use real butter

Recipe: broccoli salad

Lately, I’m feeling torn between winter and spring. I love to get my tele (skiing) on, feel the delicate cold kisses of snow blowing at my face, see Orion at night in the sky, watch Kaweah move through the drifts like a shadow, curl up with Jeremy between flannel and down each night. But with our longer daylight hours and a few assignments I have to highlight spring’s bounty, I can taste the tender greens and first berries of the season in my mental palate. My thoughts have already turned to spring mountaineering more than once this past week. We have had a few warm spells interspersed with snow storms and I feel like a puppy delighting in each new turn of the weather. Invigorating any way you look at it.

We skied mogul fields at Vail on Friday until my legs were too wobbly to stand. Sweetness… then I took the big ride down the last black run (which I discovered was a sheet of ice) as everyone standing at the top watched me slide all the way down – unable to stop or get my skis under me – and moaned a collective, “oooooooh!” Such a shame to waste that last run. In the evening we met my ILs for dinner at L’Atelier because they were visiting for the weekend. Dinner was so fresh and faboo (L’Atelier NEVER disappoints)! Saturday morning we went back to Boulder for class.

Recipe: pomegranate, orange, and jicama salad

We just got tickets for a performance I cannot wait to see. I am giddy. Giddy. And I just rearranged my pantry closets. More giddy.

Thanks to those of you who have commented on the Kyocera ceramic knife giveaway so far. I do read each one and have cooed more than one “awwwww” or chuckled out loud at several answers. These are great and I’m really pleased that so many of you can be in a Good Place. A couple of commenters were caught up in my spam filter which is set to *paranoid*, but not to worry as I do retrieve legitimate comments. For those of you who have commented multiple times, you will be counted once (that PhD is good for something… I can actually count).

Now that my pal has received this package in the mail, I can post a picture of what I made for her. It’s a relatively simple pattern, but I think it is especially gorgeous with any Manos del Uruguay wool (especially the multis).

Recipe: citrus almond salad

Did you know that this here blog, Use Real Butter (urb?), was born of surgery? I had a blog I started back in 2004 by the same name and it had everything in it: personal, rants, cooking, more rants, politics, life, more rants, work, funnies, rants, photography, relationships, and rants. Use Real Butter was more a directive on how to live life rather than how to cook – but it works for both. When I found myself wanting to participate in the food blogging world, I couldn’t. I didn’t want all of my personal baggage dumped into the public arena (I still don’t). I split my blog into Siamese twins, so to speak, and this is how you are reading the public twin which retained the original name.

When I met up with Cindy (Katie and I call her Figs, and I discovered that they call me Butter, and now I wish I had named my blog Lady Deathstrike or Badass Ripchick…) we talked about blogs that suck. I mean popular blogs that we think are *yawn* boring. My own biased deduction is that the readers have no life, which would also explain why so many crappy movies and television shows have so many viewers. Then again, those readers could accuse me of having no taste.

So what makes a blog interesting enough to keep *me* coming back?

**Jump for more butter**