Wild Leeks and ESP...or what?

My goodness!!  I just sat down to write a post here and thought to check my friend Cyndy's blog first.  I couldn't believe that she is writing today and will continue with a place on her blog she will call Aunt Jan's Wild Corner.
  The notes I wrote today for this blog are about the wild things to be found at hand and in the woods around us! Now isn't that what they call ESP??

I love to dig some nice dandelion greens and my lawn usually provides me with plenty.  The fiddleheads are ok but I really prefer the dandelions.  Cooked up and served with a nice helping of hot mashed potatoes and maybe a fat slice of ham like my Gram used to make.  Yum!  She would put a thick slice of ham in a big iron skillet, put some brown sugar and dry mustard on top and pour milk around and up almost to the top of the ham.  Then bake it in the oven for about an hour.  The flavor was just super and with the greens and mashed potatoes,  a favorite spring meal.

Cyndy spoke of the leeks too.  Years ago, when she was a little girl, her mom and I and another friend, Barb and her little boy would take a hike up on our nearby mountain, Hawks Mt. and find there among the rocks just below the top, lots of these wild leeks.  We would sit and eat our cheese and crackers and the wild leeks that we would clean as best we could. Always picking enough to take home for later.  They always made our cheese and crackers taste so good!  Barb and her family moved to NY a few years later and when it came time to go to the mountain again that year and search out the wild leeks, we were missing her so we picked a few extra and thought we would send them by priority mail to her.  We were sure to wrap them in plastic with some water, but very little, to help keep them fresh, or so we thought!  We got them over to the Post Office just as the mail truck picked up at 5 PM so they would be kept cold right up till the last minute. Then we waited for a surprised and delighted Barb to call us.  Well, she finally did and she was way more surprised than delighted !  She got the package and as she opened it the oniony smell, I should say the spoiled oniony smell was anything but delightful!! They were in pretty bad shape and certainly not edible by that time!  So much for our surprise.  We thought she would love having some leeks from the mountain as we knew she was missing us as we missed her.  What is that saying, "it's the thought that counts"!!

Each year as I bend over the lawn with my trusty digging knife and fill my basket with dandelions, I think of the time my son Chip came by on his way home from a job and stopped by for a visit.  As he came down the road and saw me all hunched over gathering my supper he told me his thought was, "Ah, there's Ma getting ready to eat the lawn"!  It was that Mother's day that he bought me the book " Stalking the Healthful Herbs" by Euell Gibbons.  I have Euell's other book, "Stalking the Wild Asparagus" a Mother's day gift from my other son, Matt in 1980.  I will enjoy reading about Cyndy's Aunt Jan and her adventures stalking the wild things.

I spent some time today in my sewing room.  I have TONS of smallish pieces of fabric so I was planning a quilt for our new great grandbaby's arrival in June.  I am experimenting with a technique called Paper Piecing. I have done this before but not for a long time.  It is one of those things that if you don't do it often you almost need to learn it all over again.  I have some nice bright, cheerful pieces to use and they say that babies like bright colors.  So we'll see how this works out.  I need to make 12 blocks.  With my re-learning process today, it took me half the morning just to get that first block done right!  I am not the world's best at seeing ahead what a finished piece will look like and have been disappointed many times before with my color choices.  Once I SEE it, I know right away if it is right or not!  A bit late if the pattern is a fussy one.  So we will see how this goes.

I have done lots of Spring cleaning this year, what with all our indoor projects and all.  Since I have clean bedroom windows now and it was a bit rainy this morning, I took a picture of the flowers the "Garden Fairy" planted in our yard, out through the clean window.  I think Spring is my favorite time of year, with Autumn coming in second.

I like this quote...a daffodils response to Spring...

She turned to the sunlight

And shook her yellow head

And whispered to her neighbor...

"Winter is dead".

                                 A.A. Milne