ah, fall

I've decided that I really like fall. I like when the weather starts to cool off and the humidity drops. I like that work starts to get a little busy: busy enough to give me something to do so I'm not bored, but not so busy that I go crazy. And I like that football is on and we spend all day cooking! Yesterday we hit the farmers market and had all these plans for food to make to eat during the Jaguars game. Unfortunately the Jaguars aren't playing this week, so that plan sort of fell through, so instead we watched the Vikings game for Mike. Pretty good game, especially the fourth quarter, though I must admit I slept through some of it. All that eating wore me out.

We started our day with a smoothie for breakfast (didn't want to weigh ourselves down too early). Then we got cracking with the food. We made 2 dips: 1 with eggplant and 1 with spinach and cannellini beans. Both were awesome. To go along with these dips we attempted to make some butternut squash chips. We do this with both squash and sweet potato fairly regularly, but for some reason it totally didn't work today. So we ended up with some kind of mushy baked squash pieces. Still tasted good. Luckily we had also decided to make some pita bread to have with our dip. Yup, pita bread! From scratch! It was awesome!

You roll the dough out really thin and then they puff right up in the oven. So cool. They were yummy, too. Now I totally want to have a Mediterranean dinner party.

After the game (and my nap) we had one more kitchen task for the day: roasting chicken. Yes, we're currently roasting 2 chickens in the oven. One's just your basic roast chicken, with garlic and lemon, and the other one has a Caribbean rub and basting sauce. I'm not so sure we'll be hungry enough to eat much chicken tonight, but that's ok. It just means we'll have food ready to go for dinners this week. We have big plans to make some chicken salad to eat in our leftover pitas. Anyway, our kitchen is clearly a bit of a disaster right now, as can be seen in this picture. Alfred tried his best to get out of the frame. Ha! Got him!

I just remembered the other reason I like fall: cranberries are in season! Last year we found this amazing cranberry chutney recipe, not realizing that we were at the end of cranberry season. So we've been waiting months for fresh cranberries to be at the store again. We made our first batch yesterday. It's so damn good. I might have to go sneak a spoonful right now.

return of the weekend cooking fest

This was supposed to be our first weekend home together since about June. So of course my boss called me at about 3:00 on Friday afternoon and asked if I would come in Saturday morning to meet a bigwig who was coming to see the museum with his wife and kids. So of course I had to go in. I was only there for a few hours, which wasn't too bad, and my job ended up being to entertain their twin 3 year old boys. They weren't too sure of me at first, but after showing them an alligator and letting them play a drum, we were old friends. I went in at one point to get everyone bottles of water and the boys followed me, even though my boss tried to lure them away. I didn't get invited to lunch with them, but I got a three year old high five at least. Not bad.

We made sure to get up early enough to go to the farmers market and stock up for the week. After I got home from work, we came up with meals for the week, made a shopping list, then started moving furniture. Obviously. I think it was sometime around then that Alfred got a text from Billy's wife asking if we would house sit all this coming week. It's been awhile since we house sat for them, but it's pretty standard for them to ask us about 24 hours in advance of when they need us. So I guess this was more notice than usual, actually! However, it meant that our week's worth of meals was going to have to be prepared this weekend. So that's what we did today.

We started this morning off by shopping, then got to work cooking. We had a whole mess of vegetables and defrosted meat to use and needed to be as efficient as possible in our recipes. So we ended up making an arm roast in the slow cooker, an oxtail stew and roasted red pepper soup on the stove, and cucumber salad. We just ate the soup for dinner (pretty good), wrapped up the cucumber salad, and are still cooking the other two. Hm, it felt like a lot more work when we were actually doing it. Unfortunately we sort of forgot about taking pictures, so this one is from our first dinner of our trip, in Mobile. Also, we discovered at some point of the day that we somehow get Bravo, so I recorded a couple episodes of Top Chef, which we're watching now. What a foodie weekend!

it's back!

Briefly, at least. Obviously it went out again the other day after that short post, but right now it's back. I started writing this Sunday and hopefully it will post today. We'll see.

So what have we missed? All sorts of fun stuff! For one thing, we opened 2 new programs at the new museum last Thursday. I was insanely busy Wednesday through Friday, getting things ready and set up, and then making sure everything ran smoothly with groups. There were a few really long days, but in the end, everything went very well. Except for a slight mishap first thing Thursday morning: I smashed my thumb with a hammer. Hard.














It's doing better now, the swelling has gone down some and I can bend it almost all the way. The bruising is healing a bit already, too. It doesn't hurt to touch at least, but I can't put any pressure on it yet. It's interesting to see how often you use your left thumb. Toothpaste, for instance. And it's a good thing I cut my nails last week!

Friday was also Ella's sixth birthday! Mike sent me a picture of her with her cake that he took on his phone. Freaking cute. Damn kids, getting old.

This weekend was nice and calm, but productive. We made a whole mess of jam, since we still had some frozen strawberries from last spring, and they're on sale right now since they're in season.

We made strawberry kiwi, strawberry rhubarb, strawberry ginger, and strawberry apple. Now all we need is some more yogurt to eat it all with. The goat we get our yogurt making milk from should be producing again, so that's exciting. I think this weekend I'm going to make some bread to eat it with, too.

The last 2 nights we have had the most delicious, gorgeous salads for dinner, using lettuce that we bought from the farmers market. There's only 1 true local farmer there, and it's the lettuce/green leafy veggie guy. It was so good, I didn't even use dressing. Also, I'm listening to the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle in the car on my way home from work (mornings are for NPR) and I'm turning into a total hippie. I want to move to a farm.

Ok, I think we're pretty well caught up now. In case the internet doesn't work (assuming this posts), I may not post again till Saturday. I hope you can all hold out until then.

a belly full of taco

We had a little mini adventure tonight. We went to go look at a freezer to store the quarter of a cow that we're getting sometime in the next couple of weeks. It turned out that the couple who was selling the freezer owns a taco shop right next to the farmers market that we go to when we're home on the weekend and not lazy. So we stopped there for dinner and are now stuffed to the brim with tacos. And a burrito and a "mexicake." It was all really good. It's too bad it's not within walking distance of our house, because it would be perfect on a Saturday night after we've been boozing for awhile. Man, we drink a lot. And right now I could pass for about 4 months pregnant. But now we have a cool little local place we can go to down here, so that's neat. Real neat. It actually worked out well, because when I put everything in the crockpot this morning for our stew I apparently neglected to plug it in, so we didn't have a nice hot dinner ready for us when we got home, like we were supposed to. (By the way, when you do a google image search for "taco girl" the results aren't nearly as dirty as you might think. Also, I think I want to be a taco for halloween. I wish we had a party to go to. Or kids to take trick or treating. This paranthetical aside has gone on long enough I think.)

I love tacos. I also love pizza. And hamburgers. I love a lot of basic sorts of foods. Alfred and I had a conversation the other night about our very favorite desserts in the entire world, and it was really tough to narrow it down. I picked my top 5, then top 3, and I think if forced I could pick 1, but man, it's tough. Try it. If you could only eat 1 dessert for the rest of your life, what would it be? By the way, my top 5 were blueberry pie, my mom's warm chocolate chip cookies, flourless chocolate cake, twice baked chocolate cake, and some sort of super chocolatey ice cream with chunks, like Ben and Jerry's chocolate fudge brownie, maybe. I like that 3 of those have been mentioned in this blog. It's also interesting (or not) that there's no raspberry or cheesecake items in there. Although it may be even more interesting that I included something that wasn't chocolate. Mmm, I love pie. Gosh, I love food. I could never be anorexic. I wish I still had my teenage metabolism. Stupid calories.

so, how was your weekend?

My weekend was just stellar, thank you for asking. I could have done so, so much around the house, but I didn't. I didn't even need to clean because we've barely been home to mess the place up since I cleaned last. I was saying to Alfred yesterday how I wanted the kitchen floor washed, the windows cleaned, the back yard cleaned up and weeded... but I didn't want to do a damn thing. That's not to say I didn't do anything. Here's my weekend in a handy bulleted list.

• Saturday I headed to the farmers market and picked up some delicious, healthy, cheap produce. All of this came to $10. I feel like that's a good price, but I can't really be sure because I've never bothered doing a comparison at the grocery store.

• I got hit on by one of the vendors at the farmers market. He was wearing a shirt that said "Let's flip a coin. Heads, I get tail. Tails, I get head." I was wearing my glasses and hadn't showered yet. He suggested we go to a strip club that afternoon (because he had to give me a bunch of singles as change.) Yeah, it was pretty awesome.
  
• Speaking of my glasses, I didn't put my contacts in once this weekend. My eyeballs thanked me.
  
• We had a delicious pizza Saturday for dinner. Toppings: pears, pecans, and gorgonzola cheese. I was inspired after buying the pears that morning.
• I beat levels 4 and 5 on the second quest of the Legend of Zelda. I'm a nerd, by the way.
  
• We worked on a new set of house plans. Alfred had gotten a whole bunch of books out of the library to look at for ideas and found a really good plan in one of them, so he drew it out and made some modifications to make it fit what we wanted/needed. It looks really good. The next step is to get it drawn up professionally so it can go to an engineer and get approved to build. Then we'll be ready to go once we get all of our permits.
• I caught up on all of the episodes of "so you think you can dance" that were on the dvr. The show where the top 20 all performed didn't record for some reason, so I missed that, but it's ok. I'll live.
  
• Our dvr decided to start to break. I think that's why my show didn't tape (see previous bullet point). It worked a few times this weekend, but not much. Someone's coming out to fix it next Sunday. Luckily we don't have much taping this week, so if it doesn't work, we won't miss much. But I think I'm going to ask Ellery to tape so you think you can dance for me though, just in case. Can't be too careful.

Non stop excitement, I tell you what!

more domesticity

Apparently we couldn't slow back down to our usual leisurely weekend pace after all the excitement of the past couple weeks. Saturday we hit up the farmers market, ran some errands, I cleaned, baked some bread (which didn't rise because I killed the yeast by using water that was too hot), we went for a nice long walk (which resulted in me being sore the rest of the weekend), and got started on some apple butter. Sunday we finished the apple butter (which turned out really well), made some strawberry orange jam (early taste tests indicate success), spent almost 2 hours trying to boil water to seal all those jars of deliciousness, went to the beach, baked some rolls for dinner, and caught up on the last 2 or so weeks of tv. Craziness. A good weekend overall though, and having an extra day off didn't hurt either. I'd have more pictures, but our camera battery died this weekend and the charger and spare were both at the office in the computer case I used as a carry on to go to Minnesota, and I forgot to get the pictures Katie took. My bad.

Completely unrelated... have I ever mentioned my inability to stay awake for our drive to work? Probably twice a week I fall asleep during our morning drive. Today, for example, I passed out for about 15 minutes. It's a nice little nap, but sometimes (like this morning) I end up kind of disoriented and more tired when I wake up. Luckily the AC in our building is fixed, so the cold jolts me back into reality pretty quickly. Until the hypothermia sets in, then I'm out again.

being productive

We woke up at 8 this morning (insanity) and proceeded to have a very productive morning/early afternoon. First we went to the farmer's market about 10 miles from us. We've never been there, and it's not as big as some other ones we've been to, but it was pretty nice. It was apparently Turtle Day so they had a bunch of stuff going on for that, some kids' activities, some guy singing, and a couple of tortoises that were apparently going to race. (Pokey kept hauling ass around his little area, trying to bust out. He found a gap in the fence, but alas, he couldn't fit through. Nona was just eating the grass like it was going out of style. Pokey also stuck his head in Nona's butt, causing the guy behind me to wonder aloud if that's how he got his name. What were tortoises doing at Turtle Day, anyway? But I digress.) There were lots of nice fresh veggies, and cheap too! Check out this haul, only $9.35 for all this. We're going to make stuffed peppers.
We got home by about 11, and for some reason I decided I was in the mood to do some yard work. I wasn't about to argue with myself, so out I went. Since we have so many trees in and around our yard, we have tons of branches and leaves and pine needles around all the time. So I blew off the roof, picked up the branches from the ground, and raked. Doesn't sound like that much now that I'm writing it out, but it took me a couple of hours. This is a vast improvement, believe it or not. You can see our neighbor's perfect yard in this picture, can you imagine how much he hates us? He's going to shit himself when he sees that we actually did some work out there.