Photo Randomness

A little photo randomness for Friday!

Matt has discovered a new favorite bread recipe.  The French Style Loaf from Beard on Bread.  This book is very useful for us and we've enjoyed just about every loaf we've tried.  The banana bread being the one exception.  This French Style bread has only one raising which make it quick and easy to make.  It is SO tasty.

One of my delightfully grateful library users brought be flowers for helping him track down some books.  It is so nice when people are grateful and appreciative of what you do.  It IS my job after all, but it is so nice to be so kindly thanked.  These white flowers were dyed rather day-glow colored.  One of the blue flowers still had one single white petal.  I thought that was kind of neat.  I wonder why that one petal didn't take up the dye.  I love having bicycle baskets to carry all my belongings, including a vase of flowers!

We bought 15 pounds of cucumbers at the farmer's market for pickling. We decided we couldn't let our move further west deter us from cycling downtown for the market and so off we went on our bicycles.  The ride there was easy-peasy....the ride home with the cucumbers, tortillas, garlic, dill, corn, and spicy peppers was a bit tougher!  I am still so glad that everything in Billings is reachable by bicycle.  It really is the best mode of transportation, in my humble opinion.

I really like my backyard.  Sometimes I wake up in the morning and just spend a few moments gazing out the bedroom window into the quiet, green space with the rustling aspen leaves and calling chickadees.  Its also a great place to have dinner... 

...and play Yahtzee.

Matt's brother has golden raspberries.  We planted some this year, but they will not fruit until next year.  Ryan let us sample what we have in store for us.  Yummy!

I am super impressed with Ryan's garden.  He makes such good use of space, especially by growing in containers.  He has a pepper plant that is nearly as tall as I am!  Matt, as I believe I have mentioned, is over the moon to have his brother to talk gardening with. 

I finally managed to break Matt out of his Yahtzee-Only game playing rut.  And I stomped him.  More important than that though was the we used a bunch of words we'd never played before such as condor, pacify, doilies, and reggae.  That always pleases me.

All the smoke from the wildfires has made for some pretty amazing sunsets/rises.  This one was taken near Lewistown, MT on our recent tie-dye vending trip.

Matt picked me a four leaf clover and basically blew my mind.  I'd never seen one before.  He then dashed the mind blowing by saying they're really not as rare as you might think.  And then he promptly found a second one for me.  It was still cool.  We figured out that they are just much easier to find in very small patches of clover, but the instinct is to start looking for them in the big patches.  In the big patches the leaves all run together and its much harder to tell what is what.

Homegrown fingerling potatoes roasted with olive oil and some fresh homegrown herbs.  We need to get better at using herb fresh.  We just don't have as much experience with them as we do with dry herbs.  It is uncharted cooking territory for me.  In the store they are so ridiculously expensive, but with my homegrown herbs I have no reason not to experiment.  There were quite good, but we definitely needed more herbs, especially chives!

Don't I look happy with my cucumbers?!  This photo makes me laugh