use real butter

Recipe: stacked enchiladas

looking from the other side
I lived in Southern California for a total of ten years. My friends in States With Real Winter used to send me hate email in January for posting pictures on my blog of things like barbecue parties on our patio with fat, juicy oranges dangling off of the verdant trees in the background. I love California winter. Winter in California is what I think summer should be. Of course, the moment March rolled around I wilted until November. But now I live where I get many good months of winter and the summers are tolerable (it can still get hot at 8500 feet). We mountain folk are smug little bastards. When I talk to Boulderites I refer to their town as “the flats” and I like to remind them that they don’t even know cold, snow, and especially wind. When I regard them from my home, I literally look down at them. Okay, but where the hell is this going?

Cindy posted about some beautiful baking she did this weekend, and it is indeed beautiful. Then I notice these flowers that adorn the cake and cupcakes and I’m thinking those are awfully pretty – I wonder where she got… And she writes that she traipsed outside to her yard and plucked these flowers and I’m imagining Bambi and friends gathered about and waving hi and little bluebirds singing while they do her hair. WTF? People think I’m joking when I say our growing season is on the order of a few weeks. California has two lettuce seasons. TWO. Let’s see here, if I go outside in my yard I find these:

Recipe: chocolate matcha earl grey cake

The date sort of snuck up on us. We are both bad about remembering dates, but my MIL called on Friday to say there was something special to look for in the post – something for our anniversary. Our what?! Oh that’s right… We celebrated 11 years of marital dorkiness on Saturday. Marriage was never something either of us really wanted. It was what our mothers kept asking about since we were living in sin for many years. We finally caved in since we realized our car insurance would go down – way down. Bargain! I think we would feel better about marriage if some of our dear friends could marry and enjoy the same rights we do.

We didn’t do anything special, just ran a ton of errands. We discovered that Chinese food on the flats is neither Chinese nor food really… The day was incredibly warm – 70 Effingham degrees? It was a cruel joke as far as I was concerned. March is when the weather flirts with spring then winter then spring then winter. You get those hoochie mama crop top days when you have to shield your eyes from the exposed white limbs of undergraduates on campus, chased down by those gorgeous spring upslope events that dump a ton of powder and send the ski whores rejoicing back on the mountains. Anyway, I promised Jeremy I would make a nice something or other in celebration of our day since this is my good week before the next treatment. He likes chocolate and I had matcha on the brain.