diumenge, de novembre 26, 2006

Thanksgiving Success

Iron Chef Lundeby

Thanksgiving chez nous went spectacularly well and Austin and I enjoyed every minute of hosting it. The side dishes turned out well and the brined bird truly did take center stage. I even ate some of it and I rarely touch poultry of any kind. Austin and I had done enough prep before the main even that everything went smoothly and the process of cooking for our family was quite enjoyable.

The next day, my mom baked a stuffed French toast casserole that we topped with berries-- sweet overload. Austin has a sweet tooth but it was at my limit, very good but very rich. It was nice to have it all ready to throw into the oven.

The oven was really the only source of a minor snag; we had been intending to clean it for ages but never got around to it. Roasting the bird at 500 degrees resulted in quite a bit of smoke and at breakfast, the oven was still disagreeable. I think the oven's hygiene needs to be addressed in the near future.

After breakfast and visiting, Austin and I headed to his parents' on Friday. I was able to visit with some friends for a bit and then on Saturday, it was T-day 2. It was nice to see the extended fam again and continue to eat whatever happened to be in our line of sight, hungry or not.

Now it's Sunday, ugh, Sunday, and I'll be spending most of the day working on a presentation for my SLA class and possibly grading exams if I have time. Then it's a five day work week, what's with that? I was already used to the three day week...

dijous, de novembre 23, 2006

Thanksgiving Kitsch-en

Austin's Gramma gave us this turkey; not only is it beautiful but it serves as a gravy boat as well. Happy Turkey Day!

Kitsch-en Decoration

Happy Thanksgiving!

Last night we did our T-day run-around, finalizing groceries and cleaning. The big success of the night was scoring a case of our current favorite Sauvignon Blanc, Pomelo. The description says it has "subtle" hints of grapefruit but we find the grapefruit is more than subtle on the palate. It's often touted for being a great summer wine, no arguments here, but we're guessing it pairs well with a turkey dinner too.

The disappointment of the evening was not being able to find fresh sage anywhere. This of course makes sense since many people use it to make sage dressing but we did hold off on buying it for a reason: the last few times we've purchased it, the sage has been at the point of molding. Ugh. So I called every grocery store we hadn't been to and was shot down. My mom called her local grocery store and they said they had some "hanging up in little bags in the produce department." I don't know what it is about that statement, but I'm worried it's going to be dried sage. Oh well, we'll all live if the gorgeous white cheddar and sage mashed potatoes have to be subjected to the indignity of dried sage.

When we came home, Austin checked the bird and he didn't seem to be defrosting very well in the refrigerator even though we thought we had timed that well. We put him in a bath of cold water in the kitchen sink (he's not a whole bird, just a breast). I started to wash the kitchen floor and noticed that I had left a big puddle of water by the sink. When I went to mop it up, I realized the sink was leaking and at a good rate, too. Austin had to move the bird to the other side which luckily wasn't leaking and then I had to rewash the whole section :-( When I was a kid, there was always some sort of plumbing issue at Gramma's on T-day so I figured this was actually a good omen.

But then I moved on to the bathroom and had another floor washing misadventure. I reached down to the mop pail and, when standing up again, managed to bang my head into the side of the door. Hard. It was exactly like what they call in a novel a "sickening crack" and apparently I shouted some vulgarities after because Austin heard me from the basement and came to check on me. I took some ibuprofen and just went to bed. The good news is that there is no hideous, disfiguring bruise today, just a little red mark. I was worried that my family would think that Austin had abused me with a frozen turkey or something. Also, no headache or other issues; I think maybe bonking your head just sounds a lot louder and more serious when you are the one who lives inside of it.

We slept in a bit and still have to prepare the potatoes and green beans. Austin brined the bird last night while I was asleep so that is well under way. There is a tiny bit of miscellaneous clutter to remove and some final vacuuming to do but other than that, we're right on track and life is good!

dimarts, de novembre 21, 2006

♪ It's the Final Countdown! ♪

This short week is great and tomorrow will be fun because it won't feel like a normal class period. One student even volunteered to bring treats and he wasn't a person I would have imagined would offer or be interested in such behavior.

After work tomorrow, Austin and I are doing the big shopping run and putting the final touches on our cleaning. We will also get the potatoes assembled so they just have to bake and heat through. The green beans will be trimmed and the toasted hazlenut-lemon butter will be prepped so we just have to boil the beans and toss with the butter. Austin will also get the bird in the brine and get that going.

My sister and husband are bringing the squash and cranberries and my brother and fiancée are bringing hors d'oeuvres for later on (sadly, we actually do get hungry again). My mom is bringing dessert and a stuffed french toast breakfast casserole for the next morning. There will be eight of us total.

Then Thanksgiving will be over and it will be finals week and Christmas and 2007. It's all a blur from this point on...

Weekend Recap

Friday, I met LeeAnne for dinner in Hudson. We actually started out meeting at a coffee shop and just catching up on everything. I gave L her belated birthday presents and some of my old bridal magazines so we paged through those, mostly making fun of the hideousness that you can find in such mags.

We headed to dinner at The Twisted Grille and decided to order one appetizer, entree, and dessert and split it. We had delicious ceviche followed by a seafood stew in a coconut lime sauce and then had some sort of flourless chocolate delight for dessert. The ambience was also quite nice; lime green walls and lots of spiraly metal sculptures. We sat upstairs so we had a view of the very cute downtown Hudson, with all the Christmas lights up and people bustling around. All in all, very satisfying.

On Saturday, Austin and I worked really hard to clean up our house for the upcoming Thanksgiving event. We had been quite neglectful of general upkeep and that's why it was rather time-consuming. Now the place looks great and I wonder why we don't maintain it that way more often; it's so much nicer to sit and grade or read or just relax when the clutter is gone. Of course it has everything to do with time, work stress, etc, but we're going to try to keep it in better shape.

Saturday night, we saw "Borat" and I was disappointed. I had seen clips of him from something other than the movie and actually found those more interesting. Having an underlying plot actually bothered me and seemed too contrived. Anyway. Dinner at the tepanyaki/hibachi place was outstanding as always and I had a cute little cocktail with an umberella, always fabulous.

Then Austin and I came home and had a little wine and planned our future travels. It was one of those perfect conversations where you get so excited about sharing a life with someone who has so much in common with you yet is different enough to challenge you and keep it interesting.

Oh, and then the travels involved driving around looking for a Wii. He didn't get one, of course, and was seriously mopey and mournful the whole next morning.

Besides Austin being a bit dejected, I got my usual "Sunday Syndrome" where I started thinking of everything I had to do and how it would never get done in time and got so overwhelmed that for awhile, I just sort of sat around and stared into space. Then I got up and did more cleaning which helped get me going and made me feel productive enough to wrap up other loose ends.

It was our last weekend at home for awhile and it was wonderful.

divendres, de novembre 17, 2006

Slacker Friday

TGIF and all that. I'm looking forward to a fun weekend and I'm already checked out at work. Two of my classes aren't happening today because it's oral exam week and everyone scheduled theirs before Friday. Ethically, I probably should have un-canceled the class but once you tell college students they have Friday off, well, it's a lost cause to try to recover it. In my other classes, we are starting the subjunctive and I LOVE teaching it. I'm serious, I'm that much of a grammar nerd that I love the subjunctive so I'm all pumped to do some related activities.

After work, I'm meeting LeeAnne for dinner in Hudson to make up for the snow-related cancellation last Friday. We will be celebrating her birthday and her engagement, both of which happened in October. We have lots to catch up on and we are very similar in that we are both constantly making, changing, updating, and altering our life plans. I like the fact that I can share my latest wacky idea to get a Ph.D. in Catalan Studies or something and she doesn't bat an eye, just encourages me but in a reasonable and realistic way. Then when I change my mind five minutes later and decide no, for sure I am getting a Ph.D. in Occitan Studies because it's even more useful and wonderful, she's never skeptical of my whims and still handles me with the exact right level of seriousness. It's great to have a friend like that.

On Saturday, Austin and I are rescheduled to go out with another couple on whom we had to cancel last weekend due to Austin's unfortunate health status. He's feeling better now and we're ready to see BORAT, as recommended by Bad Z and all of my students. Yeah!

On Sunday, I'm having lunch with a girlfriend who had to cancel on me a few weeks ago due to a work-related snafu. We're going to a cafe I haven't checked out before so I'm looking forward to that.

In addition to all this social activity, the man and I are also going to attempt to clean the house in order to make it suitable for Thanksgiving guests. I will also be doing large amounts of grading and work for my SLA class.

After this weekend, we're booked into 2007 and I'm starting to panic wondering how I will ever finish all the work for my class, the classes I teach, and the couple of side projects I'm doing. I might follow the example of Bad Z and chart the hell out of everything using a big calendar and markers and possibly stickers.

For now, though, I'll just enjoy this weekend.

dimarts, de novembre 14, 2006

Sleepy Tuesday Morning

Tuesdays are always my prep day and where I work, you can interpret that however you want. Some people work from home, some come in for limited hours, and some are here all day. I tend to treat it like another work day and am usually at my office from 7:30-4:30ish.

This morning I woke up a few minutes before my alarm but I thought the clock was going to tell me I had many more hours to work. Unfortunately, it wasn't the middle of the night and the sunrise lamp had been turned off since Austin had called in sick and stayed in bed on Monday. I usually don't have problems waking up but today I felt like I was dragging, hence the current "bloggin' from work" instead of working at work. Hmm.

As I mentioned, Austin has been sick so our Saturday evening plans were canceled and I canceled my Friday plans due to the snow. It was a low-key weekend but I got a lot done at home which is always satisfying. It was sort of the pre-Thanksgiving cleaning and organizing although there will be much to do next weekend.

Austin also threw together a really good pizza. We got a Boboli thin crust and spread on a light layer of bbq sauce. That was topped with pieces of Boca's Spicy Chik'n Patties and slivers of red onion. A little parm/mozzerella cheese mix held the whole thing together and it was really delicious, something we'll definitely make again.

dissabte, de novembre 11, 2006

Of easy wind and downy flake...

This week flew by. I had my SLA class on Monday night, went out for Indian food on Wednesday night with Sean and Angie and their friend, went out with Austin on Thursday night to the restaurant where we got married, graded approximately 800 compositions, and then woke up to this, the crown jewel of the week:

Friday Morning

There was a prediction of 1-3" of snow but when I woke up at 6:00, I think we had already met the goal. It was snowing at a rate of 3"/hr, that's the rate that means you pull your car out of the garage, stop, run back in for a scraper, come out, and end up with huge, heavy flakes covering your hair so that all the straightening you did that morning is shot to hell and when you get to work, you have to pull it back in an awkward ponytail and make a more awkward joke to your students about why it looks like you just got back from your 7am class (inside joke, eeep!).

I know it's not the snow's fault, but the rest of my morning went a little crazy. I had a language lab activity that failed spectacularly in spite of the fact that I had the appropriate training AND had successfully set up the activity with colleagues in the lab so I knew I could do it. Then I had to sort of reorganize what I had planned for the remaining classes since it was a failure on the part of the technology and not as much the user, so there was little I could do. The day was saved, though, when my last class made fun of my drawings on the board but applauded my last one. Like actually clapping, it was pretty cute. They also cracked me up when I made them do conversation exercises that were set up like a speed-dating format (i.e. moving around a lot, not actually hitting on each other en español). The groaned a little in protest but a handful of them said "At least we don't have to dance. We had to dance for a whole class period in my other Spanish class. It was like awkward middle school gym class." Hee hee.

I love my students and I love my work. They are so creative and even when I'm having a bad day and don't want to go to class, in the end I'm glad I did. I tell them to write a Halloween story and some how it's a story about Dennis Hopper falling out of a tree. I have them do conversation practice about finding an apartment together and they make up a story about kicking their aging grandpa out of his house and making it a party pad. I have them practice health vocabulary and they make a huge picture of a Power Ranger suffering from obesity. Why a Power Ranger, who knows, but they managed to incorporate amazing amounts of vocab in their little story about him.

Alright, enough of my cute little students stories. This post was originally about snow so here are a few more pictures I took after work. I'm sure the snow will melt before the stuff that stays all winter comes but it's still kind of sucky to deal with it in the first half of November. Ah, the joys of the upper midwest...

Campus Shrubs

Our Lantern Is Wearing a Hat

diumenge, de novembre 05, 2006

Operation: T-Day

We’re a little over halfway through our weekend and at home and we’re enjoying the relaxing, unscheduled feel of it. Yesterday, Austin did computery things and I went to my hair appointment and ran some errands. Some laundry and dishes were done, some organizing, and lots of laying around and reading.
Our other project was to plan the Thanksgiving dinner that we are hosting and begin test runs on any new recipes. Austin was very cute and excited about hosting dinner, so much so that I had to rein him in a bit (example: he was envisioning a series of elaborate hors d’oeuvres for after dinner so that our guests would not be forced to munch on leftovers).
Last night’s test dishes were the sides since the brined turkey from last year is still being talked about and will be repeated this year. We did the mashed potatoes recommended by my old French adviser from college, the Bon Appetit recipe that involves fresh sage, white cheddar, and of course butter and cream. We decided that a slightly less heavy side would be in order so we tried Cooking Light’s Green Beans with Toasted Hazelnut- Lemon butter.

Both dishes turned out quite well and are on the Official Menu of the 2nd Annual LundeRoy Thanksgiving. The potatoes were creamy and buttery and delicious and sage was a lovely addition. The bonus feature is that the dish has to be baked so you can prep the whole thing a day or two before and all you have to do is throw it in the oven (if you can spare the space) until it’s warmed through. I didn’t use white cheddar since I couldn’t find any but it’s only a question of aesthetics since cheddar is not yellowy-orange by nature; that comes from an additive.
The green beans were also just right, light and buttery and lemony with the crunch of hazelnut bits. The beans can be trimmed the night before and the butter can be prepared up to a week in advance so all you have to do at game time is boil the beans for a few minutes, then toss in the butter mixture. In this dish, I was so concerned about getting the hazelnuts down to the perfect size that I forgot to toast them. I probably will do so on T-day.