use real butter

I’ll have a recipe for you all tomorrow. Right now I’m baking up some tried and true recipes for some of my favorite dudes while rocking out in my kitchen to some good tunes. And I’m going to rattle on like a dope. I’m just not in the right mindset to come up with new recipes to make and shoot lately. Must be party-lag. It’s waning fast though. Even as I type, ideas are leaking into my mental desktop. Nice.

tulip(s) that nichole and luke brought for me

I know that several folks have complained about Daylight Saving Time kicking in, if for no other reason, the loss of an hour is pretty distressing for those of us with a shitload of stuff to do. But despite losing that precious hour, I kinda like that it stays light later. [Sorry babe, those of us in the higher latitudes experience far greater variations in daylight – but you know I still love ya.] The days are getting longer here… we’re on the upswing! That always puts an extra spring in my step. I mean more so than usual. Jeremy was explaining (in his calm, cool, collected and professorial way) why Daylight Saving Time is a crap concept and my mind just wandered off, smiling. I know it’s stupid, but I like it. I like it.

feels like spring

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Recipe: chocolate hazelnut torte

Oh my! I had no idea that my knife skills instructor could evoke such… interest from my readers! Honestly, weren’t you all impressed with the chiffonade? Well, here is one last shot from class – something I finally learned to do correctly:

knife honing

Speaking of knives, Adrienne, the winner of the Kyocera ceramic knife giveaway, finally received hers and sent me a picture of her happy new knife. I thought the dreamy look on her face was too adorable not to post. She looks like a pro! (courtesy Adrienne):

blissful

How often do you start out in the kitchen with the intention of making one thing, only to wind up with an end-product that is not what you had in mind? It tends to happen more often with pastries and desserts for me. Is that because I occasionally screw things up when making pastries, but rarely have moments like that when cooking anything savory? I think I am a more confident savory cook. Even so, I really enjoy futzing about with the sweets.

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If things are looking a bit different, I’m in the process of some tidying up around here, which I hope is more or less transparent to everyone, but you never know… Besides, it’s the only tidying up I can do right now. As the Chinese New Year was nearing, Jeremy and I scrambled to clean the house because you aren’t supposed to clean once the new year arrives for fear of sweeping out the good luck. I’ve always read that you don’t clean for 2 weeks until the Lantern Festival (15 days later). Unlike my mom, cleaning isn’t one of my hobbies. Whenever she comes to visit us, within an hour of arriving, she will don a pair of rubber gloves and begin scrubbing my kitchen. I always tell her that I just cleaned the house and she always smiles and says, “Oh, I like to clean the house!” The first time this happened, Jeremy walked into our old apartment kitchen with eyes wide and blinking, “If your mom cleans our place before we vacate, we’d get every cent of our deposit back.” So when I mentioned to Mom over the phone that we just finished vacuuming and scrubbing since we aren’t supposed to clean for two weeks, she insisted, “No, just one day.” I told her everyone else says two weeks and she emphatically said, “It’s just the one day.” Okay, well I’m going to take that 2 weeks as a directive…

radda for lunch

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