Happy to Be Back!

Thank you for your well wishes, your demands (ahem, Drea), and your patience! Here I am! First, a short digest of what's been going on.

A move (we all felt this way):

Beautiful new surroundings (Our Hero and I have climbed that mountain several times now!):

Aaaaand, a high-speed chase ended in our front yard. No better way to meet the neighbors, I say. You can't see it in this (very poor quality) picture, but the truck hit THREE trees in our yard, like a pinball. Amazing. It was all complete with the guy attempting to escape. Very surreal.

Indeed, things are well. Our Hero has started his work nurturing the minds of the young, and I have been puttering, filing, labeling, budgeting, alternately panicking and relaxing, reading, hiking, swimming, and . . . cooking of course!

I'm excited to get the blog rolling here again as we ease into harvest season. Farmers' Markets here are plentiful, and this weekend I spied the first squash of the season! My father made the mistake of calling me and asking what to do with a squash, and I'm afraid I went on and on and on and on, exciting myself as I shared about pasta sauces, soups, pizzas . . . I'm doing it again. Better quit while I'm ahead.

In any event, I will be posting regularly again, and can smell my next post finishing up in the oven as I write. Stay tuned, I'm getting in touch with my roots by making Basque-style stuffed peppers.

. . . Coming Soon!

After a bit of internet-access frustration and the all-around craziness of finding your way around a new town and settling into a new place, we have a date for internet service: August 30th! Barring any unforseen problems, I will be returning to the fold then! Miss you all . . . xxxooo

Thanks for your well-wishes!

We have arrived safely here in MyTown, Part Two. The house still resembles a disaster area, and my internet access is spotty at best.

Thank you for all your happy thoughts, keep sending 'em our way! Be back to posting (hopefully) in a few weeks!

Movin' on up

I am busy wrapping things up at work, and then we must begin the ardous tasks involved in preparing to move to another state. We move in two-and-a-half weeks, and the stress has already begun.

If I have the time and resources, I will try to post, but it may be a little sparse until August. Be gentle! Come back and check soon!

Fiesta!

So, the cake seemed a hit, though I wasn't as excited with it as others purported to be. I think people were being honest, not just nice, so let's call it a success.

R, something of an expert in Mexican Cuisine, made an absolutely exquisite molé, served with chicken and shown on duffpower's stovetop, left. The recipe, he has promised, is forthcoming when I manage to guess the ingredients of the sauce. I'll keep you posted.

R also prepared a trio of delicious salsas, chipotle-marinated flank steak tacos, and lovely little stuffed zucchini-halves (both on view below with the chef extraordinaire). duffpower's enchanting margaritas made everyone super-friendly, and the evening was a bit hit!

Topping off a fantastic weekend, Mytown's home team had a wonderful win, Our Hero and I finished unpacking and situating, and I got to spend a good deal of time in the kitchen! The weather was lovely to boot.

Happy Spring!

Settling In

Well, both Our Hero and I have healed up nicely from our bout(s) with the flu, and we survived the move to our new flat with the help of lots of our great MyTown friends, whom we will miss terribly. We are loving our new place, though I realize a little more acutely each day how crappy a nice apartment makes our furniture look. (Really crappy.) Still, we are making the best of it and enjoying the change.

As you can see on the left, the view from our bedroom window reveals that a bit of green is just beginning to peek from tangles of branches, and I couldn't be more excited. Just before I took this picture, I noticed a fat little chickadee perched in the branches, nest-building material clamped in his beak. At the old apartment, he would have been a pigeon. On the roof of the house next door. Probably defecating.

The new kitchen is clean and lovely, and though I've begun cooking (very simple) meals in it, I hope to be mainly unpacked and settled by this weekend. I've got a turkey defrosting in the oven that I must cook (thanks for the encouragement, JoMo, in the form of "suck it up and baste that bitch"). I'm hoping that involved Sunday dinner will break in the new digs. As you all can probably imagine, we are very busy unpacking, working, and doing all the things we normally do. I promise I will post some recipes soon; currently, I'm making a lot of old standbys that are easy and quick. Stay tuned for more soon!

Flu and Move

April indeed seems the cruellest month; after our bout with the flu over Easter weekend, the Understood-Hero household was again hit by some kind of evil bug beginning last week. VERY early last Tuesday morning (1am), Our Hero became violently ill. Thursday evening, just as he was beginning to feel better, I got the bug. I'm still getting over it now. It means business.

Complicating matters is the fact that we are moving to a new apartment in MyTown on Saturday. I have doubts that I'll have time to post until May. Please come back then! Stay healthy!

Birthday Dinner, Part II (Belated Posting) and NEWS!

Here is the long-awaited picture (excuse the laundry baskets) of Our Hero's second birthday dinner: pizza, wings, red wine . . . what more could a birthday guy want?

It seems I am on the mend from the awful flu or "flugh" that began to surface Friday evening. Our Hero and I went out to celebrate his BIG NEWS, and ate a tasty dinner. We came home and opened a sweet (but not too sweet) buttery bottle of asti (*POP* = celebration), and lived it up! Well, except for that nagging stomachache . . . I couldn't sleep at all that night, and lay on the living room floor all day Saturday (okay, on a futon matress) begging for relief of some kind. This being a "food blog," I will refrain from conveying any further detail about the episode. I vaguely remember sending Our Hero a text (while he was working at school) that said "Gd hlp me." Worst part: I had to miss a fun party with friends Saturday night and Easter dinner with the cutest little girls EVER on Sunday. Boo. By Sunday evening, Our Hero had joined me on the floor. We were sick.

The flu might have put a temporary damper on Our Hero's big news, but we are getting back to excitement here in the Understood-Hero household. Just this morning, Our Hero accepted a tenure-track job at SmallMountainTown U! And though we will be very sad to leave our friends that have become very much like family here in Mytown, we are looking forward to our next chapter.

Great news about SmallMountainTown? Farmers markets galore! CSAs? Yesplease! Raw dairy? Youbetcha! Humane and range-fed meat? Mmmmhmm. Can't wait to share the bounty with y'all.

Happily, we have several months to say goodbye to Mytown and to our loved ones here. We'll be making the big move the first of August.

As I said earlier, we haven't been eating much of anything of late, but I promise to update with some recipes asap.

more than a feeling

i am going to disturb the sanctity of this food blog to say something:

oh what a beautiful morning,
oh what a beautiful day,
i've got a beautiful feeling,
rummy is in his last days!

no victory is perfect, but damn it feels good! i'm just going to kick back and enjoy this extra spring in my step for a while. finally, a raise in minimum wage in sight! hallelujah!

a big bite of winter

here in mytown, there was a freak snowstorm that paralyzed the city and knocked out power, initially, to almost 400,000 “customers”. our hero and i included. soooo needless to say, without refrigeration, without a place to store leftovers, without light or heat, it was a dark, cold, icky week. six days into our outage, power was restored. for some of our neighbors it took nine or ten! i’m happy to be back in the light, and ecstatic to be able to really cook again. i’m a little behind in posting recipes, but because not much was made this past week, i should be able to catch up.