Prayers are simple enough at Daniel's age, but they teach me something for sure. He has just begun to list all of the many things he's thankful for. Usually he says things like "wii", "balance board", "tennis" and "mario kart" (what idolatry we've already instilled in this young child!!), but he's really started to mention family and will name different ones he loves. He also surprised me today when he started thanking God for "blue, red, purple, pink..." and on and on. It strikes me as a worthy subject of thanksgiving. Isn't it amazing that God gave us color? Wouldn't the world be so boring if it were only black and white? Thank you Father for being beautiful and for creating and sustaining beauty.
My dad got a great shot of one of Abby's food faces... Daniel shed some tears over something and I comforted him. Dad returned some of the silly faces. So thankful I'm there all day for these precious children.
This one is my favorite. It's called "American Flower" in Albanian but I call it "dragon flower". If anyone has a more precise name for this beautiful plant, please let me know. It has yummy nectar so maybe it's a honeysuckle of some sort? Abby went right for the dirt and I didn't stop her. Kanchi looking on. No, he's not crying. Really, let's take apart this old plant and reuse the soil mom....
So, summer seems to be here and I'm really loving the lower prices on spinach and tomatoes and cucumbers and zucchini. For some reason, I can't seem to go a day without making something with zucchini. I actually started to get sick of it at some point last week after like my third double batch of zucchini-carrot muffins and my second attempt at zucchini mucver and my second or third batch of zucchini sauce. Well, I'm almost ready to make more of the muffins as the last of them got eaten this afternoon. So, I thought I'd share a website with you that has inspired me a lot. Having experienced first hand the culinary traditions of Nepal, India, Thailand and Albania, as well as being influenced by the eclectic culinary traditions of the U.S., I have had the tendency to try to do everything well. This last year I decided to just focus on one cuisine and do it well. I chose the cuisine of Albania - sort of makes sense. So, I learned a couple dishes and just kept on making them till they were fairly consistent. Last summer when I started this trend, I made stuffed peppers and stuffed eggplant every week. This winter I've learned to make yummy beans - the way the Albanians do it and the way the Punjabis do (rajma) and good lentils and great dahl (we're trying to avoid meat) as well as cabbage with meat and burani (a spinach/rice dish). Anyway, I did digress some from the cuisine of this area but overall I'm trying to stay Mediterranean and cook with ingredients that are in season. So, the website I like is called "almost turkish" and what's great is that almost everything she makes has simple ingredients that I can find anywhere, and many of the dishes are also Albanian. The Turks spent a good deal of time here in Albania and seem to have made their mark on the cuisine. A couple dishes for summer I'd like to point out are the ones I mentioned at the beginning - zucchini sauce and baked mucver. These are both really good. The author of the site has great pictures and the recipes so I won't repeat. Please visit the almost turkish site. Did I mention I love to cook??? Ha!
