The “girls” have a sitter for the weekend, and Mark and Junior and I are on our way to Steamboat Springs.

Mark is running the Steamboat Half Marathon tomorrow, but we also plan to make the most of a nice long weekend with a trip to Strawberry Hot Springs and some geocaching. I loaded up the GPS and the iPhone with all kinds of caches. Our first find was about 1.5 hours into the drive. What a great way to stretch your legs!

Junior really wanted a buzz cut.  Or so he told me.  And the barber.

So, he got one.  Then he cried.  He wouldn’t let me take an “after” picture.  Though he did claim two hours later that it was starting grow out already!

I love watching a grown man skip.  I love it even more when he is my husband, and he is skipping with my son.

For those of you who haven’t had to listen to me proselytize about the virtues of making your own bread, well, consider yourself lucky!  That also probably means you haven’t had to hear me go on and on about making your own pizza.  Seriously! It turns out that making your own pizza is easy pizzy, AND takes about as much time as running down to your local take-and-bake joint.

The beauty of this pizza is in the dough.  No-knead dough.  The same stuff we use to make gorgeous artisan breads and cinnamon rolls!

So get to it.  Stop wasting your money on cardboard crusts and less-than-fresh toppings….

Step 1:  roll it out

Step 2:  a good foundation – we like a nice garlic-olive oil glaze

Step 3:  Any toppings you please.  

Step 4:  Bake on the top shelf of a 425 deg. oven for 12-15 minutes, turning 180 deg. after 3-5 minutes

Step 5:  open a good bottle of vino…and enjoy!  Easy Pizzy….

For me, the best Farmers’ Markets are on days when the weather is nice enough to 1) ride our Xtracycles to Market without fear of snow, and 2) find more than just spring greens on market tables!  This weekend?  Spot on!

I love Windsor Dairy. Truly, Windsor is a world-class dairy, with the tastiest milk, butter, cream, and cheese on the planet. Like many great artists, though, logistics isn’t their strong suit.

We’ve been cow-share members for nearly a year now, and each week is kind of a crap-shoot when it comes to whether or not our “extras” will arrive at the co-op:  butter, yogurt, eggs, cheeses. Inevitably, it is the week you really need the extras that they don’t show. Like when you have 3 extra kids staying at your house for 9 days!

I’ve found a solution…and it doesn’t involve moving to Windsor so the dairy can hire Mark to straighten out their operations and logistics! I’ve already posted how easy it is to make your own yogurt….why not your own butter, or your own cheese? Turns out, there are lots of instructions on the web about how to make butter using your kitchenaid mixer. It also turns out that doing it is EASY. We made some today, using the handy instructions here.

So now, I don’t have to worry that I will get unsalted butter when I ordered salted butter….or that I won’t get butter at all! Now I just skim the fat off the top of my milk, and about 20 minutes later….custom butter. Salted, unsalted, herbed, garlic…..

Just what I needed….another excuse to eat more butter!

Now that we finally own this joint, I feel good about ripping out the front yard and planting our garden. Sort of like the White House did, but on a….slightly smaller scale.

Why the front yard? Well, it’s the sunniest spot we’ve got, and while we love the fact that our back yard has great big trees for climbing and shade, I would be hard pressed to grow a veggie back there! And“, we wanted a spot that wouldn’t get trampled by various children, dogs, and chickens.

Ours was a true family effort (not to mention the handy efforts of our good friend Doug)….back-breaking at times, but worth every minute.

So….welcome to our garden! We’ll keep you posted on its growth throughout the summer, but for now you can bear witness to its birth.

An alternative title for this post could be “How I spent an evening rolling around in Chicken Poop”.  That was us, just a couple of weeks ago.  You see, the baby chicks finally moved out of our guest bathroom and into the Gucci Coop.  Only they couldn’t figure out how to get from the run to the coop at night.  Instead, they’d camp out, huddled in a big ball, in the far corner of the run, UNDER the coop.  And they wouldn’t move….even with large amounts of prodding.  So….unless we wanted frozen chicken nuggets in the morning, a-crawling we went.  Under the coop.  Through the poop.

Thankfully the chicks have learned a great deal in the last few weeks.  Including how to put themselves away at night! And how to run away from the big chickens!

I have a very good friend who is a successful professional.  Only she doesn’t want to BE in her profession anymore.  For years we have discussed what she does want to be, and finally one day she announced “I want to be a cupcake baker!”  Terrific!  Only problem is, this professional friend of mine is convinced that she is a terrible cook.  

We solved that problem (at least where cupcakes are concerned) with a one-night class at the Culinary School of the Rockies, aptly titled “Cupcake Bash”! We were joined by my good friend Meta Megan, who also seems to think that her cupcake skills could be improved (she is WAY too modest).  

And while I am not quite sure my friend is ready to leave her day job, I can attest to the fact that she can now bake one mean cupcake!

So much got done while I was at work today, I can hardly believe it!  The dogs went to the vet, the dog poop got cleaned up in the yard, dry cleaning was picked up, laundry was folded, and the dishwasher emptied.  Phew!

No….I wasn’t “working from home”.  I hired a wife.  Though I suspect the politically correct term is probably “personal assistant”, “wife” is so much more precise, not to mention catchy.  

Now the only question is, “What took us so long?”.