I love the combination of flavors and textures. The broth is delicious in itself, but there are add-ins like bean sprouts, cilantro, basil, sliced onions, sauce, and lime wedges that really put it over the top.
Latest posts made by Mary Anna
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RE: Pho!
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RE: Salads
Strawberry Mac sounds good and it reminds me of a watermelon salad that I had at a friend's house. I've made several variations on it.
The original recipe is chunks of watermelon, slivered onions, chunked feta cheese, sprigs of mint, and an oil and vinegar dressing. The proportions of each are totally up to the cook.
I'm on the fence about the cheese, so I usually leave it out. I'm not wild about mint, so I swap it for dill or cilantro, but basil would also work. I season the oil and vinegar dressing with salt, black pepper, cayenne pepper, and powdered garlic. (I prefer fresh garlic most of the time and I'm sure it would be amazing in this dish, but it would also make the recipe all about the garlic. The powdered garlic stays in the background better, IMHO. Also the salt, ground black and cayenne peppers, and ground garlic seem to help the vinaigrette emulsify.)
I'm sure this would also be good made with other melons or a medley of them.
This salad is great the first day and arguably better on the second, after the flavors have blended, although this may be more true of my non-cheese version. It doesn't seem like feta would be happy in watermelon juice for very long. A
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RE: Salads
I put eggs in a lot of salads--potato salad, tuna salad, chicken salad, salad nicoise--but not bean salad. I'm thinking about whether I'd like them in bean salad and...I'm thinking no? For bean salad, I don't do much other than marinate the beans in some vinaigrette with maybe some finely onions and herbs.
I don't have any really creative family salad recipes to contribute, because I do the same thing for potato, tuna, and chicken salad and it's not fancy: Mix the main ingredient with chopped boiled eggs, chopped sweet pickles, mayonnaise, salt, pepper, and a drizzle of pickle juice.
Oh and for potato salad, I'd fancy it up with a sprinkling of paprika on top.
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RE: Summer 2024
The grass thing with round lavender flowers sounds like some kind of allium. How big are the flower balls and the grassy foliage?
I like the sound of daisy bushes!
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RE: Summer 2024
I doubt I will do much gardening here. The yard is small and I wouldn't do vegetables here, just maybe a few flowers. This house would be good for hanging baskets, part-shade in the front and mostly sun in the back. Our neighbor has pretty hanging flower baskets and I may copy her in front. I could see herbs or a miniature tomato in baskets out back.
There's a rhododendron that's too big for its spot and it's reaching out to scratch our cars and us in the driveway. I'd like to move it to the side or back yard. I think it's pink.
If I decide I miss vegetable gardening too much, there's a wonderful community garden a short walk from the house. If I have a summer when I know I won't be traveling too much, I may get a plot.
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RE: Summer 2024
Since the hydrangeas portion of this thread was posted, I have moved into a house with two big hydrangea bushes. They're both bigleaf, I believe, and they're both blue. (At the moment.)
The one in front of the house is a lacecap, and our soil pH must be right at 7, because a few of the flowers are purple, and I've seen an old photo of the house where that bush was blooming pink.
The one in back of the house, but on the side and visible from the street, is what I think you call a mophead. The flowers are a deep purplish blue.
They're both starting to fade to a pinkish brown, but I like the look of the dried brown heads and plan to leave them. This town seems to be really well-suited to hydrangeas, because lots of people have yards full of them, and I've seen all the varieties I know and some I don't--mophead, lacecap, Annabelle, peewee, climbing, oakleaf, and probably more--and in all the colors hydrangeas come in. The old, established yards of some of the houses near us are really remarkable.
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RE: What to do with older set of china?
I wouldn't hesitate to break it up. If it had sentimental value or if the complete set had the kind of monetary value it would once have had, then maybe not. But now? There aren't any feelings involved and there's no financial value in keeping it together. Keep what you like!
I have never had the never-use-it feeling about fine china and silverware, but I haven't used mine in years, because as empty-nesters, we literally never sit down to a meal. We're now more a bowls-in-front-of-the-TV household. Sometimes that makes me a little sad, because I do enjoy the ceremony of mealtimes. While I never brought out the china and silver for everyday, I did use it for holidays and birthdays and such. Now that we're living where we'll have more family gatherings, I do plan to use it more.
This thread is making me think about moving my sterling flatware into everyday rotation. My china is a little fussy for that, but who knows? Maybe I'll decide it doesn't matter.
My mother used her Franciscanware for special occasions. (At least two forumites have her Apple pattern.) I inherited half of it but just didn't need more china, so I gave it to Muffin's Sister. Now I get to see it once a week when her eldest posts pics of what he cooks on Mondays, his appointed night to be family chef. (What did we call him? Stud Muffin?) It would make Mama happy to know it was being enjoyed.
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RE: Taking up needlework again?
I've done a number of needle arts over the years--crocheting, crewel embroidery, cross-stitch, sewing--but I never got really good at any of them. (This is a metaphor for my life.) Knitting was beyond me, though. Somehow, a single crochet hook is easier for me to handle and, more importantly, crochet stitches are more intuitive for me in terms of shaping the item into something three-dimensional.
There's a yarn shop a couple of blocks from the new house and I have a yen to start a new project after I finish unpacking. (So not any time soon.) It will probably be a scarf and hat, since I've moved to the Great White North and making gloves and mittens scares me.
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RE: I have an actual piano music question (sight reading)
I've enjoyed the Classics to Moderns series, too. But if he's more interested in other styles of music, I imagine that at least some published sheet music in most every style is available in easy versions. The more famous it is, the more versions you'll find. Our family enjoys playing Christmas music, so I've got a ridiculous amount of it, and we particularly enjoy the Vince Guaraldi music from A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS. For various loved ones at various times, I acquired the Big Note version, the easy version, and a sort of middle-of-the-road version of sheet music from that album. I have played for many years from a harder version that sounds very nice and that I always thought was pretty close to what Guaraldi played, but then I found a version of one that purports to be exactly what he played and it's so far beyond what I can do that I just look at it on my shelf.
My point is that if he determined where he was on the Big-Note-to-Guaraldi scale, he could find a big collection in whatever style that he enjoyed playing and read through it. I made a project during the Covid lockdown of sight-reading through the Early Advanced Classics-to-Moderns book, hoping I found a new-to-me piece that spoke to me. I've been in a long drought as far as finding something new that excited me enough to practice it, but I think I'm going to go back to that effort. Maybe pandemic depression was keeping me from falling in love with new pieces.
Also, my nephew (22) was just here visiting and he was playing some lovely jazz. I asked if he had improvised those pieces or memorized them from sheet music. He said that there were websites with a combination of written music and video recordings that he uses to learn new things. I also know that my granddaughter (13) has taught herself to play the ukulele from YouTube sites. There are probably websites that we have no idea about but that your son's friends could point him to. The internet has something for everybody, so there are probably YouTube channels devoted solely to working on sight-reading.