Bodark

Since my parents moved to Gainesville several years ago, Gropius has been fascinated with a local tree that locals call the Bodark Tree. Technically, the name is Bois d'Arc, but who likes speaking French, right? Certainly, not me!

Anyway, there are quite a few of them growing around my parents' house and I took advantage of the setting sun one day to get some nice photos of one of the trees before we left.







And while the drought in Texas is still on-going, I'm happy to report that my father finally has some water back in his tank:

He's even talking about stocking it with some fish in the spring.
I guess Hope does spring eternal, huh?

While we were out walking, an old early 20th century plane flew overhead. He was close enough to snap a photo and waved at us as he circled around.

Merry Christmas! Fröhliche Weihnachten!

We survived our flight from Sacramento to DFW on Tuesday and then managed to find our way to the rental car counter and survived our drive up to Valley View (h/t to the map function on my iPhone).  Unfortunately, our suitcase was too big (!?) for to take the Fiat 500 as our rental car and I didn't pay the upcharge for the midsize/standard car or else we could've taken the new 2011 Jetta for a prolonged test drive.  Instead, we're stuck with a Toyota Yaris for the week.  Wheeeeee!

So far, we have made a gingerbread house, decorated sugar cookies to leave for Santa, and done a bunch of last-minute christmas shopping for gifts.  There are still gingerbread men to make, bake, and decorate as well as cinnamon rolls to prepare for christmas morning.  Gropius and I have cooked two delicious dinners and I was able to indulge my homesickness by eating awesome chicken-fried-steak (or CFS in the local parlance) with mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans, corn, and biscuits.  YUM!  Now all I need is to have some good barbeque to quench the hunger pains.  You just can't get a good chopped beef bbq sandwich or proper "German" sausage outside of a Texas BBQ joint, esp one with neon lights and a drive through....

On Thursday, we drove over to Frisco to see the city hall and downtown all lit up, complete with a musical accompaniment on the radio so you can tune in to watch the lights dance in time to the music.  Very neat.

Coming up?  Christmas Eve service at the church tonight followed by a traditional Texas christmas dinner of tamales and Pedernales chili (h/t to Ladybird Johnson).  What better way to whet your anticipation of christmas morning than by unwrapping some tamales??  My brother and his family will be driving up on Monday to have dinner.  For those who know me well, you know I can't wait for that one.

I've taken a TON of photos, but I have no way (that I know of anyway) to upload them from my camera, so the posts with pictures will just have to wait until we get back to Sacramento late next week.

Merry Christmas and have a wonderful New Year!

Fröhliche Weihnachten und ein gutes neues Jahr!

This year's Christmas Card

Weekend Breakfasts

The holiday baking bug has hit, so last weekend, I made my great-grandmother's gingerbread recipe.  It's interesting to see how much darker her recipe is than the commercial stuff you see in the stores right now.  There's no need for powdered sugar or icing on this version!



It's funny though--I have several recipes in my collection of family recipes that I can attribute to her, but I've been scratching my head to remember a specific time that I ate her gingerbread!

On Friday, I made two batches of pizza dough when I got home from work with Lulu--a whole wheat one and a crunchier one with cornmeal in it. I'm thinking about instituting a weekly family pizza night on Friday nights to go with the Sunday evening wine and cheese. It's all about efficiency and economies of scale, folks!

Anyway, we made half the whole wheat pizza for Lulu and threw the remainder in the fridge until this morning. This morning, it was called to a higher purpose: Speculoos Pizza. These are a favorite cookie of ours that you see EVERYWHERE in Belgium. No kidding. It's on every saucer when you order a coffee and on every dessert plate after dinner. You can picture our delight to learn in the NYTimes that one of the major producers of speculoos was creating a "spread" of the speculoos cookies and my even greater delight upon seeing a jar of it at our local Whole Foods. FTW!



Needless to say, Lulu is a HUGE fan. HUGE.



So, we used the remaining whole wheat pizza dough (I'm telling about its whole wheat nature to try to make the following sound more healthy) to make speculoos pizza this morning. We par-baked the pizza crust, then smeared the speculoos spread (after lightening it with a bit of cream) on it, and sprinkled it with chopped pecans and dark chocolate chips before popping it back in the oven.

Seriously though, who can resist this on your plate for breakfast? I can't!

Pizza Party.

Merryhill hosted a pizza party last night with the opportunity to take pictures with Santa Claus. Someone ate her weight in pepperoni and cheese pizza in her own inimitable style:



The toppings are the most important part, clearly:

And after pizza was over, we waited our turn to take photos with Santa. Unfortunately, there were 2-3 really young kids in line before us whose crying freaked out Lulu (who prior to that point, was looking forward to her photo with Santa). But, I think we still managed to get a nice photo anyway:

Can't wait to see what that looks like in Lulu's art file on Monday!

And here's a close-up from our camera:

Ham and Cheese: Thanksgiving Edition.

We bought a 20 lb Kentucky country ham for Thanksgiving this year.  And now we're faced with the monumental task of figuring out how to eat our way through it.

So Saturday morning I experimented with ham and cheese pancakes.  Yeah.  Pancakes.  I used Bittman's recipe for regular pancakes, omitting the sugar.  I added about 1/2 C of finely diced ham, 1/2 C of grated cheddar cheese, 1 tsp of whole grain mustard, and a dash of dried thyme then proceeded as usual.

I have to say that I was pleased with the results.  Very tasty!

Post-Thanksgiving: The Morning After...

So, I woke up ~6:15 on Black Friday, far too late to hit the eh sales but in time enough to make it to Cost Plus by 7am when they opened. My incentive was that they were giving away free Tintin ornaments and a movie ticket to the first 100 people in line and I figured that Cost Plus was NOT going to be the huge draw of say, Target or Wal-Mart.

And I was right.

Gropius got his Tintin ornament. On the way home, I remembered that we needed orange juice and figured I would stop by Raley's and pick some up. And when I walked into Raley's, I remembered Gropius talking about what a great deal they had on Chandon champagne earlier in the week. So, I picked up the OJ and swung by the wine section to grab a couple of bottles of Chandon for $10/bottle (told you it was a good deal!). On my walk back to the cashier stand, I decided that Lulu probably wouldn't be a big fan of the leftover biscuits with ham that we were having for breakfast (and I was right). So, I picked up a package of little, white, powdered donuts.

All perfectly reasonable and logical, right? Yeah, that's what I thought, too...which is why I was surprised when the cashier turned to me with a wink and asked, "Breakfast, huh?"



D'oh. At least it wasn't a 40 of malt liquor and a bag of pork rinds, right?

And Lulu really enjoyed the donuts.

Thanksgiving Dinner

All ready to go!

We had our friends Ross and Amber and their daughter Stella over for Thanksgiving dinner this year.  Ross and Amber are from North Dakota originally which just continues my streak of friends and acquaintances from North Dakota.  Given how small the state's population is, I think I could easily play six-degrees-of-separation and hit just about everyone on the census list....?

L-R:  glazed carrots/parsnips, lingonberry compote, cheesy olive bread, sweet potatoes, dressing,
cabbage/apple dish, bundles o'beans, baked corn dish, ham

from the opposite end of the bar

and the dishes in the middle

Ross and Amber brought over cheesy olive bread, a baked corn dish (although technically NOT a "hotdish" because it doesn't have enough ingredients in it!), and a delicious chocolate marbled cheesecake. YUM!  This was in addition to the Kentucky country ham we ordered from Zingerman's back in October (that spent the last month in the nightstand in our guest bedroom until last weekend), sweet potatoes from our garden, my apple/chestnut dressing, a cabbage/apple dish, lingonberry compote, bundles of beans, and buttermilk biscuits.

chocolate marbled cheesecake with oreo crust--it was delicious!

Yeah.  No one left our house hungry!

Lulu got to "be the mommy" a lot to poor Stella...

We had a wonderful time and lingered over cheesecake and coffee while the girls played together.  Snorri even came inside for a bit of post-prandial bunny petting (it sounds dirrrrty, huh?).  And best of all, we had the dishes in the dishwasher and the food put away by 8pm.  Heaven!

Happy Thanksgiving

Everyone on Facebook has been posting what they're thankful for everyday this month (and truth be told, it's getting a liiiiiiittle bit annoying). But today is Thanksgiving, so it's only proper to acknowledge what I'm grateful for in my life.

Here are my two favorite people in the whole, wide world.

Calzones

In between a gym visit and heading to campus yesterday morning, I put together some calzone dough to rise while I was gone. I don't think I've made them since we moved to California and it just seemed like a calzone sort of day. I really like Donna Hay's recipe that was printed in a Better Homes and Gardens I read one summer while living in Mo'town, WV with Gropius. It took me a while, but I finally tracked down the recipe.

ripe with potential....

Our were stuffed with tomato sauce, provolone cheese, salami, and roasted red bell peppers. After sealing them up, I brushed them with olive oil and they were ready for baking:

I got better at sealing as I went--this is the last/best one of the bunch.

And, boy, were they tasty! We even made one for Lulu--although hers had swiss cheese and black beans instead. And she gobbled hers up, too, which made this momma very happy. She went to her play kitchen and brought over her rolling pin to "help" me roll out the calzones. Then she wanted to help stuff and seal them--at which point Gropius took over and they had some pretend play in her room instead.

Sbarro's couldn't do it any better!

Spaghetti and Meatballs

Meals in Miami

We enjoyed some really good food while we were in Miami!

On Thursday, our friend Sarah joined us for lunch at a Cuban cafe a short walk (sort of, the humidity made any walk seem longer!) from our hotel.  We enjoyed traditional pressed Cuban sandwiches that were delicious!  Lulu really got into her hazelnut and banana sandwich as you can see:

My sandwich

licking off the nutella after she picked out the banana slices to eat

quite satisfied with her mess!

And that evening, we took a taxi to the "design district" and ate at a great place called Michael's Genuine Food and Drink. We sat outside on the patio and got to enjoy the weather, the food, and the company. A woman straight out of Real Housewives of um, Miami walked over to the table across from ours with these:

apologies for the fuzzy shot--low lighting, quick moving dogs and trying not to be noticed

I kid you not. It was quite the experience--it's not everyday you see Maltese being pushed around in a glorified stroller.

Lulu's favorite part of our meal was dessert and I have to say I think I agree with her. The pastry chef is really inventive and creative and does her job well! Lulu had two scoops of white chocolate hazelnut ice cream paired with one scoop of buttered popcorn ice cream. I know! It sounds crazy, but the combination worked and it was delicious (at least the tiny bit Lulu was willing to let us try).



And I had a smoky brownie ala mode made with a scotch caramel sauce. It was also covered in pecans (my favorite!! I love the South):



And Gropius had a white chocolate tart with some sort of cranberry compote that was delicious as well:



I wish I could tell you exactly what we had but when I checked the dessert menu on the restaurant's website, the pastry chef had already moved on! Lots of places tell you that they change the menu daily, but I think this place really does!

The wine list was also AMAZING. The sommelier and owner/manager have done a really nice job of showcasing little known wines from Austria and we definitely took advantage of the opportunity...to the point that when we ordered our dessert wines, the owner didn't even have to ask which table the order was for! The wine we enjoyed with dinner was a nice one and I wish I could've tried the sparkling wines and rosé, too.

Bourbon

Gropius and I went to The Grange in the Citizen Hotel last night for dinner as a celebration of turning in my tenure file.  They were having a bourbon tasting dinner with 5 courses each accompanied by a separate bourbon cocktail.  Yeah.



Per my mother-in-law's request, here is a blow-by-blow of our meal.
First Course:

Woodford Bourbon served neat with hand-cut ice

Smoked Butternut Squash Bisque with Pumpkin Ragout and Duck Ham
(is Duck Ham an oxymoron?)

Bread basket interlude:

salted, rosemary buttah

Second Course:

bourbon, grapefruit juice, and black pepper honey syrup

(apologies--we dug in before I remembered to take a picture!)
Bourbon-glazed Pork Belly with Celery Root and Brussel Sprouts

Third Course:

bourbon appletini-type thing with a poached pear (very tasty!)

sous vide salmon over braised, bacon-y greens

Fourth Course:

Ta-Dah!  The Mint Julep.

Hanger (hangar?) steak with fingerling potatoes and baby carrots

Dessert Course:

bourbon, walnut liqueur with pecan/pepita brittle garnish

poached pear with cranberry sauce and blue cheese gougere-type thingie
(I didn't like the blue cheese part)

We had a wonderful meal meanwhile Lulu had a great time at home with her favorite teacher from Merryhill, Miranda. It was really bittersweet because 'Randa is leaving next week to move back home to Fresno to finish up her teaching credentialing program and I don't know what we're going to do without her. Seriously. No idea. But that's another post entirely.