this little life of mine

We had a beautiful sunset last night. There were lots of whispy clouds and contrails to capture the last rays of the setting sun. It looked like the sky was on fire!

I spend a healthy chunk of last Sunday morning cleaning and polishing a bunch of my silver earrings. It turned out to be a LOT harder than I thought it would be, but in the end my earrings look a LOT prettier and shinier than they were. This pair of mermaid earrings is one of my favourites. Unfortunetly I don't remember where I purchased them, although part of me wants to say it was a little place called The Old Mole in Moscow, Idaho.

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

•Grab your current read
•Open to a random page
•Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
•BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
•Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

This week I'm back to reading on Nicky the Nook. It's a little book called Witch Song by Amber Argyle, and so far it's pretty good and I LOVE the cover art!! Isn't it lovely? Anyway, here's my teaser from page 40:

"The Dark Witch has captured all the others. She sent me to chase after a rumour. That rumour turned out to be you."

I made this recipe from Clean Eating magazine before, but at that time I didn't have the smoked paprika nor did I have a jalapeno pepper.  (Okay, honestly, I chose NOT to use a jalapeno pepper because I was afraid it would make the dish too hot, and I'm a wimp when it comes to hot and spicy foods) This time, however, I had both items and used them!

I used some tomatoes from our garden instead of buying the grape tomatoes from the store - I think that might've improved the taste considerably! - the green bell pepper is ours as well, and the little jalapeno pepper was from the garden of a co-worker of mine.

The dish turned out beautiful and delicious, and I will definitely be making it again. The jalapeno was not hot at all (another of my co-workers who is an amazing cook told me to remove the seeds and wash the pepper off really well to remove the oils that cause the heat; I did and it seemed to work!), and the smoked paprika has a lot more flavour than the plain paprika does. Next time, however I will be doubling the vegetables, because it's supposed to serve 4, but there's no way there's enough veggies for 4 people!

The squash plants might be on their last legs, but the rest of the garden is in full swing this week:

I still got one good-sized zucchini today and found another little yellow squash, but I left that for next week:

I'm still waiting for these two big green peppers to go red. I think it's just been too cool for them to turn. 

The tomatoes, OH THE TOMATOES!!! I harvested a bunch of them, but there are SO many more that will be ready during the week as well as next weekend:

 So, I got a pretty good haul again this week, including the biggest tomato we've harvested so far this year (from the Big Bertha plant):

And, I got it in the nick of time, considering it was starting to split! Anyway, until next time, cheers!

 
bright orange, yellow, gold

bursts like sunshine in my mouth

perfect little fruit