rice krispie treats

If you've spent any time looking at the recipes on Dulcedo, my philosophy on cooking is probably easy to identify. I generally think the best food is simple and approachable, and made with fresh, quality ingredients. I eschew cake mixes and other preservative-laden, processed foods in favor of fresh foods with ingredients I can both recognize and pronounce. If I'm going to spend time in the kitchen, it's worth it to me to cook from scratch. And if I'm not up for that, then it's worth it to me to pay someone else to cook from scratch and I'll enjoy a meal out. That's just what I think. Generally.

lighter stuffed jalapeno poppers

I don't eat fast food very often, but when I do, it's usually Jack in the Box. (Are you picturing the Dos Equis spokesman as you read that?) As a kid, I loved the spicy chicken sandwich, and to go with it, Mom and I would often split an order of the potato wedges or the jalapeno poppers. These days my tastes are a bit broader, but no matter what main menu item I choose, it's usually still accompanied by a few jalapeno poppers. What can I say? The cheesy/spicy combination is hard to resist.

amaretto bourbon punch

It's Memorial Day weekend. Perhaps you, like me, headed to the grocery store with intentions of merrily traversing the aisles, filling your cart with a supply of ingredients that would keep you cooking, baking, and grilling all weekend. But unlike me, I hope you did not wait until late Friday afternoon to make that trip, finding yourself trying to maneuver between extra-wide stock carts and the seemingly several hundred other people in the store. If you did, then I'm sorry, and you likely emerged an hour and a half later and in serious need of a drink. This post is for you.

strawberry biscuit cobbler

I don't enjoy bridal showers. Or baby showers. Or any other social gathering that involves pastel mints and feigning interest in games like making dresses out of toilet paper with a bunch of women I don't know. So when it came time to plan a bridal shower for my sister last year, you can imagine my dilemma. How could I possibly throw her a shower that appropriately acquitted me of my maid-of-honor duties, but which didn't drag in all the aforementioned ways?

crispy broccoli with garlic & lemon

I have a confession to make. I've owned a lovely Canon 40D DSLR camera for seven years, and I still don't know how to really use it. If I take a good picture, it's thanks only to having a bit of talent at composing shots and a good camera and lens to take them. But I don't know how to use them, which is kind of pathetic. I shouldn't still be pushing buttons at random after all this time. But my friend Kevin -- who is a much more ambitious amateur photographer than I've turned out to be (because let's be real -- I haven't learned because I didn't make it a priority) -- was kind enough to give me a lesson in aperture, shutter speeds, ISO, and flash last week. And now I understand, at least enough to do purposeful trial and error with my camera settings. So I present to you:  Broccoli! Less crappily photographed than it would have been before.

grandma's oatmeal cookies

I am largely a self-taught cook. My mom taught me the basics of baking -- particularly the difference between a wet and a dry measure -- but she doesn't particularly enjoy being in the kitchen, so after that I was on my own. However, the way I feel about cooking and baking is largely inspired by my Grandma.

pineapple upside-down cake

Summer is almost here, and we were treated to some unusually nice weather in Seattle last week. So nice that I was inspired to pick up some annual flower starts, clean out the flower beds, and finally get my tomato seeds going indoors. I love starting plants from seeds and watching them sprout and grow. My neighbors probably think I'm growing marijuana -- what with the bluish-white light radiating from my windows at odd hours and all -- but that's ok. In a few months my yard will sport a bounty of Black Krim tomatoes. Maybe I'll even share.

lemon bars

Back in January, I lost a close friend. His name was Jay. And he committed suicide.

I think I danced more dances with Jay than anyone else in the last five years. We had a great connection as partners and shared a common sense of dance etiquette. Every dance seemed effortless. And every dance (or nearly so) was insanely gratifying -- the highest of highs, unmatched by any drug and untouchable by anyone else in the room.

pasta with mushrooms & goat cheese

I got a fun new kitchen toy. This doesn't happen often anymore because 1) I have a pretty solid arsenal of tools already and 2) I live in an exceptionally tiny house. While the kitchen is actually pretty roomy, it is nearly devoid of useful storage. Therefore, any tools I'm not using on a weekly basis are kept in clear plastic storage bins in the basement. And to get to the basement, you either have to go outside (great, it's definitely raining again), or crawl through a trap door in the floor of the closet and shimmy down a ladder. That's not an exaggeration. So I'm pretty selective about acquiring new things, and pretty darn good at donating or selling old ones.

irish stout beef stew

I read a comic the other day that said "Being 30 means waking up with an injury you didn't have when you went to bed." That is legit. I'm 31 and I can attest to this funny-because-it's-true sentiment. Don't get me wrong, I'm not falling apart at the seams and I don't by any means think I've got it bad. But I've got it...annoyingly 30...ish. (How long am I allowed to round down?)

pink lady cake

I miss cake. A lot. I gave up candy and anything that might be considered a decadent dessert for Lent this year. Try as I might, I can't find a way to classify cake as anything but decadent. Even though sometimes it seems so necessary.

I'll try to channel my cake longing into this post about pink lady cake, which I made for my 30th birthday (a year and a half ago). This cake is so good, it should be a sin. And for me -- during Lent -- it is.

chicken enchiladas

Sometimes when you lose interest in something or just can't seem to prioritize time for it, you need to step away and revisit it later...like in half a decade or so. Which seems to be what I've done with my blog.

The thing is, I've actually been using my blog this whole time -- to refer to my favorite recipes and remember the necessary modifications. (Hooray -- that's why I started the blog in the first place.) But recently it has been nagging at me that I've made several awesome dishes in the last five years, but none of them appear here. And every time I want to remake one, I have to find the right cookbook or website and hope I recall any changes I made to the recipe.

four-star fried chicken

So I made some changes to the design of the blog, mostly just because I was tired of looking at the old site. The new design has some big benefits though. When I finish adding the necessary links to the "Recipes" tab, it will be a heck of a lot easier to pull up a recipe from the site on my phone (I find myself doing this quite a bit at the grocery store). I think my favorite addition, though, is the "Worthy Reads" tab. A combination of blogs and books, this tab has almost all of my favorite literary kitchen resources. (Though not mentioned, I also utilize the recipe databases on MarthaStewart.com and Epicurious.com.) There are only three blogs listed, and I can't say that I keep up with them on a daily basis, but they are the first three blogs I visit when I'm looking for a new recipe. The books section, however, is the bread and butter of this tab. (Or maybe the cupcake and frosting?)

clam and chive dip

So a very cool thing happened to me just before I went home for Christmas. I was sitting in my office -- which is cold and crowded with boxes of paperwork that don't have a home -- and I was feeling terribly glum, as it seems there is no aspect of my job anymore that makes use of my creative gifts. Payroll, tax preparation, meeting organization -- this is not the job I moved across the country for, and not the job I was promised. The economy is in the can and I work in a specialized industry anyway, so finding a new position has proven extremely difficult. Woe is me.

peanut butter chocolate chip cookies

Last Tuesday was a pretty uneventful day. I had a meeting that ran late after work, then I went to the grocery store, and then home to relax. The Cowboy had plans to meet up with a friend (who is known in real life as Thunder Dan...I wish I had a cool nickname like that), so I had the evening to myself. Like any productive 27-year-old, I put that time to good use by organizing pictures, filing credit card statements, and cleaning the air filter in my vacuum.

Just kidding. I actually ate buffalo wings, played Super Nintendo, and did nothing productive besides think about putting away my Christmas decorations. (I think that counts.) And it was awesome.

I also had toast and chocolate chips for breakfast that day. It's possible I'm not fit to live on my own.

Anyway, (un)productivity aside, I was asleep on the couch by 9:00 p.m. This was nice. Being awakened by someone pounding loudly on my door at 3:00 a.m., however, was not. It was scary. The couch is only a few feet away from the door, so if I got up, the person outside would be able to see me...and my panic-stricken face. I did not want that. Plus, it seemed logical to me that the person outside chose my apartment because there were lights on (my nearby neighbors are early-to-bed folks and, most likely, were fast asleep at the time). Proximity to the ax murderer, near certainty of premeditation, and my own paralyzing fear kept me frozen on the couch. After a few minutes, the person went away -- on foot, apparently, since neither a car door nor the sounds of an engine could be heard -- but I held my position on the couch for another 30 minutes and then, wide awake, wandered around my bedroom for two hours after that. Not nice at all.

turkey meat loaf with sun-dried tomatoes

OK, here is the deal: I am going to go back to posting and no one is going to hold a grudge about how failed to post anything good (or bad) during October, November, or December. I won't even claim that I was busy. I wasn't. But no one wins if I tell you what was really going on. I've come to realize that no matter how I tell it, the story will make you feel sorry for me, then you will think that I'm a little pathetic, and then you will think I am crazy. In that order. So we'll just skip that saga story and move on to one about a coat.

uncle brian's potato salad

With the end of summer came an intense craving for my uncle's homemade potato salad. Labor Day weekend in Seattle was rainy, chilly, and mostly unpleasant, so there were no opportunities to make potato salad for a crowd. Last weekend, however, the Canadian Cowboy and I rented a cabin on a small lake outside of Seattle. I made potato salad and pretended there was a crowd. (Note that this sort of mind game will result in a boatload of leftovers.)

Canadian Cowboy was in charge of the fishing gear. I haven't been fishing in over five years, so I had to relearn how to bait a hook and cast a line. As it turns out, I'm not very good at putting my own worm on the hook -- we saw quite a few of them fly off in the other direction when I cast my line -- but I deserve an "A" for effort, I think. Okay, maybe a "B." I mostly gave up after my fumbling resulted in a squirt of worm guts to the face. (I bet you're hungry now, right?)

steamed crab with clarified butter

This post is like cheating. Hardly a recipe at all, it's basically just an excuse to post pretty pictures from Sunday's trip to Pike Place Market with Canadian Cowboy. Our mutual love of the market is such a nice thing. On one of our early dates, we met at the market at his suggestion. He purchased Copper River salmon (the best!), scallops, and fresh asparagus. Much to my delight, he let me pick out two bouquets of flowers -- one for his apartment, and one for me to take home. I selected these gorgeous irises for myself and a bright (but masculine) seasonal bouquet for him. Market fare in hand, we went back to his place, where he proceeded to grill up an outstanding meal. He even grilled the salad and wrapped the scallops in bacon -- very impressive!

cowboy cookies

Oh, my. It seems things have gotten away from me again over here in blogging land. Terribly sorry about that. It's not that I don't enjoy cooking, baking, and blogging -- you know I do -- it's that my priorities have shifted a bit over the last year. Last July I started taking dance lessons. As it turns out, dancing comes rather naturally to me, so what began as just a little Country dancing (two-step, Schottische, triple-step, etc.) had, by September, ramped up to include ballroom, swing, and salsa, too. I danced five to six days a week all through the fall and winter, then dropped down to three to four days a week in the spring, partially because I was running out of money (private lessons are expensive!), and partially because I wanted to spend more time with my Country music/dancing friends and less with everyone else.

Spring, as you have read, brought carrot cake, the introduction of The Pioneer Woman, and Snickerdoodle cupcakes. Oh, and Orlando Bloom. Ugh. Let's wrap up that last part right now. Outside of the initial introduction, the Orlando Bloom experience was a disaster from start to very quick finish. He was not so much cowboy as redneck, and that just doesn't work for me. Moving on.

carrot cake

What Not To Do: Helpful Tips for Boys Courting Girls. I could write this book someday. Even though I haven't actually penned it yet, let me give you some exciting excerpts from my dates, past and present:

Do NOT...

1. Ask girl out and then share your fantasy about an evening with her roommate.
2. Initiate date number two by calling girl at 2:00 a.m. and asking her to come over.
3. Attempt to initiate dates three and four by calling girl at 2:00 a.m. and asking her to come over.
4. Take off your jacket at the restaurant to reveal a loose-fitting black tank top circa 1992. Visible armpit hair at the dinner table is a no-no.
5. Go with girl to her business-related gala, take full advantage of the open bar, and then insist that you cannot possibly drive home and must stay the night at her apartment.

True stories, all of them. Sad, right? Married people should count their blessings.