"I think this is my favorite day of my whole life"

Those are some pretty strong words. Let's see what that day looks like in the world of Bryan.

Start here:

From Bend Nov 08

Step #1
Wake up in the king sized bed in this room:

From Bend Nov 08

From Bend Nov 08

From Bend Nov 08

Step #2
Open door to get the morning coffee waiting for you outside of your room.

Step #3
After enjoying morning coffee, walk downstairs for your custom breakfast. We both had a quiche-type thing with eggs, cream cheese, potatoes, cream, spinach and onions (me), bacon and mushrooms (him). He had a homemade caramel pecan roll, while I had a cinnamon roll. We also had a second cup of coffee, plus fresh grapefruit juice (me) and cranberry juice (him). Oh yes, he also had homemade white bread toast with local marionberry jam.

Step #4
Play a game of disc golf on the 9 hole course around the B&B

From Bend Nov 08

From Bend Nov 08

Step #5
After disc golf game, take a 2 mile walk in the sun around the B&B where you see this

From Bend Nov 08

Step #6
Head to spa for deep tissue massage and pedicure. Wait in this room while drinking wine in your robe

From Bend Nov 08

Step #7
Enjoy complimentary meal between services, which was a fabulous healthy treat after the gluttonous breakfast (with another class of wine).

From Bend Nov 08

Step #8
Head downtown to wander through the shops. End up at a happy hour and enjoy a local brew, tempura veggies with 3 dipping sauces, margarhetta(sp?) pizza, and cheese fries. Cheer on the Packers while said food is enjoyed. Declare day "the favorite of my whole life," even though more stuff is to come.

Step #9
Go back to B&B and grab fresh cookies and hot chocolate and milk waiting outside of our room

From Bend Nov 08

Step #10
Enjoy cookies and milk while watching DVD (Baby Mama) and relaxing on the couch with TWO footrests

From Bend Nov 08

Step #11
Sit in outdoor hot tub while gazing at the stars, unpolluted by city lights

Step #12
Crawl into king sized bed and feel so grateful for a weekend of relaxation and time to reconnect without worrying about moving, work, bills, etc.

I long time ago, I talked about a rough meeting that I had where I left in tears. It was part of a long, grueling process in working with a school district on a grant application. I am an evaluator, which means my piece is the evaluation section. However, this particular high need district had been rejected for this grant THREE times before, so I was heavily involved in re-vamping it.

Yesterday, we got the news.

THEY WERE FUNDED!

This is super news for myself (as I got this project going all on my own with my own connections) and super news for my work. All that hard work paid off, and we will be the evaluators for the next 4 years.

My sweet husband took me out to celebrate at Pastini. It was SO yummy and nice to be able to go out together (especially with the likely gall bladder removal in husband's future). The restaurant is in a new outdoor mall, so after dinner we walked around enjoying the nice summer night (and I got a shirt on sale at JCrew). It was fabulous to finally have a night that wasn't 50 degrees or 100 degrees!

Food porn (or Rachel Ray you are not)

I'm not sure if it was Bryan or Krista I first heard it from, but "food porn" is a common occurance in our household. Food porn can consist of looking at restaurant menus online, watching cooking shows on the Food Network, talking about where to go out to dinner, discussing what you'd LOVE to be eating right that moment, etc.

So a couple of weeks ago Bryan and Krista were engaging in some food porn Rachel Ray style. I guess that day she was making Cubano Hash. The next day, they decided that they wanted to make it. Now it was maybe 11am, and NO preparation had been made to create this. Here is the recipe as Rachel Ray made it.

1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
3/4 pound ground pork
3/4 pound, packaged chorizo, peeled and chopped
1 medium onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 teaspoon ground cumin, 1/3 palm full
1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1/2 bottle beer
4 Portuguese rolls or 2 sandwich sized English muffins, split and toasted
4 deli-cut slices Swiss cheese
4 dill pickles, chopped
2 tablespoons yellow mustard
2 tablespoons butter
4 large eggs

So as they read the recipe together, this is how it went...me listening in hysterical laughter as this unfolded:
olive oil
- K: "We have that"
ground pork
- T: "We don't have that. All we have is frozen pork pieces"
- B: "That will be fine!"
Chorizo
- K: "We don't have chorizo, but I have some sausages and some strange hot sauce from Costa Rica, so that will be perfect."
Medium onion
- B: "We don't have a fresh onion, but we have frozen chopped onion with celery and red pepper in it. That should be fine."
3 cloves garlic
-K: "I have some in a jar, that will be fine."
Ground cumin
-T: "Yes, we have that in the cupboard"
Ground allspice
-K: "What's allspice?"
-B: "Beat's me!"
-T: "I think it's in the same family as cinnamon and nutmeg, but we don't have any."
-K: "Ooh, but we do have cinnamon and nutmeg. Good enough!"
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
- Yes, we have salt and pepper
2 tablespoons tomato paste
-K: "I don't have any."
-B: "Neither do we, let's just use ketchup."
1/2 bottle beer
-B: "Oh, I have one beer left! How's a pale ale?"
4 Portuguese rolls or 2 sandwich sized English muffins
-B: "We've got wheat bread, how's that?"
4 deli-cut slices Swiss cheese
-T: "I just bought some swiss cheese yesterday, lucky for you guys. This might be the only thing you'll actually do right!"
Dill pickles
-B: "I think there is a jar in the fridge that isn't too old."
Yellow mustard
-K: "We don't have yellow mustard."
-B: "I have some brown mustard. Brown isn't that far from yellow, right?"
Butter
-Margarine will have to do.
Large eggs
-B: "I think we just have 4 eggs left."

And yes, after this discussion where they had less than half of what they needed, they decided to forge ahead. If only I could explain the HORRIBLE smell this recipe made. It looked even worse (I wish I had pictures). But the verdict from the college kids....................

IT'S DELICIOUS!!!!!

Much to their dismay, I refused to try it.

Brunch

At Christmas we were given a gift card to a local Italian restaurant that has a very fancy Sunday brunch, which we finally went to today. The photo above shows the chocolate fountain, which has a caramel fountain right next to it. YUMMY! It was definitely my favorite part. There is nothing like fresh fruit in the winter, and the added bonus of chocolate was fantastic.

Here's the rest of the menu:

Made To Order Belgium Waffle Station with Fruit Toppings
Carving Station - Roast Beef, Lamb, Pork & Salmon
Create Your Own Omelet Station

Mario's Wheel-Homemade Fettuccine tossed in a Parmigiano-Reggiano Cheese Wheel
Grilled Chicken with Mushroom Sauce
Seasonal Vegetables
Roasted Garlic Mashed Potatoes
Tortellini Alfredo
Ricotta Stuffed Shells with Marinara
Eggs Benedicto
Bacon and Sausage
20 Italian Antipasti-Caprese, Marinated mussels, Calamari Salad, Balsamic
Grilled Vegetables,
Grilled Mushrooms and Many More
Fresh Cut Fruit Display
Croissants, Danish, Bagels and Muffins
Lavish Array of Cakes, Tortes, Pastries and Cookies
Regular and Decaffeinated Coffee
Fruit Juices
Champagne Mimosas

Yep, tons of food. Some was a bit bizarre to be eating for out first meal of the day, but most of it was good. For the price ($50 for the 2 of us), we expected a bit more, but since it was free, we were more than happy :)

Enjoying the sun, not enjoying the aftermath!

Sunday was a beautiful, sunny, warmish day, so we decided to take a bike ride along the Erie canal. It is a nice paved path that runs for hundreds of miles and is relatively flat. We decided to ride from our town to the next town over, which has a really cute little village area that has some shops and ice cream. This is the canal.

So the problem is, we didn't quite recognize that our fairly regular trips to the gym DID NOT mean that we were in shape to ride our cheap-o Huffy bikes. We rode about 10 miles, which is short in the realm of bike rides, but our bodies later told us we might have ridden 100 miles. We both had trouble walking for a couple of days after!

In typical us fashion, while we were wandering around the village we just had to read the menus of the cute little restaurants along the canal. So instead of having ice cream we ended up having linner (lunch/dinner) at Aladdin's Natural Eatery, a little greek restaurant. The food was decent, and probably much better for us in the long run than Ben and Jerry's.

Us in our "geek hats" at the canal. Bryan HATES wearing a helmet, but when I assure him he only has to wear it because I love him and don't want him to get hurt, he gives in. Literally everyone I know that rides has been in an accident, and one person even cracked her helmet in half.


Although we were so tired and sore, it was so much fun hanging out together, outside, for a few hours. The bikes were sold today on Craigslist, so that will be the last ride for quite awhile.

Backwards birthdays

A certain gentleman lives with me. That certain gentleman had a birthday a couple of weeks ago. Said gentleman doesn't like that he has crossed a certain age threshold, so that gentleman decide he's counting backwards now. So the gentleman had his #29 this year. Due to some yucky commitments (school for the gentleman, some very important grant deadlines for me), we were unable to party ala Prince (Like it's 1999) the day of. However, we were able to have an eating feast thanks to my mom. And if you know us, and you are a loyal reader of this blog, you know that we love to eat. love might be too low-key of a word. LOVE might be more like it. This was our first encounter with Edible Arrangements. Heavenly delicious fruit in the middle of winter. Hooray! It caused a feeding frenzy around here. It fed the 3 of us for a week solid. Ours had cantaloupe, honeydew, pineapple, strawberries, grapes, and chocolate-dipped apples. Although they are a bit pricey, they are worth every penny when all that is found in the grocery store is rock hard peaches and mealy apples. I highly recommend these as a unique gift that every fruit-lover will love.


This was the smallest basket of this variety available, and it filled up 3 GIANT tupperwares (after we'd already made a huge dent in it). The cute part is that the skewers are all stuck into a head of lettuce.

Shoot, work calls! More on our delayed birthday trip to NYC to follow......