Happy Easter!

I hope you had a wonderful day with friends and family. Our family had an Easter celebration with a barbecue, Easter egg hunts for the little ones and, of course, the very necessary chocolate bunnies. My terrific sister-in-law made sure ours were gluten free.

We finished the work on our house and the air quality is significantly better. Thankfully, our son's asthma has calmed down being in a better home environment. My husband and I are really releaved at how much better he feels. Up next on our home list is wood rot. It's one of the dubious joys of living in a humid environment.

We've really enjoyed living in Houston. We're still trying to get things figured out, such as which doctors to use, where to get the car fixed and where to get your suits dry cleaned. We're making progress though and we've even managed to start building relationships with new physicians.

Our neighborhood has scoodles and scoodles of dogs and cats. It seems like everybody has a dog or two and maybe a cat or two. Some folks even have the additional menagerie of rabbits, lizards, mice and hamsters. We've got the lone Shetland Sheepdog. Her wish is that the neighbors would all let their rabbits loose, so she'd have something fun to chase. In her opinion, these cats are way, way too cranky for spontaneous bouts of joy.

I've got my pantry stocked and I've started baking again. I've been busy churning out muffins, bread (the current favorite is biscuits) and focaccia. Plus, a few batches of cookies for good measure. One of my favorite things is to walk into my house and it smells of the foods we love to eat.

More to come...

Houston - Heat, Houses & Pots

Thank you for all the kind messages about moving, selling our house and surviving the process. Our lives have been swept up in one whirlwind after another until last week. All our neighborhood research and house hunting focused in on a great house in a really lovely area. We put forth our best offer, but we weren't able to come to terms with the owner. So, we're back to the house hunt. 

While looking for that special house that appeals to all of us, we've been living in a furnished corporate apartment near downtown. It has been a lot of fun being so close to so much activity, great food, museums and more. Coming out of New York, we were driving everywhere, I'm sad to say...even four blocks down the road. The heat was more than our bodies could take those first few weeks, in fact our poor Sheltie hasn't stopped shedding yet.

We're settled in our apartment, although I'm having a bit of a challenge getting used to cooking in an apartment. The kitchen has a built-in microwave that also functions as a hood vent. I've discovered that it doesn't vent outside, it just filters whatever it pulls through and leaves this lovely greasy stain on the cabinets. It puts a real crimp in using the self-cleaning cycle on the oven as well, since the ceilings have all those well placed smoke/fire alarms and sprinkler heads. Needless to say, I've gotten friendly with the oven cleaner can again.

I packed up a mini-kitchen set up for the apartment, when we were packing up our house. Currently, we don't have any house prospects on our horizon, so it looks like temp living is going a bit more long term. In the kitchen equipment our leasing company provided, they gave us some Anchor Hocking baking dishes, but they gave us a set of pots and pans where the nonstick coating is very scratched up.

This is actually the opportunity I've been looking for...an excuse to upgrade my pots and to get a nice enameled cast iron dutch oven or cocotte. I've been looking at All-Clad, Tramontina, Le Creuset and Staub. Does anyone have a favorite set of pans or are your favorites based on the individual piece? Or on something different?