Spring is here! Eric was all prepared to talk about how spring will be here really soon and we're doing an Early Spring Salad to celebrate when Charisse pointed out that spring came last weekend. Swing and a miss. At least we got that sorted out before the post. The early spring part apparently has to do with the ingredients we used, spring onions and radishes are among the first crops up for harvest in the new year and they are tasty. Oh yeah, and more lemons in here too from the great lemon harvest of 2011. So what are we doing with Spring officially here, grass growing in the backyard and living in California? Staying inside and working on the stuff around the internets because it's been raining for the last week. Raining hard. The kind of rain that makes you never want to leave the house because you can go

As of Sunday night, we were officially wiped out. We're back in full project mode, working on the house, the blog and life in general. For starters, all of our tabs can take comments too! We've also launched our "Home and Garden" tab, where we'll keep you updated on our projects around the house and how our garden is doing. We're also getting ready to launch our new photo platform on Smugmug.com. Right now we are hosting all our images on our Flickr account, which was great when we were new and scrambling to get viewers but we've outgrown what Flickr has to offer, so now we're switching platforms. We plan on rolling out our first Smugmug hosted post later this week, so keep your eyes peeled! Hmm... what else have we been up to, oh yeah! The Backyard! That one teensey little task thats taken us 2 years to

If you remember back a ways, Charisse's mom Monica's lemon tree went a little crazy and we ended up with a bunch of lemons. Charisse's Grandmother's Meyer tree has so far produced a TON of lemons, and thats just the ones we've taken. We ended up with around 200 lemons last weekend and that was our second trip over there, the Butera family has just gone completely bananas! We mean lemons! We've got so many lemons we are literally scrambling to use them before they go bad. Lemon drop martinis, martinis with a lemon twist. Lemonade. Frozen Lemonade. We used quite a bit for the lemon curd we are featuring here, and still have a bag leftover. Eric thinks that the funniest part of this whole thing is that Charisse's dad Pat hate lemon, lemons and anything lemon flavored yet he is constantly surrounded by them. Sometimes Eric is easily amused. We've

Last weekend we wanted to sit down and prepare a really nice meal as an entry for the upcoming Foodbuzz.com blogging competition. Eric went to Lowes first thing in the morning then we both went to Costco, looking for something to cook. We got home around noon with this perfect whole wild caught Alaskan salmon, invited some friends over and put together and planned a whole day of cleaning, working on the house (new screen door) and cooking (and eating!). Seven hours later, the house was not any cleaner, the front door was taken all apart and pretty much everyone was grumpy. The night looked like it had hopped on the fast lane of the Highway to Disaster. And it was speeding.  Then the salmon came out of the oven and the smell of perfectly cooked fish seasoned with lemon and thyme turned the tide. That night we sat down around the

Nothing goes better with cake than new toys. Right. What? It turns out Eric is obsessed with finding reasons to by new toys. Tools, gadgets, gizmos, every project or endeavor seems to need just one more. Want to put new floors in? Have to buy a nail gun. Fix the fence, need a new saw. Fix the other fence, gotta go get a different saw. Start a food blog? Must get a new camera, new lens, new flash, new tripod, new computer, another new camera, one more lens... and you get the picture. Sometimes the new toy tool costs more than the rest of the project but ends up in the cart because it has to. This is exactly the kind of thing that puts a real gleam in Eric's eye whenever theres a new project or something gets broken, which is exactly what happened to our camera flash last week. We were getting ready to start shooting

Earlier this month we celebrated our second wedding anniversary with a dinner and some sparkling wine that Eric's parents dropped off. Eric likes to joke that we ran to Vegas and came home married, but in reality we spent a year planing it, and it was spectacularly fun. Fun was actually the key, we wanted everyone who came to really enjoy themselves something that doesn't always happen at weddings. It was pretty exciting to see everyone who came, about 100 of our closest friends and family on both sides. The Wynn Hotel, where we had the ceremony and reception was really good to us and we had 4 full days of fun. The hotel had a really pretty outdoor venue and the coordinator there was wonderful. The wedding is actually a topic that still comes up at dinner parties and BBQs, so much so that everyone keeps insisting that we get

We're not usually huge fans of deep fried food. Baked, grilled and skillet cooked are our specialties but every now and again we come across something lifted out of fry oil that just screams EAT ME. Twinkies are not a part of this group. On the other hand, deep fried lemons? It sounded fun and now we've decided that from here on out these are a must eat. We came across this idea while we were figuring out what to do with the Farnsworths' bumper crop of lemons as their tree is a strange mutant that produces about 6.4 billion lemons each year. Not that having more lemons that you know what to do with is bad mind you, but you can only have so many lemon drops in a week. Ok, maybe you can have one more than that, but that still leaves more on the tree. We preserved some

Tuesday and Thursday nights are typically Eric's night to cook, which isn't a bad thing its just... time consuming. Lets just say that "multitasking" is not used in his vocabulary next to "I can" or "I'm good at" very often. So when Eric cooks, eating later in the evening (8:30 anyone?) tends to be more common than not. Such was the case last night when he got home all excited to start on a recipe he found, and realized halfway through that we were out of a great many things. This is actually okay as the phrase "lets just wing it" is a very common phrase in the Eric Lexicon. Halfway through, the dish was starting to sound more like a Martini than a dinner so a few of those got added to the meal too. In fact a cold martini is one of Eric's favorite meals.The recipe here calls for fresh spinach, but sometimes

This recipe caught Charisse's eye a while back and its been sticking around in her head since then. We've never heard of such a thing as using preserved lemons, but after some digging we found that they are quickly becoming a fad among many restaurants. With her mom's lemon tree in full swing producing more lemons that we could make lemon drops out of, we decided not to pass this up this opportunity and ran out to grab a couple of mason jars for this experiment. After a lot of internet research we found that preserved lemons can be done two ways: plan, or with spices. Since we've never done either we preserved both to see the difference. After 2 months of sitting and curing in the refrigerator the once tart and tough skin should be soft and edible. The skins are then used in various recipes and drinks, especially