Six eggs! That’s the most yet this season. But while daughter 1 and I were down taking care of the ducks this morning, Beautiful was already boiling eggs for breakfast, so we’ll have these another time.

I dumped granola into my bowl and overshot. Then I was in a rush to eat and get out the door, so here you see some granola on the table. That’s my impatience at work (it would have taken three seconds to scoop it off the table, but who has three seconds?).

You also see our pine table from Ikea, a box of corn flakes, and dishes. Eggs and butter came from the store. Everything else in this shot is a result of our own work. Beautiful made the granola (we like it better than the stuff I used to make, but that’s because she’s a phenomenal cook). I made the bread–the one food in the house Beautiful lets me make instead of her. It’s half-white/half wheat and improbably simple; I’ll show you how I do it sometime. The huckleberry jam came from a patch on the mountain 15 minutes above our house. The yogurt is homemade, flavored with peaches we canned last summer. The apple cider is from apples gathered last fall, crushed into cider on a Mennonite press north of here, and canned in our own kitchen. Let’s see, anything else?

Butter & eggs: I don’t mind boiled duck eggs, but I forgot to remind Beautiful this morning. As to the butter, we made butter for a while too, but didn’t know to let the cream warm up before churning it, or to cleanse out the buttermilk when it was done, so the butter would go rancid. Now we know better. We’ll try again here sometime.

Huckleberries: We’ve wandered all over the area picking berries every year, but this patch, just up the road, was phenomenal; the size and the density of the berries strained belief. Huckleberries wax and wane by the year; we picked something over four gallons last fall in case this year wasn’t so good. Have you ever had fresh wild huckleberries, or huckleberry jam on hot homemade bread, or huckleberry pie on a snowy winter night? Better get started: we’ll be eating these things in heaven.