Tomato Sandwiches

I can't help it. I live in a hotel and eat out of the supermarket so when I come home I am totally preoccupied with the lovely fresh veges growing in my garden. One of my favorite meals is a tomato sandwich made with a juicy beefsteak tomatoe and a thick slice of vidalia onion. My grandfather taught me about tomatoes. He and my grandmother moved frequently because he was congenitally unable to live anywhere for more than two years (they lived in at least 10 different towns in the Philadelphia area, some of them twice, not to mention Pawnee City, Nebraska, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, New York City, The Hague, Netherlands, Portugal, Chicago, Ithaca, New York, Kansas, Lambertville, New Jersey, Abiquiu, New Mexico and many others I am sure I don't know about), but whenever he could, he always had a lovely vegetable garden which featured Big Boy tomatoes. When we visited in the summer, there was always a platter of freshly sliced tomatoes on the table at dinnertime.

In any case, the best way to make a tomato sandwich is to toast two slices of white bread (this keeps the bread from getting soggy). Slather them with Hellman's mayonnaise (the real stuff - no low fat imitations) and add one thick slice of tomato and one thick slice of vidalia onion.
Cut the sandwich in half and enjoy! What you can't see in the picture below is that I couldn't control myself and I took a bit out of the corner of bottom half of the sandwich. mmmmmm.

Garden

This is a picture of the harvest from my August garden. I try to plant only the vegetables and fruit that are beautiful, unusual and delicious. Seedless concord grapes, baby red and yellow tomatoes, Japanese eggplant, red raspberries, garlic chive flowers, Italian basil, roma plum tomatoes, golden tomatoes, varigated eggplant, and green and gold peppers. Of course, produce that is eaten within minutes of being picked tastes completely different from any of the sadly aging items in the supermarket. To me, they provide as much visual satisfaction as any of the flowers in my border.

Outlet Shopping

Saturday I treated myself to outlet shopping in Lancaster. My focus was on grays and purples. Like this Eggplant Sweater jacket that I found at Banana Republic for $39. And a classic pale gray cardigan at Ann Taylor for $35 and a matching gray sleeveless turtleneck for $29.

And these cute open toed taupe shoes with beige suede bows that aren't really gray or purple. Not quite a bargain at $60 but I couldn't resist them.

I did heroically resist a lovely eggplant unfitted knee length wool coat at J Crew that was marked down from $500 to $189. Missed my shopping companion. She would have probably talked me into buying it.

Liberty Prints

In my last blog, I mentioned my collection of Liberty prints. Tonight I laid them out on my sewing table to photograph them and the table wasn't big enough. It has been several years since I looked at them all together and I forgot how many I had and how beautiful they are. I am sure my daughter remembers many of these because we used to pick them out the remnant basket together. Every time we went into London, we always stopped at Liberty to see what goodies were hiding in the little baskets in the fabric department.

I made many lovely dresses for my daughter, and some of their remnants are among the ones in my picture. I particularly like to collect variations on a particular print and my favorite is the Strawberry Thief, though I have several others. Our guest bedroom has Strawberry Thief curtains that I made out of some of the material I bought when we moved back home from Surrey. As I put then back into the closet I counted 48 different prints. If Ashley ever has a daughter, I will make her lovely dresses out of these like I did for her mother.

I LOVE........FABRIC!!!!

Ok. I confess. I have been a fabric junkie since I was 12 and my mother took me to the Everfast Mill store where we could get amazing remnants for 10 cents a yard (this was 1960, when gas was 19 cents a gallon, but still a bargain). I used to make most of my clothes and don't sew as much as I used to but I still have hundreds of yards stored away in my craft room and occasionally open the doors of my cupboards and gloat over the goodies. The prize of my collection is a huge variety of Liberty remnants collected over a 20 year period. Most of them are 1/4 yard or less, but I also shipped over 200 metres of curtain fabric back to the US when we moved back in 1998. I probaby have 50 or more different Liberty patterns including some amazing patchwork that I bought in 1997. Sadly, Liberty hardly sells any rems any more and the last time I visited in May of 2008, I couldn't find the little baskets that used to contain the precious delicate floral prints.

Anyway, the Fall fashions have reawakened my lust for lovely luxurious wools, but the suburbs no longer have any fabric stores except for the highly plebian Jo Anne's which seems to specialize 50 varieties of fleece and shiny synthetics suitable only for a working class prom queen. Dredging through my ancient memories to the summer when I was 16 and had apprenticed myself to a talented local designer, I recalled that we used to haunt Fabric Row around 4th Street in Philly. Googled it and it still exists so I have to set myself up for an expedition.

Cherry Pie

Made a Cherry Pie late last night. Had some for breakfast this morning ............

Harper's Bazaar Fall Fashions- Installment 1

The Fall Fashion Issue just arrive and I have selected some pictures to share with Ashley. This fall I particularly like the tailored tweeds - and the unstructured coats. Fedora's and rich plums and purples. The shoes are impossibly scary. After a lot of agressive manipulation for all this scanning, my Harper's now looks a bit lumpy like someone was reading it in a very steamy and humid bathroom.