Chocolate Baguette Anyone?

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This day called for some extra kickstart - it was going to take more than a spritz of perfume to make me feel happy about the day's job ahead - painting second story windows on ladders.  I love to paint but I dread the kind of painting where you have to climb up and down constantly and the moving of tall, top heavy ladders in tangles of flower and shrub gardens is the worst.  Over at the Yellow House I have had 23 new windows installed so far over the last couple summers and up until today I had yet to paint the window frames after they were beat up during the installations.  All but two of them were second story windows and I have 15 more going in in two weeks (we are replacing all 55 by next summer) so I had to get started.  And I had a carpenter replace about 20 clapboards in various areas and levels of the yellow house earlier this summer that he left for me to paint.  Anyway, back to this morning's breakfast - it was fabulous!  Decadent, chewy, rich, oozingly satisfying, especially dunked in good hot chocolate.  Here's what I did:

Take a really good baguette, chewy-crusty outside and full of holes on the inside.  We got this one at the new French cafe/bakery La Maison Navarre on Congress St. in Portsmouth.  Cut it in half, drizzle on some extra virgin olive oil, some flaky sea salt, load it with tablets of pain au chocolate (any good dark chocolate broken up will do - I used the bars that are added to chocolate croissants in bakeries).  Put the top back on the bottom piece and wrap in foil and toast in oven at 375 for about 10-15 minutes - just so it's really warm but not baking or it will get hard.  You just want the bread to be hot and the chocolate melted.  I ate mine like a sandwich; Dan ate his in two halves.  This breakfast treat was really really really good!  Here are the steps in pics as well as the fun we had over at the Yellow House (not).

 I spread the chocolate around before I put the halves back together.

 I'm smiling here because I had just about finished all the second floor windows on the front, left and back side of the house plus 8 clapboards in the area around me.  Dan came with me today to help me move the ridiculously heavy ladder around.  We are both going to be sore in the shoulders tomorrow from the strain of lifting and dragging it.  It looks light but it is not!  So many times we almost lost it to a crash to the ground or into windows but we prevailed.  I also have a lot of overgrown plants to prune and cut down in the border!  While I painted, Dan trimmed a hedge and cut down and cut up three old good sized diseased fruit trees with his chain saw, broken branches on other trees and a bunch of large limbs on the barn's big maple tree that needed all the lower branches taken off to let more light on the lawn over there.  He worked so hard that at the end he just dropped to the ground as he waited for me to get his help on one final ladder move.  Thank you Dan - you saved the day and did all those tasks that you really detest doing!

 The hedge Dan trimmed in front and the view of painted windows and clapboards in back.

Before I left for the day, I ate about 30 raspberries from the berry patch, a Jonathan apple from one tree and picked a bunch of pears from another - the fruit trees are so loaded that branches on all of them have just broken off so I picked a basket of not quite ripe pears from a broken limb.  New England is having one of its best fruit tree harvests on record and mine are no exception and this year even though I didn't spray at all, there is no insect or blight infestation; just a tiny bit of scale here and there but that just means the skin isn't flawless.  I am seeing fruit trees everywhere I drive so loaded with fruit and broken limbs.  Here's what I did below with a bucket full of apples last night from our Rye apple tree that just won't stop giving.

Apple Pies ready to be tightly wrapped and put in the freezer to vent, bake and eat another time.

 One more report from the Yellow House property!  Here is the before and after of the brick patio I put in at the Barn and finished last Saturday.

 Here I have brushed in a bunch of mortaring sand and am waiting for it to dry before I sweep it.