Until I lived down in Cape Town, "hot crossed buns" was just a childrens' song to me; I'd never actually seen or eaten one until I went to a friend's house just after Easter in a Cape Town suburb. Seeing my fascination at this bread, my friend's mom explained to me that raisin buns like these only bear the cross on or after Easter, to signify Christ's rising. Huh...who knew? They are traditionally made with currents or raisins and crossed with a white dough on top. For extra sweetness the cross can be made of frosting, instead, which I how I made them last year. They were really good...I might have to make some this weekend to make up for their absence on Easter.
Here's my first-ever lemon meringue pie. I didn't let it cool enough before we cut into it, as you'll notice the lemony goodness is oozing out onto the plate:
The reason I forgot about Easter this year was because of my physical chemistry final, which was on Saturday morning at EIGHT AM! I loathe having finals on the very last day of finals week. Everyone else is done with exams, gone home to be with family. All in all the exam went fine; we only had to answer 9 out of 10 problems and I even finished early. After checking about 12094894854309 times for the rest of the weekend, my grade of a B+ was finally posted online. Whew! Because this class is a "deficiency" for my graduate group I'm required to get at least a B. There are bumper stickers that say "Honk if you passed pchem." Seriously, this class is tough...you'll notice that the sticker doesn't say "Honk if you got an A in pchem."While my dad was here we did some gardening; like his spontaneous suggestion last time that he and Dave remove that huge stump, this time he suggested that we start my front yard redesign. So we spent the better part of Monday removing turf with pick-matics and then rototilling about 18 horse feed bags of compost into the soil. (My dad has a mess-free system where he fills used 50-pound horse feed bags with black gold--his amazing compost--and then sews it up with his professional bag sewer, just like dog food bags. This way the compost can be hauled in a truck bed or the trunk of your car without making a mess.) Since we're going to replace the fence in a few weeks we didn't extend the garden bed along the front fence that runs between us and the neighbor yet so we can ensure that we will have enough room to work. Eventually I'd like to have only a small "puddle" of grass in the front yard surrounded by bermed garden beds. Right now all we have is very boring, very flat grass-and-weed turf, plus a flower bed under the front window that Dave made for me last fall. By creating berms with the soil the yard will look bigger than it is since the mounds won't let your eyes see the whole yard at once. Even an elevation change of 12 inches can make a big difference, visually.
See how the stump is still there on the street in front of the house? It's been there ever since they took it out of the ground; the city wouldn't take it since it is so large. Our chain saw was being cranky so we couldn't cut it up to the city's required size. Instead, my dad and I rolled it up a plywood ramp into Cliff the Big Red Truck to haul it back to Livermore. Daddy has a collection of old stumps and tree debris that will eventually go into a gully at the Far Side Ranch (our cabin south of Livermore).Daddy brought me a "Julie Sized" tiller a few weeks ago. The big red one we brought back from Georgia is too big for me to handle, at least when I have to turn it. It is a bit much for Dave to handle, too, since the drive shaft arm was so long and flexible that you couldn't take it out of "go super fast" to put it into "go nice and slow" or even to put it into reverse. So it would drive forward like mad and there wasn't much you could do about it unless you had muscles like the Incredible Hulk--or the Incredible Dave--to man-handle it wherever you wanted it to go. This little Snapper is great because it is small and it can be maneuvered around tight bends and up close to fences.
Daddy and I have decided that we must do something "plant related" together every Easter weekend; a few years back (2003 I think) we were up at the cabin ("Far Side Ranch") identifying native flowers using the Jepson manual for my botany class. Last year we carved the garden beds out of the rear-most yard here at the new house for our first summer garden. This year it was making the first flower bed for new redesigned front yard.
On Tuesday morning Daddy was slated to depart for Livermore so he and I went to IHOP for breakfast (its our heading-back-to-Livermore tradition). While there, Vic, my PI (Principal Investigator, basically my research professor except that he's not a "professor" he's just a researcher), called to see if I could come in to lab to show him how to use a particular program. My dad and I went back to the house, hopped on bikes and rode to campus. It was great to have my dad finally meet Vic. They keep trying to meet up but it had never worked out before. They totally hit it off! They talked all about my dad's work history, stuff Vic has done as a farmer, and all sorts of stuff. After that we walked across campus to drop some books off at the engineering library. We stopped by Bainer Hall to see if my dad's research associate was in his office so we could drop off some samples to him. He wasn't there, but now I at least know where his office is since my dad left the samples with me to drop off later. It is cool that my dad has a work-related reason to come to Davis these days...hopefully he'll be able to come up here more often.
I'll post more later...I have some other pictures and recipes to share from this past weekend as well. But right now I need to go to bed.
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