Posts by Liz

Eclairs

Weekends, I typically have a cooking and/or baking plan. Yesterday morning as I gathered ingredients and utensils for making the creme patisserie for eclairs I was struck by how much I enjoy puttering in the house, even though I spend most of my weekdays here as well. The light, the quiet, the serenity of just being here is so wonderful for me that it is sometimes hard to go anywhere that is a bit noisy or crowded.

I took the above photo to share some of that.

And then I made the creme.

This morning, with the creme fully chilled, I made the shells, stuffed them with creme and dripped the chocolate glaze. I’ve been making the pastry shells from Julia Child’s recipe…practice runs, you know :)! They are amazingly simple and fast to mix and get in the oven and another of those cooking astonishments – making something that seems so complicated and turns out to be simple and great fun.

Eclairs.

It’s wrong!

8:17 p.m. on September 23, 2011 – the first day of Fall and it is 73F. It was 81 at the warmest late afternoon. Tomorrow it is forecast to maybe hit 90!

That’s just wrong!

I got to a stopping point shortly after 5 and found Bob near the front porch keeping an eye on a critter hole…lying in the grass like it was Summer!

He had been out all afternoon.

I brought him in so I could go out with Bear.

I sipped on a Friday night glass of wine while Bear chased squirrels and a warm wind sang in the tops of the pine trees.

The light looked like Fall but the air felt like Summer.

It’s wrong :)!

Afternoon light

It is trying to be Fall but we are having a last blast of Summer… 75F at 5:45 p.m. today and we are to maybe set records on Saturday before dropping to “normal” Fall temperatures next week.

Bear and I went to the vacant subdivision for a diversionary late afternoon walk.

The clouds…like they were painted with watercolors or colored with pencils…smudges in the sky over the mountains. Cicadas were singing like the late Summer day that it is. It will be officially Fall, here at 3:05 a.m. – as in very early Friday morning, 9/23/2011 – late this year :)!