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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: waffles

It was not my intention to let February go like that. It shouldn’t surprise me, but it always does. I forget that February is a short month and find myself face-planting into March. BLAM! March is going to be good. March is going to be fun. March is jam-packed with mucho mas mejor! I will have the photography workshop site up and running for registration sometime mid-month, so please do keep your pants on!

It’s our anniversary today. Thirteen years of wedded bliss. Make that 17.5 years of effortless bliss. Jeremy and I aren’t so big on the wedded bit, except for that free driver you get to add when you rent a car (woohoo!). I’ll not go mooning on and on about him. I will just say this: Jeremy is good people, he is the absolute best.

jeremy and our juvenile delinquent

I have had a minor obsession with waffles ever since I left home. It’s not that I wanted to eat them, I just wanted to make them. I never ate waffles growing up. I’m a savory breakfast type – I like the eggs, hash browned potatoes, bacon (oh the bacon), sausages, country ham, corned beef hash, biscuits… not so much the sweet stuff. But waffles intrigued me because they required a specific tool to make them – a waffle iron. On the rare occasion when I ventured to try a waffle, I determined I preferred them much more to their pancake cousins.

it’s what you do with the eggs that makes the difference

oil, milk, and egg yolks

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