Weekend Edition: Bits and Pieces

This weekend was mostly spent on unglamorous, back-breaking tasks such as cleaning the irrigation ditch and starting to irrigate. Cleaning the ditch doesn't sound that hard, but we're talking about 200+ feet of ditch that accumulates a lot of weeds and dead leaves over the winter. It has to be raked out and sometimes dug out where sediment has collected. Then the debris filling the bed of the pick-up needs to be taken to the local green-waste dump and unloaded. It's taken us the better part of three weekends if we add in our portion of the shared acequia that we cleaned a couple weeks ago. And we aren't finished! Almost though. Then all we have to do is clean out the actual garden, re-dig two of our raised beds so we can line them with weed fabric, build a couple of gates for the irrigation ditch, PLANT the garden, dig a new bed for the raspberries that we received on Friday and need to get into the ground asap... and on and on and on. While I love summer, the early part is so much work it can get overwhelming pretty quickly.

The plus side is that all that physical labor makes me not feel any guilt when I eat delicious high calorie treats like these peach and banana tartlets that I made on Thursday. They were modeled after the tart tatín recipe from Chocolate & Zucchini which uses a short crust instead of puffed pastry. I had some peaches that we froze last summer that I wanted to use up, but not quite enough of them for the quantity of dough, so one tart was made with a banana which was the only piece of fruit on hand. I have to say it was really good-- not surprising since how could you go wrong with banana, caramel and shortbread? The peach were excellent as well.

I also got new shoes. Basically a Swedish Hasbeen knock-off, which are cute enough, almost half the price, and most importantly available locally so that I can try them on before buying. I anticipate these being my daily wear-with-everything shoe for the summer.