Up and Down, Up and Down, Up and Down

The hardening off of the seedlings has begun as I transfer them from the basement to the deck every morning and back down again later on.  I should be able to leave them outside for about 7 hours today which means the end is in sight.  I hope to plant them on the weekend.

I hardened off everything that I could put in the cold frame last week and most of that has now been successfully planted.  The only thing left were my gigantic tomato plants.  For some reason 5 of about 14 plants grew extra large.  If I had labelled them, I might find they are one variety.  An organized person would label.  I live for the surprise.  The bunny guarding the plants was picked up at a craft sale at Buckhorn Community Centre last weekend.  I thought he would go in the veggie patch and keep the other bunnies that visit company.  Maybe he'll be like a scarecrow and the real bunnies won't eat my pea shoots.  Not likely.

I'm on vacation this week and had a great day in the garden yesterday.  I did worry momentarily that I had bitten off more than I could chew and made the veggie patch too big.  But I quickly gave my head a shake and planted some more greens and beans and have filled it all.  Now I wait to see what sprouts.

Cooking yesterday was also quite successful.  I made the Smokin' BBQ Chicken from the book Bite Me with a Grilled Radicchio and Romaine Salad from the Fine Cooking that just arrived and chocolate chip cookies from Flour, my latest acquisition.  All were yummy.

The BBQ sauce was a little sweeter than it should have been.  Despite having it on my grocery list, I forgot to buy honey and, of course, didn't have enough for the recipe.  So I topped it up with maple syrup.

The salad had the added benefit of using up one of my leftover anchovies from the day before.  I'm not sick of anchovies yet!

I did sub dark chocolate for the milk chocolate in the cookies.  I just can't see a world where milk chocolate is ever chosen over dark and since the recipe was a lot of work for a cookie, wanted to make sure it was as tasty as possible.  The work came from toasting the hazelnuts, grinding some, chopping others.  I also bought chocolate wafers instead of using chips and had to chop those.  I did skip the part where she suggests refrigeration of the dough for 3 hours.  I'll try that next time.  I tend to want to make cookies when I want to make cookies so a 3 hour wait at 6PM is not really feasible.  The finished product was excellent so if 3 hours in the fridge makes them better, I'll be more organized next time; maybe.

Now it's back to the garden.