Stuff!

This morning I hosted a brunch for Kelly's bday, and everything went surprisingly well. I made Margaret Fox's french toast, Joshua's Oven Baked Omelet (Mendocino Mornings, Joshua Grindle Inn), chicken & apple sausages, bacon, baked home fries, and a fresh fruit salad. I'd never made bacon before, and I hadn't done a test run of any of these recipes, so I wasn't all that confident about the taste factor, but they were all great! I used a sourdough baguette for the french toast, which is all I will ever use in the future, because it was delicious and it looked pretty. Because it was a bday brunch, I also made a chocolate mousse cake for Kelly. I'd never made mousse before either, and for a few hours I'd thought I'd fucked it up, but it turned out fine, too. All in all, one fantastic breakfast/brunch. And I had so much fun making it! I have this ridiculous desire to throw dinner parties all the time forever, but almost no one lives close enough to attend, so Kelly gave me the perfect opportunity and I went all in.

My summer classes start tomorrow evening. I'll be taking baking A and B this summer. It's essentially one course, but they broke it up into two half-semester classes for some reason. I work Tue-Sat 5am to 1pm and the classes are Mon-Thur 5:30pm to 9:40pm, so I'm going to be exhausted all the time for the next couple of months, but I'm going to learn a lot while I'm at it. Maybe by the end of the summer I'll actually be qualified for my job, lol. My schedule will be pretty similar in the fall, and I'll be taking advanced baking (C) and the hot foods lab. At the end of all of that I will have earned the baking certificate. Go me.

My garden is growing! This is something that utterly amazes me, because I swear to god it looked dead two weeks ago. My green tomatoes are slowly but surely growing, my siberian reds are going effing insane (the tiny tomatoes are just smaller than golf balls right now, twice the size they were 3 days ago!), and the cherry tomatoes are blossoming. The zucchini is blossoming, too, and the cucumbers haven't died yet, which I take as a good sign. Both pepper plants didn't make it, but I didn't really expect them to, and one section of my lettuce is thriving. The rosemary died after transplant and the cilantro didn't sprout. Over all, I'm satisfied. I'm just happy that something is growing successfully.