use real butter

Recipe: ispahan panna cotta

The longest day of the year just ended (well, the daylight part). I rather love the late light of the summer solstice. One year we were backpacking in Jasper National Park (Canada) on the solstice. I remember throwing disc with Jeremy in a huge field of wildflowers and green grasses that was littered with elk poop. Good incentive to NOT drop the frisbee. It was 9:30 pm and we didn’t crawl into our tent until 11:00 pm. It was still light enough to see without a headlamp. Love that.

While testing a high-altitude conversion for a cookie recipe this afternoon, I exchanged several emails with my lovely friend, Helen, discussing people’s manners – or rather the lack thereof. Face it, if you maintain a blog that gets a decent amount of traffic, you will inevitably encounter crackpot or inappropriate comments. Reminds me of the person who wanted a refund from Peabody for the cost of ingredients for a muffin recipe they got from her blog that they didn’t like. Wha?! I guess it isn’t just manners, but also an indication that the offender doesn’t reside on the Plane of Reality. For some reason, because people don’t have to say it to your face, they feel as if they can behave poorly and say stupid stupid things over the internet. So uncool.

The majority of my commenters are an incredibly funny, sweet, and caring group of people – they are so wonderful! And they respect me for the person I am. That means a lot because when you have cancer, plenty of people think this is an open invitation for their “advice” and I do use that term loosely. I appreciate how people have expressed their kind sentiments to me with, “I wish you well” or “I am praying for you” or “you are in my thoughts”. I don’t pray, but it’s okay if someone else wants to pray. However, it is not okay for someone to tell me what to believe in terms of faith. That is not only rude, but hugely disrespectful.

So what did I manage to do with all of today’s daylight? Here’s a sampling, but you can visit the photoblog for the full rundown.

i shot this in my yard

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: blackberry ice cream

I’m not cooking or baking as much as I’d like and that’s mostly because I’m dealing with unpleasant physical issues related to my least favorite of my chemo drugs. [I know that the last infusion was almost 6 weeks ago, but please tell that to the drugs…] I met with my oncologist this morning and he hasn’t seen it before in his many years of poisoning cancer patients. Great! I’m exceptional in every frakking way… Meanwhile, it would seem that all of my medical appointments have piled together lately such that I fell asleep on the table last night during my heart scan. Well, I’d rather sleep through Journey wailing over the speakers than listen to it while isotopes go racing through my heart.

[While waiting for my radiation appointment this afternoon, I’m killing time by blogging from a bakery in Boulder. Dude half my age just walked past and winked at me. WTF?]

Yesterday evening as Jeremy drove me to my heart scan down on the flats, I spied some mammata forming in the distance. Mammata clouds are typical precursors to tornadoes. In very simple terms, they indicate instability in the atmosphere. We see a lot of them in the summer around these parts.

mammata: look like giant grapes or… boobies

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Recipe: chocolate-dipped orange peel cookies

Cooler than most of you, anyway! We are nearly a week away from the summer solstice and it is snowing outside.

and this is why i live here

Perfect timing as I have a double batch of lentil soup simmering on the stove. All of the barbecue I’ve been making over the past few weeks has me craving non-terrestrial animal foods. I say non-terrestrial because I don’t think I could ever EVER tire of seafood, our lovely, tasty, wonderful aquatic pals… We hit another sushi bar yesterday, but I won’t post on that right now because I don’t want to freak my dear Graeme out with too much fish.

these are not fish: chopped candied orange peel

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