use real butter

NaBloWriMo day 17.

Eat on $30 day 7.

Saturday was the final day of Eat on $30 and my mind is filled with so many thoughts that have tumbled about in my head for the past week. This weekend is short on time (didn’t I tweet earlier that October had too many parties?) but I promise to sit down this coming week to give you some cohesive parting thoughts on the issue of hunger and the hungry. For now, I’ll just toss out the thought that struck me in the morning while I was feeding Kaweah… The dog gets dry kibble and she acts like I’m feeding her chocolate mousse every day (she’s a lab, what can I say). Kaweah can live healthily on her large chunk Iams lamb and rice formula for large breed dogs day in, day out. It contains everything she needs in these crazy kibbles.

When Jeremy has been short on time, he’ll often bemoan the fact that there is no “bachelor chow” to dip a measuring cup into and serve himself an instant meal complete with all the nutrients he needs. Made me wonder why there isn’t a provision for people chow. Could you eat the same thing every day? I know most Americans balk at the idea. There are plenty of people who *hate* leftovers and throw leftover food away. That makes me cringe. It makes me sick, actually. Such waste. Just because you can afford it, doesn’t mean you should do it. A good many people in this world eat the same thing EVERY DAY. We’re so spoiled. The disparity between the haves and have nots is staggering. I’m just thinking there has got to be a better way to meet the needs of the hungry.

Our day involved a big brekkie from the remaining three potatoes, the remaining kielbasa sausage, two eggs, and our last bagel (split in half).

i love me some hash browns

kind of a last hurrah

This may sound odd, but even though we couldn’t eat any of the fabulous food we bought for our coming party, I felt so content just preparing the food. I think a large part of my joy in food is not the eating, but the preparation. Shortly before our post office closed, Jeremy went to pick up our mail and came home with a huge box from Todd and Diane. It was a box of my dangerous items from the after party schwag bag in San Francisco and fruit from their amazing garden.

dragon fruits, calamansi limes, passion fruits

I ran around in circles raving over the incredible fruits and singing the praises of my beloved friends. How lucky am I? I am so damn lucky!

mixing apples with spices and sugar and butter

topping with the oatmeal crumble

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No recipe today, kids. I didn’t want to mix things up too much here, as there is a giveaway to announce! I trust everyone had a pleasant weekend?

We had a small group of people (and their assorted extensions) from Jeremy’s department up for a barbecue on Saturday. Our intention was to invite them oh… two years ago, but we got waylaid for well over a year with my treatments and randomly leaky appendix. Once that was mostly behind us, it was winter and we don’t invite the uninitiated up to our place in winter lest they never want to return again. So finally(!) we could feed the starving graduate students and the not-so-starving non-graduate students properly this past weekend. It was nice to meet the people behind the names.

the menu
crudités and spinach dip
chips, salsa, and guacamole
citrus, almond salad
german roasted potato salad (sans bacon)
honey wheat rolls
roasted pepper, goat cheese tart (sans prosciutto)
grilled marinated flank steak
barbecue chicken
vanilla bean, matcha green tea, chocolate, and coffee ice creams
chocolate stout cake

busy eating

That morning we purposely took Kaweah on a trail run so she would be a little too pooped out to shamelessly beg for food from guests. She still shamelessly begged, but at least it was more hopeful than shameless. J’s two young children kept themselves amused with Kaweah and then with our yard, bringing in giant bouquets of dandelions, gold banner, and bluebells they had picked. As we saw folks off that evening, I noticed that our yard had gone from gold- and blue-dotted to pure green. I should have known better than to leave the flowers in the house because my eyes were gummy and weepy the next morning what with all of the pollen from our yard concentrated in our living room. And I see the pine cones out my window are primed with the yellow powder of passionate pine tree sex. It begins. My arsenal of steroid nasal sprays, antihistamine drops, and pills are at the ready.

While it will be another month before wildflowers make their entrance in the high country, the wildflowers of our neighborhood trails are ramping up while the ones down on the flats (Boulder) are at or just past peak. For a flower-dork such as myself, this translates into wildflowers from April through September. Nice.

fo shiz on that, yo

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Recipe: shrimp toast

I’m done processing my photos from Yosemite and I think the latter half of any shooting trip always suffers. By the end of a multi-day shoot, I’m less inclined to sit around trying to get the perfect shot and by the end of my photo processing (which proceeds chronologically) my threshold for photos to even bother processing goes way down.

foothill poppies and lupine

yosemite falls (upper and lower)

You can see selected photos from the trip on the photo blog: waterfalls, flowering trees, Yosemite valley shots, foothill wildflowers, and wildflowers within Yosemite. After Yosemite, we spent three days getting stuffed to the hilt on amazing Chinese food. I can’t keep doing that. Next time I see Grandma, we’ll have to make a deal that we only eat out once a day and nosh on fresh fruits and vegetables the rest of the time. After the third meal out, I feel as if I’m going to blow up from all the sodium intake. Of course, the menus never fail to entertain.

you can always find chinglish

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