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March 30, 2023

The Chestertown Spy

An Educational News Source for Chestertown Maryland

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Local Life Food and Garden Notes

Adkins Arboretum Offers Trip to Mt. Cuba Center

March 30, 2023 by Adkins Arboretum Leave a Comment

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With origins stretching back more than 80 years, Mt. Cuba Center in Hockessin, Del., has been a home for conservation and preservation since the 1930s. Transformed from farmland to a lush botanical garden featuring more than 1,000 species of native plants, Mt. Cuba inspires an appreciation for the value of these plants and a commitment to protect the habitats that sustain them. On Thurs., May 25, join Adkins Arboretum on a trip to explore Mt. Cuba’s stunning gardens and grounds and to learn about the history of preserving the site’s natural lands.

Pamela and Lammot du Pont Copeland completed their Colonial Revival-style home and began establishing formal gardens on the site in 1937. In addition to these gardens, which surround the house and are laid out with the symmetry and geometry that characterize formal garden design, Mt. Cuba Center includes a 15,000-square-foot trial garden used for native plant research, wooded paths and slopes, ponds, a bog garden, a dogwood path where woodland meadow plants intermingle at the forest edge, a meadow, a trillium garden and other points of interest.

Surrounded by exotic-looking plants and trees that brush the skyline, Mt. Cuba’s Ponds provide shelter and sustenance for carnivorous plants, native orchids and water-thriving wildlife. Photo courtesy of Mt. Cuba Center.

The day will include a guided in-depth tour of the gardens and opportunities to learn about notable natives, sustainable gardening practices, climate change, systems-thinking and consciously sourcing native plants. Following lunch in the Colonial Revival house, there will be ample time to explore the grounds. Participants can expect to see plants such as phacelia, coreopsis, Canada anemone, Ozark phlox, spiderwort, Bowman’s root, penstemon, baptisia, blue flag, sarracenia and lady slipper orchid.

The fee of $145 for Arboretum members and $180 for non-members includes transportation, driver gratuity, admission, guided tour and a gourmet boxed lunch. The bus departs from Aurora Park Drive at 8 a.m. and will make stops at the Route 50 westbound/Route 404 Park and Ride at 8:20 a.m. and the 301/291 Park and Ride in Millington at 8:45 a.m. Return time is 5 p.m. Advance registration is required at adkinsarboretum.org or by calling 410-634-2847, ext. 100.

Filed Under: Food and Garden Notes Tagged With: Adkins Arboretum, local news

Adkins Mystery Monday: What Little Blue Flowers are Blooming?

March 27, 2023 by Adkins Arboretum Leave a Comment

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Happy Mystery Monday! Spring has sprung and the blooms have begun! What little blue flowers are blooming along our entrance drive?

Last week, we asked you about violets (Viola spp.). There are 12 species of native violets reported for Caroline County. While many people might think of violets as lawn weeds, the native violets are beautiful and early blooming groundcovers that are also important ecological assets. Violets serve as a host plant to a variety of fritillaries, as well as a specialist mining bee. Different species tolerate different conditions ranging from meadows and lawns to forested floodplains. For more information, check out the Indigenous Peoples’ Perspective Project on our website for a plant profile on violets!
#adkinsarboretum #mysterymonday #mysteryplant #carolinecounty #nativeviolets #hostplant #nativeplants #whatsinbloom

Adkins Mystery Monday is sponsored by the Spy Newspapers and Adkins Arboretum. For more information go here.

Filed Under: Food and Garden Notes Tagged With: Adkins Arboretum

Food Friday: Home Cooking

March 24, 2023 by Jean Sanders Leave a Comment

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Last week The Spy received a query about our St. Patrick’s Day piece, asking why we published recipes from easy-to-find websites, and why we weren’t featuring local restaurant reviews. Food Friday has always been about home cooking and never about food criticism – unless we are disparaging my inability to make a pie crust. The foods we talk about are seasonal, sometimes home grown, or found at our farmers’ markets. Sometimes it’s when when we have to get creative with a load of turnips from the CSA. It is economic food cooked hastily; or the tedious and oft toiled over: the boring and repetitious lunch box challenge. We have modest expectations. Sometimes we are served an unexpected and wonderful dish in a restaurant we’d like to recreate, or we remember a childhood dish, and find out it that isn’t a secret family recipe after all – but one from the back of the box of Baker’s Chocolate.

I have never been a professional cook. I worked as a server in a few restaurants during college, but never in an establishment with aspirations of greatness: my best job was waitressing at L.S. Grunt’s Chicago Pizza Pie Factory in London: sightseer by day, waitress at night. After six months I thought I’d never want to see another pizza in my life. And now, my longest cooking experiment has been 30 odd years perfecting pizza dough. In the 90s, I started making a weekly Friday night pizza with our children. The fever was re-ignited during COVID, while everyone else had a named pet sour dough starter, I was weighing and measuring King Arthur’s “00” flour and comparing it to Cento Anna Napoletana Tipo “00” Extra Fine Flour Italian pizza flour, seeking the magical ratio of water to flour, stretching, rolling and manipulating the resulting doughs. (I can’t toss the dough – low ceilings and decided lack of coordination.) We even bought a pricey Ooni pizza oven for flash cooking pizzas at 900°F. This is very serious, though highly unprofessional cooking.

But it is home cooking. COVID brought us all home. There aren’t too many restaurants in our little town, so for three years we very studiously tried to stay safe at home, reading other people’s food stories for inspiration, because otherwise we would be mired in the cavernous rut of cooking the same foods every week. Monday is pasta night. Tuesday is Taco Tuesday. You know the drill.

When I post links to “easily accessible websites” it’s because help is out there, and I spend a fair amount of time every week thinking about the other home cooks, who don’t have the leisure time to poke around the back waters of food writing like I do. Since we started the Spy back in 2009 we have always admired the Food52 website. What a wildly successful juggernaut of food thought: recipes, helpful hints, videos, virtual classes, podcasts, merchandise. Wow. It is daunting just to tap onto their site sometimes – all their positive energy and myriad inspirations! They are full time geniuses. While the rest of us limp along.

Kenji Lopez-Alt, who used to be with Cook’s Illustrated and now is with the New York Times, will take huge amounts of time exploring cooking processes. He spent an entire month perfecting cooking a hard boiled egg. He keeps exacting records, with photographs and annotations. I don’t have that kind of skill, or stamina. But I do have subscriptions to both publications, and can read about it, and let me tell you, the paywalls there are swift and unyielding. I try to digest some of Lopez-Alt’s research. ( He also has a charming Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/kenjilopezalt/ Lots of great ideas there.)

I also keep shelves of cookbooks, most of which are not digitized. They came in handy this weekend, when I couldn’t find our most delicious and reliable chocolate chip cookie recipe. It had vanished out of the 3-ring binder where I keep printouts of our faves. I couldn’t find it on the Food52 website – which has a great little file for saving recipes. I couldn’t find it in the New York Times food section. It wasn’t in Julia Child’s, or Alice Waters’books. Finally Mr. Sanders dug it out of a Dorie Greenspan cookbook. Phew. The cookie attack was successfully resolved.

Origin stories of recipes almost never make it to websites. You have to thumb through your own batter-flecked and stained cookbooks to remember a successful birthday dinner, or a firefly enchanted summer cookout. (Unless you document everything on IG. Good luck to you there.) That’s why I read Vivian Howard, M.F.K. Fisher, Mark Bittman, Laurie Colwin, and Nigel Slater. I listen to food podcasts while walking Luke the wonder dog. This morning on Table Manners a guest remembered Iraqi-influenced chicken dishes from his childhood – the orange chicken was sweet and citrusy, and the lemon chicken was tart and peppery. Listening to the stories of those meals made me think a little more creatively about our dinner tonight. Maybe I’ll thaw some chicken. Because we will be cooking at home.

COVID and the restrictions that we have learned to live with have influenced how we eat and cook. The economy makes it challenging, too. I like setting the table and lighting candles every night; to rehash the day, talk about the news, share some gossip, while eating a modest, home cooked meal. I will never cook a real New Haven pizza, but I enjoy making the effort every week. There is always room for improvement, and the time spent in the kitchen, at home, is rewarding. We enjoy the feeling of satisfaction when the bubbling pizza slides off the peel, when the freshly baked cake springs to the touch, when the steak sizzles in the cast iron pan. There are stories to tell.

“No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.”
― Laurie Colwin

Filed Under: Food Friday, Spy Top Story

April 2023 Sky-Watch

March 23, 2023 by Dennis Herrman Leave a Comment

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Both of the inner-most planets of our Solar System, Mercury and Venus, will be seen at their best for all of 2023 during the first two weeks of April this year. Mercury will appear 5 degrees above the western horizon at magnitude –1.1, 45 minutes after sunset on April 1; itself setting a hour after sunset. Venus, stunningly bright and so, unmistakable, will be above and left of Mercury.

Mercury gains altitude each night until April 19th and on April 21st, the crescent Moon joins the planet, just above and left of it. Venus will move along a path between two star clusters associated with Taurus the Bull; the Pleiades and the Hyades. By April 10th Venus will be just below the Pleiades (M 45)open star cluster. Check this out with binoculars!

On April 22nd the Moon and Venus will appear very close together; with both of them near the Hyades open star cluster. This will be another great view to see through binoculars. By the end of April, Venus will have moved further east and lie between the horn stars of zodiac constellation Taurus the Bull.

Mars has faded considerably in the last two months; it is over 100 million miles from Earth now, but it will be seen all month among the stars of the Gemini twins. It will not set until around midnight. On April 25th the waxing crescent Moon will just above the red planet. Both of them will be seen in the sky just below Castor and Pollux, Gemini’s two 1st magnitude stars, that mark the heads of each of the twins.

Saturn returns to view but in the early morning eastern sky rising around 5 am. However the observing window for it will not improve much until the end of the month. Early on it will be quite low to the east horizon. Jupiter will not be visible at all this month. It is in conjunction with the Sun. But things improve for seeing both Saturn and Jupiter in the eastern mornings skies by May; and then into the summer months.

The LYRID meteor shower peaks on April 22nd with ideal conditions for it because the Moon will not interfere. Lyra the harp in the sky from where the meteors appear to come rises close to the zenith(top of the sky) just before dawn. This is toward the east-northeast sky. The rate of meteors from the Lyrids averages about 18 to 25 per hour.
The Full Moon of April is on the 6th.

Filed Under: Brevities Tagged With: local news, Sky-Watch

Adkins Mystery Monday: Can You Identify this Early Purple Bloom?

March 20, 2023 by Adkins Arboretum Leave a Comment

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Happy Mystery Monday! How about another native groundcover? Can you identify this early purple bloom?

Last week, we asked you about golden ragwort (Packera aurea)! This native groundcover has year-round interest! Throughout the winter, it retains its green basal leaves. In spring, it is amongst the earlier blooming natives with bright yellow flowers. In summer, it will go to seed and in the fall, you’ll see young golden ragworts starting anew. Packera aurea readily self-seeds, so is an ideal plant for filling gaps. At Adkins Arboretum, it grows in the forested floodplain as well as the Parking Lot Alive! gardens, demonstrating its ability to grow in various soils and sun exposure. The flowers provide nectar and pollen to a variety of bees and flies! #adkinsarboretum #mysterymonday #goldenragwort #mysteryplant #parkinglotalive #winterinterest #carolinecounty

Adkins Mystery Monday is sponsored by the Spy Newspapers and Adkins Arboretum. For more information go here.

Filed Under: Food and Garden Notes Tagged With: Adkins Arboretum

Echo Hill Outdoor School Announces New Waterfront Exhibit

March 19, 2023 by Spy Desk 1 Comment

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Chestertown’s waterfront just got a lot more interesting, thanks to a new outdoor exhibit created by Echo Hill Outdoor School. Along the dock near the Outdoor School’s floating fleet, a new series of signs, interactive stations and displays tell the story of the Chesapeake’s working waterfronts, vessels, maritime communities and culture.

The exhibit, developed in partnership with Locust Grove Studios, uses the School’s historic vessels to explore the ways the Chesapeake historic environment shaped the region’s people and places. Eight signs in total tell the stories of skipjack Elsworth, bateau Ric and buyboat Annie D, and detail bygone Black maritime communities like Chestertown’s Scott’s Point. Other signs share the biographies of boatbuilder Stanley Vansant and writer Gilbert Byron, and discuss the history of oystering, steamboats, and more. An introductory panel provides an overview of the School’s mission and history. Additional “fun facts” provide extra information, and several of the signs are capped with boat silhouettes that provide visitors with a full side view of the historic vessels.

In addition to the exhibit panels, dockside visitors can test their skills of knot tying on an interactive rope display, and an oyster dredge, winch, crane and oyster bushel display suggests the oystering heyday of Elsworth and Annie D.

To ensure maximum accessibility for exhibit visitors, Echo Hill Outdoor School also upgraded the decking on the piers and finger piers where the exhibit is installed. Completed during the first summer of the pandemic when Echo Hill Outdoor School was closed, the work was finished by Outdoor School staff on a volunteer basis.

Currently, the exhibit is fully open to the public, and Chestertown visitors are encouraged to stop by and take in the panels, history, and stories of the Chesapeake’s past. And new panels will soon join the waterfront signage. Associate Director Andrew McCown, who spearheaded the project, is currently working on additional panels for the exhibit that explore the Chester River’s steamboat history and the future of the Chesapeake environment.

For Executive Director Peter Rice, this exhibit is a natural extension of the School’s environmental programs. “Echo Hill Outdoor School’s historic floating fleet serve as our environmental classrooms and provide a way for our participants to connect to the Bay’s unique history and culture. These new signs let us share the ways the Chesapeake environment has shaped lives for generations with the greater community, right in downtown Chestertown.”

Echo Hill Outdoor School was established in 1972 in Kent County, Maryland to provide outdoor education programs to students and teachers from throughout the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Specializing in immersive, experiential programs, Echo Hill Outdoor School’s classes can be customized to the needs of different school groups.  For more information, or to arrange a program, visit ehos.org or call 410-348-5880.

Filed Under: Brevities Tagged With: Chestertown Spy, local news

Food Friday: Full Irish

March 17, 2023 by Jean Sanders 2 Comments

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Happy St. Patrick’s Day! If you are planning on a big celebratory day of pub crawling, or consuming any amount of green beer after the parade, the best of luck to you. Tomorrow a breakfast bowl of Lucky Charms just won’t cut it. You will need a full Irish breakfast to insure your full recovery.

During the week I tend to be a bowl of sticks and twigs kind of breakfast eater: bran flakes, raspberries and 2% milk. I worry about my fiber intake. Sundays I let loose, and bake biscuits, or make pancakes, with bacon or sausage. Sometimes I bake scones. Or make eggy French toast. I won’t say that I am abstemious, but I have had very few meals that have included three kinds of sausage and bacon. I thought the overwhelming English breakfasts I was served in modest B&Bs were absurdly huge, until I ran into the multifarious Full Irish breakfast.

Remember Gareth? Whose funeral we attended in Four Weddings and a Funeral? Remember the foreshadowing with his big English breakfast fry-up every morning: eggs, tomatoes, bacon, sausage, and fried bread, topped with a soupçon of cigarette ash? That was modest high cholesterol fare, the breakfast of a hermit howling in the wilderness, compared to the vast number of heart-stopping calories found in an Irish breakfast.

Here is what is required in a full, Irish breakfast:
Bacon or rashers
Sausages
Fried eggs
Black pudding (don’t ask – think of scrapple)
White pudding (ditto)
Mushrooms
Tomatoes
Baked beans
Fried potatoes
Soda bread/toast/fried bread
Real Irish butter
Breakfast tea

According to the Irish Post newspaper: “A full fry-up contains on average around 1,300 calories in one serving, which is almost three quarters of a woman’s daily recommended intake (2,000 calories) and over half of that suggested for men (2,500 calories).” Yikes. https://www.irishpost.com/life-style/the-ingredients-of-a-hearty-traditional-full-irish-breakfast-78903

The Irish Sun newspaper information is even more dire: “Three rashers weigh in at 213 calories, one slice of black pudding is 192 calories, while two sausages grilled add 324 calories. Toast, eggs, tomatoes, mushrooms, beans and hash brown will bring it up to over 1,500 calories.”

I’ve read that some calorie-wise folks will grill everything instead of frying it, and might even toast the bread instead of frying it. It sounds like a fool’s errand to me. Opinions about the Full Irish are strong. If you serve your beans in a ramekin, you look snobby and are acting self-important, even though some people don’t like having the beans touch their eggs. You must ask first. If you serve chips (French fries) instead of frying the potatoes in the chip pan you are rejecting tradition. It is morally wrong to serve eggs without runny yolks. Here are some tips for preparing your own Full Irish breakfast feast: https://www.irelandbeforeyoudie.com/the-perfect-traditional-irish-breakfast/

If you were an Irish farmer, facing a long day of grueling physical labor in the field, a Full Irish will adequately fuel your day. But if you are a puny twenty-first century home-office worker, it might be overkill. Especially if you consider that everything is bathed in sweet delicious Irish butter. It’s oatmeal for you. Maybe Weetabix. Think about your fiber intake. Think about Gareth. And just smell the bacon.

“When you make a wee wish
on a green four-leafed clover,
may your belly stay full
and your cup runneth over.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich

https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/irish-weekend-fry-up-51145610

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https://www.happyfoodstube.com/full-irish-breakfast/&psig=AOvVaw1ZG1J5ogXJQ68RYbQX1Gxi&ust=1678731865774000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CA8QjRxqFwoTCJj7ldaB1_0CFQAAAAAdAAAAABAR

Filed Under: Food Friday, Spy Top Story

Adkins Arboretum Audio Essay Podcast Explores Nature and the Underground Railroad

March 16, 2023 by Adkins Arboretum 1 Comment

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Adkins Arboretum is pleased to announce the release of the Rooted Wisdom Audio Essay, the latest addition to the Rooted Wisdom initiative. Recorded at the Arboretum and featuring filmmaker Mecca Lewis and historian Anthony Cohen, the production explores the Underground Railroad and reveals how sometimes what’s before us is the past.

Rooted Wisdom examines how self-liberators used their knowledge of the natural world as they forged a path to freedom on the Underground Railroad. It comprises a guided experience, the heart of which is a beautifully filmed and narrated documentary, Rooted Wisdom: Nature’s Role in the Underground Railroad, in which Cohen guides viewers through the Adkins Arboretum landscape and reveals freedom seekers’ methods for navigation, concealment, evasion and nourishment. The guided experience also includes a companion website, rootedwisdom.org, that presents the film in five chapters and invites a deeper understanding of the relationship between self-liberation and nature through detailed accounts, related historical sites and resources relating to the landscape both then and now. The film and virtual companion premiered in 2022.

In the new audio essay, Lewis and Cohen discuss the Underground Railroad, the unending process of pursuing and interpreting history and how a cultural knowledge of nature factored into the planning and process of self-liberation, all while walking the Arboretum grounds. The guided experience and audio essay are available at rootedwisdom.org. To ensure ongoing community engagement, the Arboretum has partnered with Beech Works, Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to broadening public discourse and advancing public education on social issues through thought-provoking documentary and narrative films, to advance the rootedwisdom.org web presence, offer a 26-minute version of the film for community screenings and develop additional programming for audiences beyond the Arboretum. Additional resources at the Arboretum, including information about school field trips and docent-led guided walks, can be found at adkinsarboretum.org.

Filmmaker Mecca Lewis and historian Anthony Cohen record the recent Rooted Wisdom Audio Essay at Adkins Arboretum. Photo courtesy of Schoolhouse Farmhouse.

Mecca Lewis is a Baltimore-based documentary filmmaker and a lover of experiential research and play. Her works include Florence’s Flowers, an expeditious search for the echoes of once-resonant voices in the formerly vibrant radical abolitionist utopian society of Florence, Mass., and Perspectives from “Nowhere,” collage excerpts of visual and auditory landscapes of West Baltimore with community voices both past and present to detail the ongoing stories of history about the people of the Westside and the Highway to Nowhere.

Anthony Cohen is a historian, author and explorer of the American past. In 1996, he traveled 1,200 miles of Underground Railroad history from Maryland to Ohio, tracing the steps of freedom seekers along wilderness trails and waterways and stopping in towns along the way to chronicle their stories through artifacts, documents and oral accounts. He embarked on a second trip, from Alabama to Ontario, in 1998 and in 2015 followed the route of a great-great-granduncle who fled slavery in Savannah, Ga., in 1849 for freedom in Canada. He is founder and president of The Menare Foundation, Inc., a national nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the history of the Underground Railroad, and operates the Button Farm Living History Center, a 40-acre farm that depicts 1850s plantation life in Maryland. He has served as a consultant to the National Parks Conservation Association, Maryland Public Television and NASA, among others.

The audio essay is a co-production of Adkins Arboretum and Schoolhouse Farmhouse. It was written by Mecca Lewis, Lauren Giordano and George Burroughs and was produced, recorded, edited and mixed by Giordano and Burroughs. It is based on work made possible by a grant from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, funded by the 400 Years of African American History Commission, and was financed in part by the Maryland Heritage Areas Authority.

A 400-acre native garden and preserve, Adkins Arboretum provides exceptional experiences in nature to promote environmental stewardship.

Filed Under: Food and Garden Notes

Adkins Mystery Monday: What Groundcover is Starting to Pop Some Color into Our Gardens?

March 13, 2023 by Adkins Arboretum Leave a Comment

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Happy March Mystery Monday! We are starting to get some early plant growth and blooms! What native groundcover is starting to pop some color into our Parking Lot Alive! gardens?

Last week, we asked you about true velvet mites (Family Trombidiidae)! These little, bright red arachnids are often found crawling around the forest floor. In their larval stage, they may act as parasites preying on other insect or arachnid hosts (some of which can be problematic pests for us!). True velvet mites play an important role in the ecosystem, keeping balance in the forest floor. They may be small, but they are mite-y! For those of you feeling the creepy crawlies, don’t worry, they don’t bite or try to parasitize people (or other vertebrates). #mysterymonday #adkinsarboretum #smallbutmitey #velvetmite #ecosystembalance #mysteryplant #winterinterest #carolinecounty

Adkins Mystery Monday is sponsored by the Spy Newspapers and Adkins Arboretum. For more information go here.

Filed Under: Food and Garden Notes Tagged With: Adkins Arboretum

Food Friday: Spring Ahead

March 10, 2023 by Jean Sanders Leave a Comment

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Good morning, Gentle Readers. Rise and shine. Arcane laws, Senate bills, and agrarian rituals dictate that you will lose an hour of sleep this weekend – unless you are enjoying an early spring break and are waking up someplace in Ft. Lauderdale. But that is another story.

We change the clocks this weekend: we are springing ahead. Luke the wonder dog will be puzzled. He has the most accurate internal clock I have ever seen. Daily, he starts moaning and wriggling and doing his little wake up tap dance around 5:58 AM, certain that Mr. Sanders is about to oversleep. Every morning of the week. Luke is no fan of Daylight Saving Time. He and the birds will be up when the sun beckons, and not a minute later.

Changing the clock is as bad as jet lag, without the perk of foreign travel. We stumble around for a few days, dazed and confused, cotton-mouthed and vaguely exhausted. Who needs Ft. Lauderdale? So pour another cup of coffee and pull up a newspaper on your tablet. Breakfast awaits.

I always feel smug when I remember a meal I have stashed away in the freezer. Luckily, clock-watcher Luke, who is my constant companion, is unaware of these rare moments of personal triumph. As handsome and good as Luke is, he is an anxious dog. He has separation issues. His life is better when he has company. Mr. Sanders is his preferred human, but I will suffice during the day. He attaches himself to me, limpet-like, at 7:00 AM. We go for a long walk first thing so he can suss out the neighborhood. Then he follows me around the house, the garden, the laundry room, through my studio. I announce to him when I am just going out to the mailbox, though I will be right back. He pays more attention to where I am than my mother ever did. He is asleep here, by my side, twitching, chasing bunnies, anticipating the storm trooper UPS delivery who will shatter our domestic idyll.

I have realized that I don’t need to go to the grocery store, or abandon Luke to the uncertain fate of menacing Amazon deliveries. A day without a trip to the grocery store is a good day for Luke. Tomorrow’s breakfast is already nestled in the freezer, so I won’t need to leave him. Instead, I will just clatter around the kitchen, making pizza dough for tonight’s pie, and our secure, cosy routine will not be interrupted. There are only 6 more hours until our second walk of the day, and at 5:58 PM, approximately, Mr. Sanders will sail through the front door. It’s going to be a good day.

I like easy peasy muffin pan meals. Last week we had the sweet muffin pan Portuguese cream tarts. This week we are going for something savory: Cheesy Bacon Egg Muffins. You can prepare clattering bowls of sticks and twigs, glasses of juice, and steaming mugs of coffee to be wholesome, or you can just reach into the freezer, pull a couple of these muffins out, and call it a meal; it all depends on your level of sleep deprivation. We are having company in a couple of weeks, so I want to be fully prepared and well-stocked. These will be perfect.

Cheesy Bacon Egg Muffins for Early Mornings

Preheat oven to 350ºF.

Grease muffin pans with olive oil or cooking spray, or use cupcake paper liners

5 large eggs
1/4 pound (about 8 slices) crisp-cooked bacon, crumbled
Luke the wonder dog and Mr. Sanders prefer
crumbled breakfast or Italian sausage
1 cup grated cheddar, or any cheese you like
1 cup chopped onions and bell peppers, sautéed (optional)
A pinch of salt and a pinch of black pepper
1/2 teaspoon crushed chili pepper flakes or dried herbs (Luke won’t say, but I like oregano)

It’s the perfect time and place to sneak in some diced tomatoes, broccoli, sautéed mushrooms, leeks, spinach, green onions, olives, fresh basil, rosemary, thyme, parsley; or any other old Simon and Garfunkle song you can remember.

Break eggs in a bowl, and beat them with the salt and pepper. Add cheese, bacon (sausage), pepper, other add-ins – and stir. Divide the egg mixture into the greased/lined muffin cups and bake in the oven until set, about 10 to 15 minutes depending on the size of your muffin pans. I like to put the muffin pans on cookie sheets in case of spillage. Serve warm. Save one for Luke. He has earned it. No UPS guys broached his defense today.

Here is a variation: https://morethanmeatandpotatoes.com/bacon-and-egg-muffins/

For the Keto Diet fans this is even simpler: https://theketocookbook.com/keto-recipes/bacon-egg-cups/

Luke isn’t too bothered by the clock change since he never skimps on his naps and he makes sure his meals are served on time. Mr. Sanders and I are hoping this will be the last time Daylight Saving descends on us all. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-approves-bill-that-would-make-daylight-savings-time-permanent-2023-2022-03-15/

“I’ve lived on the equator all my life and we never had to change clocks. Now they’re telling me time goes forward an hour after midnight? What is this, Narnia?”
― Joyce Rachelle

Filed Under: Food Friday, Spy Top Story

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