What I Accomplished This Summer

Exhibit A: New recipes

Tonight's dinner consisted of warm blueberry soup--a new Swedish delicacy I recently discovered--served with sour cream and crushed walnuts. AND honey-roasted carrots with feta cheese and thyme, which the first time I did in the oven but this time I prepared on the stovetop, which is much cooler for summer. I don't know if Dear Husband noticed carrots, to be honest, since feta is his favorite. The soup had delightful warmth about it, so I can see why they often prepare it during the winter with blueberries saved in the freezer; and even though it was lightly sweetened with maple syrup, it was no dessert-y.

Those were more successful than the white-sauce vegetable lasagna I tried to recreate from residency, when it was my favorite meal on the Internal Medicine side (back before they had to switch to cold lunches to save money). Unfortunately, while it looks like the real thing, it was pretty bland. If I make it again, I will have to punch up the spice level. As it was, we resorted to nuking the leftovers and flavoring them with red hot pepper flakes or sage and marjoram.

Exhibit B: Cross-stitch and embroidery

Whereas in COVID Spring #1 I took up Settlers of Catan online, in COVID Spring #2 I decided I wanted something to do with my hands while sitting through endless Zoom meetings and a history of medicine conference, so I searched Etsy for cross-stitch kits with three goals in mind. The first goal was to make a pair of "Wash your hands" canvases to donate to a student group at the medical school to auction off for the local free clinic next year. With the extra canvas and floss I have, DH thinks I should make a matching set: "Wash your hands" and "You filthy animals."*

The second goal was to take on an ambitious cross-stich/embroidery hybrid of a golden bee as a housewarming gift for a friend who keeps bees. I had the fun of putting it together on two successive family vacations. Below you can see us at Lake Anna one quiet afternoon with it one-third done.

Then I had a #caturday with Rosamunda while at home.

I actually completed the final version at the housewarming party, since our dish was ready to take out of the oven before I had quite finished the honeycomb pattern in the background. J.H. plans to frame it for her wall of "bee art."

The third goal will be to purchase some anatomical patterns (a heart, a kidney, etc.) to cross-stitch with the next batch.

*In case you are neither a child of the 1990s nor a fan of the epidemiology series This Podcast Will Kill You, it's a joke based on the fake "classic" gangster film in Home Alone.