Alfred's birthday weekend

Well, we certainly had an action-packed weekend. Mike came to visit, and of course we celebrated Alfred's birthday. We got things off to a rousing start with a pizza dinner and the obligatory power hour. We now have a regular waitress at the restaurant we've been going to the last few weekends for their 2 for 1 pints of beer. She joined in on betting how many minutes it would be before Ilya started hiccuping (he's a cartoon drunk). Sadly, we all lost, but when Mike's war wound made an appearance, she comped all his beer for the night. Score!

The next morning Alfred got to open his presents, including this gem from Mike:

Now they can be twinsies! We went to breakfast (somehow we didn't make it to the gym), then went shopping to kill some time. World Market was first. We wandered the store awhile, then decided to set a place setting with comically large items so we could pretend to be tiny.

Then, of course, we had to set a ridiculously tiny place setting so we could feel giant:

An employee came over and asked if he could help us while we were gathering our tiny items. I told him no thanks, we were just looking.

Next we hit up Target, where I (accidentally) made fun of a little girl's Halloween costume. Ok, I purposely made fun of the costume, I just didn't realize that it was hanging on someone's cart and that they were 5 feet away from me as I did so. Somehow we managed to accomplish our mission, which was to buy awesome socks to go bowling in:

Then proceeded to go bowling:

After bowling three rounds and each winning once (with yours truly managing to get the high score of the day, after a dismal 59 on the first game) we headed to a liquor store to stock up on some essentials: liquor, beer, and cigars. We bought a 2 for 1 gift set of Kahlua, then went back to the house and proceeded to plow through 1 and 1/2 of the bottles. Then we played with some antique armor.

It was pretty tiring, but luckily we had some coffee with our Kahlua so we were good to go. We headed out for another pizza dinner, and plenty more beer.

The evening proved both fun and educational, as we learned a handy little party trick along the way:

It's much more impressive looking in person.

Sunday was sort of low key: we went out for brunch, Mike checked out a bunch of girls, pretty standard. Then we sat around outside and smoked some cigars, even though it was kind of drizzly and crappy out. Not a good weekend for swimming, unfortunately. Mike headed back to GA that afternoon, and we headed over to Max and Robyn's to watch all but the last minute of the Jaguars game (it got cut off by the dvr, which kind of sucked because it was the best minute of the game, or so we assume). All in all, a good weekend. And I should think that this post should earn me at least a couple of picture-less posts in the future, no?

pasta-riffic!

We tested out another mixer attachment this weekend: the pasta maker! Yes, folks, we made our own pasta. It was awesome. Here's how it happened.

It all started when Alfred and I watched an Alton Brown episode about eggplant. Thus inspired, we purchased several eggplant from the farmers' market on Saturday and decided to make baba ghanoush and pasta with eggplant and tomato. We followed Alton's instructions to roast half the eggplant and salt the other half. Ilya and Mercedes were joining us for dinner, so after they arrived we got cracking.

The baba ghanoush was good, but I forgot to add the garlic. Next time, it will be better. I blame the bloody mary.

Then we started on the pasta. For this I enlisted the help of Mercedes and Katie.

Alfred and Ilya helped by continuing to drink.


It looked like real pasta!


Katie and Alfred graciously offered to play sous chef, aka chop all of the veggies (eggplant, tomato, onion, pepper, garlic, basil, and parsley). No pictures of this, but it really did happen. I think that was my favorite part of the evening: not having to chop!

And so we have the finished product:


I had already eaten a bunch before I remembered to take a picture, hence the plate looking kind of juicy. It was yummy.

We then settled down for a nice long stretch of speed uno. Now, as most of you know, Mercedes is from Spain. It stands to reason that she thinks in Spanish and translates that into English for our benefit. Also, in Uno, when you are down to one card, you yell out, "Uno." The back story thus established... at one point of the game, when she was down to her last card, Mercedes called out "one." We had quite a giggle.

strawberries

It's hard to post when I don't have a computer. I apologize to my legions of fans :)

We went strawberry picking with Ilya and Mercedes on Saturday! It was a perfect day, sunny and warm, and when we finally found the place (it was a bit off the beaten track) we had a lot of fun. Well, at first we were a little confused, it was just a whole bunch of land with no one around, but we finally found someone and figured it out. The set up was cool, this is the entire field of crops that they grow to sell:


Right now it's mostly strawberries. It doesn't look like much, but we were able to pick almost 30 pounds total! We also tried some of the lettuce and other veggies that she had growing. Here's a close up of the planting system. The white boxes are just styrofoam, I think, and they're all stacked so you can fit a whole bunch of plants in a much smaller space than if they were planted in the ground. Plus it's easier to pick the strawberries this way. And, it's all organic!

After we picked the plants clean, the lady (I think her name was Betty Jean, rather fitting I thought) took us over to see the animals. They had chickens, pigs, donkeys, goats, cows, all sorts of stuff. They also grow a big corn maze every year that's open to the public.

Once we got home, we washed, cut, and froze most of the berries. How luscious do they look??


We're going to make jam with them once we get all of the supplies. Alfred bought pectin online so we're waiting for that to get shipped. In the meantime, I made a pie! It looked much prettier before it was baked and juice leaked out in a few places. It was super delicious though.


Yesterday we just hung out at home. It was cloudy and dreary all day. Saturday was so busy that I needed a day to be kind of lazy, so since the weather wasn't as nice I figured we had a good excuse to sit around. And eat pie, of course!