It Must Be Summer

Happy Monday!  We had a heat spell last week that lasted until Sunday, so it must be summer now.  It's not so bad in this house during the summer months, so hopefully the season will pass without too much grouchiness, it's early still so we will see.
Friday I polished up the house, as evidenced above by my gleaming hardwood floors! I love Bona wood cleaner, it makes the floors in this house look so pretty.  I forgot to show you the rug that we bought for the living room a while back, but you can see a little glimpse of it in the picture with my cocktail. I really love seeing the hardwood floors, so we got the 5x8 size.  We looked a lot of places, and none could beat the price and quality of this rug from Pottery Barn. Years ago we bought the same design for another house, but the runner version. It still looks brand new. Design rules say it should be bigger, but like I said, I sure do love the floors, so we didn't want to cover them up too much, design rules be damned!

I have to explain the top two pictures. Friday, after I cleaned the house and watered all the potted flowers out back, some animal must have had a party on the Nectarine tree shortly after I came into the house!  When I was out there, I did not see all those fruit piled up on the lawn like that. David came home from work, and went out in the back to water the veggies, when he called me outside to see this mess. You can see the little teeth marks on the green fruit! Our guess is that it was a squirrel that must have landed on that branch and knocked all of the fruit off, then decided to have a snack. Little stinkers! Those nectarines take an eternity to ripen, so it's a bit annoying that we lost that many all in one fell swoop.

I've really been wanting to make up a batch of chimichurri sauce and grill up some carne asada for a while now. I love eating this combo at our favorite Mexican restaurant in Oakland, so we tried to duplicate it. It was so good! It's kinda funny that the Mexican restaurant puts this on their carne asada, since it is Argentinian in origin. It's a very basic sauce and you can find many versions of it all over the web. I used parsley, cilantro, white wine vinegar, because I was out of red. Fresh oregano, garlic, chili flakes and olive oil, salt and pepper. Whirl it in a food processor and voila! It's good on chicken and fish as  well. We are going to try and push ourselves to use the grill more this summer. Last summer we did not grill one single thing! I think this weekend we might experiment with the pizza stone and see how that comes out. We also would like to grill some of the peaches and nectarines when they are ready. Besides the regular hamburger and hot dogs, does anyone have creative dishes they like to do on the grill?

Sunday we went out to dinner with Caitlin and Cyrous to a Peruvian restaurant that has been forever so busy we could never get in. Being Sunday it was not as busy and we finally got a chance to go to it, it's called "Parada."  Click on the word and see how yummy the food looks. We really loved the food and will go back again for sure. Three of us had their specialty drink, Pisco Sour, and they were very tasty and very strong! I highly recommend the restaurant if you live in the Bay Area. They have two other locations with different names in San Francisco as well.

Today a gentle breeze is blowing through all the open windows and I'm off to do some menu planning before it gets too late in the day.  Catcha next time!

Oops, forgot to mention the lady bugs. Never in all my yards, have I seen so many of these lovely little insects. I captured the last pictures with my iPhone leaning out of one of my living room windows. The peach tree is covered in them. They are the cutest!!!