The green mine on my windowsill

Yup, it's another cooking post. *grin*

Most of the new cookbooks that we have bought lately are from Racheal Ray. So far, we have Cooking 'Round the Clock: Racheal Ray's 30-Minute Meals, 30-Minute Meals for Kids, 30-Minute Get Real Meals, and yesterday I used one of my Bed Bath and Beyond coupons to buy 365: No Repeats-A Year of Deliciously Different Dinners. (Just FYI, did you know that you can use as many of those 20% off one item coupons during one visit that you want??????) I have been reading through these cookbooks, and so far, she's two for two...I have made spicy chicken tacos and linguini with red clam sauce, both of which were excellent, and normally I don't like chicken tacos OR clams. But they were both awesome. Now, the 30-minute thing, well, I guess I'm still working on being an organized cook, because the spicy tacos took me almost an hour and the clam pasta about 35 minutes, but that's all right, they were both delicious. If you're looking for some cool cookbooks with some yummy recipes that don't take a lot of time on the gourmet side, I strongly recommend these books...they are awesome!

But, the one thing that I've noticed in virtually all of these recipes is that they call for fresh herbs...fresh parsley, fresh cilantro, fresh thyme, fresh oregano...do you see where this is going? Ha ha ha ha...

At the end of the weekend, I now have a green mine growing in my kitchen. I now have pots of basil, parsley, chives, cilantro, spearmint, sage, rosemary, and oregano. I really really want lavender and thyme as well, but I couldn't find any live plants this late in the summer for both, and no seeds anywhere either, so I think what I'm probably going to do is see how this goes for now and then next spring, I'll order those off the internet if I can't find them in town. Marjoram would be cool too, and peppermint too if I have the room. I think if I want any more herbs other than what I have already, I'm going to have to get a rack for the kitchen or move them outside. We'll see. I'm trying hard into talking P into letting me till a small garden outside, but so far I'm not being too successful...we had a garden about five years ago and it was great...until we got a small yellow Labrador puppy who systematically destroyed it starting with the banana pepper plants. Oh, Katie's lucky I love her so. And Simon marks everything, so we're not too jazzed about putting plants out there that we plan on eating for him to possibly piss on.

Oh, I so don't have time for another hobby, but I just keep piling them on. Cooking, gardening, scrapbooking, stitching...sheesh, just WHEN did I become so domestic? Oh, yeah, when I had a child! Well, I can't blame it all on her...I've always loved cooking and stitching. But gardening is SO fun...I had a great time today and yesterday scouting out the plants around town. And surprisingly, Wal-Mart had a lot of them...I bought all of my plants and clay pots there except for the rosemary and oregano which I found at Home Depot.

So here's my question (since I'm betting I have some container gardeners out there that read my blog)...how long do I have to wait to start snipping the herbs?? My chives, rosemary and oregano are already pretty long, so I think I'm safe to start snipping those, but what about the rest?

All right, that's all for now. I hope everyone had a great weekend. I sure did...my Dutch oven arrived, we bought a new Emeril skillet (a 4-quart one), and some fun kitchen gadgets...and now I have a garden inside! What more could I ask for?

And just FYI...McKenna is having surgery tomorrow to have tubes inserted in her ears. I didn't want to make a big deal out of it, because truthfully this is the BEST thing that we could do for her. Poor baby is just not getting any better and I know these ear infections are just making her miserable. So we are scheduled for surgery at 11 am, and hopefully we'll be home sometime in the early afternoon. Keep your fingers crossed for us! I think after it's over she's going to be hearing and feeling a LOT better.