use real butter

Recipe: apple bacon cheddar dog (abcd) treats

While working on our annual digital year in photos, I scrolled through a lot of snaps I took of Neva when she was a wee pup. I had completely forgotten about them because I was in such a state of sleep-deprivation for a period of three or four months starting on May 23, 2015. Jeremy was in the other room, but he could tell I was looking at puppy pictures because I kept squealing and cooing at the computer. Neva was so cute, but she was so feral compared to a normal dog – because she wasn’t a normal dog. She was a puppy.

these cute little faces will suck up all of your time

Oh, but now Neva is becoming a really good girl as she settles into a routine of the familiar. She’s now used to watching dogs, cars, and people passing through our neighborhood. She doesn’t flip out when she sees birds anymore (there are so.many.birds). Her favorite places to nap depend on where the sun is hitting the house. Neva knows to ask when she wants to go outside instead of sneaking into the office to piddle next to Jeremy’s desk. I remember how it took forever and a day to walk anywhere because she had to put every damn pine cone, rock, stick, blade of grass, and flower in her mouth. We loved her little adorable puppiness, but we both knew from the start that we couldn’t wait for her to grow into a dog.

Neva always knows when I’m making HER treats in the kitchen. She’ll hang around patiently at my feet until I pop them in the oven, at which point she stares longingly at the oven. I’m not sure how much variety Neva needs in her treat selection, but I know for a fact that these treats are her number one all-time favoritest treats on the planet. I threw them together last month with a bunch of leftover ingredients and she’s been pretty devoted to them ever since. They smell fantastic while they bake because duh – the treats are made with cheddar cheese and bacon! I used applesauce as a healthy binder, along with an egg, and threw in some parsley for her breath. So I wanted to share this with anyone looking to make some extra wonderful goodies for their canine companions.

applesauce, bacon, cheddar cheese, egg, parsley, whole wheat flour

prepping the ingredients for mixing

chop the bacon and parsley fine, especially if you are making small treats

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Recipe: cocktail meatballs

Sunrise is so late these days that I keep missing it because I’m already up and doing things by the time it happens. But this week I’m still at battle with that not-quite cold. It’s right on the threshold, yet I manage to keep it at bay each day. A little extra rest seems to help, which meant that I was able to see sunrise this morning. So glad that I did. Every sunrise is a gift.

fiery color for a few minutes, then the rest of the day was overcast

The winds have been pretty horrible, too. Sometimes we get nice cloudscapes AND nice weather, but usually the most interesting cloud formations occur when the winds are crazy terrible. That’s life on the boundary layer for you. Life on this part of the boundary layer has been all about wrapping up this year and getting ready for the next one. I dropped by the vet after taking four pairs of skis in for tuning (I hope we’re beyond rock season now), to ask about Neva’s microchip. It appears to have migrated to her front leg. Nothing serious, but they want to be sure that the chip is still scannable. While there, I got to hang out with Aspen, the Giant White Dog of Nederland. Aspen could give Jon Snow’s Ghost a run for his money. Neva looooooves Aspen. Actually, I think she loves everyone. In many ways, Neva channels our beloved Kaweah.

aspen knows how to shake

aspen’s mom gives him a treat (he is as tall as her when he stands up)

Lately, I’ve received the best kind of packages in the mail – the ones that aren’t sent for an occasion, but just because. I say packages, but they are gifts. Gifts that were crafted or grown, and shipped because of friendship and love. Gifts from hearts and hands. Jamie was test driving new equipment in her woodshop and cranked out several gorgeous custom bottle openers. And then Todd and Diane sent a box of fresh, fragrant Buddha’s hands from their (ridiculously amazeballs) garden to my doorstep in snowy Colorado.

i don’t even drink, but i opened a pear hard cider just to use the opener

neva peers into the box of california sunshine

Times like these, when my head is a little foggy from congestion, are when I’m most grateful for my cookie distribution spreadsheet. It’s the only way to keep track of how many cookies, which kind of cookies, to whom, when to bake, and when to deliver. Timing is everything because everyone skidaddles starting as early as a week before Christmas, and fresh baked cookies are freshness wasted if they aren’t eaten until after the start of the new year. But my window grows short because I don’t make edible gifts when I’m potentially sick, so I’ve had to work on other things.

You know what I crave most when I’m deep into cookie making season? Appetizers. I love me some savory appetizers. It’s a good thing I don’t attend sportsball parties, because I would dive straight into the appetizers only to require extraction at the end of the game. Some day, when I have the time and brainwaves to plan a party, I’ll have to add these cocktail meatballs to the menu. They are like little meatloaf bites, but with more surface area dedicated to the tangy sauce.

salt, worcestershire sauce, sherry, water, vegetable oil, bread cubes, milk, mace, mustard, red currant jelly, paprika, black pepper, ketchup, eggs, onion, ground beef

prepped for the meatballs

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Recipe: chocolate-dipped key lime pears

Oh weekend, I hardly knew ya. We are always up for a ski, provided there is decent snow. But we haven’t had much snow lately, so we took Neva for a hike to scope out part of the high country. It was rocks and dirt, then ice, then snow, then snirt and more rocks. Patchy conditions annoy me more than anything because it’s a pain to get your skis on and off every twenty feet, but it also sucks to have to get microspikes on and off your shoes. I suppose we could snowshoe, except we swore off snowshoing the day we learned to ski in the backcountry. The mere thought of going back to snowshoes is a major snoozefest (sorry snowshoers, but I speak the truth). Eventually we reached consistent snow cover, then really decent snow for skiing (which meant not so great for hiking). Snow began to fall from the sky and Jeremy squeezed my hand through our gloves.

which way to go? jeremy looks left and neva looks right

The snow didn’t last long and then the winds arrived to make the snowpack sucky. I battled kitchen disasters then went to bed early to ward off a potential cold. Instead of trying to make a ski day the next morning, we opted for a round of fetch at the elementary school soccer field and then spent several hours cleaning out the basement. Neva thought the fetch part was great, but had a lesser opinion of the house cleaning.

catching the ball in mid air

floating back to earth

I always forget how much I enjoy pears until they are practically screaming at me from the produce aisle in November. For a while when we were without a dog, Jeremy and I adhered to a strict rule of not sharing a pear between two people. It’s a superstition that Grandma and a lot of Chinese people follow – because the Chinese word for pear sounds the same as the Chinese word for “split up”. Now with Neva, we can all three share a pear safely (Neva is loving little nibbles of pear).

A few years ago, I was in San Francisco visiting Recchiuti Confections when I spied their key lime pears – wafer thin slices of pear soaked in key lime juice and dipped in dark chocolate. I purchased a box to bring home for Jeremy, because he likes pears and he loves chocolate. They were spendy, so each slice was precious. Each slice really was precious. I became obsessed. When I returned to San Francisco later, I decided to purchase Michael Recchiuti’s cookbook for the sole purpose of getting the recipe for the key lime pears. My pal, Lisa (whose blog is Lisa is Bossy, but my mom has since named her “Lisa is the Boss”), asked if I was going to blog it. I said yes, of course. That was more than a couple of years ago. So it’s time to make good on my word.

water, sugar, bartlett pears, key limes, and chocolate

A word on ingredients. The recipe instructs you to use bartlett pears that are green and hard. Please do this. I have made this recipe twice. The first time was with bartlett pears that were green and rock hard. They turned out beautifully (as you will see). The second batch that I attempted this past weekend was a lot harder to deal with because I couldn’t find bartletts (I only went to one store), so I used the hardest variety I could find – red D’anjou pears. Those didn’t work well at all. The flesh is too soft and they nearly disintegrate during the soaking process. So absolutely follow the recipe on the pear variety and hardness unless you like to make yourself miserable. For chocolate, please use a good quality dark chocolate. There aren’t many ingredients in the recipe, but the quality makes all the difference. And finally, if you can’t find key limes, you can use regular limes. You won’t need as many because they’re much larger.

make a sugar syrup with water and sugar

juice the key limes

add the lime juice to the syrup

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