use real butter

Recipe: strawberry macarons

I know you weren’t gone. I was, but it’s like you were gone. Now that I’m back, my regular brand of crazy can resume. I haven’t had a moment to really wade through my photos properly, but I have a few preliminaries to share of Yosemite and some of our visits in the bay area. You might even see some folks you will recognize.

Recipe: lemon mousse bombes

It’s the last day of March, kids! Where did all of that time go? Our local farmer’s market is opening this weekend and I’m both excited and a little leery. Excited, because I love farmer’s markets in general and Boulder has a nice one. Leery, because if I recall correctly, early season doesn’t have a lot of fresh produce to offer (particularly the fruit). See how living in Southern California can spoil the heck out of you (me)? I especially miss harassing the asparagus dude at the Pasadena Farmer’s Market (and then the Alhambra Farmer’s Market the next day).

My enthusiasm for cooking and baking and blogging waxes and wanes. There are times when I just don’t want to bake or cook (or at least blog about it) for several days. Knowing this, knowing myself, I have a stash of recipes in queue for just those times. I think I got into the habit when I kept having to dash to the ER last year or when I knew I’d be out after a chemo infusion. But when my enthusiasm is on the upswing, like it is now, I just write a list about a mile long with ideas and recipes I want to make and shoot and I wonder if the old recipes will just languish in the archives for months on end (some are already 6 months old).

Recipe: chocolate bag

Ahh! Finally, I can sit down after a whole day of cooking. In the morning, I baked. Starting from noon until now, I’ve been slicing, dicing, mincing, wincing… Chinese New Year’s Eve is tomorrow, yo. That means I must dedicate at least 24 hours of my time to chopping vegetables and tofu and all manner of Chinese ingredients for the big feast. I guess it’s to preserve my Chineseness since my Mandarin is in the shitter.

Okay, two points.

1) I know a lot of bloggers have this problem and it crops up from time to time for me too. While I was searching online today for a good wine recommendation to pair with Chinese hot pot, I found a PDF with recs from Simon Tam who I think is in Hong Kong. Great! I open the PDF and what greets me is a collage of MY PHOTOS from this post on Chinese hot pot. The fuck?! What is it with folks who ignore the copyright notice, don’t have the decency to ask permission (I usually say yes if you ask first), and then post my photos without giving credit? Jerkwad fuckheads. *Edit: Turns out it was Macau Closer – a glossy magazine – who stole my photos and not Simon (Simon is a nice fellow – he emailed me). That’s great – magazines stealing from bloggers. You assholes.*

2) In my about section, I have a few guidelines about interaction on this blog. The fifth one down states, don’t be rude or nasty. My litmus test is: if your comment was said to my face in my house and my reaction was to 1) haul off and punch you 2) give you the verbal smackdown or 3) kick you out of my house, then you probably violated the fifth guideline. You wanna be an asswipe? Get your own blog and be an asswipe there. That’s what I did.

Yesterday was a squirrel day. I covered a lot of ground in search of ingredients for our Chinese New Year’s celebration. It was a tad frantic at the H Mart in Denver because we were on time constraints and it’s a Korean market, so when I asked where x, y, and z might be, the little Korean employee smiled and then asked me to ask someone else. I say we, not in the sense of the royal we, but as in myself, Manisha, and Kitt. Oh yeah, that same little Korean employee flagged me down and asked me to help another customer… it turned out to be Manisha! Hi-larious. Yeah babe, I know where the dried shrimp are.

**Jump for more butter**