Summer's here!

So, I don't want to make all of you back in Ireland and the UK feel bad, but the weather here in New Hampshire is only GORGEOUS! I'm writing this (Sunday evening) after having taken a leisurely swim in a friend's backyard pool and eating my way through the best part of a quart of blueberries picked up at the local farmer's market yesterday. Tonight, there's fresh summer squash on the menu, and the weather forecasts say it's going to be blissfully blistering for at least another week. *Grin*

Fresh blueberries. Yum! From wikimedia commons. 

There's only one thing that could make this holiday more perfect, and that's having hubby here to enjoy it all with me. I'm struggling on without him though. Saturday, my parents and I visited what I like to call 'the Mecca of bread' - the When Pigs Fly bakery and restaurant in Kittery, Maine. After sampling our way through most of the dozens of bread on offer and buying an obscene number of loaves for the freezer at home, we managed to fit in a bit of lunch in the restaurant next door before hitting the nearby outlets. Credit cards smoking, we then visited the farmer's market for a cornucopia of native produce, including the aforementioned blueberries, incredibly juicy nectarines, tiny little pickling cucumbers, and about a bushel of mixed courgettes and summer squash. It's a bit too late for native strawberries and a bit too early for local bread and butter corn on the cob, but the farm stand had some of the latter from Massachusetts, and it was only amazing! To paraphrase Kevin Spacey's character in the film, K-Pax, 'the produce alone has been worth the trip'. ;)


I don't have much to show for the couple of days I've been here, but I've been working away on finishing the binding on my Double Irish Chains quilt and am really happy with how it looks. I hope the new husband and wife like it, too! I also made a lemon pound cake to bring to my nana when I visited her Sunday afternoon. I used this recipe from Smitten Kitchen and had high expectations, especially given how much I love some of her other recipes, but I wasn't overly impressed with the end result. It was certainly tasty and might tickle the fancy of a true pound cake lover, but I think I prefer cakes with icing or frosting. It wasn't exactly dry, just a little boring, I guess. If I were to make it again, I'd probably add a little lemony drizzle over the top and/or poke a few holes on the top of the cake and soak it well with a flavoured stock syrup. Live and learn. 

Lemon pound cake, fresh from the oven

As you can see, I haven't been great at taking photos, mainly because I keep forgetting to bring my camera along, but I'll try to be better from now on. 


xxTina