use real butter

Recipe: roasted vegetable quiche

Lunch is a nice word.

Lunch is my favorite meal of the day. Then comes dinner. Then brekkie. Breakfast gets short shrift around here because we like to do things first thing in the morning like ski, hike, ride, or work. I know this is a terrible habit – skipping breakfast. I wish I had the same gusto about breakfast that Kaweah has. But when lunch rolls around, I become quite animated. Lunch can be anything and lunch can pretty much be any time for me. I like work lunches, “let’s try out this new place” lunches, picnic lunches, backpacking lunches, team lunches, lunch dates, happy hour lunches, grazing my way through awesome location lunches, loud Chinese lunches, après ski lunches and most of all… social lunches.

dana applies thai basil to her pho

I had the noodle bowl stir-fry because I’m a noodle girl and because I love the vegetables. I love vegetables in general and often times I will end up with one oddball vegetable here and there on my counter, in the pantry, or in the refrigerator. Or I’ll dig out a bag of greens that have been languishing in some remote corner of the refrigerator in dire need of immediate cooking and consumption. I hate waste. Hate to waste food, especially 1) expensive food and 2) produce.

i found purple kale, peppers, eggplant, potatoes, and an onion

i bought the purple kale a while ago because it was so pretty

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Recipe: milk tea boba

I did not expect the volume of comments and emails in response to my last post. At some point, I plan to sit down and reply to you when I can carve out a chunk of time and clear some space in my brain. I suppose that is the main issue – time… okay, time and priorities. All of the other gobbledygook just feeds into the priorities (which ultimately translate into time allocation). Hopefully changes, if any, will be implemented behind the red velvet curtain and relatively transparent to you. But thank you for your kind words of support and well wishes. It was not my intention to alarm anyone, just to vent some observations (frustrations?) that have been bugging me like floaters in my eye. I think it’s healthy to regularly assess where you are, where the heck you’re going, and why.

This past evening, like every evening, we let Kaweah out to do her business in our yard. And like every evening, we put her glow collar on before letting her outside. Black dogs in the black of night who like to dawdle in the blackest of shadows scavenging for inedible things to eat get glow collars in this house. I did a few long exposures to see what manner of light trail Kaweah would create for giggles.

at first, she didn’t (jeremy’s figure(s) to the right)

but look what happens when you say “treat”

Kaweah reacts to the word “treat” the way Jeremy does to the word “coffee”. One of his favorite places for caffeinated beverages in Boulder is Atlas Purveyors. That’s pretty convenient as I tend to have meetings at Atlas and grab a latte to go for Jeremy if I’m going to pick him up from work. I like Atlas. I like the people who run Atlas. I like the people who work at Atlas. I like the patrons at Atlas. They were one of the sponsors of the Food and Light photography workshop we held last summer.

But I don’t drink coffee. Couldn’t tell you the difference between the worst coffee and the best coffee. The first time I stood at the counter trying to find something non-coffee to order, Chris – one of the owners and a really swell guy, rattled off all manner of teas that might interest me. I spied boba on the chalkboard. Oh, I love me my boba. A milk tea boba, please (also known as bubble tea). And I’ve been hooked ever since. Atlas is where I go to get my boba fix and Chris has been sneaking in bits of tea education to boot. I wanted to make my own milk tea boba, so I asked Chris if I could purchase some of that lovely black tea.

black tea from atlas purveyors

5-minute boba

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Recipe: breakfast sausage

Last week during some long overdue maintenance on the innards of this blog, I had to go back – waaaaay back – to the earliest posts to close out comments (has to do with spam, not with any of you). It’s been a while since I’ve revisted my old posts. I skimmed several dozen and realized that there was a lot more of me in those posts even though I tore much of the personal stuff out. (Also, my writing was actually worse, if that’s possible). I feel as if there is less of me here lately on these virtual pages.

use real butter used to be a happy place for me. These days I am feeling an ambivalence creeping in that I’ve tried to follow to its source. I don’t hate it, but I’m not loving it like I used to. The world of food blogging has changed a lot. People assume if you write a food blog that you want more traffic, more readers, more links, more stumbles, more, more, more! There are formulaic instructions for writing your blog, shooting your photographs, building community – for “success”. Honestly, it used to feel like a community to me and now it feels like a strip mall surrounded by McMansions. That’s depressing.

Blarg.

The past couple of days have been really good for me. I’ve been working and planning with some exceptional people on several projects – some professional, some personal, but all of them what I want to be doing. I am energized. And I’m happy. Yet I can’t decide if the blog is helping me or hindering me at this point. Can you feel it? I can feel it.

I’m not sure if I just need a kick of motivation or inspiration here, or perhaps a change? Maybe a little change, maybe a great big change? Maybe time away? I don’t know. Don’t fret. I’m thinking aloud which I rarely allow myself to do here and after reading that last string of questions, it’s probably best to rein those loud thoughts back in. All options are on the table. If anything, I’d like to steer myself back to the original purpose of this blog, which was to document the recipes I like (Future Me is always thankful to Past or Present Me for doing it), record some of what I’m thinking and doing, and welcome those who drop by.

after last night’s sunset

I’ve been wanting to make homemade breakfast sausage since forever. I love that stuff. We rarely ate it at home, but I was obsessed with the spicy, salty, aromatic pork patties. These days, I will not touch the store-bought name brand sausage patties. You know why? The two times I ate it (in college, of course) resulted in two separate trips to the emergency room, doubled over in pain from severe cramps, only to be given some crazy awful codeine syrup that knocked me out for a few days. No, thank you!

ground pork

rosemary, sage, and thyme

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