The most wonderful time of the year

I love this time of year. Not because I haven't broken my New Year's resolutions yet or because we get a day off for ML King Day. It's the time of year that kind of creeps up on me, especially given it is still cold outside and pretty much all green life is dead. I sit down one quiet Saturday morning, take stock on what needs to be done around the house and exclaim, in complete surprise, "it's time to plant seeds again!"
In just 8-10 short weeks, it will be warm enough to plant our quickly growing seedlings outside. Which means we have to start them growing now. Not everything needs an early start, but enough that the whole operation becomes quite the to-do at our house.

So yesterday I got our first flat started, and set it on the dryer to stay somewhat warm.


I'll get another one started soon, but we are still waiting for some of our seeds to be delivered. The fact that we have only 2 flats this year, plus a few pots (that are living in the fridge right now for the all-important cold treatment) is an amazing feat for us. Check out our craziness from just 2 years ago:


Four flats never seems like much at first, but once things start growing and are moved into bigger pots, they take over. I think we are finally getting the hang of what grows well (and have toned down our enthusiasm to grow EVERYTHING) that we can now focus our energy on a few select varieties.

We'll post more as they start to come up....it's so exciting! (Feel free to comment on my dorkiness....)

Meanwhile, Lisa has been very busy in the kitchen. She coined yesterday the "Day of Bread" and had been looking forward to it all week. She started by making a couple of loaves of french bread:


We have a very busy work week ahead of us, so in preparation we made sure we had lots of easy meals planned out in advance. Lisa made pizza crust and even topped it so all we have to do is heat it up:


She finished up by making naan (indian flatbread) for dinner that went really well with the spinach artichoke dip she also made. I know, it has dairy in it. Sometimes we cheat.