roasting peppers

I've always bought roasted peppers in a jar even though I knew there was a different way to do it. I'm making three-bean chili tomorrow and needed the peppers roasted so while Regis cooked chicken, we put four peppers on the grill and roasted them. So easy and so good smelling. The whole house smelled like delicious peppers. The skins come right off when you put them in a paper bag for a while then rinse them under cold water. Most of the pepper should be charred for this to work.

Tomorrow was supposed to be my yard work day but it looks like rain, Miles. There is a big line of storms right across the border in the Dakotas. Dang if I have to put the lawn mowing off one more day.






We picked one red tomato and a handful of yellow pear (heritage) tomatoes off our giant vines today. I'm too irresponsible a gardener to grow vegetables so we're lucky these are hardy and self-maintaining. I swear the plants are five feet tall. They probably would bear more fruit if I trimmed the foliage like I should but I don't think the pioneers did that in their gardens so why should I. They are delicious.

Pear tomatoes are small like cherry tomatoes. One year I grew two cherry tomato plants and I had so many they should have been used as ammunition in a war instead of something to put in a salad. There was no way to keep up with that harvest!

Tom brought me some of the spoils of his garden: a big bag of basil (I see a basil gimlet in my future), four tomatoes, and a cucumber. About the time he was leaving, Paul came over with a pound of beef brisket. I don't have to go to the grocery store anymore...I'll just stand in the front yard and food appears. The beef brisket is really just to die for...smoky and tender and like southern barbecue. At least the way southern barbecue looks on food tv.

None of my herbs did very well this year. It could be that the soil I planted them in was poor or it could be the Round-Up I used to kill the weeds.

I think I wrote about the chairs we bought from the well-known outdoor supply store that ended up in such a fiasco. If I didn't, somebody let me know and I'll relate it. It was quite a story. With the proceeds of the chair deal, Regis bought himself a pair of boots that he got an amazingly good deal on. When the boots arrived, he decided they were too heavy so he sold them on eBay for a 50% profit and bought himself another pair of boots. No end to the deals that guy can make.

I'm starting to feel like there is a big piece of culture we're missing out on by not having television and it's not the programs it's the ads. Our kids were around this past weekend and I think three or four times they talked about things from ads about which I had no clue. I'm not trying to sound hoity toity, but sometimes I like to rewrite a sentence so it doesn't end with a preposition. Just a little brain exercise...some people do crossword puzzles, I avoid prepositions.

When I was a student in high school and college, I loved to diagram sentences. I know it's a lost art and I don't believe it helps anyone write better (no threatening comments, please!) but I thought it was fun. I found a website http://www.geocities.com/gene_moutoux/diagramnews.htm where you can click on the sentence and see the diagram. Cool! Jill, you'll love it. Here, believe it or not, is a sentence diagram for the Pledge of Allegiance:

Sentence Diagram for the Pledge of Allegiance

And that's where I will end for today.