Oh gin, how you suit citrus so well.

I hit a boon the other day. there is a market nearby me here called North Park Produce. Very cool place, lots of choices for your greek, middle eastern, etc. type of cuisine. I needed garbanzo beans to make hummus so I popped in to grab some. Given I can't just walk in, get the one thing I came for, check out and leave, I wandered through the produce section.

And there it was, a display of really reduced produce. Including several large bags of blood oranges...for only 99 cents each. I couldn't believe it. They didn't appear to be rotting, so I grabbed four big bags.

And I promptly came home and juiced them all. I was hoping they'd be ok for eating, but they were all a bit soft, not bad by any means, but if I was going to get any use out of them, I'd have to do it today. So about 45 minutes of juicing later, I had half a gallon of blood orange juice. And I decided to drink some.

Blood Orange Cocktail

1 cup blood orange juice

1-2 shots gin

2-3 teaspoons honey

Ice

Club soda or sparkling water

Combine the orange juice, gin and honey in a shaker with a handful of ice and shake well. Pour over additional ice into two tall, cooler type glasses. Top off with the club soda or sparkling water (I had Pelligrino on hand and used that).

This one is actually the virgin version, I added gin to the next one!

Yes, it's time for another soup!

Biggest pot I own, normally I use it for canning...

I enjoy making a good soup. Besides being delicious and what not, they are super for lunch at work the next day. Especially if you heat it up, have to run in and take care of a patient or two or three and then you come back, realize your soup is cold again, reheat it, and it amazingly still tastes great.

Not that I've ever had that happen to me at work. Not once.

Okay, it's happened a few times. Such is being a nurse and all.

I've got another confession to make.

Or two, or three. Actually, I'm not sure how much I'll be baring my soul today, but let's get started, shall we?

First, I'd like to acknowledge I have a thing for tablecloths:

I need a vacation from my staycation.

Child labor FTW, again!
Shredding radish for the slaw.

You know how it is, right? You go on vacation. You rest, relax, sight see, what not and end up still being tired at the end of it all once you get back home. I feel that way today, trouble is, I didn't go anywhere last week! Just spending a week running around town with my sister, niece and most times my brother in law on top of cooking dinner a few nights for the army of folks coming by to visit did me in. By Friday, I was done, with the cooking portion at least. We went to our local aquarium and then out to both lunch and dinner.

A pixie and her hummus.

This is Eva:

Child labor to clean lemons!

She's one of my little nieces. Eva, her mom and dad (my sister and brother in law) arrived from Oregon for a visit on Saturday. She just got a haircut yesterday, she wanted to have a pixie cut to skip that pesky hair brushing step in the morning.  Eva was super excited to be cooking with Auntie yesterday, we started with a dig-that-earth-day-hummus.

Greek for dinner

I swear I've been cooking, I just haven't been here blogging, more is the pity. Between work and life over all, I just haven't stopped to write about any of the cooking I've been doing. Good news is the recipes have been really good and completely worth repeating.

Tuesday night was Greek night here. True, it was Fat Tuesday, and Greek isn't the first thing one thinks of on Fat Tuesday, but I've been craving it for about a week or so now. Unfortunately, my nearby options for Greek food are all Daphne's. Daphne's isn't bad, but it isn't great. I've never liked their tzatziki sauce all that much.

Planning and plotting.

I have other food I've actually made to talk about, but stumbling around the internet I found this page: http://www.epicurious.com/articlesguides/howtocook/dishes/cakerecipes

I do love a good cake. And it just so happens I have a birthday coming around next month and I will likely need a cake for the celebrating. I've picked a few out, want to offer your thoughts?