Last year around this time my local Ralph’s Market sent out a little brochure with a great appetizer recipe, Bacon Wrapped Dates with Choriso & Goat Cheese. This year their brochure included these Cheesy Puff Pastry Pinwheels, which are stuffed with just about every ingredient that makes your tastebuds sing: artichokes, feta, kalamata olives, roasted red peppers and Gruyere. Plus spinach, so you can feel healthy. All rolled up in puff pastry, sliced and baked into really delicious pinwheel appetizers that can be eaten warm right out of the oven or at room temperature. It’s up to you.

I think these would be wonderful to nibble on while watching the Superbowl next Sunday, February 3, being played in New Orleans. Since I live in Los Angeles, I’ll be rooting for the California team. Yea! San Francisco 49ers! Good luck to the Baltimore Ravens, too. I am looking forward to Alicia Keys singing the National Anthem, and Beyonce at Half Time. So about 3 PM I’ll be sitting in front of my TV watching those really fun commercials and thinking about all of you waiting in anticipation for the kick-off, just like me.

The chopped ingredients are rolled up in the puff pastry and sliced into 3/4-inch slices. The pieces fall out, but just stick them right back in and keep rolling.

The slices may not be pretty and the little pieces are still falling out, but persevere, it all turns out ok in the end.

Here are the finished Pinwheels cooling on their rack, looking so cheesy and delicious!

Our ordeal with the roofing disaster and debris finally came to a close a couple of weeks ago. The lawsuits were settled finally and now we are going to move. I haven’t moved for 18 years and I have forgotten what a big job it is. A lot of our stuff is still covered with roofing debris and will have to be cleaned before we can pack.

Like my hundreds of cookbooks, which are covered with little black rocks, black sand and microscopic dust. So today I started vacuuming them, wiping them down with wet paper towels and then dry paper towels. I haven’t really looked at my cookbooks since I started my blog. Maybe occasionally for reference, but not to really read them. So today I actually picked up and opened about half of my cookbooks. Each and every one. It was such a nostalgic trip, almost like a reunion with old friends that I hadn’t seen for years, but had enjoyed so much in the past and had wonderful memories of our times together. Anyone seeing me caress the pages of a cookbook and sigh would have probably thought I was a little dingy.

Tomorrow I will go and pick up a lot of boxes from the moving company and start putting the books in them. I am looking forward to unpacking them in the new house and putting them in a logical order in the bookcases. I have stacks of cookbooks all over my house, so I will get to incorporate them into those already on the shelves. A wonderful OCD project awaits me.

So I am going to take a little vacation from my blog so I can pack and move. I will be back in a couple of weeks with some fun recipes that I have in mind. In fact, I was going to make some Black and White Checkerboard Cookies today and photograph them. I went so far yesterday as to making the vanilla and chocolate dough, which was chilling in the refrigerator today. But then I thought to myself that I better put the dough in the freezer and get to packing. It will keep just fine until I get in the new house.

I’ll talk to you soon.
Lynne xo

Duck Carnitas with Chipotle Blackberry Sauce

I am on my way up into the mountains east of Los Angeles to attend Camp Blogaway Food Blogger Bootcamp for three days. From Friday noon until Sunday morning I will be immersed in food blogging lectures, foodie friends, eating and talking with 90 other food bloggers. I can hardly wait!

I went to Camp last year as a newbie food blogger, so this year I know all the fun and interesting things that are going to happen. Check out the Camp Blogaway website and see the sponsors and lecturers, and a list of all the attendees. Very impressive.

So you may be asking, what is that photo of Duck Carnitas with Chipotle Blackberry Sauce doing on the top of this post? Well, the first night, Patti of Worth the Whisk, the organizer of Camp Blogaway, is going to do a Parade of Bloggers. Each blogger is going to be introduced, and if she follows past Camp experience, she will be putting the home page of each blog on a big movie screen so we can all see who’s who. So I wanted a photo of mine that was very photogenic and everyone could see what I was about. I love that photo that I took at Baleen and posted about September 20, 2010.

Here are some photos I took last year at Camp Blogaway showing how everyone parks their cars pointing down the road in case we all need to make a fast get-away. Like a forest fire, for instance. You can see the inside of the lodge where we will be spending all our time with the lectures and eating. There is the big fire place in the lodge to sit around and make S’Mores.

These were the bunk beds in my cabin. It looks a little rustic, but the cabins have hot showers and are heated. Back in our cabin at the end of the night, my cabin mates and I talked food blogging well into the wee hours. So much fun.

And just in case, one more photo of mine, Mirepoix Meatloaf. I’ll talk to you all when I get back. Have a great weekend yourself. Bye.

Food Photo Project on a Table in the Living Room

First of all, I want to thank everyone for your concern, well wishes, prayers and offers of help. It has meant so much to me to know you are out there sending me your positive energy. Thank you, dear friends.

Friday, November 12th, was the day scheduled to start putting the new roof on my house. The week before, the roofing contractor had visited me, looked around inside my home, and said, “There might be a little dust.” Well, to me that meant there also might be no dust. I figured I might have a feather duster in my near future.

So at 8:30 AM Friday, when I left for work, the take-off roofing guys were on the roof with square-edge shovels, breaking up the old roof, shoveling it onto big squares of plastic, and walking them across an improvised walkway from the roof over to an immense shipping container on a big truck that was parked at the curb with the top open. There it was dumped into the container. The debris consisted of, not only the old roof, but 2-3 inch rocks, compost from a 4-inch layer of old leaves, bird droppings, fallout from the nearby oil refinery and LAX, and who knows what from the last 58 years. I waved good-bye and drove off.

When I got home around 3:00, the take-off guys and the shipping container were gone. The new roof supplies had been deposited on the roof and a new roofing crew was getting started. They were nailing rolls of what looked like thick paper across the whole surface. I waved, and they smiled and waved back. Three guys and lots of pounding.

I stuck my key in the lock, opened the door, walked in and gasped, Oh my god!! I walked around from room to room, wringing my hands, saying, Oh my god, over and over. Every surface in my home was covered with roofing debris, from black oily dust to crystalline black sand and rocks. Stripes of black debris ran across every surface and the carpet. It was beyond my ability to understand what had happened. Everything in my house had been destroyed.

My house has slanted, tongue and groove, open beam ceilings which were popular in the 1950’s when it was built. This is Southern California and back then little beach houses didn’t have attics that were insulated. My ceiling is also the roof. The roofing materials are attached to the top side of the ceiling boards. Not only had debris fallen through the tongue and groove, but the take-off guys shovels had broken through the “tongue” and created holes open to the blue sky in every room. Big piles of debris had fallen through those holes. My bed. My desk. My grand piano. My antique white sofa. My kitchen floor was completely black. A big black stripe ran across the top of my refrigerator. My oriental carpet was black. My cookbooks had black dust and little pebbles all over them. It was a nightmare.

I called the roofing contractor in San Diego and told him what had happened. He said he was sorry, that I should call a Molly Maids cleaning company to help clean up the dust and he would reimburse me. I explained it wasn’t just dust, but piles of horrible black debris. Everywhere. He said he would pay to clean it up.

(To be continued)