The first photo shows this year’s deer. My yard, as a territory, usually has a semi-resident female and offspring, but a male deer, who I call Derek, has been growing antlers and browsing at the bird feeder through the summer. He had little velvet spikes, that turned into double points, and are now cleaned of velvet, while he’s grown much larger, and turned from fawn-color to grey for the winter.

In the second photo, a few more bulbs. Bluestone Perennials was having a 50% off sale, so I picked up some allium, Ornithogalum, Dutch Iris, and daffodils, and made combos of them in these yogurt tubs. In the deer photo, you can see the path edges, where I’m planning to have bulbs all the way along, though buying them one year at a time. 

Finally, this bread pudding turned out really tasty, so I’ll tell the story and share what’s in it. The “shortages” meant I could only find a half gallon jug of half-and-half, which I only buy for coffee. It usually lasts well in quart sizes, but this jug must have been the worse for shipping, because it went bad after a couple of days. Then I had almost 8 cups of product to use for some purpose. I baked two cakes to freeze and still had half the jug left. I looked up bread pudding recipes, and none were quite big enough. But the whole purpose of bread pudding is to use up things you would otherwise throw away, so recipes are only guidelines. I didn’t have bread, but I had lemon and spice cakes. This pudding has 4 cups of half-and-half, simmered and mixed with a tablespoon each of sugar and cornstarch (mix these two together to avoid the cornstarch clumping). It has about six loaf-style slices of lemon cake, and the equivalent of four slices of spice cake. The milk is mixed with two eggs, stirred; and everything is topped with pecans.