Not all about the fish this time.

So, you know what I've been doing aside from working all the live long day and then making room in the liquor cabinet for new gin?

ONLY COOKING MY FACE OFF IS WHAT.

Yeah. I've cooked some stuff recently that was rul good. 

And I baked a thing that was rul good. 

And I have a crush on a new vegetable. 

Because that's a thing a person can have - a crush on a vegetable. It's called love, people, and I encourage you to try it.

In my case, I have Bubba and Jada and life and this muther fucking parsley:

It's as big as my fork, milder than your typical parsley and, after a light frost, is just a little bit sweet so that you go, "WHATTHA YUM?" when you first try it.

Everyone, I'd like you to meet the fourth member of our love square - Giant of Italy parsley. 

And before you get all, "You can't love parsley like you love Bubba..." and other nonsensical shit, do remember that I tend to get a little overexcited about vegetables. 

I mean, right?

You know I sort of have a thing for growing vegetables. 

And I have tasted a lot of types of parsley and grown a lot of types of parsley, so it's not like I just tried it for the first time and declared it the soul-fillingest parsley of all time. 

It's totally not like that. 

Because, until I just had this parsley the other night with butternut squash ravioli I awesomely froze for myself a few months ago, I just grew parsley because it was an herb I chopped up and put in the base of every soup and meatloaf and meatballs and a billion other things I make because parsley is a standard.

If by "Standard", I mean "BITCHIN", which I do.

Or am I the only one that puts parsley in everything? Is this maybe a personal problem I have? Is it possible that I don't really want to lay down my life for this variety of parsley now that I've enjoyed its riches in my mouth which sounds really really bad?

No, none of that can be right.

Mostly because it sounds absolutely lewd.

And, while I do love this parsley, I don't want to, like, marry it or something.

I just want to eat it with every meal. 

Or whatever. I'm sort of a slut for food lately because I keep getting really good stuff from work and then from my garden and then my lovely Bubba who announced that he'd like a chocolate cake which prompted me to (accidentally) find the world's most incredible chocolate cake recipe.

So yeah, fuck vegetables for one second - chocolate cake.

That's the real story here.

Just you try to look away. IT'S AN UNDOABLE THING.

Firstly, I'll warn you that the recipe is from Cook's Illustrated, so while 100% awesome and worth it, you need to be prepared to dirty every tool in your kitchen twice and have to do dishes in between projects.

Because this recipe is a total project.

Like, I had a strategy going into it (make the frosting first, put it in the fridge to firm up, THEN bake the cake, etc)(hey, that's a strategy!)(Shut up.) and there was proprietary shopping involved and then there was lying down with a cocktail involved after I finished baking and frosting this cake. 

Sort of took it out of me, all of that mid-stream dish doing. 

But I can say that it's the best chocolate cake I've ever tasted, Bubba nearly flushed his wedding ring down the toilet when he took his first bite and declared he loved it more than anything in the world and even my not-sweets-eating boss was "stoked" on it. 

The only things I did off-recipe were to bake it in a 9x12 glass dish as a sheet cake rather than as cupcakes, not try to fill the thing awkwardly with ganache and then I put a bit of this awesome vanilla bean baker's salt on top. 

Then Bubba pledged his love to me (as long as the cake is joining us) for the rest of his life. Again. Because he did already do that once when we got married. Before I learned how to make this cake. So, like, I know he didn't just do it for the cake.

Can you imagine?

Anyway, I am also going to shill like the shilliest shiller from shilltown right now:

HOLY SHILL

Yeah. I grew that. 

And, FOR TESTING PURPOSES ONLY, I brought it home from the farm to make sure that it was, um, shelf stable - yeah, that's it - and also edible. 

"Edible" is the lamest word for this basil.

Then I felt crazy and like a seasonal cheater when I actually went into a grocery store (FRIGHT) and bought sweet red bell peppers. 

In winter. 

Like a total traitor. 

I mean, they're still organic and they're actually from our ranches in Mexico, but eating bell peppers in winter feels wrong and naughty.

So, spank me. Because my enchilada peppers are THE FUCKING MOST.

At least I put some of the cilantro from work on top. Ripped it out of the ground myself earlier in the day. 

And also some of these chives.

Gee. Hope there's enough for the harvests.

So yeah, cooking, working, eating, skiing Utah, riding and running the Santa Cruz mountains, emptying and refilling the liquor cabinet, repeating - that's what's been going on over here. 

Lest you think all we do is fuck with the fish.

Come at me, bro.

Everything I said last time except the opposite.

It's kinda sweet how I naively think I've figured out a few things in life. 

I mean, I have learned to wear proper shoes when shoveling so that I don't bruise my arches, how to light the furnace so that I don't blow my face off and how to hive a colony of bees so that they don't swarm the neighborhood.

These things I know how to do. 

And I KNOW that I know how to do them because I've done them wrong a bunch of times (or one tragic time) and then right a bunch of times (or a few triumphant times), so I feel confident when I say that YES, I know how to, like, do that kind of shit.

But the funny thing that I haven't yet learned how to do is how to NOT say I know how to do something until I've first done it successfully once and then repeated the thing successfully again.

That's what I should do.

But instead, I just go declaring victory when victory hasn't yet even been proven a single time.

I'd make a terrible scientist. All declaring YAY! I've found the cure for cancer! after just making Kool-Aid in a flask or something.

Anyway, today's lessons in Finny Doesn't Know Shit About Shit are as follows:

Dr. Fischoeder's Cleaning Lady, Consuela, doesn't clean a damn thing.

In fact, she makes more of a mess than Dr. Fischoeder and it's pissing me off.

Is that Consuela I see growing on the treasure chest? Why yes it is.

It would seem that Consuela is colonizing the fish bowl. Edging Dr. Fischoeder out perhaps or perhaps just making herself at home and commandeering items that she deems to be her own.

I take.

So all of that nonsense about the moss ball being "like a cleaning lady for the fish bowl" was complete crap. 

Not that I really announced to the world that it was The Truth And Nothing Else, but I did repeat what I'd been told by the dude at the aquarium store and that was a mistake. 

Don't always trust the stoned freak working at the aquarium store. Noted.

And then there are the paperwhites.

Damnitall if I didn't think I'd finally won the battle of These Things Fall All Over The Fucking Place just a little too close to the paperwhites so that they heard me and then rebelled.

WE WIN. AGAIN. STILL.

Yeah. If these flowers weren't so fucking beautiful and didn't smell like heaven and weren't being so hilarious, I probably would have ripped them out of their vases just for mocking me and making me a liar, but they are and they do and so I haven't.

Can't fall over in a vase this tall you say? IS THAT A FACT?

And while this has nothing to do with me being wrong, but more the seasons being off or our tree being absurd, our tree thinks it's fall.

January, November - what's the diff?

I mean, who couldn't use a little fall in their winter?

Even Jada's confused by this tree.

Yeah. Nice try out there, awesomely beautiful but crazy tree.

And then, because I I was feeling bakey, I made the best chocolate cake of my entire life last night.

Also the cutest napkins ever, courtesy of my delightful sister who knows me very well. 

Yeah, if you're looking for a chocolate cake recipe and none of your good-for-nothing cookbooks that claim to have all the recipes in the world in them (Hi. Joy of Cooking. Not as thorough as expected.) have a recipe for just plain chocolate cake, go to Cook's Illustrated and be free.

Thankfully, Bubba had the bright idea for me to scan all of my Cook's Illustrateds into my tablet and then start using that for my recipes, so I just had to search my tablet for "chocolate cake" instead of leafing through a thousand pages of magazine to find it.

He's a smart one, that guy. Which is why I let him eat cake straight from the pan with his hands like a fucking animal.

I used this recipe for chocolate cupcakes, but made a sheet cake because I'm a sunuvabitch like that.