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I take it back – I’m not just cooking for the lack of better things to do. It’s just that I’m getting over my past cooking failures and learning that I can actually make decent food! It’s kind of exhilarating. Also since we eat at least 3 times a day, I better get good at this cooking thing.

As I mentioned earlier, I recently obtained a mini food processor, which I put immediately to good use. I made hummus! With the first hummus attempt, the blender didn’t quite cut it (pun unintended, but HAHA! I made a funny!), but I was quite proud of this basil hummus. I think the biggest challenge lies in its 3-cup capacity which doesn’t give me much room to work with.

This was especially evident when I tried to make coconut lemon bars; the cubes of butter and coconut flakes were spilling out!

I really wanted to make good use of the huge lemon tree in the backyard, so I’m developing quite a repertoire of lemon receipes. These lemon bars are just perfect; although they are a bit too sweet, one bar (or 3, in someone else’s case) is just enough to satiate any sweet craving. The lemon topping was sweet and just tangy enough without puckering up those lips!

So far, we’ve made:

• Lemon Bars
• Lemon Meringue Pie
• Lemonade

Okay, I admit the list seemed longer in my mind, and each dessert requires the juice of no more than 1 or 2 lemons—so maybe it doesn’t warrant growing a whole lemon tree. But a couple gallons of fresh lemonade in of itself is worth it I think!

This past weekend, I also obtained a slow cooker from my mom’s large inventory of random kitchen appliances. We tried to stuff 2 pounds of pork shoulder in that tiny 1.5-quart pot, but it didn’t quite fit. Nevertheless, I can’t believe how easy it was to make pulled pork using Reid’s former manager’s father-in-law’s recipe: we made some dry mix, rubbed it all over the pork, and simply stuck that sucker in the pot 6 hours. But lemme tell ya, you don’t want to use a slow cooker when you’re hungry and you want food NOW. I guess we didn’t take that into consideration and ended up eating at 10PM. But after 6 torturous hours, slather some BBQ sauce on the pulled pork on top of a french bun and it is GLO-RI-OUS.

Okay, not-so-tortuous 6 hours. Reid, Nelson, and I made spring rolls while we waited! Thanks to my homegirl Kim who used to feed me every day in college, I learned how to make spring rolls. So easy: boil vermicelli and shrimp, prepare cucumbers, lettuce, and mint leaves, and then roll into rice paper! So healthy and refreshing, and it tied us over until we could stuff ourselves silly with pulled pork sandwiches.

Best of all? My whole day’s meals consisted of buckwheat pancakes, eggs over-easy, Vietnamese spring rolls, and BBQ pulled pork sandwiches, and by using many of the things I already had in the fridge, it cost less than $15 altogether to feed 3-4 people throughout the day! (And $7 of those dollars were for spices, sauces, and other ingredients that I will be reusing multiple times.) WINNER!

For lack of better activities to write about, this is turning into a food blog and should be aptly renamed to “Failed Kitchen Adventures”. Recently, I’ve been cooking a lot more in order to cut down on expenses that would otherwise be spent on dining out, but I’ve probably invested just as much money in failed attempts at preparing what initially appears to be delicious and easy dishes. Fortunately, I am unfazed as I have an iron stomach and can stomach almost anything except the lack of food.

St. Louis, MO has a dish called toasted ravioli, which is basically deep fried, breaded ravioli. Reid replicated it here with frozen ravioli. I’m not sure how it’s supposed to taste but it was damn good, especially when dipped in hot marinara!

To go with the toasted ravioli, I decided to make bruschetta. You can’t really mess up any concoction involving tomatoes, basil, mozerella, and balsamic vinegar, but this time I blanched the tomatoes to peel off the skin, added a lot more basil, freshly grounded peppercorn and capers, and toasted the baguettes with olive oil. I’m pretty proud that I did this without any recipe or taste-testing and it came out just perfect. But again—it’s hard to mess this up.

Then I decided to make 4-minute chocolate mousse. It did not take only 4 minutes. I messed up the meringue again, in a glass mixing bowl, which leads me to believe I need to use a metal one. And I managed to unintentially submerge the pot of melted chocolate into cold water about three times. In the end though, after 30+ minutes, it turned out pretty delicious, albeit a bit thick and not mousse-like at all. I guess you can’t REALLY mess up chocolate either—it tastes good regardless of what you do to it!

Yesterday I traded my little portable grill that had been gathering dust in the garage for my friend’s food processor. Now I have the means to make my own pesto, guac, and hummus!

As awesome as it is that Reid blogs avidly more than even I do, I think we’ve encountered an unforeseen issue: Who gets blogging dibs on our mutual activities? Do we Rock-Paper-Scissor-Lizard-Spock it? Or does Reid yield to me, as he should if he knows what’s good for him? In this case, he’s beaten me to the punch :(

Spent the Fourth of July weekend with a couple of friends in a cute pink and green cottage (with it’s own backyard vineyard!) in Healdsburg, Sonoma County, CA—the heart of California wine country—and it was gorgeous.

I like pictures to speak for themselves, so I will use this one from Reid’s stash:

1) Wine for Dummies. We went wine-tasting at Ferrari-Carano, Sbragia, Francis Ford Cappola, Clos du Bois, and Seghesio. I don’t know the first thing about wine. Well, okay—up until last year when I started traveling for work and eating really well in D.C., I didn’t know a thing about wine. I’m learning though!

2) Wine. We drank some of it and bought even more of it. The Seghesio Pinot Grigio and Clos du Bois Fleur Late Harvest Riesling were probably my favorite!

3) Ice pack. I tried road biking for the first time this weekend. When I learned that we would be biking, I imagined myself on a banana yellow beach cruiser bike, maybe with tassels and a bell—brrring-ring!—but no. I got a road bike because I was told I would have an easier time… LIES. We went for 33—THIRTY-THREE—miles. I also tried to bike up a 6-mile incline to Sonoma Lake. I’m in pain. But vineyard views were beautiful while biking by, and it’s a totally different experience than seeing them through a car window. Also, I went down a hill at 25 mph, so that was kind of awesome. (An aside: What’s with all these summer activities that require uphill climbs? Hiking, backpacking, biking—I can’t wait ’til winter; snowboarding is ALL downhill.)

4) Pajammas. Lots of relaxing, cooking, reading, and playing Bananagrams, Uno, and other card and board games. Good stuff :)

This picture is fairly representative of the entire trip.

Okay, the brevity of this post is not indicative of our overnight backpacking trip to Young Lakes, Yosemite. But, since I’m in a hurry to blog about Sonoma and I don’t like my blog posts to be out of sequence, I am now trying to capture the essence of the trip—which, as the blog title suggests, is death.

I exaggerate. But you know how I usually say that the worst mishaps make the best stories? Yeah, I regret it now, because each time it seems to get worse.

On the 14-mile Rancheria Trail in Hetch Hetchy, Yosemite last year, we ran out of water and it was 95-degrees F, with forest fires; on the 34-mile Skyline-to-the-Sea Trail from Saratoga to Santa Cruz last October, it rained unrelentlessly overnight and our tent flooded. And it was totally worth it.

Every time I do one of these overnight backcountry hiking-camping trips, I swear I’m never going to do them again. Yet, I have somehow gone on 3 of them in the past year and accumulated way too much backcountry gear that it only makes economical sense to keep going. (Right.)

At 10,000 feet above sea level, we ran into a lot of snow patches on the trail (in JUNE), while most of us were wearing shorts; we didn’t pack enough warm clothes since we had anticipated extremely warm weather like last year’s forest fires; and we all experienced altitude sickness to some degree, some worse than others.

Altitude sickness aside, the 6-mile trek wouldn’t have been bad at all and the trip was worth the view—a beautiful lake in a basin surrounded by rocky and snowy peaks—once we got to our campsite, even if I didn’t get to spend much time enjoying it while hyperventilating in my tent.

I didn’t get many good pictures at the lake, but head on over to Reid’s and Nelson’s for more blogging fun and pictures.

Some meadow. Gorgeous!

Good trip, but can’t say I’m not glad to have a month or so off before the next hiking trip! Half dome? Oy.