2010 June | Rocky Mountain Woman

Archive for June, 2010

WEDDING PART III – PICS!

Written by Rocky Mountain Woman on June 24, 2010 – 5:43 am -

Here are a few photos of the wedding my friend & I caterered for my niece:

food

what I did when everyone went home

xxoo,

RMW

CUBAN SANDWICHES FOR LUNCH

Written by Rocky Mountain Woman on June 11, 2010 – 12:36 pm -

A long time ago I lived in South Florida. Every Friday one of my workmates and I headed to Little Havana for lunch. There was only one choice on the menu at the little place we always went to, Cuban Sanwiches. There are no Cuban Restaurants in Utah (at least as far as I know), so I sometimes recreate my Florida Friday Lunch by making unauthentic Cuban Sandwiches. You can’t really make authentic Cuban Sandwiches without authentic Cuban bread, but these work in a pinch:

Start with some plain old seeded hot dog buns sliced diagonally

slice some dill pickles

and some ham & roast pork (yes two meats, shaddup, it’s Friday!.)

Butter the tops of the rolls & then layer the pork and ham on the sandwich

add some Provolone cheese

and the pickles

I like lots of pickles and then a little drizzle of plain old yellow mustard.

At this point, if you have a panini press it’s pretty simple, just grill them in the press. Out here in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains, we don’t have fancy schmanzy panini presses, so we just heat up our weighted grill in an iron skillet slowly with a little melted butter

ok, a lot of melted butter – Shaddup, it’s Friday!

When everything is warm, put the sandwiches in the skillet

and cover with the hot press

this is the hardest part – you have to wait until the cheese is melted and the bread is toasted. I find that a glass of Pinot Noir or one of those fancy new Rose’ wines helps with this part (it’s Friday, leave me alone!)

Sip the wine until the glass is empty, refill the glass and by then you should have this

ah caramba, almost as good as being in Miami (without the humidity).

Ricky: ”Lucy’s acting crazy.

Fred: “Crazy for Lucy or crazy for ordinary people?”

Happy Friday!

xxoo,

RMW

ROCKY MOUNTAIN WOMAN BUILDS HER DREAM HOME PART VI

Written by Rocky Mountain Woman on June 10, 2010 – 5:46 am -

After a few days the HOA figured out what was wrong with the water and got it back on! Whew! My horses and I and my little dog settled into a routine of me going to work and the animals hanging around the travel trailer all day being lazy, waiting for me to come home to walk, feed, brush, whatever…

My little trailer was cramped cozy, there was a convenience store in town that made sandwiches and a restaurant that did breakfast. Cooking or even eating anything in the trailer usually meant that the mice invaded it immediately afterward, so I tried to avoid doing that or even taking a shower there since it had a very small waste water holding tank that was a pain to empty. I got a membership to a local gym and went there every night after work to take a shower. I think the people who ran it were convinced I was a homeless person, and, I guess in a way, I was!

When I moved into the trailer, I gave away all of my old furniture and most of everything else I owned. I rented a small storage unit and when it was filled, I decided that everything else had to go. It was an amazing feeling of freedom to get rid of all that junk! It was also a little disorienting after years of kids and homework and cleaning the house, to just have me to worry about.

I made an appointment with the architect to go over the plans one more time. The house was just too big! I wanted to downsize, not upsize. I was enjoying the fact that I could clean the whole trailer in 10 minutes. We had a long discussion where he explained to me that the cheap part of the house was the part that was underneath it, i.e. the foundation and basement and that the expensive part was the part above ground. It just didn’t make sense to build the house smaller, especially since most of the houses in the area were larger. So my architect talked me into keeping the house the way I had designed it and he had drawn it.

In the meantime, I had a few meetings with Dick the contractor to go over the last few details of his bid. We applied together for the permit from the county and I closed on the construction loan. Dick told me in one of our meetings that the county usually takes about six weeks to grant the building permit and no one ever really waits for the permit to start work. It sounded a little fishy to me, but I had never done this before and he had so I decided to trust his advice. I was so impatient to get started that six weeks might as well been six years! Anyway a few days later when I got home there was a backhoe on the property and the beginning of the hole that would be my basement.

I called Dick and asked him if he would mind putting in a real driveway so I could get my horse trailer in and out easier and also so it would be easier to pull the travel trailer out so I could empty the waste storage tanks. So a few nights later I came home to this

Wow! Life instantly became easier, hay deliveries became a possibility (up until now I’d been buying hay a few bales at a time and bringing it in in my pickup).

Dick assured me that he had a few weeks work on another project and he’d start pouring the foundation in two weeks.

So I spent the next few weeks working during the day and taking photos in the evenings and on weekends. I found a laundrymat with a restaurant across the street from it in Park City and that became my new Saturday morning destination for breakfast and clean clothes.