Goodbye

Bye, sweety, you´ll truly be missed. Love you.

When life hands you lemons…

Things aren´t going particularly smoothly for me right now, so I hope you forgive me for the lack of regular posts. Our family dog, Maia, seems to have a severe neurological problem and we still don´t know what it is, so I don´t know if she´ll make it or not (she´s not even 5 yet, by the way). And Phoebe has been having problems with her eyes (i need to take her to the vet yet again, but I´m pretty sure she has a cataract in her left eye and she´s only 7 months old).

I´m sure that for those of you who don´t have pets, this doesn´t sound like such a big deal, but when you love your dogs as much as my family and I do, it means there´s quite a bit of despair floating around.

So cooking, and writing, are taking a back seat right now… and it doesn´t help matters at all that I´m being cheap with buying new ingredients since not much work has been coming my way lately. Yes, I am officially the reincarnation of Debbie Downer, but I just wanted to explain why I haven´t been posting much lately.

But to cheer things up a little bit, I´m going to tell you about some kickass lemon bars I made a couple of weeks ago for a BA bloggers meeting (along with my staple brownie recipe and the chocolate-chip-yogurt cake I posted about almost a year ago). You have probably seen them before since Mary of Alpineberry first posted about them and then Helene adapted them. I used Helene´s version but used lemons instead of key limes and upped the amounts for the crust a bit since I knew that wouldn´t be enough for a 10×13 pan.

They are extremely easy to make, yield quite a few bars and the general concensus was that they were great, so I´m definitely making them again soon… since life has been handing me lemons lately, I might just use them!

Another round of egocentric ranting

Well, it seems that this one will add up to the recently growing voyeuristic section of my blog (I´m hoping the use of the word will increase blog traffic exponentially, because as you know, sex sells.)

My good friend Lis from La Mia Cucina tagged me for this meme about “7 random things about me” and I just couldn´t resist the temptation to go on and on about myself, it´s kind of an annoying treat I have, but I find that fortunately (or maybe unfortunately) many people share such egocentric tendencies, so I´m hoping no one minds.

So here we go, brace yourselves.

1. The nickname Pip doesn´t come from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, but from a tango called Pipistrela. The tango is basically about a working class girl who thinks she´s too beautiful and classy for her surroundings. When I was like 8 years old, a friend of Javier, my older brother, started calling me Pipistrela, i have no idea why really since I wasn´t standoffish or anything. But anyways, of course, I hated the nickname and started hating his guts, my brother thought it was a brilliant idea and started calling me Pipistrela, then when it got too long for his lazy ways, he shortened it to Pipis, even worse, and finally, many years later, when he had regained his love for me, he went for Pip, which I actually didn´t mind because it was pronounced with a degree of affection, something practically unheard of between siblings.

No one really calls me Pip but my brothers and a couple of friends, and of course, people here who think that´s my name, but remember, as long as you stick to Pip, we are ok.

2. Just as a clarification, I don´t just do baking as some people seem to believe (just don´t ask). Yes, muffins and cakes are a big part of what I´ve been publishing lately, and if we count bread as baking (which I don´t), then you are killing most of my later obsessions, but not all is lost. Just some examples from the archives: naan bread, tandoori chicken, quinoa with lime chile vinaigrette, milanesas with panko and parmesan cheese, won-ton ravioli, and home-made tagliatelle. Ok, I´m tired just from linking to all of that and now I need to find 5 more random things about me, damn it!

3 . I´ve always been a bit of a bookworm, though I don´t read as much lately. Picture a 9 year old girl asking for books on her birthday, not just a book or two, but a trip to the most gorgeous bookstore ever to explore and buy a bunch of books, I think they were 8 novels (about 200 pages each) and I read them in 6 days. Talk about fast reading! The wonderful thing about reading at that age is I was reading the classics without knowing they were classics, so I could just take them at face value. For instance, I loved Dickens, Wilde, Alcott and Jack London, yet I remember hating a Dostievski book I read. Ok, on to the next thing before my geeky nature becomes to blatant.

4. When I was a child I got along better with boys than with girls. I just couldn´t seem to grasp the endless fascination with playing house and went to play soccer or ride the bike with my brothers and some friends. My tendency didn´t go as far as my cousin´s, who cried because she wanted to imitate her brother and pee standing and couldn´t… but it´s something that still pops up once in a while when surrounded by women who are too prototypical and only think about clothes and diets.

5. I love dogs mmmm I guess you already knew that, but here are some new pics of Phoebe so you don´t realize I´m cheating.

6. This one isn´t about me, but about Argentina, but since I´m running out of ideas, this will have to do, today is Friends´day in Argentina, yes, we do have a day for everything here. I don´t particularly hate or love the day, I think the idea is good in theory, but I hate the commercial aspect of it all, I´m not buying some stupid stuffed bear or something just because. Yet it´s a good excuse to get together with the friends you see all the time, and even those you don´t see that often anymore. So happy friends´day to all my new and not so new virtual friends.

7. I don´t believe in God as such, but as Seinfeld would say “not that there´s anything wrong with that”. This would deserve a long explanation, but this is not a religious blog, so let´s just say I used to be a Catholic, I´m not anymore, and I´m fine with people believing what they want if it makes them happier as long as it doesn´t make them feel like they have to “convert” me. I´m even nice to Jehova witnesses when they ring the bell and try to save my poor tormented soul… well, there was one time when they woke me up at 10am on a Sunday when I probably wasn´t that gracious, but that doesn´t count.

Since I´ve seen this meme everywhere and I don´t want to burden people, I´m just going to tag 7 people in case they want to share some dirty little secrets and if anyone else wants to do it, just join in: Ilva, Madeleine, Diva, Frank, Nathan, Alan and Kristen.

growing pains… and joys

Due to popular demand (I´m looking at you, Lisa), I´m going to do a picture update on Phoebe.

Needless to say, she´s quite a handful at 3 and a half months, but she´s also a riot and makes me laugh all the time… well, not ALL the time, sometimes she makes me fret with some potty issues better not discussed here, or with jumping and biting a bit too much… puppy owners know exactly how it goes, sometimes you can´t believe how much you love them, sometimes you wonder if you were crazy for taking up such a huge responsability.

But mostly, it´s a fun ride, and we´ll start going to the park in just 2 weeks after her vaccines… oh yes, I´ll be able to make her tired for once! Or so I like to believe at least hahaha

Without further ado, a full slideshow for your enjoyment. (hrmp! the code isn´t working, so I´ll have to post the url instead until the people at WordPress solve my little problem).

Phoebe

(UPDATE: Problem “solved”, apparently, the only one I can use is slide.com, so here´s another slideshow, though I like the first one better.) 

For the no-puppy crowd, I promise to be back very soon with food posts.

rebirth

There are things that are just right… some come easy, some take a loooot of effort and patience. Puppie delivery 101 at the our household was of the latter variety.
In the last 3 days, I have slept a total of 12 hours and worried for about mmm 72 hahaha
As we had thought, we spent Christmas eve in the middle of Maia´s labor… which finished today at 10 a.m after a total 22 hours since the first symptoms started… my poor girl.
The good news is that after all the troubles, Maia gave birth to two beautiful female puppies. YES, 2 AND female. Just perfect given the possibilities. They are all chubby… I guess they got to eat like 8 puppies all by themselves, those are my girls!!! hahahaha
I don´t have any pictures to share with you yet because it has just been 10 hours and Maia is still feeling quite protective of the little babies, so I´m guessing she wouldn´t be too keen on the idea of picture taking lol
But as soon as I have some, I´m gonna “torture” you all with all their mighty cuteness. I mean, I love all things food… but puppies are above and beyond anything 🙂
And I know I still owe you all the details of the panettone experience, but that will wait a few days till I sleep all I have been missing and get some work done.

UPDATE: here are the first pics of the new babies 🙂

Bad day

Sorry, but I´m having a craptacular day, so I can´t sit down to write about food today. I have two recipes to discuss (apple cake and falafel), but they´ll have to wait a few days. No one seems to be reading this stuff anyway.

The thing is I woke up early today after sleeping for just 5 hours to take my dog Maia to the vet to get x-rays and see how the puppies were doing. Remember I told you there were at least 4 puppies in the ultrasound? Well, they don´t know what happened but now there is just 1 puppy, or 2 at most if for some reason the other puppy was placed exactly opossite, thus blocking the view. Yes, your eyes didn´t deceive you, just one freaking puppy! Now, how that is possible is pretty much beyond my imagination (the vet says she probably had a natural miscarriage and the body just reabsorbed the tissue, because there wasn´t any bleeding or anything.)

What I do know is that this is devastating news for me at this point. I mean, I am thoroughly aware that this is not the end of the world. But now I am left hoping that everything turns out fine with that one puppy and for Maia to be fine. And I´m 50-50 on my chances of taking a puppy home with me because I can´t have a male dog. So maybe we went through all this trouble for nothing.

Besides, I had this image in my head of playful puppies running in my parents´ backyard all clumsily, it was all going to be so much fun. But oh well, I have to get used to the idea and pray for the puppy to be healthy… and female.

Again, sorry for being such a downer, I´m just not in the mood for anything else at the moment and I wanted to update you.