Sam gets jiggy with his neighborhood friends in the bouncy castle at the annual Rosalia Street block party recently. He had an absolute blast!
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new theme
trying to fix some code, i managed to blow up the blog. so here is a new design. more tech detail later, but this comes from the brilliant k2-inspired theme by dean robinson, redoable. i hope you like it. i’ll work on some more customization soon.
Results
Update Monday, May 7th: Well, a night in the fridge did nothing to help out the strawberry jam. We have a solid block of a deep purple substance I can only describe as being somewhat akin to hard candy. I’ll try again soon, but this time I’ll do some more research!
With all those berries, I had to cook something up. Above, you can see the good – a yummy strawberry buckle, a recipe from Cook’s Illustrated I modified from it’s origins as a blueberry buckle for the wonderful fruit just picked yesterday I had on hand. Below is the bad. I thought it would be great to try making jam – strawberries have so much natural pectin that it’s easier than most fruit. The allrecipes.com instructions didn’t highlight how carefully I’d have to watch this – and while chasing Sam around the house I managed to let the bottom stick and burn, essentially ruining the flavor of the whole batch. I’ll test it in the morning to see how it turned out, but I do not have high hopes. But the buckle goes into the recipe book as one to keep.
Picking a Winner
With Amy pulling seven gigs in three days, I 
was Mr. Mom, and looking for things to entertain Sammy. On Saturday, we headed out with Sam’s future wife and his parents to a ‘u-pick-’em’ strawberry farm near McDonough, GA. With flavor you just don’t get from supermarket specimens, and at $8.50 a bucket (around 5 pounds worth), it was well worth it. And Sammy and Sophie had an absolute blast. There is a great website (Atlanta-area farms here) that catalogs all these self-picking farms across the country – we plan to hit the blueberry and fig farms later this summer. And maybe then Sam will get to see Old McDonald – he kept asking for him! We finished the day with a wonderful lunch (shrimp and grits, mmm) at a cute place in McDonough called Truman’s – well worth the visit. More photos of the outing are here. (Photo at right of Sam’s hand with a strawberry by my friend Joel Silverman, photographer extraordinaire. See his site here).