The Thing About Squash...

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Potato, Squash & Goat Cheese Gratin. Photo from THE KITCHEN website.I spent two hours last night cooking squash. Even for me, that seems a bit excessive. 

The problem--or happy circumstance depending on if you're a half full/half empty glass kind of person--was squash overload. I'd bought some at a Farmer's Market this past weekend and then my exterminator dropped by on Tuesday with what was probably a 2-lb bag of yellow squash. 

That's a lot of squash. 

So I got cracking. Fired up Google and searched for summer vegetarian squash recipes. I pretty much made the first 3 recipes that pulled up. My criteria for trying a recipe looks like this:

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Coffee & Biscuits

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I love my exterminator. Is that a weird thing to say? Too bad, because it's true. The semi-retired gentleman who arrives once a month to spray our home is a treasure of the past. He is the very definition of a simple country man, in the best sense. When I answered my front door yesterday he smiled and said, "Well, I guess those Russians didn't kidnap you after all," before he gave me a big hug. 

I love hearing about his life. He was twenty years old before he ever lived in a house with hot running water. He remembers the first time he ever owned a pair of jeans. They came with a t-shirt and a pair of shoes. Yesterday he was telling me about the first steak he ever ate in his life when he was around age 25. They had a cow, but that was for milk and butter. His family grew wheat and tobacco and his stories of life on the farm are fascinating. 

It's the little details that catch my attention. Yesterday, for example, we were talking about food and what his mama used to cook. He said for breakfast they'd often have homemade biscuits that the kids would dunk into coffee and add a couple tablespoons of sugar and that was breakfast. His daddy drank coffee out of a saucer where he'd poured it to let it cool. 

I could sit and listen to him for hours. I encouraged him to write down or record his memories, but he doesn't think anyone would be interested. I disagree. I may just have to start writing down what he tells me, as memories like his are too good to be lost. 

Cheers,

Dena

The Travel Diaries: Estonia, Finland, & My Meltdown on the Plane

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Tallinn, Estonia. If you have the chance, go there. Who knew?

We arrived late afternoon at this seemingly perfectly preserved medieval city after a 9-hour bus ride from St. Petersburg. I loved it from the word go. Cobblestone streets winding around curves into hills, a stone wall fortress surrounding the town still in place, and a central open square where you could (and we did) kick back with a beer or coffee and enjoy some great people watching? Count me in.

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The Travel Diaries: Moscow & St. Petersburg

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I'm going to pass on giving you the descriptions of the sites we saw (I can send you Wikipedia references, if you insist) and instead focus more on our experience of the trip. Why? Well, laziness for one. It's a lot of work to type in the immense history and meaning behind much of what we saw. But also (and I understand this may not speak well of me), what's below is a good portion of what I'm taking back with me from the trip. Churches tend to blur into one another after a certain period of time, but the overnight train ride as mentioned below? That will stay with me forever.

Soaking up info outside the KremlinMOSCOW

We were three days in Moscow which is two days too many. There just isn’t that much to see. The Kremlin, Red Square, Saint Basil's Cathedral, and the Armoury museum don’t take up more than a day. We saw a few extra sites, mainly because I think our tour guide was desperately looking for ways to fill the hours. Traffic in Moscow is intense and our hotel was a two-hour drive from Red Square, which meant we spent at least 4-6 hours on a bus each day.

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