Spicy air

The other evening I left our place and instantly smelled mandarin orange spice. The week before it was cinnamon apple spice. There is something magical about spices greeting you as soon as you leave the house. Especially when it's dark out. We live right by Celestial Seasonings. Once a week, the air is heavy with tea. It's nice. And kinda weird.


I have been meaning to write about the little dinner party we had Sunday nite. We invited our friends Lindsee, Azlon and Andrew over for dinner. Saturday morning I took out a pasta cookbook I had been eyeing for a while and looked through every recipe to get ideas for Sunday. The one thing I knew I wanted to make was a key lime pie. That wasn't in the cookbook, but it's one of my faves and I like to make it every once in a while. So the menu was:

Hearts of romaine with a creamy feta dressing

Chilled artichoke and onion soup, topped with paprika and sun dried tomatoes

Grilled eggplant, baked with mozzarella and tomatoes

Spaghetti with a garlic butter sauce

Vanilla and dulce de leche ice cream topped with dulce de leche waffer crumbles

4 bottle of red wine



You will notice the menu doesn't include the pie. Sooooo. I have never made soup from scratch. I made the soup first, since it had to chill for four hours. Everything went well until I had to add the soup to the blender to puree. I was kinda smart in that I only put in about 3 cups of the soup to start and thought to puree in batches. The second puree involved about 4.5 cups of the soup and the lid blew off of the blender. Hot soup went all over. Mass amounts of cursing. Yea, pretty ridiculous. Why did I do that?! Third attempt, the lid blew off again. Massive amounts of yelling, then crying. Finally got it all pureed and into the fridge to chill. Next up, start the pie. I bought an already made pie crust and when I opened the little package, the whole crust crumbled. So I cried. And felt overwhelmed. And decided to get ice cream instead. I knew I was an emotional eater but I didn't know I was an emotional cook! Poor Steven, he had to listen to all of it.


The dinner was yummy. I haven't ever taken on that much in the kitchen before. That felt pretty good.


And!!! The book I recently ordered arrived literally on my door step Tuesday evening. I opened the door to see how chilly it was and viola! There it was, looking up at me and smiling. I had ordered A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table by Molly Wizenberg. I can't put it down. I love her writing style.

P.S. I secretly live for comments. Don't be shy.