Taking it Easy

Good morning, my friends. Yesterday's activities kept me busy most of the day. Still, somehow, it felt relaxing. I spent some time on my slow-stitching. This piece is densely stitched. It's still going to be a couple of days before I can move my hoop to the next section. Here's what I have so far.

When I was finished with that, I took a walk on the treadmill, and then I got busy making our dinner for the day. It's nice to have dinner already made ahead, and then I can just sit and relax at the end of the day. This recipe for Spicy Mexican Street Corn Salad was new to us. I made it to use up a tub of feta cheese, and we liked it. I made just half the recipe, which was plenty for last night's dinner, with leftovers for another night.

Don't let that word "spicy" scare you. I carefully removed the seeds and ribs from the jalapeno pepper I used, and it was not spicy at all. If you like that sort of thing, you can leave the seeds and ribs.

We had that along with this long-time favorite recipe for Curried Chicken and Apple Wraps. This is pretty easy to put together. The recipe calls for mango chutney. I make all kinds of chutneys from different fruits, and I just use whatever I happen to have open. This time I used cranberry chutney. For the chicken, I pick up one of those whole roasted chickens from the deli at our grocery store. At our store, they put the ones that didn't sell the day before in the refrigerated section with the lunchmeat, and they mark them half price. For this wrap, I like the spinach tortillas. I've also used the tomato-basil tortillas. It's a good wrap no matter what kind of tortilla you use.

After making dinner ahead, it was mid-afternoon before I accomplished anything on my quilt binding. Happily, my stitching cat was right there with me.

With his help, I turned the second corner, and I'm bearing down on the third. I'll estimate I'm about halfway around.

There's a little housework to do today. There's also watering to be done. It was hot yesterday, but it has cooled significantly. We're on a fire watch in our area because of some thunder and lightning passing through. Indeed, we heard thunder cracks nearby already this morning, and we saw a few sprinkles of rain.

I've been making occasional trips to the freezer in our garage recently, and I noticed the many sandwich bags of shredded zucchini from last summer's garden. It gave me a powerful yen for some zucchini bread, and so I'll do that today. I've also looked through my many zucchini recipes to see what else I might do to use up some of that. For today, I'll indulge my zucchini desire and bake some bread.

Aside from that, I'll just keep stitching on my quilt binding. Possibly I can finish it today. Time will tell.