Dear Reader

Dear Reader,

Thank you for your patience over this past summer. My blogging has been less than consistent. As you might have seen, I did a lot of traveling! Iceland, England, France, Iowa, Memphis...some of which I haven't even had the chance to write about yet. And most importantly, I delivered my second daughter to college in Maine to start her first year. She, of course, is totally fine. I, on the other hand, was a bit gob-smacked by feelings. Fortunately, I stopped in Rhode Island, spent a day on a beachand recovered a bit.

I've also been working on my own cookbook. Even though I've been posting recipes from the beginning of this blog in 2009, actually putting them all together and combing through my files to make sure I didn't forget anything, along with testing and retesting recipes, has been quite laborious. The stream of my thoughts goes something like this:

Holy crap, this is a lot of work! Why did I decide to do this in the first place? Oh, yeah , my kids kept begging me and I'm tired of having to look up all my recipes online and not finding half of them because of some re-platforming a few years ago...SHEESH. Maybe this will be my last book. When I'm done with this I'm finally going to get back in shape and spend weekends hiking and doing fun things rather than sitting in front of my computer and testing icing recipes. Wait, who am I kidding? What about those other three books I'm working on? Dear lord, I will never get in shape again... Perogies...I've got to retest those perogies. They just aren't quite right yet...

Sometimes life can be exhausting. But what I love the most about doing the cookbook is going back to my old recipes and seeing all of your comments! I love them! Thank you! Keep commenting. It's very helpful.

Oh, and even though I took a summer off from vegetable gardening, the weeds didn't. But at least I was reinspired to garden. Seeing Prince Charles's walled vegetable garden at Highgrove this summer did it in an instant. Of course, he has a pretty large staff of gardeners, too. Too bad I wasn't allowed to take any pictures there...

And then there is that KonMari book my oldest daughter got me, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up... So many things to clean out, so little time...

Anyway, I hope you all had a wonderful summer! I promise I'll get back to regular substantive blogging, now that we're all "back to school."

Thanks again for hanging in there, and here's to many great things to come. Including a cookbook in fall 2016!

For more from Maria Rodale, visit www.mariasfarmcountrykitchen.com

Source: Dear Reader