A March Hodgepodge

Springtime along the Colorado Front Range.  The sun shines bright and warm, the foothills have a dusting of snow, and the winds still blow cold at times.  We often see clouds rising up in the early morning when the sun shines on the frozen ground, and although we get "chance of rain" warnings on our Alexa device the rain never comes.  This winter the frequent Pacific storms that have besieged California with torrential snow and rain have also traveled west to bring the Colorado Rocky Mountains beneficial snowfall. Steamboat Springs recently announced they have had over 500 inches of snow this season at their summit, and SW Colorado San Juan mountains reported its best snowfall in almost 30 years!

It was exciting to fly over the beautiful and rugged San Juan Mountains after we flew back to Denver from San Diego in early February when we were returning from our Disney Wonder Cruise.  We have visited towns in these mountains in the past ten years--Telluride, Ouray, Ridgway, Lake City, and Creede, and I've blogged about them all, but seeing these 14,000-foot mountains from a birds-eye view from an airplane window was an unexpected thrill for me.

One of the first wildflowers that we see in Spring on the Colorado foothills is the miniature but hardy Starlily  (Leucocrinum montanum)  It is always exciting to spot it on a hike when it first appears in March. 

With Easter approaching in a few weeks I already prepared and froze a couple trays of Manicotti.-- click here--for my recipe that I posted many years ago.

I make them in a small Wearever brand frying pan I've had for my entire marriage.  It makes small five-inch shells which are just the right size for us as we serve them as a "primo" or first course after appetizers and before the "second" which is usually ham, leg of lamb, or both, depending upon how many guests we have for dinner.  Everyone goes home with trays full of leftovers, so nothing goes to waste.

Gumbo is one of our favorite soups and I made it recently on a chilly breezy March day. I first tasted gumbo soup when my husband and I first visited New Orleans in 2007, when we dined at Paul Prudhomme's restaurant "K Pauls Louisiana Kitchen. I was so infatuated with his food that upon returning home I purchased his cookbook "Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen" and I've been making his Seafood and Andouille Gumbo ever since. You can see the recipe on this blog link--the only additions I make now are adding a 12oz bag of frozen okra and some File Powder to the soup as a thickener.

Sadly, when researching to write this blog post,  I learned that K Paul's Louisiana Kitchen restaurant closed in 2020 after 41 years.  Paul Prudhomme passed away in 2015 and a niece and her husband were keeping his restaurant open, serving his famous Cajun cuisine, but closures during the pandemic lead to its demise. Happily, his line of Magic Seasonings Blends is still in production and a pleasure to use to add a New Orleans dash of flavor to any dish.

Last winter I experimented with saving tomato and pepper seeds and growing them by a sunny window. I had great success and decided to do the same this March. They are all sprouting and soon I will replant each plant into a larger container.  When the danger of frost is over --usually late May here, I will take the individual plants pots outside for a couple hours each day to "harden them off" and then when they are acclimated to the outdoors I'll plant them in large pots on my patio, where they will be enclosed with a chicken wire fence to prevent the deer from eating them. Last summer, by late August, and early September I harvested plentiful tomatoes, Calabrian Red Peppers, and Hatch Style Peppers. This year I'm growing the same and adding Poblano Peppers. It will be fun watching them grow and I'll record their progress here.

Our daughter had a business trip to Connecticut and she was able to take a day to visit The Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, and took the photos above.  The celebrated author, Mark Twain, sat at the desk in the photo to write his famous novels.  Mark Twain and his family enjoyed what the author would later call the happiest and most productive years of his life in their Hartford home.

So, it seems fitting to finish this post with one of Mark Twain's famous quotes:

"In the Spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside 24 hours." 

Mr. Twain, you sum up Colorado's weather perfectly!

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