Chilling

Good morning, my friends. We took our day off very seriously yesterday. As a result, I don't have a lot to tell you. We didn't laze the whole day away, though. Mike walked about one block to the Family Dollar store to see if he could find a few things. While he was off doing that, I did some laundry. By lunch time, we figured we'd earned the Chocolate-chunk Oatmeal Cookies with Pecans and Dried Cherries. They're big cookies, so one each is enough. We had those with our afternoon cup of espresso.

While I was waiting for laundry and baking cookies, I took the first stitches on Block 3 for the Kittens quilt. It's still the same Smitty-in-Drag kitten, only this time, he has a turquoise ball of yarn for playing.

Of course, we all had nice long naps. Even dinner was easy. I like a dinner that can be done without a lot of stirring and monitoring, and this is one of those. This is Apricot Chicken with Almonds. It was published in our local Oregonian newspaper back in 2008, and it's a great camping recipe. No exotic ingredients and easy to put together without dirtying too many dishes. 

We almost always eat fresh vegetables. I just think they taste better. However, the produce at the grocery store here in Kanab was pretty sparse. We didn't see much that sounded good as a side dish, and so we turned our thoughts to canned and frozen. Canned green beans are pretty good, but I wanted to spruce them up a little bit. We only made half the chicken recipe, but I made the whole recipe for the apricot sauce. I added a little to the green beans, and also sprinkled them with some of the sliced almonds, and that was a pretty easy and tasty dinner.

Okay, so this is our last morning in Kanab. We'll be moving up the road just about 90 miles to Cannonville, Utah. It's a central location for visiting three sites. We've looked ahead at the weather, and decided on a schedule that makes sense. Saturday, we'll visit the town of Panguitch. It has an interesting history quilt-wise, and so I want to see it. Bonus: There's a quilt shop there.

On Sunday, we'll visit Kodachrome Basin State Park. These are both things we missed when we had to abort our previous visit to southern Utah. We'll do some hiking in Kodachrome Basin. Also on my list for hiking is a hike through Willis Creek Narrows. I love slot canyons, and this looks like an easy hike through some interesting rock formations.

So you can see there's still plenty to keep us busy as we wind down our trip. We have just a week left, but a lot to see. Our drive this morning will be short, and so we'll be killing time here, staying until check-out timet in order to arrive at the appropriate check-in time for our next stop in Cannonville. It should give me some time to work on my slow-stitching this morning.