Chocolate Love & Vegetable Color

In this context, I am not so witty as the master to entertain you with my kitchen failures, suffice it to say that as wonderfully tasty as salted butter caramel concoctions are, I have ruined enough of them in the kitchen this week (in terms of texture and presentation, not taste) to conclude that I am not mastering my time as a new mother as well as Béa, and to satisfy my craving for salted butter caramel for a little while (or at least until I get in the kitchen again). Now that the little gal is here, I'm suddenly so inspired to bake, cook and blog up a storm, but I'm irrationally nervous about her needing me every time I go into the kitchen and as a result my mind is only half on what I'm doing in there. Must be that whole as soon as you can't do something, you desperately want to be doing it again, and I have been neglecting this blog so.

That said, my absence from the interwebs does not mean that I don't eat or that I don't enjoy eating these days (far from it, in fact I don't see these extra pounds vanishing as fast as I'd like them to, but not eating whatever I want is as appealing as shoving a fork in my eye, so they'll just have to take their sweet time going away). So, to console me from my pastry failures and for my first Mother's Day (I have step-children but he meant it in the you-made-this-baby way), A. made me pick out a pound of chocolates at the La Maison du Chocolat counter at Horrid's yesterday while he went to the meat counter. I picked a few of just about everything they had except for the alcohol-filled chocolates (while we love us some booze in other instances, neither A. nor I have ever cared for alcohol in chocolates). I know, my life is hard.

In a nod to that most brilliant ingredient photographer out there Haalo, I took pictures of some of the lovely colorful vegetables that A. brought home to make my Mother's Day dinner. Of course I didn't do them justice the way Haalo does, but since I'd never seen purple asparagus before and it is actually a very-short lived veg (in season 6 weeks of the year), and I often overlook round courgettes but these were such a gorgeous lemony color, here they are for your (perhaps) viewing pleasure. A. made us Moroccan meatballs with raita, sauteed horsehoe mushrooms and yellow courgettes, and grilled the asparagus (which were so loaded with flavor, I'm hunting them down every year from now on). It was delish. I love my husband.
Happy belated Mother's Day to all you mothers out there.