Sooooooo the plan for today was to leave San Jose around 9AM and arrive at our friend’s place in Lake Tahoe around noon for a couple of days of snowboarding and fireplace-lounging and such. But if you follow me on IG stories or Snapchat, you know that 9PM (mmhmm, a solid TWELVE HOURS after we commenced this little adventure) found us not just “still on the road”…but quite literally still. On the road. Like not moving at all. And then we did that for two hours while we waited for the snow to clear enough for us to go through the pass.
(Obviously this ended up being the best part of the entire day, because we specialize in travel disasters and have, over the years, learned how to make traffic jams into awesome dance parties.)
But back to the semi-stranded-in-a-snowstorm thing: I had thought I had left disastrous, gnome-killing, angel-summoning weather behind me in New York, but this thing that’s currently hitting California – which is, so you’re aware, called a bombogenesis (really, and yes that is now officially my favorite word ever) is giving the East Coast a run for its money. Right this very moment, for example, my backyard fence is located in my pool. There is a greenish, shredded, cloth-like substance carpeting my driveway that I think used to be our patio umbrella, but I can’t be certain. And let’s not forget the many, many hours we spent tonight staring up at 200-foot-tall snowdrifts barely clinging to the sides of mountains, and replaying select scenes from Alive in our heads.
We are here. Not “here” like “where we intended to be,” but “here” like “in a hotel that we decided to sleep in because we didn’t want to drive up an avalanche-y mountainside in the middle of the night.” And while this hotel is rather cute, it also has rather spotty internet, which means that the video I was planning to post today is going to have to wait a mo’.
Enter: Mollie’s Cream Cheese Pie recipe, which is vaguely thematic because this is more or less what it looks like outside my window (white, fluffy, etc).
This crazy-easy no-bake dessert is the perfect solution for last-minute entertaining…mostly because you probably have everything you need to make it right there in your refrigerator already. My personal tip: double the recipe so that it almost overflows in the pie dish – it makes it look way more impressive. (And you can use whatever filling is left over in mini parfaits. Or you can just eat it.)
– Mollie
What You Need:
- 1 9″ crumb crust
- 1 8oz package cream cheese
- 1 15oz can sweetened condensed milk
- 1/3 cup fresh or bottled lemon juice
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
What You Do:
- Soften cream cheese to room temperature, then whip until fluffy.
- Gradually beat in the condensed milk until well-blended.
- Beat in lemon juice and vanilla extract until well-blended.
- Pour into crust.
- Chill 2-3 hours, and top with lemon curd just before serving.
