My Valentine

Mr X loves me!

Snowshoeing in Rabbit Ears Pass

On our way home from Steamboat we stopped at the top of Rabbit Ears Pass to go snowshoeing. It was 9 degrees (F) outside. We had a bottle of water stashed in Mr X's backpack and about an hour or so into our hike we pulled it out to have a drink - it was half frozen already. Mr X had to poke a hole in the neck and then shake it up like crazy to break up the ice enough so we could actually drink from it. 

We were essentially making fresh tracks as you can see the previous tracks are nearly covered with new snow. It is exhausting to make fresh tracks.

When we started out we were both pretty chilly.

Once we got going we quickly started roasting

 

Mr X, catching his breath and waiting for me (I'm a bit slower, as usual).

 

 

Mr X trudging up, making nice tracks for me to follow.

Heading back the way we came, using our old track, thank goodness!

 It was fun, but maybe next time we'll try it with cross country skis instead. We'll see.

Snowboarding @ Steamboat Again

Mr X and I fell in love with Steamboat last winter. We have been eagerly looking forward to enjoying Steamboat again in the winter for nearly a year now. Finally last weekend we headed up there to play. And we got really lucky/blessed because it dumped snow before we got there and while we were there so we were, once again, able to play in fresh "champagne powder". Yay! 

I did a bad job of capturing the fun on camera. I was always either too busy or too exhausted to pull out my phone and snap a few pictures. This is really all I managed to get. Sorry! I'll try harder next time, I promise! 

You have to take off your board/skis to hike up to this spot, but it's worth it. We do it over and over again because it's so great. Every time I'm doing the hiking part I'm thinking, "I'm NEVER doing this again!" and then once I get to the top, catch my breath and float down the beautiful untouched powder I think, "I HAVE to do this again!"

Our favorite run is technically out of boundaries and therefore not really a run.

Mr X is antsy to get going here.

Since I failed to get good pictures of what this place looks like with my own camera I found some photos courtesy of the interweb of how beautiful Steamboat is:

A view of the slopes from the main street.

A view of the surrounding landscape from the gondolas.

So much powder everywhere!

Riding in Aspen trees is my favorite and there are loads here.

This is exactly what the aspen branches look like after a good snow storm here - it's beautiful!

 

I'm already looking forward to our next Steamboat weekend.

Adventures in Cheese Making

Last year for Christmas my MIL and FIL gave me a goat cheese making kit because they thought it was right up my alley. It was. Here's a recent attempt at making my very own goat cheese:
 

The cooking of the goat milk, after which you add the citric acid, which is the catalyst for the curdling process.

I was really skeptical as I gazed into the pot of simmering goat milk - it certainly didn't look like it would EVER turn into cheese. Then after I added the citric acid and let it sit 10-ish minutes, I came back, peered in again and decided that for sure this wasn't going to work. But hey, I might as well see it to the end, right? So I dubiously poured the contents into a cheesecloth lined colander and then left it to drain. I came back later and to my sheer delight I found a lump of goat cheese left in the colander. I then added the required amount of salt, mixed it in and then filled two molds with as much of the cheese as I could. just wrapped the rest in the cheese cloth in and let them both continue draining in the refrigerator overnight. This was the final result:

It made A LOT of goat cheese. It was sooooo delicious too!

I used some of the cheese in a lemon goat cheese pasta dish I made the next day. Mr X and I ate some plain and then the large round of cheese I've frozen to see how it fares in that state. I've frozen cheese before, but most don't turn out well once they are thawed, in my experience. We'll see how this does - I just couldn't bear to watch my precious homemade cheese mold from my inability to eat it fast enough. (I know, for those of you that know how much I LOVE cheese, the ideas of me not being able to consume large quantities of cheese in a short time is shocking. *shrug*)

The Verdict: Making Goat Cheese At Home Work And It Is Delicious!

Stock Show Excursion

In mid-January Mr X and I went to the Denver Stock Show to check it out. I guess it's a pretty big deal here in Colorado so we thought we should see what all the fuss was about. 

We watched a show with trained pot belly pigs - weird but amusing.
We saw a chainsaw woodcarving demonstration - interesting and loud.
We went to a big, fancy rodeo - always entertaining.
And we perused the show animals - my favorite part. You should see them groom these animals for the judging - it's like an animals spa complete with hot showers, hair cuts, hair styling (using giant blow dryers, some sort of hair spray stuff, etc) and brushing/combing. All of the animals really do look like they are really enjoying all of the pampering. It was funny. The best part though was seeing how impressively HUGE some of the animals were. Some of the returning champs even had plaques and ribbons hanging above their stalls.

I didn't get many photos of the animals but the guys below impressed me enough that I overcame my photography laziness and tried to snap a few: The Texas Longhorns and the Brahma Bulls. These were monstrously huge in person!

Even though the stock show & rodeo were interesting and well done, I'll probably not go again due to the sheer number of people there. It was maddening. Awful. By the end of the day there was nothing more I wanted than to retreat to the foothills and hide from all humans except Mr X. I couldn't get out of there quickly enough. That being said - I'm glad I attended this event once.

Food Experiments

In case you weren't aware, Mr X and I were lucky enough to source our meat this year from a small "farm" - My Dad! It was our first year doing this (for both us and my Dad) so we weren't really sure how everything was going to turn out. For my Dad's part, the animals were raised well and happy so subsequently the meat was of incredibly good quality. Mr X and I really didn't have a great idea of how we wanted our meat processed at butchering time. So we did the best we could on that part - we had the majority of our meat left as is, but cut up in the traditional manner.

Since we received all this meat we've spent a lot of time experimenting with it.

Here are a couple of examples:

Ham. We ordered our hams cured - the only things that we had cured. Next year we plan to cure at least one of them ourselves. Anyway, we decided to then enhance our ham further by smoking it on our Traeger and glazing it with a maple-y glaze.

Honeybaked hams are delicious. I honestly wasn't sure that our little ham would measure up. But with the superior meat, a good cure, and Mr X's expertise, this ham was even better than a Honeybaked ham.

Next up - Bacon. 

We had the butcher leave the pork belly alone so that we could try making our own bacon. 

This is what we did:

1) Cured it with a mix of curing salt and maple sugar for 7 days. 

2) Washed the cure off  and then let it "rest" in the refrigerator for a day.

3) Smoked it for 3 hours using applewood chips.

4) Let it cool and rest in the refrigerator overnight.

5) Ate it for breakfast.

 

 It was the best bacon I've ever eaten. I'm not kidding. So delicious!

Lost Photos from SD

Mr X had a few photos on his phone from when he came out to visit me one weekend in San Diego last month. The pictures were really nice so I felt it would be a shame not to post them.