Monday MishMash

If you feed the birds like I do you know that you can go broke feeding them quality seeds.  As you can see, I have some pretty large feeders and they have to be filled every day.  The word is out that they can get gourmet food at the MoneyPenny house and this was costing me close to $60 a month.  But I hate to offer them the cheap stuff with all those fillers that can't be identified.

I happened to notice that Costco has 40 pound bags of wild bird food for $25.89, so I checked it out, remembering their pledge to only carry high quality items in their stores.  This stuff is wonderful and the birds are gaga for it.  This is what it looks like:

Nothing but good stuff - sunflower seeds, millet, and nuts.  The only drawback is, of course, the 40 pound bag but totally worth it considering that I'm saving at least 50%.

This is what the bag looks like:

I made a loaf of bread and some roasted veggie soup today and I want to show you what it looks like.  I've told you about it before but have never shown pictures.

Here are the roasted peppers (peppers on sale this week), onions, garlic, and tomatoes.  They were tossed with olive oil, salt and pepper, and pepper flakes ( I got a little crazy on those today) and roasted at 400 until they looked like this (about an hour):

I then dumped them into my Vitamix (my old blender worked just fine) with a can of chicken broth and gave it a buzz:

I then added a big spoon of low-fat sour cream to knock it out of the park.

You can strain it if you don't like the texture but I like it that way.  You will never again think that the stuff in the box is good.

I was talking to a friend the other day and she told me that they planted their zucchini starts.  I gave her a look and asked how that had worked out.  She said they froze to death and turned black the first night.  This is my cautionary tale to not get caught up in gardening craziness and plant tender starts like summer squash, peppers, tomatoes, petunias, begonias, basil, etc. unless they can be protected.

Again, I'm not trying to rain on your parade - just save you money, time, and frustration.  Wait until at least May 15th before even thinking about it, and then decide if it is even close to warm enough.  Last week, one morning was 27 and this morning, it was 33, so maybe we are headed in the right direction, but still way too cold for bikini wearing zucchinis.