Summer is gone. Long live summer.

Woosh. No...more like clackity clackity clackity clackity. The sound of the calendar days turning over quickly like a train station schedule board. It's mid-September already and the calendar says summer is ending. But in San Francisco it's really just beginning. The fog lingers less each day. It's a bit disorienting...beach weather is coming soon. I'll get my apple cider on ice. Travels and visitors and new work schedules and new nap schedules and new ideas swirl around me even faster than my daughter does. Blink and it will be fall. Take a breath and it will be Christmas.  Wake up and find it's a new year. I must rememeber to keep my eyes open. To jump in...participate. Choose. Take pictures...unless I'm just enjoying the moment. You never know, I might find someone small took the perfect picture for me.

pie tin

When I was a kid we ate at Marie Callender's restaurant fairly often (are they still around?). Often enough that I have a lot of memories of it. We mostly stopped eating there when TGIFridays came along, haha, but would still pick up a pie on occasion. You could get like a hundred different flavors of pie there and if you brought back your aluminum pie tin you got a 25 cent deposit back or something. When I was really little I thought we were straight trading the tin for a pie...what a deal! We always had a few of those tins in our house...I can still hear the sound of a fork scraping around one while my Papa beat eggs for french toast. One of my favorite pies was the sour cream lemon. I googled a recipe online to try to re-create it. I'm not going to share it because it didn't turn out as delicious as I'd hoped...maybe I had the wrong pie? Lemon cream cheese? In any case, I had fun in the kitchen that evening and enjoyed the memories...from pie to croissant club sandwiches to baby spoons to a funny double date I went on in high school.

Any themed memories kicking around in your head lately?

(Definitely not a sponsored post)

sort of a recipe

I was going to post this on Mother's Day, but I only had questionable strawberries in the fridge, ha ha. My mama and I are champion eaters and I have a lot of fun memories of sharing snacks with her: eating grapes after hot days at the pool, dipping popcorn in gooey cheese for a classic movie night, NOT sharing bagel sandwiches (it's a long story)... I need to think of a name for the snack I'm showing you today...it's healthy, but not...sweet, but not... it's classy, but simple: strawberries+sour cream+brown sugar. It sounds weird, but it's so tasty! 

All you need is a dollop of sour cream, a little pile of brown sugar, and some quartered strawberries. Dip a strawberry in sour cream, dab it in brown sugar, then pop it in your mouth. When you run out of strawberries, you'll probably swirl your finger around in the sour cream and melty brown sugar. Okay, so maybe that's not so classy...but you could use a fork?

Enjoy!