use real butter

Dinner went very well considering that Beth double booked and arrived late. I didn’t mind her arriving late so much as I was a little surprised that she left her date with an empty seat for a few hours at a wedding reception while she drove his convertible up to our place to eat dinner with us. We were finally able to get Dave and Fran up to our place – which is nearly impossible because they are always traveling for work and play. Most of all though, I realized that I am going to miss Nicole and Andrew a lot when they move. It makes me sad. Well, all the more reason to visit Seattle!

Here’s the cross section of that strawberry everything cake I made for dinner last night:

My allergy symptoms are pretty much under control now that 1) the steroids are in full effect and 2) I have learned to keep my grimy fingers out of my itchy eyes. It took me a while to get that second one through my thick head, but after the second day of being incapacitated because my eye was pink, oozing crap, and swollen shut, I began to accept that yes, you really do need to just deal with the itch or make it worse. Usually, I find some sort of distraction helps in that regard.

Jeremy and I have been painting the exterior of our house. It’s wood siding and so it isn’t painted a color per se, but rather we desperately needed to seal it before winter. Everything needs to get done before winter. I feel like a pika running around preparing for winter. We were joking the other day about our two seasons: winter and almost winter. Actually, I like that because I think I can generally stand a month of summer. Too bad autumn is all of 2 weeks here, but the thrill of getting an early snowfall is on par with my love for fall. Back to the house, we are still getting afternoon rainstorms and that – along with morning winds (assuming that is all from solar heating and mixing of air masses which usually starts up a few hours after sunrise) – makes the ladder work a little dicey when Jeremy is trying to paint the exterior of the third floor. Most of it is manageable except one part over our mudroom which will require me to belay Jeremy. But we need to care for the house properly considering the big bucket of weather that gets blasted at the south and west faces.

Recipe: argentine empanadas

Four weeks in Argentina as a field assistant on a GPS campaign is enough to know when you are in love with a cuisine. The Argentines know how to cook (they’re all Italians, for crying out loud) and dance and drink and smoke and drive like maniacs and look beautiful. I have some favorite foods from what we sampled in restaurants, from the grocery stores, and in the homes of so many kind hosts. The best part was the asados – argentine barbecues that literally had 7-8 courses of MEAT. First we start with morcillas (blood sausages) and chinchulines (organ meat sausages) and then various cuts of beef like lomo and bife de chorizo at the end. You work yourself up to the best cuts, but of course by then I was drunk from all of the flowing red wine and probably had colon cancer to boot. I also loved the morning dose of dulce de leche on tortas warmed over the parilla in camp in the morning.