Pasta and a Rye to make you sigh

It was a gorgeous day. The Olympics may be a disaster just to the north of us, but the weather down here has been spectacular, whether or not spring is a month or two early...

we took a long walk to the post office in the full sunshine, dropped off our packages and then came home for lunch. Afterwards we did some work around town, stopped in at the library and came home to cook. I've been looking forward to making this.

Dinner was fresh pasta with a sauce of cannelinis, carrots, onion, garlic and kale with some parmesan on top. It was splendid!! Really hit the spot and I love the way the cannellinis give everything a creamy sort of taste. It was also a bread day, which got a little mixed up with the bee class on Tuesday...both starters got an extra day of feeding which meant that we got a day of sourdough pancakes. :-) Anyway, I made rolls with the wheat starter, and made a sponge for a sandwich bread that I'm making today. But I tried some new flavors with the rye and I'm really delighted with the way they turned out. We had a toast party before bed and ended up eating half of one of the loaves!! To the rye I added two tablespoons of anise, some chopped and rehydrated mandarin orange peel I saved from the holiday season, and a couple of cups of raisins. This made an awesome loaf! Really fragrant and it tastes wonderful toasted. I've been having a hankering to make fisherman's bread, which has dried apples, raisins, and anise in it, among a few other things, and this has satisfied my desire. The anise is a really lovely scent. It's kind of new for me to be using it.

At the Re-Store on Tuesday I found just what I've been scouting for...two gallons of dark exterior latex - non toxic. The paint is for the exterior of the bee hives. One gallon is unopened and a very dark red color (I want the dark colors so they will absorb heat - since we're in the north -or at least I think we still are...) and the other is 3/4 full and a kind of aqua greenish color that I'll use to make some patterns on the hives to help the bees orient to the correct hive. We're starting to get pretty excited about the bees, the closer we get, and a little nervous too. Hope we can treat them right and get them well established. It's a tougher job with the advent of Varroa Destructor (who just has a name like a character out of some epic sci fi extravaganza...and is far more lethal it seems. Still and all, the work's gotta be done so we'll try our hands...Off to work in the sun...we've still got tons of work on our restoration job and today we're working on the raspberry patch, which needs about two full beds removed completely (we're inheriting many canes!!)...more later!