What is it? No. 9

So I was walking Sophie yesterday and noticed something odd about the back of this car. What could that lumpy thing be? It sure looks like bird poop from here. Really really big bird poop.
Click the photo to find out!

Far and near

(A few extra photos from Friday.)

From the top of a mountain you can see a long way. It's nice to have map to put a name to all you can see. (If you click the photo you can see it much larger.)
Breckenridge ski area is to the right above the map. It would take maybe 45 minutes to drive there.

The wind was really fierce up top when we arrived, though it settled down later.

In the afternoon, I traded snow and long views for 60 degrees and a close-up with a pasque flower (Pulsatilla). Pasque means Easter, which is about when this blooms. Except this year, when Easter came very very early.
The purple is pretty, and what makes it interesting is its exceptional hairiness.
There's something about hairy ...

When life hands you coconuts

Make macaroons!
Perusing the bulk food section on Friday at Wild Oats, I discovered they have organic shredded coconut! It was way on the end.

I have been buying shredded coconut in packages that cost nearly twice as much. This was $2.19 a pound. And at Safeway, you can't even get the unsweetened kind.

I whipped up batch of macaroons last night (seriously, these are probably the easiest cookies you can make). I used the same coconut macaroon recipe as before but tried Demerara sugar to see how it would taste. This is raw cane sugar that has really large crystals and a slightly "browner" taste. I used just under 3/4 cup.

The larger crystals made the macaroons a little trickier to shape, as they didn't want to stick together, so I just went for lumps instead of fancy pyramids. But the taste was really good, and they didn't seem to burn on the bottoms as quickly. I left them in the oven longer (about 12 minutes) to get brown and crispy the way I like them.

In the middle of the night in a Tupperware container they don't look all that fabulous, but served up with pretty china and linens they become elegant.
Thanks to Clotilde at Chocolate & Zucchini for the original recipe.

Sound asleep

I may be walking her too much. Poor old thing.

Fence frustration

I fired the fence guy, telling him I'd found someone else to do the job. Which I haven't. So I'm out there trying to remove the old posts myself. But they're too damn heavy. Oy.

Soba noodle salad with peanut sauce

I have a huge number of cookbooks, and tons of Internet bookmarks for recipes I want to try. But when the mood strikes me to cook up something, it's often one of the most recent things I've seen that gets me rolling. A couple of days ago I saw this lazy day peanut noodle salad at 101 Cookbooks. Mmmmm, peanut sauce, I thought. Mmmmmmm, lazy.

On ski days, I'm all about lazy.
So, after a nice après-ski nap (which may top the damn-boots removal as the best part of skiing), I made a quick trip to the grocery and assembled the ingredients.

You can use whatever fresh vegetables strike your fancy. I opted for asparagus, carrots, pea shoots and sugar snap peas. Instead of spring onions, I used chives, which I like better (and have in the garden).

You also need an 8-ounce package of soba noodles. The recipe calls for extra-firm tofu, so I got some of that, too.

To make the sauce, combine 3/4 cup creamy peanut butter, 1/4 cup brown rice vinegar, a drizzle of seame oil, a pinch of red pepper flakes, some minced garlic, and salt to taste. Thin it with some hot water, adding a little at a time until it's more "saucy" than "gloppy." If you know what I mean.

The recipe suggests adding your asparagus in the last minute to the boiling soba noodles, then draining the whole thing and rinsing it with cold water to stop the cooking. This is an excellent suggestion: the asparagus came out at just the right tenderness.

I don't like a lot of raw garlic, and I wanted the thin carrot slices (created using a peeler) to be a little softer, so I sauteed them for about a minute in olive oil with most of the garlic. (I took that idea from the next recipe at 101 Cookbooks, for Sunburst Carrot Salad.)

I also like a little more flavor in my tofu, so I added more garlic and sauteed the tofu until it was a little crispy and golden around the edges.

Then everything got tossed together, including some crushed cashews (since I didn't have peanuts). Voilà!
This was very tasty! I originally tried it with less sauce, but it needed more sauce and more salt, so I salted up the remaining sauce and mixed it in.

The tofu here was just eh. I think some marinated and grilled tofu, or some of the baked kind, would be better. You could also use a little grilled chicken.

Cilantro sprinkled on top would also be good, if you like cilantro. (I do.)

The main thing I will take away from this recipe is the quick and easy sauce – which I could now wing on the proportions and toss with any kind of pasta or vegetables – and the asparagus-cooking tip.

It wasn't so lazy the first time through (what with all the thinking I was doing, and being careful in my prep), but from now on it will be!

The best part of skiing

Taking the damn boots off.

The tasty part of skiing

The better part of skiing

The worst part of skiing

Putting the damn boots on.

"Mansion" no more

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you may recall the brand-new "mansion home" for sale in my neighborhood last summer for $1.15 million.

Well, in my continuing search for that missing glove (I have to walk the dog anyway, so why not?), I passed the place again today and noticed that
1) It has a new realtor,
2) They're no longer calling it a "mansion home" and
3) They've dropped the price to $999,800.

Oh, that's much more reasonable, don't you think?

Missing its mate

Sophie is happy she got four miles of walking in today. I am unhappy because two of those miles were walked just now – retracing our steps from this morning in search of my missing glove. No luck, either.

Case in point

Here's the forecast. Nice today. Snowing tomorrow. Nice Friday.

Ah, springtime in the Rockies.

Snow, schmoe

We keep getting snow every few nights, but spring is bustin' out anyway.

The forsythia is blooming!

And some kind of fruit tree (crabapple, maybe?)

And yes, the inevitable:
First dandelion of the season. Happily not in my yard.

A different kind of spam

On the weekends around here you see a lot of real estate signs popping up on street corners, advertising open houses. When it warms up more, the garage sale signs will appear, too. The real estate folks are pretty careful about taking their signs down again at the end of the open house, and the yard sale folks generally are, too.

But there's another kind of sign that also pops up, and that's the street spam. It's not tied to a particular property or timely event, and usually appears on parkways or other public property. On Saturday, a bunch appeared in my neighborhood, including all around the school, at the park and on several corners that had empty lots or unoccupied homes for sale.

When they were still there on Sunday, I walked around with Sophie and removed as many as I could find, tossing them in the trash, then came home to look up the city code-enforcement number to file a complaint. In my search, I ran across a website for Citizens Against Ugly Street Spam and discovered there's a whole bunch of people who do the same thing!

Maybe I sound like a busybody with nothing better to do, but I live in a nice neighborhood and I want to keep it that way. Such signs are no better than empty liquor bottles scattered about, and I toss those, too.

The only bright yellow blooms I want to see on my walks look like this:
I'm glad to know other folks feel the same way and are doing something about it.