One of my favorite "Paris" blogs is David Lebovitz's Living the Sweet Life in Paris. He's an American chef/baker/I'm not sure what-all, and his blog is 50 kinds of fun. He features recipes often, of course, and cafes and restaurants and just living in Paris yarns. He also plugs cook books he finds excellent, and I was so impressed with his writing about Serve Yourself: Nightly Adventures in Cooking for One by Joe Yonan, that I immediately ordered it online. And it's every bit as cool as David said it was.

Tonight I tried my first recipe out of it: I made the Sweet Potato Soup Base and after portioning it out into four containers to save some for another night, I sauteed a four ounce chunk of salmon, broke it up and dropped the pieces on top of a bowl of the soup, added a slice of lemon and a few extra leek shavings, and then - amazing! - I remembered to take a picture!



I was uncertain how good this might or might not be. The idea of the combination of sweet potato soup and salmon wasn't a 100% sale for me, but I figured, if I want to be adventurous, this is how you do it.

Happily, I was pleasantly surprised - it was really good!

So I thought I'd better report it here.

This cookbook has many great recipes and I can't wait to try more of them. It includes over 100 recipes for both weeknight staples and weekend projects. Says so right on the cover.

The landscaping crew came out Thursday and planted 5 Bridal Wreath plants in the empty space out front, and one of them in the middle of the "bird bath" flower bed triangle out back. It would look a lot better if I'd plant some colorful annuals in both places. And scatter some grass seed to fill in the numerous small bare spots in the front (it gets about 100% shade all day long, plus there were two old blue spruces here until about 1995 so there are undoubtedly still anti-competitor chemicals lingering, plus there is the maple tree in the middle of the yard also pumping out anti-competitor chemicals so it's no wonder the grass struggles...but it is definitely doing better than most of last year.) I have already used more energy writing this than I have in actually *working* out there so I'll shut up now since I don't have any intentions of actually working out there.

Really life is almost uniformly uneventful these days, which at my age is just what I like. I go to work, I come home. I putz around the house as needed, outside I water the hanging baskets and the transplanted plants and the new plants, I come back in and read and watch Netflix (I don't miss TV at *all* - anything I want to see, I can wait awhile and see it on Netflix.) I go to bed early and start the routine over in the morning. I'm loving all the reading I get to do.

I'm content - but that's boring to read in a blog so I'll sign off now.