Squash Blossom Pizzas

This time of year, there's not much left of my summer crops in the garden. The fall crops are starting to come along nicely, but eggplant has stopped flowering, my peppers are finishing coloring up, and my zucchini plants are full of blossoms that will never mature into zucchini.

Squash blossoms are very tasty. Stuffed with cream cheese, dipped in egg, rolled in Italian seasoned breadcrumbs (or panko) and lightly pan fried, they are a delicate appetizer worthy of the most discriminating gourmand.

But on top of a sauce-less pizza, they are just as lovely.

(The yellow part is the zucchini blossom).

These little pizzas were topped almost entirely from the remaining produce from our garden... tomatoes, thinly sliced zucchini, purple onions, fresh herbs (basil, oregano, parsley), and heavily dotted with glorious cream cheese. Marinara sauce would have overpowered the baby vegetables on this pizza.

The blossoms were a really great surprise; very fresh.

Earthy crunchy cheesy chewy goodness right there.

So pluck a bunch of blossoms, throw them on your favorite pizza crust and enjoy one last glorious taste of summer.

The Mouse Who Lived

Mice love us. Or, rather, they love my pantry.

Every year around this time, we get several mousey visitors, and through their fatal attraction to peanut butter, they're usually all dispatched to that great mouse nest in the sky within a few days of their arrival.

But this year, after claiming two victims, our trap has been silent as a... well, you know. We've got a peanut butter laden trap next to every place this mouse has left his signature, and each day we're amazed to see it still empty, surrounded by fresh... er... sign.

Last night I actually saw the mouse walk over to a trap, sniff the peanut butter from afar, and back away.

The little bugger doesn't like peanut butter!

Clearly we've had a tactical failure in underestimating our enemy; he's a true foodie. This, of course, means war, as I don't want to sacrifice my good cheese for the refined palate of the vermin's last meal. But if that's what it takes to reclaim the territory of my pantry in the name of humanity, then let the siege begin.

Tricksy, Precious

In preparation for its December 14th movie release, my husband and I have been reading The Hobbit aloud to each other in the evenings.

And, just as we got to the part where Gollum loses The Ring, I looked down at my husband's hand and noticed: he wasn't wearing his wedding ring. 

As long as we've been married, he's never been without it for more than a few hours.

I could drag it out for dramatic tension, but seriously, this is pretty much how it went down:

Overachiever

"You've got to see this," my husband said, as he handed me an egg carton that wouldn't close.

"Is it a turkey egg?" I asked, bewildered at the monster-sized-egg.

"Nope, it's an overachiever."

For perspective, the egg on the bottom is an X-Large egg.

Wowzers. I wonder if that poor chicken needed an epidural.

Okay, that makes more sense.

Does anybody happen to know, if this egg had been fertilized, would the twin chicks have hatched, or would they have died? I know about double yolks, but not about twin chicks in one shell.