Couldn’t have asked for a better day for this – sunny and almost 70!  I do wish that there was one more day in the weekend however, I’m not ready for another full week starting tomorrow.

We hit up three new-to-us vineyards:  Piedmont, Three Fox Vineyard and the Winery at La Grange.

Piedmont

Three Fox Vineyard

Winery at La Grange

"Nebraska's Prince Amukamara (21) intercepts a pass intended for Oklahoma's Adron Tennell in the first half of their NCAA college football game in Lincoln, Neb., Saturday, Nov. 7, 2009." (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)

Tonight, the Huskers beat the Sooners for the first time since I’ve been a Huskers fan.  Woohoo!  Go big red!  It was a great game – 4 hours too just about!

Otherwise, it was great to be at home today.  Originally had lots of tentative things we *could* have done, but in the end, we got up sort of early, did some stuff around the house, went for a good 7 mile run and walked another 2 back to our car.  I did a lot of cooking today, making enough food for breakfast/lunch/dinner today AND lunch/dinner tomorrow ahead of time, while Nick has been working on finalizing a creative project we’ll add to the site soon.

As far as the recipes – the Cauliflower Omlette this morning was really tasty with the feta and used up the rest of the huge head we got from the CSA this past week; the quinoa salad for lunch was the first time I’d used this grain and the verdict was that it was pretty darned good and pretty cute to boot.  Tempeh ruebins for dinner – wow.  Sauerkraut always gets my vote.  We had them with baked sweet potato fries.  And, in the interest of adding ’snack food’ to the house, this cucumber radish raika that was made this afternoon is REALLY good.  Can’t wait to dig into it good, on everything from leftover quinoa salad to just as a bread dipper.  Mmmmm…  I stuck the recipe for the braised cauliflower pasta in there too even though it’s from a few days ago – the tag team of cauliflower dishes used up the head pretty well.

Recipes 20091107

No rest for the weary this Friday.  Up and at ‘em  early as usual.  Was pretty excited to come home for lunch (I love getting out earlier on Fridays!) because the cauliflower pasta leftovers from last night were waiting for me in the fridge.  Pinot & I set out to meet Melanie & Snowball at the Wheaton Dog Park this afternoon.  It was Snowy’s first time, and she handled herself pretty well, but there was definitely a point when you could just see her thinking ‘I’m too old for these young pups to be running around at me’ and began hiding under the table/on-in Melanie’s purse.  At that point, we decided to go for a walk.

Pinot & Snowball eagerly await Melanie's return from el bano

It was a nice afternoon for a walk, and hopefully the pups were very tired out as we all had a big evening planned, courtesy of Doug, beginning with Korean BBQ in Annandale at Honey Pig!  Yes, you will notice that this is a big steaming plate of meat.  I did not eat it all by myself, I promise.  Melanie stuck to her guns, but my lack of officially declaring to be veg and Nick’s convincing argument that I didn’t order it and it just would go to waste (Ok I admit it – with 23 people at dinner, I was lazy and didn’t want to make a big deal out of ordering noodles) – alas, yummy food.  (In a random side note, there were a couple articles – one and two -today that got me to thinking about the food stuff.  It’s enough to make your brain explode if you think about it too much.)

After dinner, we all packed up and moved over a few blocks to a private room for kareoke!  Never had a private kareoke room before, and the experience was a lot more fun and less nerve wracking than my last kareoke experience with Kamy in Alabama all those years ago.  Crooning out hits considered oldies, to show tunes, to today’s top 40 – the hours flew by and we rolled back into the house a bit before 3AM.  Great night!

These are the inquisitive faces that I have to answer to if I come home from work and then, oh, need to run some errands.  Tonight, it was Trader Joes for groceries for the week, and in my defense, I had been home for a good few hours before venturing out again.  But still, always the guilt trip.  Best buds, sitting next to each other, staring at me – but we’ve been alone almost all day long, and now you are leaving without me again?  Well – Cashew is starting to look distracted with something else, but still – sitting together like that with the original look, I wished that I had the good camera handy and around my neck but didn’t want to jinx it because the second I’d move to get it is the second that the pose would be gone.

Nothing big today.  Glad that it’s Thursday, which means that tomorrow is Friday!  Actually, today I found that the metropolitan cooking show is going on this weekend, and I really want to go, but I’m not sure how it’s going to fit in just yet.  It’s Nick’s last weekend at home before SC 2009, so I think we both were hoping for some down time, but alas, we’ve got a busy (and fun!) weekend ahead.

Today could have been your average, run of the mill Wednesday – but no – today is day 100!  AND today is my half birthday.  So yeah, if that doesn’t make your average run of the mill Wednesday more exciting, I don’t know what will.

How did we celebrate this fantastic day you ask?  Well – my day consisted of a very exciting tip that I learned from Colby & Liz over the weekend – leave my high heeled shoes at work.  Much more comfortable than walking to/from work in them.  Genius!  And they fit in my lower desk drawer so nicely (nope, haven’t gotten quite to the shoe rack point just yet, mainly from a lack of desire to go to Target.)  The CSA pickup today was actually pretty cool -  I had never before seen celery not from a grocery store celery – and it is huge.  AND the CSA today gave us some free apple cider with our box of goodies.  Good stuff.

While I went home, went for a run, and did a bit of weights, Nick went to Laura’s Marathon Happy Hour downtown.  The Gburg boondocks comes though again, there was no possible way for me to get the CSA, get home, and make it back downtown for happy hour.  I’m glad Nick got to go, and woohoo to Laura for an awesome time in the NY marathon last weekend!

Nick and I met up with Maria & Jeremy for dinner at Redwood in Bethesda this evening.  Good times, we don’t get together very often these days.  NJ and I really enjoyed the food, though I hear there is some debate on the quality in the foodie community.  I’d recommend it and gladly go back.

Cashew certainly has the right idea today- what I wouldn’t give to have taken a cat nap on my computer this afternoon!

Instead, Pinot and I had an exciting run around the neighborhood and close to home. Actually started online window shopping for the holidays while dinner was in the oven- twice baked potatoes take awhile! These pictured are Nicks- mine are sans pepperoni; both have a mixture of white and sweet potatoes with random veggies (celery, onion, garlic, carrot, parsnip, and spinach).

On that note- I for one am going to try to get to sleep early tonight!

Today was a great day for tying up loose ends.  Not in terms of housework unfortunately, but in terms of other stuff.  For example:

• Pinot had her follow up vet exam yet again, and the ear infection is *finally* gone!  Woo hoo!  She got the first dose of the doggie flu shot too.
• Got the remaining original picture files from the Munich trip today.  Keyword tagged people, approximate geo-tagged, and rolled in to existing folders.  Created a webpage for ALL of the original prints that will be unveiled later this week….to those in the circle.
• Booked a hotel for New Orleans – this was the cheapest, best rated, close to the French Quarter AND close to the start line giving a discount for people signed up for one of the races, and I wanted to book it early to make sure there were rooms available.  done!
• Figured out our plans for Thanksgiving/weekend.  Now I just need to convince Nick that he wants to do a Turkey Trot with me on Thanksgiving morning.
• Confirmed the Christmas plans with all the key players and everyone is on board.
• Finished and ordered a fun surprise.  Stay tuned.

The housework did live to see another day, but at least we had a really yummy dinner to go along with the season finale of Greek tonight courtesy of this  Onion Custard Pie Recipe.  I have no idea what the difference between this “custard pie” and a “quiche” is, but I do know that this recipe was pretty darned good.  I’ve started making a batch of pie crusts and freezing the dough so it’s ready to go at a moments notice on nights like this, when the urge for something with a crust arises.  I’d like to think that I made the recipe a bit lighter by skipping the 1/2 and 1/2 and subbing skim milk, but the butter probably counteracted any of that.  This took a bit to make, between the parallel (onions cooking/pre-baking crust) followed by the actual oven time, but the result was quite tasty and filling.  Considering how much Nick was wandering around the house before dinner complaining that he had to tighten his belt to forget the hunger pains, one serving and the boy was filled.

Bonus points to those of you that got the Troll 2 reference. 

….  daylight savings time.  An extra hour of sleep?  ‘Nuf said.

…. Indian buffet.  Today we hit up a buffet with some of the crew in Bethesda before Nikhil took off.  Lots of veggie options, tasty food – yum.

…..  sale fares!  This afternoon, the goals were to figure out what we were doing for Christmas and to get stuff working for New Orleans.  New Orleans reservations ended up being closed till tomorrow, but we did spend a good hour or two putting together and discussing this chart.  (  another shout-out hooray…. marker board!)  Driving, leaving from WAS or somewhere in upstate NY and different dates made for the complex chart, balanced by Nick and I having different priorities for the whole thing.  My best option was driving, though I was not excited about 40 hours in the car over 9 days; Nick’s best option was flying from DC though the price was almost double that of driving.  << more discussion>> << checking email>>  Low and behold, I saw a midwest airlines fare sale announcement delivered at that moment.  Clicked it a second after receiving it, and found the exact flight we wanted for the price we originally wanted to pay, and booked it on the spot.  Big WOOHOO to the best balance of all the options! (And to the timely way that happened – double checked the sale fares an hour later and they’d gone up substantially!)  So nice to have Christmas figured out.  A bit too brain dead from that to even try to tackle Thanksgiving this evening.

….final hooray goes to Melanie and to my mom, for driving and watching Pinot for the holidays, respectfully.  (Cashew gets the place to herself, since we won’t be gone for that long.  Independent kitteh!)

Happy Halloween!

Relaxing day today for the most part.  The 6 mile run this morning was not as enjoyable as it was last week.  Not sure if it’s due to the fact that I’ve been trying to do more hill workouts on the treadmill mid week, or if it’s because last week I took Friday off and yesterday I got stuck to the schedule and got a workout in (late albiet, but in!).  I guess we’ll see how next week goes.

The Huskers won against Baylor (! finally after the past two weeks of insanity), which set the day off on a good note.  Roasted some pumpkin seeds while Nick was at the airport picking up Nikhil….  made them in three flavors this year:  salted, curry, and smoked paprika.  Tried to brine them before roasting (based on this post I found last week), but I didn’t notice a difference at any rate. The flavored seeds were good, but I think good ol’ sea salt and olive oil is still my favorite.

And we were off to Patterson’s Happy 30th/Halloween festivities!  I’m still not a huge fan of our point and shoot camera, so the pictures taken on it were minimal, but alas – for your viewing enjoyment.  I do with we had a before picture of Julie as a bunch of grapes – what a brilliant costume!  Melanie may be posting more pictures at some point today – hers are sure to be more complete than ours!

Nick & Colleen as German Folk

Mehul & Liz as Cash for Clunkers

Hilary as Swine Flu, Christy as a Redskins Fan, Patterson & Lee as Star Trek folk

Greg as Dan Snyder, Nikhil as the Big Bad Wolf

Julie as a bunch of (here, deflated) grapes

Lots of winging it this week, which turned out well and actually gave us lots of leftovers.  Funny how excited I get about leftovers nowadays – used to hate them, now I’m excited that weekend lunch is taken care of

With the throwing stuff in a pan this week, not many ‘dinner’ recipes for this week – but the recipe file (Recipes This Week) has recipes for the chili and bean dip we had with pumpkin carving, the pumpkin whoopie pies that Mehul & Liz brought over, and all the components of the Ghost cupcakes made this evening.