When you're making sandwiches, you have to work with what you have, and when Pam went into the mostly empty fridge the other morning, to make sandwiches for the plane ride to Sarasota, FL, the ingredient that made the difference was boiled beets. She sliced them up along with some green onions (the long way), lettuce and green peppers, added a slice of pepper jack cheese and a light coating of French red pepper mustard (thanks Carolyn, for leaving it behind), and put it all between darkly toasted bread to keep things from getting soggy. We ate 'em somewhere over Tennessee, I reckon. They filled us up a bit more than that tiny bag of "gourmet" pretzels.
And then today Pam went into Janet and Freddy's fridge (they'd gone off to work) and found some bottled roasted peppers, hot giardiniera and cheese, plus good whole-grain bread, and added a handful of fresh greens mix (arugula) from the balcony garden. We ate that out at Myakka River State Park, where the birds of the day were black vultures, scores of them that had converged on the park to pick clean the invader species tilapia that had died off during the recent 26-degree cold snap. It smelled pretty bad along the water's edge, where the carcasses were washed up by the dozens, but a volunteer ranger told us that it smelled a lot worse a few days ago, before the vultures provided their ecological services.
Tomorrow or Sunday we'll probably go kayaking, with Pam and me in a rented boat and Janet and Freddy in their new inflatable kayak, below. Yes, that's Doctor Lepore wearing his dress white shirt pumping up the thing; it arrived the day we did and he couldn't wait to see what it looked like. It's a very impressive piece of engineering, complete with "military style" valves that must be what the Navy Seals can manipulate with their teeth even when under heavy fire and pulling a few fallen comrades to the boat through 10-foot waves.
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