Whaaaat?

Welcome to one of the best dinners of your life! Tammy cooked up Chicken in Cider and Bacon Sauce!? Are you joking, you may ask incredulously? No! Cider And bacon sauce. With parmesan potato wedges and green beans cooked in the chicken broth with more bacon. This was a seriously great weekend.

Some Hippos

These are some hippos we made. Our techniques are still pretty unsound, but we are improving, definitely an up and coming phenom you should be looking out for.

Ice Cream Cake

Another creation of Tammy's kitchen, although this one wasn't the unmitigated success that we have seen in the past. Mostly I think it came down to the fact that the ice cream cake just isn't quite worth it. It tasted pretty good, although not quite as good as some of the other cakes we've done, but it was several times over more work than other cakes. Also, decorating went poorly. We tried to do frosting with a ziplock bag. All in all it was a herculean effort, but not one that will be repeated. I think we'll focus more on baking, and if needed, just add the ice cream at the end. That's the moral of the story. You can always add ice cream at the end.

Nate Nate

We'll have a better post with pictures up next week, hopefully, but I wanted to throw something on here before we leave for Chicago tomorrow. Nate was in town Friday to Monday, which was fantastic. It was one of the walkingest weekends of my life, but really good times. Days were made of good food in large quantities, breakfast out every day, a blazers game, saturday market, arcade, billiards, donuts, videogames, and still more walking around. We made it through pretty much everywhere downtown, most of Hawthorne, and a little bit of Mississippi/Alberta. Weather held out well around 55 with infrequent rain.

This was kind of our first run through of hosting someone besides parents, which lent an interesting perspective. I think both of us are feeling pretty comfortable these days in getting around town under the scrutiny of a third party, finding good eats, and filling time with fun stuff. Nate seemed pretty approving of our new apartment and Portland in general. Food carts are a big winner in getting people on board, at least among our friends. You can get a ton of great and varied foods for super cheap.

Anyway, good times were had. We didn't do amazing, but we will have some pictures up later, which is a positive step. Anyone who wants to come out here, we now have space and are happy to show you around.

Back to business

Hello hello!

Welcome back everyone. I tried to wait it out with the fox post, just hoping someone would take care of that for me, but no luck. I am still without pet fox. Onto the news!

We have been up to some things since my last post and we will be up to many more as March looks to be a busy old month. I am finally back into soccer, with much rejoicing. Seems to be a good group of people more or less my own age, which has been something of a rarity. It'll be much more competitive than last year playing against quite a few college players, which I'm looking forward to. Season starts in April and we've gotten together for a few games already as a kind of warm up. All good things that will require a great deal of wheezing until I get back up to speed.

Last weekend we made our first trip out to the coast. We went out to Seaside, which is less than 2 hours from here. We walked the beach, ate pancakes and hung out with some seals. Everything you could want from a beach. Weather was sunny, a bit above 50*, and did it ever feel good. We are missing the sun pretty badly. Tammy went in to the doctor recently to find out why she's been tired, and it is most likely due to a Vitamin D deficiency from lack of sun. Pretty much everyone out here takes D supplements. We need sun. We stopped in at a little aquarium near the beach where you got to feed the seals, and these seals were pro. Each one had its own move it had perfected to attract potential feeders. One would rapidly slap a flipper on its belly, one would lay upside down on a rock and catch things in his mouth, one would open and close its mouth real wide like a mini golf obstacle...they were ridiculous. We did get a little sad when we found out that pretty much everyone out at the beach had at least one dog. Some people had as many as five. Just didn't seem fair.

The other major event is that we made our first ever pie. It was a chocolate peanut butter pie and life was great. Pie in the house means you are living the dream.

So those are the major points of the last couple weeks. This week we have Melody in, and I'll have a post about our trip to Multnomah Falls with pictures on Wednesday, on Friday we'll have Nate, and the following weekend we'll be heading back to Chicago. Hopefully this hectic end to March will just make the month fly along and we'll be in spring before you know it. I want to see the sun.

Winter needs a swift kick in the pants if you ask me.

Said Cupcakes

Pirate themed chocolate cupcakes with a peppermint frosting. Sooo good and that blue is fantastic for a frosting.

I'm terribly sorry

but it seems the world is ending. At this moment I am drinking V8 and eating whole wheat pita with roasted red pepper hummus.

At the very least I believe later today will involve mint chocolate cupcakes. Equilibrium restored.

Fancy Foods Week

Some important disclaimers: (1) it is hardly a week when truthfully I am only doing two days of fancy foods, and (2) they are hardly fancy foods.

Nonetheless! We have approached this week with gusto and grocery shopping and decided on two new recipes to try. Yankee Pot Roast Stew and Orange Chicken in Pasta. Oh, and maybe some beer bread later on.

Yankee Pot Roast Stew was a successful venture on Tuesday and one that will be repeated. We haven’t done much so far in terms of soups or stews and this one was a long time coming to beat back the winter weather (not our winter of course, but boy it sure was a cold week in the midwest. Don’t know how we survived!). It was a pretty simple recipe, but it was my first ever 2+ hour cooking experience.

Some facts about myself as a cook:

-I am terrible at planning ahead. I’ve been quick enough about everything that this has never really hurt any of the meals I’ve cooked, but it does make it more stressful. I like to start the first step before preparing ingredients for the later ones. So for this stew, I had three minutes of cooking time in which to chop an onion, cube some beef, and find the spices I needed.

-I tend to be intuitive in my cooking. I don’t measure carefully and after I learn a recipe I measure less and less while just throwing in what I feel would be the right amounts. Again, this has surprisingly failed to blow up in my face. Even though I don’t have a ton of experience cooking and don’t understand how flavors work together, I can only remember one or two dishes that turned out badly, and those were more cases of cooking things incorrectly or letting something go too long.

-Truthfully, this matches how I write pretty accurately. Not that I write haphazardly or without proper support, but I do generally start writing and build my papers out from wherever I happen to start. I don’t know how writing has always been my strong point in school.

-Similarly, I have no idea why I’m not a terrible cook.

As for Orange Chicken and Pasta, that is on the docket for tomorrow and I will be sure to pass on any cooking fiascos that prove the above points false.

Good luck to any other fancy food weeks out there!

Turkey Team

Welcome Thanksgiving! We have turkey town in effect and our apartment is gearing up for the holiday. We left up the orange lights on account of them being the best and there may be a few more turkeys before November is over. We apparently love to do crafts, again on account of them being the best, but probably also because we are adults.

First up is Tam’s turkey. He is a rather large, but an elegant friend with tiny feet. He has a sweet pilgrim hat. After him comes my Captain Gorton inspired turkey. He knows all about the rainy season and he is ready. Oh, also don’t be alarmed. His butt is not on fire. Those are some sweet tail feathers. Not flames.

Finally, we have our next attempt at cupcakes. These may not have turned out as well, but that is mostly because I was involved. Our decorating hit a bit of a wall when we ran out of Thanksgiving themed ideas. This happened after the third cupcake. I have no idea what is relevant to this holiday. We have autumn leaves, a native american, pilgrim hat, turkeys both standing and cooked, and then we ran into some problems. You may also find the number 8, pac man, a gravy boat, a gourd, and the x-men logo. Hooray for Thanksgiving!

So we are living up November, happy autumns!