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Recipe: gluten-free rosemary olive bread

My head is spinning from all of the comings and goings of the people in my life. Nevermind my own comings and goings. I did a double take when I checked my calendar today. Who has been filling up my schedule with all of this stuff? It’s good stuff though. Just odd that it seems to be happening at once. Speaking of which, the weekend is here and I am not. That’s both good and bad. Good, because I’m exploring someplace new. Bad, because I’m missing the birthday of a friend.

it’s a one pound loaf of bread, but it looks small because the boy is a giant

That guy Andrew, just finished six weeks on the paleo diet. I promised him a couple of weeks ago that when he was done with the paleo diet, I would bake him a loaf of bread. You should have seen how Andrew’s face lit up. It’s a big deal for me to promise that because 1) I don’t bake bread very often 2) I cuss a lot when I bake at elevation and 3) Andrew’s body doesn’t tolerate gluten. I had never baked gluten-free bread before.

gluten-free flours and assorted ingredients

sea salt, rosemary, olives

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Recipe: stir-fried chinese chives and pork

You all are really great. Thank you for the anniversary wishes! Jeremy and I enjoyed a fantastic dinner at a favorite resto in Boulder – Jax Seafood. We always manage to overlap with happy hour because we have to get home at a reasonable time to feed Kaweah. Believe it or not, the dog gets acid reflux if she goes without food for a length of time. Perfect affliction for a lab, no?

jax – pork belly sliders

jax – old school tuna special

It was sunny and 40°F on my deck yesterday – a positively gorgeous day in the mountains. Spring is a wicked little girl. She taunts you with the sunshine and the longer daylight hours and that pervasive happy mood that sends people outside for sidewalk dining in short sleeve shirts. I happily wander toward the temptations of Spring like everybody else, but I also look back with longing and wonder if Winter is gonna diss me and withhold any further snow. Not a great ski season. Okay, I’m over it. Anything else is icing on the cake at this point. And really, I can’t complain because Spring is like the super social season when folks are ready to mingle but they haven’t left for their summer travels or vacations.

happy hour with the ladies (she’s only pretending to drink the cream)

One lunch gets canceled, another takes its place. There is always laughter, but yesterday we added sushi and hauntingly bad 80s pop classics to the mix. Right on! It was blindingly sunny and lovely outside and I think the temperatures were in the upper 40s or even low 50s? It’s hard for me to gauge because I felt like it was 90 degrees and that my skin was burning off my limbs. Ah spring!

good times

salmon skin roll

chirashi bowl (my fav)

I have a little potted plant in our great room that toggles between life and death on a regular basis. My grandmother gave it to me via my aunt (this is how Chinese people send things to one another, they never mail anything directly). This isn’t just a houseplant though, it’s a Chinese chive also known as garlic chive. Grandma can grow these on her balcony because… she lives in CALIFORNIA. I keep mine potted and indoors because I like to take snips of it for garnish at times throughout the year. Otherwise I’d only see it for three months of the year. Okay, maybe four. I don’t grow enough to cook with, so I have to make that special trek to Denver to get some.

chinese chives

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Recipe: tortilla de patatas (spanish omelette)

Um, the cost of spring is apparently $8.50 for one adult! That was the price of admission to the Butterfly Pavilion in Westminster. I took my aunt who was in town on Tuesday. We had a blast checking out the incredible displays of insects, spiders, millipedes, scorpions and I even held Rosie, the Chilean Rose Hair tarantula. Her feet were so soft and furry and her step was light on the palm of my hand. What a truly gorgeous and amazing creature! But the real reason we went: the butterflies.

paper kite butterfly

The moment I removed my lens cap, my filter fogged up. It was so warm (dare I say, hot!) and humid in the Wings of the Tropics Conservatory compared to the cold and dry Colorado winter air outside. I suppose the word Tropics should have clued me in, no? Good thing I had a short sleeve t-shirt under my pullover. I was sweating within minutes. We enjoyed the variety of tropical plants almost as much as the variety of butterflies. Everywhere we looked we saw butterflies flitting, chilling out, taking off, landing, spazzing, sipping up nectar. They were enormous, delicate, exotic, simple, brilliant, striking, mellow, ADD (the postman butterflies were seriously spaz), but each one was fascinating. Every now and again I would look past the dense growth of flowering plants and catch a glimpse of the sunny, but snowy landscape through the glass. Oh yeah – it’s winter.

postman butterfly

But I like winter :) So for me the foray into this world of the colorful, humid tropics was nice in part because it was so stunning AND because it was short-lived. You can see more photos from the afternoon on my photo blog.

I’m unclear if it’s the whole Easter Bunny hoopla or just the association with the color yellow, but eggs have always been a springy and cheerful food to me. I love when Helen or Aran post their beautiful creations and have eggs littering the pages. They make me want to jump up and down like a kid and go running over to their respective kitchens to get my paws into the baking and my spoon in for a taste! So Aran has been tempting me for nearly a year with talk of her beloved tortilla de patatas.

simply put: eggs, onion, potatoes

medium dice on the onions

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