use real butter

Recipe: grilled prosciutto-wrapped asparagus

menu for hope OR get off your arse!
I just want to remind you all that Menu for Hope is still going on for a couple more days. You can find all of the fantastic prizes being offered here and then go and buy raffle tickets here. Oh, and yes, I’m offering a prize as well! Take your pick from these four photos.

how many people get an email from…
…the crater rim of Mount Erebus, the southernmost active volcano on Earth (in Antarctica)? I did! My pal is imaging the surface of the lava lake in the crater. How f’ing cool is that? VERY.

i like winter in colorado
Well, it looks like winter is taking the nation by storm *snort*, except possibly at Tartelette’s house. I’ll have to bag up some Colorado snow in a ziploc and mail it to her, poor thing. We went to Breckenridge today to enjoy some express lifts on the big mountains. While we love our local hill (and especially the ten minute drive from house to ski hill), the big resorts are really something else, despite the longer drive (anywhere from 1-2 hours). As we walked to the gondola from the parking lot, Jeremy said to me, “If I lived someplace else, I’d probably wish I were skiing all the time. Since we live here, I wake up and think, ‘Should I go skiing today?'” The answer is: hell yes, go skiing!

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Recipe: lychee martini

It’s the 18th. One week until Christmas. But I’m not stressing because we don’t celebrate Christmas. It’s not that I didn’t grow up celebrating Christmas, because in my non-religious family’s house – we celebrated the hell out of Christmas. My mother always made a phenomenal spread for dinner with lots of snacks sprinkled throughout the day to keep us out of the kitchen. As I’ve said before, my family does not have a baking tradition – *I* am the baker. But I do remember that my mom would make cookies once a year: puffy hearts and rings. I think it was a kind of cream puff dough, shaped into… hearts and rings, and spread with pink and green frosting and sprinkled with almond slivers. That frosting contained almond extract, which I looooooooved. I thought my mom was the best baker in the world! Kind of like when I thought my paternal grandmother had really stumbled onto something when she made me my first piece of toast :)

Recipe: chocolate pistachio biscotti

There is much to catch up on, but now I can finally catch up!

I saw my honey off yesterday at noon (conference), and then had a lovely and relaxing lunch with my friend in Boulder at Sushi Zanmai while it was freezing ass cold outside (1°F – you could call it a little cold snap) before sending her on her way to the airport. Despite the 51 hour visit, we packed a lot in and had a grand time of it! It snowed Saturday night, so we had fresh powder on the hill Sunday morning. It was also 0°F in the parking lot.

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