A Kitchen Day

Good morning, my friends. As expected, I spent most of my day in the kitchen yesterday. It's kind of fun to create a meal to celebrate a holiday, and so I don't mind a kitchen day every now and then. 

My morning started with the baking of this Irish Brown Bread. It's made with whole-wheat flour, buttermilk, and two kinds of oatmeal. The only sweetener is 2 tablespoons of honey (or golden syrup), and so it's a good loaf for anyone watching their calories and fat. Straight from the oven, it looked like this:

Cutting into it, you can see the rolled oats and steel cut oats inside. We had some toasted this morning, and it's good that way too.

It was intended as a side for the Irish Beef Stew I made later in the day. By rights (and to make it Irish), this should have been made with a bottle of Guinness. I didn't have Guinness, and so I used one of our Oregon porter stouts in mine. So, it's really more of an Ore-Irish Beef Stew. Also, my picture didn't turn out, and so I swiped this one from the internet.

Then, for dessert we had these Bruleed Key Lime Tarts. The recipe makes four.

They have an Oreo cookie crust, and then there is a lime sauce to be ladled over the top before the whipped cream is added. I should have used my hand for scale in that image above. These tart pans are about four inches in diameter, so this is technically a mini tart. They were delicious. And there are two more for dessert tonight.

Okay, so with all that going on, there wasn't much time for sewing. While the stew simmered, I spent some time on the quilt binding. Smitty kept my lap warm.

With his help, I turned the second corner. I'm probably about 40% of the way around this now.

The bird feeders were empty, and so I took a break to get outside for a little while. More daffodils are blooming.

And I was happy to see shoots coming from the Bleeding Heart. We had to move this a few years ago when snow falling from the roof pretty well flattened the other one. This one is moved out of the way of the snow, and so I'm hoping it'll take off and grow larger this year.

There was also some progress on September's block for A Year in the Garden. I expect to finish it this morning.

And that means I'll need to trace out the next one or suffer the scourge of a stitching emergency. Next up will be the 6th block for Le Jardin. These are the blocks I have for this quilt so far:

Also, I'm hoping to get back to my treadmill walking today. It's the one part of day-to-day life that I haven't resumed since we returned home. I want to get back to it, and today seems like a good day. There's one housekeeping chore on today's agenda. After that, I'll get back to my quilt binding and my quilting. I'll pick it up where I left off on Monday.

And I haven't forgotten about the Gumballs quilt top. I'm hoping to get that finished today too.

So it's a long list of to-do's for today. Time to get going on it. I hope y'all had a nice St. Patrick's Day yesterday. We certainly did. There was a lot of cooking, but also a lot of relaxing and good food. What could be better than that? Maybe if it was payday too, but we'll take what we can get, right? Okay...off I go. Have a good day, Everybody!