Queen of the Mountain

Today mom proved what I'd been suspecting for awhile. When she's with my step-dad, she's a dainty, wilting flower who can't do anything but shop. When she's alone with me, she's a strong woman up for a real adventure. It's the weirdest thing.

Step-dad has been sick pretty much since they got here, so today me and mom hit the trail without him. She'd been saying she wanted to see snow before she left so I suggested snowshoeing up at Bear Lake. She always gets giddy in the snow. I figured it would be a stroll around the lake, at most, before scurrying back to the warmth of the truck. But no, we walked across the frozen lake not once but twice just because it thrilled her to walk on a frozen lake. She was throwing snowballs, falling and crawling in the deep snow, and then wanted to go UP the mountain! That blew me away. Of course she got winded not being used to the altitude and not having a lot of cardio conditioning, but I was proud of her. She said she wanted to buy some warmer boots and try real snowshoeing up the mountain next time she was visited. She was like a totally different person. I even pointed that out to her. I asked why, when she's around step-dad, she acts like a silly airhead who can't do a thing for herself and gets a chill with the slightest breeze, but when she's with me she wants to climb a snow-covered mountain in 30 mph winds. The answer was complicated and kinda cute actually, but seeing her out there being active and strong really filled me with joy. I love you mom.

Procrastinating

Lordy what a gorgeous sunny day. I've got the windows open. It's almost enough to make me forget that tomorrow is supposed to wet and cold.

I saw the first honeybees of the season and the crocus are now fully open. I also saw a couple of gardeners cracking open their sleepy garden soils. It does my heart good.

In totally unrelated news, here is one example of the many reasons I hate the world's ridiculous obsession with utterly useless technology: MeBot Seriously?

Looks like I'm going to be traveling to San Diego for work in a couple of weeks. I'm meeting with some Navy officials about renewable energy optimization on their bases. I may extend my stay and soak up some beach while I'm there.

In April I'm off to DC for mom's birthday, and in May mom is coming to Boulder for my birthday. I'm surprising her with a room at the Hotel Boulderado, one of her favorite spots in town.

June, July and August I plan to burn all of my vacation time: New York, Chicago, Portland, Yellowstone National Park, Sequoia National Park and the Grand Canyon are my top considerations.

But at the moment, I have 7.5 days until the quarter ends and all of my assignments must be submitted for final grades. With diligence and a dash of luck, I'll get it all done this weekend and I can breathe easy for a couple of weeks until the spring quarter starts. I'm so looking forward to summer.

Rocky Mountain Home

After two weeks in my old Texas stomping grounds, I'm back in Boulder. A two and a half hour plane ride and an hour and a half bus ride and I'm the happiest person in the world.

I stepped off the bus tonight and took a long, deep breath of that sweet Boulder air. A bright moon shone in a cold clear sky, making the snow covered ground glow a silvery blue. Boulder creek was tumbling and icy. And mountains. Those beautiful, beautiful mountains.

I soaked up every glorious moment of the stroll home. There I found Gerard with a smile and a warm hug. I ate a hot homemade meal of spicy pinto beans and fresh baked cornbread, took a hot shower and slipped into my favorite flannel pj's.

There is no screaming television. There are no strings of traffic backed up for miles. There are no interstates or tollways, no skyscrapers, no chemical-laced prepackaged factory "foods" and no rednecks. There's just me and the mountains, the snow, the creek, and my lovely, sleepy little town.

I don't mean to imply that my trip to Texas was miserable. It was not. I had a great time and I loved seeing my best friends and my family and visiting my favorite Texas hangouts. Some of the highlights of the East Texas portion of my trip were hiking with the family in the Big Thicket National Preserve, long wonderful talks with mom, getting a tour of the "new" Houston from Michelle and Gina, and hanging out by mom's pool. In Austin, it was chatting late into the night with Scott, sharing a beer at the Ginger Man with Elizabeth, dinner with Ragen at Truluck's, dinner at Eastside cafe, barbecue at Rudy's and Artz Rib House, breakfast at Kerby Lane with Keith, a long walk around Town Lake (I have a brick dedicated to me in the overlook at Town Lake and Barton Creek), shopping for boots at Allen's Boots, visiting Bookpeople, Tesoro's and the Whole Foods flagship store, strolling the capitol grounds and hiking at McKinney Falls State Park, and spending New Year's Eve celebrating with lots of friends, food and karaoke. No, I had a wonderful time in Texas just as I always do.

But the wide open spaces of the west call to me. The mountains and the snow and the solitude of places west of Austin - whether they be in Texas or Colorado - call to me. My home calls to me. I guess I'm an introvert, because people - however much I love them - drain my batteries. Quiet time restores my energy. Nature rejuvenates me. Privacy keeps me sane.

How I love my Rocky Mountain home.

How Quickly We Forget

Yesterday I saw my Aunt Snoopy, mom's sister, for the first time in nearly a decade. (Nearly our entire family has odd nicknames, and some of us have multiple nicknames that are used interchangeably. I need to sit my mom down and find out where these names came from.) I walked inside of Aunt Snoopy's "new" (to me) house and it was like a blast from the past. My family never seems to evolve. People get older, even get new houses, but it's like they're stuck in a time warp in terms of what's going on in the mind.

I love my Aunt Snoopy. She's as sweet as can be. But she, along with everyone else down in this part of Texas, have reminded me how different my life is today. They've also reminded me why I am the way I am. My Boulder friends wonder why I bought a Ford F350 Super Crew long bed 4x4, love my cowboy hat and dream of a ranch? They need only visit my family in Texas for a day and all of their questions would be answered. It even slapped me in the face.

Snoopy's house is pretty typical of what you'll see if you visit any household belonging to a member of my family: American and Texas flags flying on the flagpole out front, huge framed emblems of the Seal of Texas on the walls, mounted deer heads and other assorted animals placed around the house, paintings of cowboys, sculptures of cowboys, references to cowboys, trinkets and fridge magnets and t-shirts and coasters and dishes with Texas symbols on them, signs out front that say things like "We don't dial 9-1-1" next to an image of a pistol, sprawling property with several big trucks in the driveway, etc. And then there's that thick Texas accent. I swear I don't know how I ever lost mine. Maybe it was the same force that took me to college and out of Texas. I'm one of only two of all the family with a four year college education, and both of us left Texas. In fact, after we left Snoopy's house, mom and I drove around the country a little bit just looking. I commented how beautiful it was and how I still can't believe you can buy a huge house on 20 acres of land for $150,000 out here. I could have a garden that goes forever and all the horses I could stand! And every house has a Super Duty, standard. But mom said she didn't want me to move back. "I would love nothing more than to have you close to me, but you'd be miserable here. You're better than this. You would never be happy living around all of these backward rednecks. You'd miss the mountains. You'd miss Boulder. You'd miss being around all of those smart, educated people and doing good things for the world." And she's right of course. I'd have no friends here, not now. I've evolved too much. Kinda made me sad, actually.

Then this morning I awoke to rain - hot, steamy rain. It's the day before Christmas eve and it feels like a tropical rainforest outside. I read in the news this morning that Boulder is going to have 10 inches of snow on the ground by Christmas Day. I have friends there who are going skiing. There's a live webcam of Pearl and 11th on the front page of www.dailycamera.com. I've been watching it for the past hour. You can just see the restaurant Salt on the left side, and to the right is the Boulder Bookstore. People are walking on white sidewalks and I miss Boulder deeply.

It's funny. I really do love Colorado and Texas in equal but different ways. They are both home to me. I'm reminded of my road trip to Austin last summer and that moment when I realized there are two loves in my life.

A Stroll Down Memory Lane via Streetview

This evening I Google Street Viewed some of my childhood haunts. It's just plain weird.

I virtually "stood" in front of the house I grew up in. My entire world revolved around those woods, those narrow streets. I "toured" the neighborhood and emotions, memories came flooding back. I'd been back numerous times in my adult life. My parents moved out of the house probably ten years ago now, but Memaw and Pawpaw lived just one street over. Pawpaw died a few years after my parents moved away and Memaw died about 2 years ago, which was the last time I was in the neighborhood. It wasn't freaky to see my old neighborhood so much as it was freaky to see it on Google. I mean when I grew up, rotary phones and a microwave were the most technologically advanced things we owned. I didn't know the first thing about computers, and a thing such as the internet was completely unfathomable. I'm having trouble connecting Google and Huffman, Texas in my mind.

The real trouble came when I took a virtual tour of Memaw and Pawpaw's old lake house. That's what we called it, "the lake house." It was basically a barn nestled among thick forest on the shore of a small slough of Lake Livingston. ("Slough" is pronounced like "cow," but my family to this day pronounces it like "slew." At any rate, a slough is a swampy area with a lot of trees.) The lake house was accessible only by a really fun (to a kid) single lane dirt road full of pot holes that meandered through some pretty impressive hills. When Memaw and Pawpaw bought the place, they were among the very first. Except for an occasional cabin or travel trailer, it was all woods. Miles and miles of thick woods. They didn't live there, it was just a getaway place for the family. It was a three room barn: downstairs was just a big room with Memaw and Pawpaw's bed, an expandable table with chairs, a stove, refrigerator and some kitchen cabinets, and the bathroom (the second of the three rooms.) The upstairs was just a wide open space with storage nooks around the perimeter for fishing tackle, tools, the hammock, marshmallow roasting implements, boat anchors, life jackets and other wonderful things. There were also three beds up there.

The lake house, painted barn red, had power and running water, but no air conditioning, no heat, no phone and no television. It was bare bones - literally a glorified barn, minimally intrusive to the land, and surrounded by woods. It was heaven. Seriously, when I was a kid there was no happier place on earth than Memaw and Pawpaw's lake house. We normally went for a week at a time, and rarely did we go when Memaw and Pawpaw weren't also up. And the absolute best time was when my dad's sister and her family joined us as well. Actually, that's not true. The absolute best times were when my dad's sister's family and Memaw's brother's large family, who owned a lot with no permanent buildings on the other side of the slough, were also up. In the very best of times, it would be Mom and dad and my brother Daniel, Aunt Kiku (that's Karen Sue to those of you who don't speak five year old), Uncle Kenneth, baby cousin Holly, Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Men (don't know where that nickname came from), Gary and Corinne, little cousin Ricky, Jan and Steve Earl, Grandaddy, Memaw and Pawpaw, and a lot of other kids that would be born into the family (I'm the eldest of all the kids and grandkids.) Man those were the good old days. What I wouldn't give for the chance to have just one day to go back and see everyone again.

I remember it was so hot up there in the summer, but when the sun went down it felt perfect to me. I remember many a hot afternoon sitting on a rotten old pier under some massive shade trees, watching my cork sit there in that murky water. I remember the ducks and the alligators that would swim by, and the thousands of turtles and dragonflies, frogs, crawfish, snakes, raccoons and birds. I remember multitudes of those iridescent little sunfishes - the Bluegill, the Longear, the Readear, the Warmouth - fishes whose names I didn't know but whose patterns and striking colors never ceased to amaze me. I'd catch them on meal worms and grasshoppers, always careful to remove the hook and quickly, gently put them back into their watery home.

I remember the bats that came out at dusk, and how I used to throw rocks not at them but in front of them to watch them dive and swoop at what they clearly thought were tasty insects in a nose dive. I remember how excited mom would get when she caught a crappie while fishing off the pier with minnows. I remember my dad cleaning dozens and dozens of fish from a successful day out in the boat. I remember the smell of the fish and the smell of the water and the smell of the dirt and the forest. I remember hunting for turtle shells among the tall weeds in the marshy recesses - and finding them. I've still got three perfect specimens in my home office. I remember how those wriggling worms and minnows felt in my hands. I remember the cool splash of the water on a scorching hot day.

I remember the day a kid drown just a few hundred yards away from where I was fishing.

I remember a man who used to play guitar somewhere on the other side of the slough. I could never see him, but I remember his music. I remember waking at 5AM to the smell of Memaw's biscuits, coffee and bacon. I remember the time I was walking alone in the woods and saw a pure white squirrel. I remember when that rickety old pier finally gave way, and mom fell through it. I remember the huge bruises it left on her legs. I remember how I protested fiercely when the adults decided it was time to replace that old pier with a new one. I remember digging up enormous freshwater mussels from the shore. I remember the wonderful, incessant buzzing of cicadas in the hot still air. I remember Memaw's old cane pole - the perfect size for a grandmother or a grandson, and that little red cork. I remember the two of us sitting by the water watching a dragonfly balance on the tip of the pole while she sang "Over in the Meadow" to me.

I remember eating cornmeal-battered fried fish we had caught that same day. I remember how Memaw loved eating fried fish eggs. I remember the biggest fish I ever caught. It was a largemouth bass. It was so big, mom and dad had it stuffed and it hung on my bedroom wall for years. I remember Pawpaw's big old red canoe - hand made of solid wood, and how I loved paddling around the swampiest, quietest parts of the slough. I was always amazed at how many mysterious and beautiful creatures lived there among the mosses and the lily pads.

I remember this and a thousand more things, all of which overwhelmed me as Google Street View took me back. Even the old lake house has been found by Google. I just can't believe it. Of course it bears little resemblance to the heavenly playground I knew as a child. Most of the roads are paved and most of the trees are gone. The few old cabins have been replaced by the many brick houses packed wall to wall. Woods have been replaced with St. Augustine grass and chain link fences. The natural shorelines have all been bulkheaded. There are no more swampy recesses for giant old red ear sliders to haul out and die in peace.

And as for the old lake house itself? It's now painted white, has a concrete driveway, and is almost completely obscured by an enormous metal carport. There's a pre-fab house behind it, right where we used to roast marshmallows over the campfire. There's a storage shed where the hammock used to hang between two oak trees, now long gone. The leaf litter where, as a child I invariably got thorns, burrs, gumballs and every other sharp local plant material stuck in my bare feet at least once every visit, is now a uniform carpet of green grass in the open sunlight.

Dusty tree covered roads that at one time were visited only by the occasional beat up old pickup are now lined with mailboxes and sporty, shiny little SUV's. Memaw's lake house now has a bricked three car garage with a concrete driveway sitting next to it. I can't help but wonder at the process of it all. I imagine it goes something like this:

A suburban couple drives out looking for a place to "get away from it all." How perfect honey! Look at all the trees and wildlife. And there's the lake! Won't this make the perfect hideaway? So they buy a lot, cut down the trees and pour a slab. They immediately set out to build a bulkhead to keep their new property from washing away, and of course they'll need a dock and a boat lift for the new boat. The house will, of course, need air conditioning, telephone, television, washer and dryer, dishwasher and all those other things that make life grand. The lot will, of course, need to be planted in carpet grass and fertilized and watered. They'll need a paved driveway, a garage for the SUV, a storage shed for the lawnmower and all of the things they can't stuff into their storage shed back home in the 'burbs. The whole thing will need a fence to keep other people out and Mitzie and Fritzie the Pomeranians in, and darn it let's complain until these roads get paved. Oh and then let's tell our best friends about this wonderful place so they too can come up and buy property and build houses because won't it be just so much fun to have our neighbors up for a good 'ol time out "away from it all?" Ah yes. And then a few years go by and they look around and think darnit, they really need a place away from all these houses and people - you know, some place with woods and wildlife where they can truly get away from it all.

And that, I think, is how Memaw's extremely modest little lake house, my childhood paradise which they sold after I moved off to college, came to look like any other suburban shit hole.

Yes, I'm bitter about it.

For the life of me I can't understand why people always need to "improve" everything. Is no one ever satisfied? Is nothing sacred? Do so few of us really understand that it isn't air conditioning and television and excess that bring fulfillment and joy into our lives? What exactly is appealing about a wooded lake retreat out in nature if the first thing you feel compelled to do is cut down the woods, pave the roads, wall off the shore, drive off the wildlife and build a replica of your Wal-Mart house back home? You're going drive to the lake house to watch TV and eat microwave dinners in the air conditioning? What am I missing here?

I toured the rest of the streets in the area and, I'm happy to report, there are still a fair number of streets that are virtually unchanged. There are still large tracts of woods and rustic old cabins and houses that look the same today as I remember them 30 years ago. There are even some streets that still can't honestly be called "paved." Even the dead end road where a six year old Bubba (me), mom and Aunt Kiku, while out for a walk one summer afternoon, encountered that "giant" garter snake which forced them to turn around as I fought tooth and nail to get a closer look, is still there, is still dirt, and is still surrounded by trees. And knowing that, I think I might be able to sleep peacefully tonight after all.

Goodnight Memaw, wherever you are. Thank you for everything.

The Urban Homestead

The calendar may disagree, but spring has arrived in Colorado.

And so begins a new season of work for the homesteader, urban or otherwise. Gerard and I were talking this morning about cycles (not the bi- or motor- kind). Successful athletes train heavy, punctuated by periods of active rest or "back-off" sessions. Most nutritionists agree that periods of fasting or, at the very least staggering you caloric intake, can help keep you lean. Even the concept of weekends offers respite from the daily grind, a cycle of work and rest. And so too the farmer and backyard gardener must stir from winter's rest to begin the planting that will end with the harvest. Nature, indeed everything I can think of, runs in cycles of on and off periods. Maybe that's why I get so much pleasure from abandoning "fresh" tomatoes in January and savoring them only during the summer months when they can be grown in my back yard. It just feels natural.

Of course that's not the only reason, but I have to say I have a much greater appreciation for some of the things which are most mundane to the average supermarket shopper. (I know, I was one of those supermarket shoppers most of my life.) Never before was I as excited about the warm months as since I moved to a place where winters are long and intense. Never have I looked upon a ripe red tomato or dark crisp vegetables with such adoration as I have since I gave up the supermarket. Never have I savored a hot slice of bread slathered with butter as I have since I started baking my own bread and churning my own butter. Why? Because I now know how wonderful these things really are. I no longer take them for granted because they aren't granted to me anytime I want them. I know how precious they are and how much work it takes to get them. When I was a child my mom told me how, when she was a little girl growing up dirt poor, for Christmas they would sometimes get a little fruit and it was a big treat. I remember I snubbed my nose and thought what a lame Christmas that must have been! Of course I was spoiled by her childhood standards. We weren't rich, but anything I wanted to eat was in the kitchen any given day of the year. An apple or an orange meant nothing to me. I wanted armloads of plastic toys. Can I honestly say my childhood was better having had the "luxury" of caring about an abundance of plastic toys more than a few pieces of fresh fruit? Life seemed so unfair if my mom wouldn't (or couldn't) buy me a toy I demanded. I never knew what it was like to long for something that could actually impact my life, like food. How might that have affected me as an adult? How might that today influence my ability to deal with the curve balls life throws?

My quest to be self sufficient, local, healthy and as free as possible from corporate overlords has taught me a lot of exciting and difficult lessons. It has taught me a lot of skills that are lost on most Americans but that at one time were quite commonplace. It has given me an entirely new perspective on the world, a much greater appreciation for the things in my life, and a sense of wholeness and joy that no amount of material things could ever bring me. My most recent conquest: bread. I've been baking my own bread for a couple of years, but until recently I was still a slave to the little plastic packets of commercial yeast. Obviously, those are new fangled products invented by someone who wanted to make a buck. Specifically, it was a man named Charles Fleischmann who introduced pre-made yeast packets to the world in 1876. Yet people have been baking bread, even leavened (risen) bread, since the stone age. How did we manage all those millennia until yeast packets became widespread in the 20th century? One answer: sourdough. After a few failures and months of digging, I finally was able to cut through all the myths and misinformation floating around the internet to discover the delightfully simple formula for bringing this ancient culinary wonder into my home. Mix flour and water and feed it daily for two weeks. That's it. At the end of two weeks you have a jar full of strong sourdough culture that can be propagated indefinitely. How amazing is this: the very organisms you need to make a fluffy loaf of bread live in abundance in the air and on the very flour that will become your bread. All you need to do is coax them into a dense symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast with a little bit of food and warm water. With your sourdough starter you can make all sorts of delicious, nutritious breads and pancakes, no mass produced industrial plastic packets of genetically modified superyeast is necessary. That, my friends, is an every day miracle.

So it was on this sunny Sunday morning over my first batch of fluffy sourdough pancakes, slathered with home churned butter and preserves made from last summer's peaches, that Gerard and I discussed the cycles of our lives. Though I gave up church and organized religion many years ago, I suppose this is our way of honoring God or the Universe or the Great Spirit and all the true wonders of this world. Our church is our chemical-free home, stocked with clean foods grown by the loving toil of real people, our neighbors. Our tithe is the labor we invest in growing, preserving and preparing the nutrition given to us by the rich soils beneath our feet and the warm sunshine that shines on our faces. And our prayers are understanding the miracle of it all and never taking for granted the luxury of having so much good food to eat.

Eckhart Tolle believes that all the beauty of nature spanning the vast expanse of space and time was unknown until humans, in all our sentient complexity, came along to tell her how beautiful she is. I suppose that's another reason why I spend so much time figuring out how to churn butter and make sourdough. It's my way of honoring the beauty of nature and saying I acknowledge that I am part of her and her endless cycles.

Merry Christmas

I'm sad. Christmas is over. I had been looking forward to my first Colorado Christmas for two years. I took a week of vacation and mom, Larry and Scott came to visit us for the week. It's weird looking forward to something for so long, only to have it pass in the blink of an eye. It's weird going back to my normal routine, only now having that thing I had long anticipated being a memory of the past rather than a fantasy of the future. It's weird to have it behind me rather than in front of me.

We had a really nice time. Mom was like a little kid playing in the snow for the first time in her life. She was running, throwing snowballs and kicking up snow like any eight year old would. She just kept saying how magical it was and laughing. I swear it took decades off her age. The image of her all bundled up and playing with a big grin on her face will stay with me forever.

After everyone left this afternoon I went back into my home, now still and quiet after a week of being filled with love and laughter. I looked back through the photos and I could still hear mom's voice laughing and I could see her eyes glowing with the light of discovery and joy. It filled me simultaneously with happiness that these moments existed, and such sadness that they had passed so quickly. But I suppose it's knowing that such moments are fleeting that make them so precious, and mourning their passing is futile.

Bear Lake holds a particularly special place in my heart now. Who knew such a short trail could hold so many memories. I love you mom, more than words can ever express.

'Tis the Season

Finally! We've got a real Colorado December in full swing. With the wind chill, it's -22 F tonight and we've easily had over a foot of snow in the past two weeks. It has really helped bring on the Christmas spirit. That, and knowing I only have four more days of work before I'm off for ten full days for a little Christmas vacation. I'm not really going anywhere. Instead I've got family and friends coming up here for a week of snowshoeing, Christmas shopping and other wintry activities. Of course, if the weather is like this throughout the week of Christmas, I have a feeling that my mom will ensure our primary activity is sitting by the fire with hot chocolate and admiring the snow through frosted window panes.

I love Colorado. Have I mentioned that before?

Taste of the Rockies

Mmmmmmmmmm! I've been cooking more since I moved to Colorado than I ever have in my life. I like to think I've gotten pretty good at it. Gerard hasn't complained. But isn't it funny how different cooks develop their own particular spin on food? Mom and Memaw were both excellent cooks, but if you were to set a plate of meatloaf with sides of mashed potatoes, green beans, black eyed peas, hot rolls, a glass of tea and a slice of lemon pie in front of me, but didn't tell me who made each item, I could tell you in an instant who made what. I know I'm developing my own "flavor" as well, though my cooking style is heavily influenced by both mom and Memaw. Sometimes I'll be cooking or baking something new and suddenly remember a technique, some advice or an ingredient that mom or Memaw impressed upon me years ago when I was just a helper sitting on their kitchen counter sticking my fingers in everything. And yet I still find my own way to do things or dig up something neat online that really works for me. For example, my chicken and dumplings tastes a lot like mom's, but I roll my dough into dumplings where she dropped them in by the spoonful. And I still make bite-sized cinnamon rolls with leftover pie crust just like Memaw taught me, but I've discovered an additional technique to make them a bit flakier.

And then there are things I never, ever learned as a kid. Things that are only in my life now because of my coming home to the Rockies and my culinary philosophy. Breading and frying chicken is pretty basic. It looks a lot like the picture above. But skinning and slicing full grown buffalo testicles is quite another task altogether. That ain't chicken frying in that picture up there.

Now in case you weren't aware, I like to stick to simple recipes made from scratch using local ingredients. As such, most modern cookbooks are useless to me and cookbooks that fit within my cooking philosophy are pretty darn hard to come by. So thank God for the internet. You can find anything in that series of tubes. And so I did when it came time to figure out what to do with my buffalo balls. That's right. Rocky mountain oysters. Bull fries. Buffalo fries. Prairie oysters. Montana tendergroin. Swingin' beef. Cowboy caviar. Huevos del toro.

So there they are sitting on a plate. Now what? How to get them from this less appetizing state to the mouth watering crunchables in the first photo? Here's everything you never wanted to know about the basic process:

1. Using a sharp knife or kitchen shears, slice the outer covering and peel it off.
   
2. Slice the orangish flesh into strips and dip in a flour, salt and pepper mix.
   
3. Drop in very hot, deep oil in a cast iron skillet.
   
4. Remove from skillet and drain on clean cloth.
   
5. Serve hot with roasted brussels sprouts from your garden.
   

Enjoy!

Anticipation

When I was a kid, there was one morning every year that my mom would wake me up at some unbelievable hour in the morning so I could come to the back door and feel the cool night air.  It was the coming of fall and I don't think a year went by when we didn't do this.  I'd always go right back to bed, but it always excited me.  Fall always was my favorite time of year.

I still get up extra early this time of year just to peek outside into the darkness and test the coolness of the air.  But my ritual since moving to Colorado has taken a new form: I now check the weather report multiple times per day until that first report of possible snow appears.  Today was that day.

According to the forecast, we here in Boulder may get our first snowfall of the year Saturday night.  Am I stoked?  Oh yeah.

Comfort Food

One of the many things I love about Colorado are all the opportunities for comfort and small pleasures.  I think it's because this is a land of extremes: extreme beauty, extreme weather and extreme landscape to name a few.  It's often said that you can't know light without dark, or good without bad.  Maybe it's true of comfort, too.  I know from personal experience that the hard times make the easy times all the more wonderful.  I also know that too many easy times without enough hard times kinda makes you spoiled, and you quickly start to lose appreciation for just how good you have it if you don't have that reminder every now and then.

I remember one particular day as a kid working my butt in the ground tearing down an old building with my parents.  We slaved, because it had to be done that day.  It was so hot, and later in the day it started to rain.  We worked through the rain.  By day's end, I was exhausted.  I was filthy, soaked to the bone and every muscle was hurting.  But the project was done.  To this day I remember how awesome that hot shower felt and how luxurious my clean clothes felt.  Yet there was nothing special about the clothes or the shower.  I had them every day.  But on this day I had been given a reminder of just how wonderful they were.  But it wasn't just that.  I also felt a sense of power.  I felt strong for having accomplished so much.  I felt confident, yet peaceful.  I've never forgotten it, nor many of the other similar experiences I've had in life.  Sometimes you have to love the pain, because it brings good things.

My weekends at the horse rescue farm has given me a taste of that particular flavor of suffering and subsequent pleasure.  A day of throwing hay bales in the sun is not something I had ever done before the horse farm.  It's hard work.  If you don't wear gloves, your hands get a thousand tiny cuts and pokes, some will bleed, but they all burn like fire the first time you wash in hot water.  Your nasal passages turn black with dust.  You get itchy bits of hay all down your shirt, manure on your boots and jeans, straw in your hair, dust and sweat in your eyes, and at the end of the day your muscles are stiff from head to toe.  And yet, I love it.  The work is so honest.  So primal.  So real.  It makes me feel alive.  It makes the shower at the end of the day feel amazing.  It makes the softness of my bed indescribably wonderful.  It fills me with a great sense of accomplishment that I carry all week long.  I helped an old lady who can't do the work.  I helped a bunch of injured or unwanted horses who can't help themselves.  I helped myself in a way that no book or counsel or potion ever could. 

I was home from work by 5PM today.  It was a beautiful day, sunny, cool and dry, just the most perfect Autumn day.  Tonight it will be cold and clear.  We're supposed to get our first frost of the season, as it'll be the first night below 40 degrees.  I wanted something warm for dinner, so I put a chicken on to boil. When it was nice and tender I pulled it from the pot to cool, and boiled down the broth with some salt & pepper and oregano from the garden.  I mixed up a batch of dough with Colorado flour, butter, salt and water.  I kneaded it with my hands.  I rolled it out flat with my old wooden rolling pin and cut it into 1 inch squares.  I picked the meat off the chicken and tossed it back into the broth.  When the broth reached a rolling boil I tossed in the dough squares and boiled it for ten minutes.  I set the table and lit the handmade beeswax candles in the centerpiece which I created from fresh pumpkins, winter squash, dried sunflowers from the garden, broomcorn, sorghum and other harvest grain stalks I got from the farmer's market.  I served up two steaming bowls of the best chicken 'n dumplin's I've had since mom's.  For dessert, we savored the last of the plum cake I made over the weekend, which was made from the last of the summer's italian plums.  

I suppose I could have just gone out to eat or picked up something from the hot case at Whole Foods.  It would have saved a whole lot of time.  But I got something much more valuable by doing what I did.  Yes it was a lot of work, but the food was phenomenal.  No chef in this world could make my food taste better than when I pour my love and effort into it.  And maybe that's what my food obsession and my cowboy obsession are really all about.  "Easier" or "faster" doesn't equate to "better."  Spending two hours cooking up the freshest seasonal ingredients to produce a hot bowl of chicken & dumplin's gives me comfort food on a cold, starry night.  Toiling in the field gives me comfort food when I take a hot shower at the end of the day and put on my favorite snuggly pajama bottoms.  There are some things, some comforts or pleasures, that can only be earned.