cold lunch

The basic: cellentani/cavatappi, mayonnaise, feta, relish.

Excellent hot-weather lunch. Also supper. Sometimes also breakfast.

Yesterday was a pleasant day weather-wise and I was able to spend the whole afternoon outdoors for the first time in weeks. Maybe not the smartest choice considering the ongoing air quality warnings due to smoke from the northern wildfires, but it just felt so good to be outside.

Sometimes with sweet corn.

Thank you all for your ideas about the raccoons, and I am sorry to hear there are so many kinds of critters making free with our gardens. My favorite solution was the rubber snakes, and "buy snakes" is now on my list. I also checked my spices box for red pepper but only found a little tin of smoked paprika from Portugal. However, I did find lots of coriander and sprinkled it liberally around the garden fence and the bean rows. I never cook with coriander, so it was worth sacrificing it to an experiment. The mystery is why I had not one but three jars of a seasoning I never, ever use.

Occasionally with avocado!

The family of raccoons has since appeared about the place in early morning and early evening, trundling along in single file with the tiny youngster bringing up the rear. They are either living very close by, or under one of my outbuildings. I'm afraid it's the latter, because I've noticed most of the goats haven't been escaping the heat and biting bugs by tucking themselves into the cooler, darker space beneath the shelters as they usually do.

Or mushrooms.

I've been tearing the house and workshop apart looking for my sprayer bottle that attaches to a garden hose and dilutes a liquid (usually fertilizer or pest spray) as you water. I bought it ages ago and have never needed to use it, and now that it is needed, it seems to have disappeared. If I buy another we all know how that will turn out, so the search goes frustratingly on. My plan is to spray a mist of diluted wine (stay with me) under the shelters and barn and around the workshop. Because: one raccoon recommendation was using a vinegar spray. Gathering dust in my tiny kitchen is a rack of wine bottles looking for a job. I haven't bought - or drunk - wine in many years now, so my thought is that most of those bottles probably now contain vinegar. It would be very satisfying to put them to good use. Just need to find that sprayer bottle!

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