Solar Art

Lacking some real art of my own for Rain's Thursday Art and Dinner Date, I turn to the solar light I recently bought for my garden.

This decorative solar lantern is made from durable Tyvek® material and is weather resistant in rain as well as in snow (which we don't really have here). While the lantern looks beautiful on its own, its true magic shows up in the dark hours when illuminated patterns appear on the ground.

Isn't that pretty? I know it doesn't quite fit Rain's theme of "silhouettes" this week, but maybe just a little bit - with a lot of imagination?

We're still having a lot of tomatoes, both from my garden and the farmers market. I'm not someone who uses tomatoes to make tomato sauce - a little bit, yes, but there are so many more ways to use tomatoes in delicious meals.

We love gnocchi. One of our favorite dinners is crisp gnocchi with brussels sprouts and brown butter. When I found a recipe for crispy gnocchi with burst tomatoes and mozzarella I thought I give it a try. It asks for small tomatoes and I had tons of them from the garden.

I only used half of the amount that is given in the recipe, and it turned out delicious. Cooking gnocchi directly in a pan without boiling them first leaves them crisp outside but chewy inside. It is heavenly. You can find the recipe here - it is from NYT Cooking, so for those of you who don't have a subscription the recipe is at the bottom of this post.

Over the past two and a half days we got a new roof. Those were noisy days, but the company's employees did a great job and cleaned up everything afterwards. My porch has never been that clean! We chose a local company since we believe in supporting local business. We also opted for light colored shingles for reflecting the light - it looks beautiful. The stanchions for the solar panels that will be installed toward the end of the year were already put in as well - another local company. Going solar has been on our radar for a long time and I'm glad that we finally took all the steps in the right direction.

Yesterday we got a stark reminder that we're living in earthquake country - at 6:39 pm, I had just started to make dinner, the ground beneath us woke up with a jolt and some very strong rumble, immediately followed by a second, weaker aftershock. We learned that the first quake was 4.4 and the second 3.9 - not much, but the epicenter was less than 3 miles from our home, therefore it felt much stronger. A few things fell down, nothing was damaged and I had the presence of mind to immediately shut off the stove. Our dinner was just delayed by about ten minutes. However, Otis, one of the permanent feline residents in my garden, took off like a rocket and I haven't seen him since. His owner told me later, that he showed up at her home, and that's where he should be anyway.