I can't tell you how much leftover guacamole I've eaten.

Today was spent, as most of our weekends have been (and will be, for the foreseeable future) on further preparing our house for real living! Most of the kitchen cabinet doors have been attached, and I have found almost all of our dishes. Thus far, there has been only one Fiestaware casualty-one of my peacock coffee mugs. I wanted to take a picture of how lovely all of the plates, bowls, mugs, and various serving ware items look in the white cabinets, but I figured the effect would be even better once the kitchen is completely finished.

I prepared my first official meal (grilled cheese sandwiches and beans and rice do not count!) on Thursday night. For the inaugural meal, I selected cold chicken satay noodles, one of my most favorite dishes. It's a very simple dish, mostly because it calls for a rotisserie chicken. I've really come to appreciate rotisserie chickens-flavorful, relatively inexpensive, and very little preparation involved! The chicken is tossed with whole wheat spaghetti, thinly sliced spinach and carrots, and an absolutely heavenly AND addictive peanut and soy sauce. I could eat buckets of these noodles, and I've even been known to sneak a small bowl in the morning! They are also the only dish that I make with whole wheat pasta that my fairly non-discriminating husband will eat. No matter how hard I try, I cannot get him to really enjoy whole wheat pasta. Needless to say, we had the nicest little meal together at our own dining room table, and I was bursting with happiness at having been able to cook in my own house.



We spent the morning raking leaves and mowing the lawn. Actually, my husband mowed the lawn, and I followed along behind, picking up the 1000's of tiny avocados that have been tumbling from the tree in our front yard. I'm going to have to read up on avocado trees and make sure I'm doing everything I can to make ours healthy. As you can see,



the tree in the front is certainly producing a plentiful amount of fruit, but they are immature. Imagine how much money that blue bucket would be worth if it was full of ripe, mature avocados? It's mind-boggling! By the way, I don't know why my hand is so freakishly swollen-looking here. It's the angle, I promise!

We set up a little table in the kitchen, a breakfast nook of sorts, and I couldn't resist including this picture:



Look at that beautiful bowl of Meyer lemons! From my own tree! For the non-cookbook obsessed crowd, Meyer lemons are a highly coveted, expensive variety of lemon. They have a more spicy aroma and taste than a conventional lemon. Lucky us.

By far the highlight of the day, however, was using my new avocado picker (a long pole with a hook and basket attached to the end) to pluck a slew of avocados from my healthy tree in the backyard. It was a delightful feeling to yank the avocados down! We're still not sure about the ripening process, so we're just going to try putting them in a brown paper bag to see if that helps. Of course, I had to photograph them first.