use real butter

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

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: pasta with summer squash, sausage, and goat cheese

There has been quite a bit of instability in that part of the atmosphere sitting over my house. It makes for interesting weather: sun, rain, hail, winds, cold, warm, frost and one of my favorites:

lightning

But today we are back to sunshine, although our afternoon thunderstorms are pretty much here to stay for the summer – and I welcome the rain and cooling off they bring each day. Kaweah has a knack for finding the very edge of the shade and then parking her furry self just outside of it.

too bad she isn’t a solar panel

School is out. I can tell this from the tent that my neighbor’s kids have pitched on their deck and the happy screams zooming past our windows, Doppler effect and all, every evening. It gets dark around 8:30 and we don’t eat until 9 or later. Kaweah petitions for dinner when the sun goes down, so Mother Nature fools her big time in summer (it’s a pain in the ass come winter when she starts begging around 3:30). The pine tree pollen orgy has not peaked yet, but my itchy eyes indicate the party is getting started. The foxes and the coyotes will be facing off and staking out their territory in our front yard, soon.

green gentian

We’ve lived here long enough that the trails we hike are recognizable even under 8 feet of snow. I know where the columbines will bloom. I know which scree fields the pika live in. I know when the stream flow will peak. I know what the light looks like in July versus October versus March. I know what the air smells like as the snowpack thaws from under the pine forest canopy. I know which cornices remain into late summer. I never thought I would treasure this sense of the familiar, but I do. I relish it and it feels like home. It may be a sign of getting older… I don’t really care. I rather think of it as a sign of happiness.

**Jump for more butter**

It’s just too much sometimes. Community Night at The Kitchen – it can be a bit much for me. Jeremy says I’m overstimulated. The shooting, the socializing, the fooding, the meeting of new people, the drying out of my contact lenses… Although we don’t make a habit of going all the time, we’ve been a half dozen times in the past four years. It’s just the ideal place to take visitors who truly love food if they happen to be in town on a Monday night. That’s what the original plan was: to go with Helen and her Bill to Comm Night along with our good friend, M this past Monday. But incompetence conspired against them and a bunch of nitwits in northern Colorado put the kibosh on those plans. I asked M if she still wanted to go and she did. So glad she did.

i drank the wine and forgot to keep the menu

Because I have raved about Comm Night and documented the hell out of what we ate in the past, I feel less compelled to do so with each subsequent Comm Night. I’m learning to relax (just a little) and enjoy the other aspects of the evening, like meeting cool people. Here is the freaky and yet fascinating part: I am meeting people at our table of 20 who have read use real butter. I shit you not.

fennel and ham salad

Last time, it was Mr. Social Tech Butterfly (total sweetie). [Edit: I almost forgot to include this little request! Have a favorite coffee you’d like to share with some good soldiers overseas? Andrew is asking people to send some beans or beautiful photography or nice letters to help his friend Skid set up a little old coffee shop in the desert. I’m shipping two large nature photographs this afternoon to Iraq. It’d be great if you wanted to pitch in! Thanks.]

**Jump for more butter**