Updated July 26, 2022

Holy crap, I haven’t updated this About Me section since July 15, 2012. Yep, it’s been a decade, and boy have things changed.

For starters, Caighley passed over the Rainbow Bridge back in December 2016. December 3, 2016, to be exact. That was a hard day, probably the hardest in my life. That girl was so headstrong that she wouldn’t give up, even though her body failed her.

Ryder has taken her place as the head of the household. He’s a fun loving, goofy pup who insists that the world revolves around him.

We’ve also gotten good a cooking. Not to brag, but I mean really good. So the quest for new recipes continues. We’ve also expanded our range of foods to include some Asian styles. We don’t have a specific country that we focus on but we’ve learned we lean toward Thai inspired dishes. Italian and Mexican/Tex-Mex continue to be our staples and what we fall back on.

We also bought a condo in Breckenridge, CO. We do a lot of cooking while we’re up there and most of the recent posts have been entered in Breckenridge.

I’ll leave the rest for posts, but I felt obligated to at least throw up some current information to this page. I’ll leave the original section below for posterity.

The original About Me:

This blog is for Curt, Brian and Caighley in Austin, TX. I (Brian) started a website back in 2002 to post pictures and our favorite recipes and share them with our family and friends. Obviously, this was before facebook, pinterest and twitter so a website was the only way to do this. We posted it on the Time Warner RoadRunner site but they shut down the site. I thought all the information was lost but luckily I found a backup on our old computer.

It was a fun experiment to create a website and learn all coding but I was never really good at it so a blog is more up my alley. This blog will replace the old website and give us both the opportunity to share things we find interesting.

One of the things we find interesting is food. We both like learning about different places and cultures through their food and enjoy spending time making complicated recipes together.We typically make food with a Latin or Italian flair. The Latin part is easy – I grew up in Texas and Curt grew up all over – but mostly Southern California. We are really familiar with Mexican foods but we really try to find recipes outside of the cliche Tex-Mex meals.

I am part Italian but I never knew much about that part of my family. My dad wasn’t close to his parents and they weren’t close to their families. A few years ago I found more about that family and where they came from. Since then, I’ve been doing a lot of research on the Abruzzo region and trying to find recipes from there. In the early 2000’s Curt put us on a low-carb diet and that took most the Italian food out of our diet. We’re still try to avoid unnecessary carbs, but we don’t completely cut our pasta just because of the carbs. However, we have learned a lot about Italian cuisine that isn’t pasta. This has been a nice surprise as we explore my Italian heritage through food.

Our two favorite sports to participate in are wakeboarding and snowboarding. I’ll admit, the water’s been a little low and the weather bad so we haven’t been out in a while. Luckily, Austin is not too far from Denver so we try to take 2 or 3 snowboarding trips to Colorado each winter. We typically go for a long 4-day weekend. I’m sure I’ll post more about this when we take the next trip. One thing that I’ll post about is Curt’s suitcase full of food. You see, we usually get a condo and make our own meals. So, Curt brings most of our foods with us. I will admit, it does make it easier once we get there and don’t have to spend a long time in the grocery store and don’t have to worry about finding some obscure ingredient in a local store in a touristy area.