Country Home; What you do on a weekend

We have friends who have a country home about five miles away from the beach and in the beginnings of the foothills. We spent Saturday there eating and socializing with them, their five year old daughter and some other guests. The house is in the beginning of the foothills so it remains cool even when the beach is getting warm. We grilled out fresh sausage, arrosticini (tiny bits of meat on skewers, grilled to very crispy), pork chops and veal burgers; along with that we had fried breaded zucchini and eggplant, tiny cubes of a fresh soft white cheese with spicy oil, salad, crostini, fresh fruit (featuring great fresh cherries), prosciutto and melon, a unique cream filled yellow cake with lots of icing and fruit on top, water, wine and caffe.

On the property, in addition to the new house, there is an old house and also a number of wild flowers including wild poppies. Posted somewhere on here are some photos of some of those things. (I seem to have little control on where photos appear and am not sufficiently motivated to learn how to control them.) Click for full size, click again for even larger, these images are greatly reduced in quality from the originals due to file size limitations of the blogsite. My favorite is the last, that being the crinkled, dying poppies.