A brief interlude for my other hobby

Before I post recipes for tamale pie and mexican rice (two of the excellent pieces of last night's potluck dinner with Rosie's Macedonian class), I thought I'd share some pics of my other hobby - house plants.  Today I went to a bonsai class and learned some techniques for shaping trees into a bonsai form.  We were given a 3 year old tree (I'll have to double check on the name) and worked on potting it correctly, trimming it and training other branches.  This class was good because we had inherited a ficus bonsai a few years back that I've neglected severely but I think I'm finally figuring out how to fix it. 

In other good news, I think I figured out how to play around with my camera and get better pictures (at least of plants).  Hopefully playing with the aperture and shutter speed will help me with my food pictures.

First the bonsai from class:

These next ones are frequently called 'dwarf jades' but in fact they aren't really jades.  They're called 'portulacaria afra' or Elephant's food, since in South Africa, apparently elephants eat these.  They grow fast and I think they look pretty nice. 

This last one will hopefully be a bonsai tree, we'll see how well it thickens up with time.

And a new purchase I was unable to turn down:  

I'm a real sucker for these guys.

Okay, back to food.