A Fond Farewell to 2007

December 29, 2007 at 9:36 pm · Filed under agates, birds, cats, Cooking, garden, Great Lakes, indian cuisine, Michigan, Travel, wildlife

This post comes to you from the beautiful wintertime woods of Northern Michigan, where I am currently enjoying a far-too-brief break complete with bald eagles, woodpeckers galore — and to top it all off — my first-ever sighting of an owl!
The jury is still out on whether it was a barred owl or a great grey 😉

Lovely Nupur of One Hot Stove, a dear friend who is always an inspiration and always ready with an encouraging word, has asked us to search the archives for our “Best of 2007”! Break or no break, I didn’t want to miss it, so here I am in my snowsuit.

I thought this would be a fairly easy task, but in the end it turned into something of a slippery slope. Once I started noting favs, I couldn’t stop!

Here are a just a few of the things I enjoyed about blogging in 2007:

Nupur’s A-Z of Indian Vegetables challenged my imagination every week for a spectacular twenty-six weeks.

Lakshmi K’s Regional Cuisines of India took me traveling all over India. A great index page for this ongoing event can be found here.

Bee and Jai, dynamic duo of Jugalbandi, started the popular food photography event Click!; I may have to take a class now!

And of course, there was another fabulous year of Indira’s Jihva For Ingredients, “the original” event, to me, and one which continues to amaze and delight me.

If I had to choose one favorite part of 2007 at Out Of The Garden, I would say without hesitation, it was my long-awaited turn to host Jihva. Toor dal was the theme, and what a party it was! To say I was thrilled would be an understatement. Check out all the fabulous dishes from the bottom of the page here.

More fun that landed on the blog:

amazing agates from Lake Superior

waterline agate close up

black-legged kittiwake over Lake Superior

black tern at Tuttle Marsh near Oscoda, MI

home canning ~ red tomato chutney, yellow tomato jam, and green tomato pickle

cozy kitties

redpolls mixing with the usual suspects (goldfinches) at the feeder, December 26, 2007 ~ could this be an irruption year!?

Thanks Nupur, for this great opportunity to look back on 2007! It turned into much more than a foodie-journey for me 🙂

It’s been alot of fun poring over past posts. In doing so, the biggest thing I learned is — at the risk of repeating myself — I have learned so much from all of you!

To each of you who have taken the time to stop and visit, offering encouragement, suggestions, advice, or just a friendly hello, I thank you sincerely.

It is the interaction that makes blogging fun. Without that personal touch, this would be just another site with so many pics of kitties, kids, and khichdi.

I wish you all a wonderful New Year filled with health, happiness and lots of time to go “blog-hopping”!

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