Spring Snowmen

Good morning, my friends. We're expecting a warmer day today, and even warmer tomorrow. This week's menu includes at least one main dish salad for eating outside. We love sitting out on our front patio for dinner, and we haven't yet had good enough weather for that. Since we'll be gone for a good part of the summer, we're trying to squeeze in as much alfresco dining as possible. 

We made several stops on yesterday's outing. Our health insurance company started an incentive program a couple of years back. If we go in for our annual physical, they'll add a $50 incentive to a previously supplied gift card. Also, they give us an extra $30 "OTC" allowance. No idea what we did for that, but hey! Cool beans! I love free money, don't you? It covers over-the-counter things we can buy at Walgreen's, and so that was our first stop. We spent about $75 of which around $68 was covered by the incentive. Nice. After that, we needed some cash, and we needed to fill our gas tank, and then we could do our grocery shopping. Even with all that, we were home well before lunch time.

My morning started with some more slow-stitching. I'm about halfway finished with the Spring Flowers.

As I was stitching, my mind's eye was digging through my stash looking for fabrics I can use to finish this off. When I made my way into the sewing room, I pulled these three. I'm not sure if they're my final choices, but it's a good place to start.

From there, I did the top-stitching and machine embroidery for the Merry, Merry Snowmen block.

With that done, I just needed to finish off the hand-stitching, and my block was complete.

It's the 7th of nine blocks for this quilt. Here's what I have so far:

That took me the rest of the way to dinner. They had some nice steelhead at the grocery store yesterday. I wanted to try this new recipe from America's Test Kitchens for Salmon Piccata. Mike really likes anything with capers, and so I gave it a try.

In my refrigerator, I have a small jar of "salted capers." I purchased them for a recipe I was testing because they came highly recommended. They are larger than the ones I find in the grocery store. This recipe didn't suggest them, but how else am I going to use them? So this was really good, and easy enough to do in the RV. I've linked to the recipe up there, but you'll need a subscription to America's Test Kitchens to open it. As always, if you can't open it and you want the recipe, please email me and I'll be happy to send it along to you.

For our side dish, I selected some asparagus. The asparagus is nice right now. Our side dish was Apricot-Glazed Roasted Asparagus. It's another very easy recipe. I can do mine in my toaster oven. I used my own homemade peach jam in place of the apricot jam, and that was an easy and tasty dinner. With the weather so nice yesterday. We enjoyed a Kentucky Lemonade outside before dinner. 'Tis the season for homemade lemonade, and we like it with a shot of bourbon.

So today, I'll make another row of blocks for the Land & Sea quilt.

Those blocks go pretty fast. If I can finish them today, then the next project on my list of WIPs is to make the final row for the Lightframe quilt.

These blocks go together pretty fast too. I'll need to decide whether I want to add any borders when I've finished the final row.

So it's a Bow-flex workout day. I've had several days off from any housekeeping assignments, but I'll need to do a little of that today. Still, it'll be an easy day with plenty of time for sewing. How are things going at your end?