally and figuratively.)

I'll do another giveaway of the same nature with my next set of embroidery patterns.

Giveaway Winner!

I am humbled by so many comments on my giveaway! I tried to reply to each of your comments, but was unable to reply to all because not everyone left an e-mail address. I've enjoyed visiting your blogs so far. I'm quite behind on replies with so many e-mails, so I will just say thank you so much for visiting and I'm excited to see so many embroidery enthusiasts liked the patterns! I wish I could give one to everyone who participated...

Without further ado, our randomly chosen winner is:
Comment number 155 belongs to Sarah S., who loves to have croissants with her tea. Sarah, please contact me with your information using the username for this blog at gmail dot com. If I don't hear from Sarah by tomorrow AM, I'll select an alternate winner and post it here.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for visiting and participating in my giveaway! I hope to do a giveaway like this with every new set of embroidery patterns I create, so this will not be the last one!