(103). Go Big Red!

"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

(96). Happy Halloween!

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

(46). Rochester

Aw, so cute. I think the girls want a screen door of their own.

Thank you so much to my mom for watching the ladies while we’re on our trip! Rainy trip to the ROC today, but nothing some chocolate almond ice cream from don & bobs and a husker victory couldn’t fix! I love fall weekends when we are all decked out in game day red:)

(39). Wait- we are at home for a weekend?

Sooooo nice to be home this weekend. I slept in this morning, did my 5 mile run with Nick, watched a movie and some college football, ran an errand or two… Including getting our Europe backpacks out of storage, I think cashew wants to make the trip with us.

Tonight we hit up the husker bar in dc to kick off the season with a win! Go big red!

New Years Fun

It seems so long ago already!  Can it be that we returned less than a week ago?

Nick, Pinot and I drove down to meet up with some Pender peeps for the Gator Bowl on 1/1 in Jacksonville, FL this year.  We left on Tues 12/30 after work, making it all the way down to Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, where we loved being out of the car, and romping around the beach with Pinot on the morning of 12/31!  We proceeded to have lunch in Savannah, Georgia – for some reason – maybe Gone with the Wind, I really wanted to check it out since it was essentially on the way – we walked around River Street with the Pinot and had 5 Guys outdoors for lunch.  YUMMY burger and YAY to eating outside on 12/31 in a tshirt and jeans!  We jumped in the car and finished the drive down to Jackonville.    Alisha, Erik, Sarah & Racheal beat us to the hotel by about 15 minutes, so good timing on our part.  Pinot and Jackson (the Wist puppy!) got along great, and before we knew it, we were decked out and off to the Jacksonville Landing for new years festivities.  Probably too good of a time was had by all, but we were all up bright and early on 1/1 getting ready to tailgate!  It was highly amusing packing the 6 of us in the Wist Clemson-mobile, with 5 of us fully decked out in Husker gear.  Unfortunately for Erik, our majority won out (Go Huskers!) and most of us ended the weekend on a high note.  (good thing, I dont’ know how fun the ride back to MD would have been on 1/2 if we had lost!)

We also got quite a kick out of South Carolina in general.  Fireworks, anyone?

Debbie’s Birthday

We headed up to Rochester last weekend to celebrate my sister’s 21+ birthday.  I only had to work for about 3 hours on Friday morning, and we were able to get on the road by 10AM, with Pinot & Melanie in tow.  The ride up was great fun – wegmans subs and grape pies and driving by the ski slopes of bristol mountain.  We were able to get some QT in with Debbie on Friday (and Pinot with Snowball) before heading home to watch the debate – after stopping for a Wegmans run of course.  My mom got home right at the tail end of the debate.  A nice low key night.  Saturday we ran a couple of errands before heading over to Debbie’s birthday party.  I made punch, and Melanie & Matt did a great job with all of the cooking.  The party was fun – and after the majority of folks left, we got to take turn driving my sisters 1964 Mercury Park Lane in Bittersweet pink, which was the awesome.  While Pinot went home with Nana, Nick and I headed out to Champps sports bar in Eastview mall to watch the VA Tech/Nebraska game, which was frustrating and exhilerating to watch, all at once.  Got stopped at a sobriety checkpoint on the way home, which was funny b/c Nick was driving, and he didn’t remember the name of the mall we went to watch the game, or the name of the sports bar/restaurant.  Got home just fine (go ahead sir!) and headed to bed before the drive home today.  Actually, today started out cute with  my mom saying “stay in bed as long as possible, it’s miserable out” – very drizzly – but then she wore her nebraska shirt under her suit to work which was adorable.  We got out of the ROC fairly early – well, early enough to make it to Catocin Mountain Orchard Farm Market about 45 min from our house in MD, so we were able to pick up a few jars of Nick’s favorite peanut butter AND some concord grapes.  And other assorted produce, I love farmers markets.  Cashew is glad to have us home

First September Weekend

So YAY – obviously from other posts, Nick passed his proposal on Friday and has now officially been promoted to candidacy.    There is a lot of work to be done in the next couple of years, but getting that first roadblock knocked out of the park was, I think, a big stress relief; especially with all of the buildup.  We didn’t celebrate by heading out – rather, we celebrated at home with some much needed sleep!  And reading, as the case may be.  Good stuff.

Woke up on Saturday to a monsoon.  Ok, not really a monsoon, but the trees outside were blowing pretty hard in the rain.  Decided not to go to the husker bar to watch the game, but rather to listen to it from the comfort of our living room.  Got my bake on with some peach pie before kick-off.  I would have liked to have seen the 1st and 4th quarters of the game, but was so frustrated during the 2nd and 3rd that overall I was glad we had the time at home.  It was actually pretty cute, with the rain, Pinot had her huskers rain coat on without the hood – she stepped outside and squinted at me like ‘what are you doing, why are we out in this?!?”  put on her hood and she trudged outside for a quick potty break before running back to the house at full speed.

Saturday night we headed up to Baltimore to the Legwarmers concert to say goodbye to Amy, who’s moving back to Maine.  It was really good to get up there, it’s been too long!!

Sunday, well, we slept in (going to bed at 4 will do that to you).  Finally got motivated to steam clean the carpets – or Nick did, I was still lazy.  That turned into a project on it’s own as the steam cleaner belt had broken, blah blah blah.  managed to get a good pass over the carpet before heading out to the 3rd annual picnic & cornhole tournement @ the Promenade, this year co-hosted by Julie and Mehul.  And got a stop in to the bookstore on the way home last night so we’d have some reading material for the trip this week.

The Season Begins!!

What a great Saturday.  Pinot & I started the day with a run, and I managed to get some stuffs done around the house early on, with college football as the soundtrack to our Saturday.  All four of us were sporting Husker gear for the early afternoon games in anticipation of the start of husker season last night.

Unfortunately, the first game was only on pay per view via Direct TV, which we don’t have, so we had to head to the bar to watch the game after Nick’s fantasy football draft.  The bar was standing room only – gotta love that much red in one place so far from NE.

The vibe was sort of different, at least to me, this year than the last time we watched a game at the bar.  We stood near one of the TV’s behind a larger group – maybe Nick has trained me well, but the group -especially the guys (?!) drove me nuts because they were talking during the ENTIRE game.  They weren’t even watching!  And they kept dancing around into my field of vision!  anyway, we moved around a bit and the second half was fine, but still – they reminded me of the “pick-a-little, talk-a-little” ladies in the music man, jabbering the entire game away.  there were quite a few fans that were paying attention, but it was sort of humorous after the fact.

It was almost a showcase of fans.  Combined with the social hour group, there were also the guys that exploding with “AW MAN!” when we’d get 5 years (instead of 6?) or when we’d block the other team from getting a touchdown….but we didn’t get an interception.  Come on folks, first game, new coach, and some plays that we wouldn’t have been able to make last year if there was money involved.  the first half of the game was exciting – I thought we played pretty well.  The second half was a bit sloppy, but overall, I think this season holds promise!

Oh – and this Saturday also marks the start of the 6th annual “Walkers Choice Rumble” college football pick-em for Nick and I.  Nick leads the series 3-2, but I’ve won the last two strait, so this could be the year that I tied it up.  But – I’m much better at picking against the spread (with or without confidence points), and this year we are doing strait up pick the winner with confidence points, which means that it is Nick’s game. And true to form, though we had exactly the same picks for the winners yesterday, he’s up on me by 14 points.  Stupid stupid confidence points.  Without the spread anyway. 

Really? It’s only Wednesday?

Coming off of Monday night book club (the August book was Water for Elephants, which we both really enjoyed) and bocce last night (a maddening 16-13 loss, after we came back from being down 12-1), I think I’m about ready for a nap.  That’s not to mention the plethora of work stuff going on for both of us lately.  For me, the new hardware is in and we are in full test mode, but I’m meeting some of my engineers that work in PA for the first time today which is somehow ‘nerve racking’ despite the phone relationship we’ve had for the past few months.  For Nick, an upcoming thesis proposal means lots of getting organized, finalizing papers, scrutinizing reading lists, preparing slides, prep & practice talks.    I’m glad we’ve got nothing going on tonight other than getting home from work and vegging, because we’re both really looking forward to CYOAB tomorrow night, and outlet shopping on Friday since I get out of work early, and of course the start of Husker season on Saturday!

(I’m a bit bummed we don’t have direct tv and have to go to the bar for the game, so we won’t be able to have Pinot & Cashew in full NE gear with us for the game this weekend.)

Oh – and on a happy note – the wine that we made from the kit that Nick gave me last Christmas – well, it turned out less than stellar on it’s own.  (One of our friends who will remain nameless referred to the taste as rubbing alcohol.)  Despite many looks to the effect of me being crazy, I managed to turn it into a decent drinkable punch with the following formula  – one bottle ‘less than awesome’ red wine combined with an equal portion of mango juice and an equal portion of diet sprite.  Who would have thought?  Mmmmm, tasty. 

Long weekend, I can’t wait for you to get here!!  Oh okay, I’ll settle for Friday

Getting excited for football season && cheesecake

Aw, poor Chad – missing his flight last weekend meant missing out on chocolate chip cookie dough cheesecake goodness.

Cashew and Pinot (as well as Nick and myself) are getting pretty excited for Huskers season to start!