Fashion Show at Lunch!

Inspired by Iris' pics, I've put together my own pictorial offering. These are all photos that I've had lying around on my computer forever, so they aren't recent. Today's fashion show is brought to you by the letter "S".


Soooo Can't Afford This Esther: Snuck around trying out designer clothing while my mom and her sisters shopped in the scary expensive Tysons mall.



Steampunk Esther: Went to a gathering of like-minded fellows at the National Botanical Garden and had a jolly good time.



Shakespearean Esther: Birthday celebration for Shakespeare at the Folger Library. Involving costumes, birthday cake, arts, crafts, a really geeky brass quartet, and a fake Queen.




Sari Esther: Part of the DC Embassy Walking Tour, the Nepalese embassy taught me how to wrap a sari. About three seconds later, I promptly forgot how to unwrap myself.



Saving Lives Esther: Firefighter Day at the rec center where I volunteer on Saturdays. Last time I was in a fire truck was elementary school.

Lemons galore!

Now that it's getting warm and happy in SF, I've really been craving happy summer food. Happy summer food like sorbet! So I went to my neighborhood market to see if anything jumped out at me and ta-da! Ginormous lemons at 3 for a dollar :)

These lemons were magical. Esther, remember the last time we made lemon sorbet? This was so much easier! Just one lemon had about 1/4 cup of juice!

And don't even get me started on how much zest you can get from just one of those lemons! Craziness!

The 'fruits' of my labor ;)

Just for size comparison, here are halves of lemons from my friend's tree next to a half of the crazy big ones from the market...

Even the juice came out different! The little lemons had darker, ever-so-slightly-more-orange flavored juice. The big lemons were light and tart, and produced about 1.5 cups of juice, so I used them for the sorbet.

There was even enough left over to try out Tracy's lemon butter cookies!

Next time the lemon sorbet needs a raspberry reduction sauce (and maybe a tiny bit less zest). Still, I loved both recipes...

And so did Ryan :)

If you want to try it out, you can see the recipe here! The only change that I made was to swap the carbonated mineral water for grapefruit/tangerine sparkling water... well, that and I added a healthy splash of rum. You know, to keep things from getting too icy. Worked like a charm :)