Mountains, Tomato Bloggers and Spring Minestrone

We had minestrone for dinner yesterday - it's one of my specialities and I make it regularly all winter. But apart from referring to vegetable soup, minestrone also has another meaning - in Italian it's used to mean a hotch-potch. Which is what this post is going to be - a minestrone hotch-potch of unconnected themes.

A couple of posts back I was bemoaning the fact that we should be able to see the Alps from Milan, but they're almost always obscured by the pollution haze. Well, yesterday there was a cold wind coming down from the mountains, and it blew all the smog away. So here they are - from the roof of our appartment block this morning. They look better if you click on them to get a bigger picture.

There's a website which I collaborate with called Rat Race Rebellion. They're dedicated to encouraging a slower, more human pace of life - and in particular, work from home. Every day they run ads for work from home jobs, and I noticed that today one of them was an advert for tomato blogger. Tracing the link back it came from a site called Tomato Casual . Check it out if you're interested in growing tomatoes, heirloom tomatoes, cooking with tomatoes - or just about everything else tomato related. would you believe that in Japan, for instance, they even make beer out of tomatoes? (Having spent quite a lot of time there, I would, I would.)

Tomorrow is the first day of spring officially, but for the last week or so here it's been clear that winter is over. The trees are starting to look green again, and even when it's been cold there's been that difference in the quality of the light that says the season has changed. I spent the weekend continuing my post-winter clearup on the balcony, and rearranged the containers. Even the plants that have been blooming all winter are now starting to look as if they really want to be there, and there are more and more jobs to be done. And it's that lovely time of year when every time you go outside, you know there might, just might be something there which wasn't the last time you looked.

And so it all starts again ...