While I gather my thoughts and photos from the past week or so, feel free to peruse these recipes for your leftover Thanksgiving cranberries:
- Cran-tifa holiday bread – perfect for bringing to that office meeting or as a gift for your neighbor!
- Seared pork with cranberry-orange sauce - If, like me, you are the only person in your whole family who actually prefers homemade cranberry sauce, make this recipe to use up some of your leftovers!
So, what was everyone’s favorite Thanksgiving food for this year? I find it changes for me from year to year. Last year, it was the cranberry sauce. This year I enjoyed the stuffing we made with Oak’s homemade ciabatta bread.
Oak and I were out shopping at Southpoint yesterday, when we decided we wanted a little snack. Oak remembered an amazing bread pudding experience that he had at the Taste of Durham that had us intrigued with the Cafe Bistro in Nordstrom department store. Yes, the restaurant is actually in the store, off in a corner near the Junior’s department. What a find. They weren’t busy at all (even though the mall was insanely crowded), and had comfy benches and booths. We just ordered a french onion soup and one of the famous bread puddings, since brunswick stew was brewing away at home.
The soup was yummy, with loads of cheese and the requisite bread melted on the top. (OK, that’s basically why anyone eats French onion soup.. isn’t it?) The bread pudding was just as Oak remembered. It’s so perfect, and it comes with white chocolate and raspberry sauces, which I think completely make the dish. Sure, it’s a little more expensive than the food court, but it’s actually less expensive than the larger restaurants in the mall (ie Cheesecake factory, etc.). Plus, it’s a much more relaxing experience! No waits, no noisy whining kids running around like in the food court. I’m sure we’ll be stopping there again next time we get hungry at the mall.
We love Cook’s Illustrated and watching America’s Test Kitchen on TV. More than once, Oak or I have said, that would be a fun job… just testing and tasting recipes all day!! (Of course, this is a passing thought.. as making the same dish 35 times with different equipment would surely get old..)
So, imagine our excitement when one day in my email, I got a note that you can join the America’s Test Kitchen team to help test recipes in your own home!! How exciting! Of course, there’s no compensation, but you do get access to top-secret test kitchen recipes!!! ooooh…
I signed up, but then didn’t get anything for a few weeks so I was seriously doubting if this was even a real program. But, lo and behold, last week we received our first recipe: Pasta with chunky and creamy sundried tomato sauce. The recipe said that we had exactly 1 week to make the recipe and turn in our survey results. Yikes! By the time we gathered the ingredients and actually had time to mess with the recipe, it was a day late. Oh well. It was delicious!!! And, they seemed to still let me fill out the survey. Who knew?
I totally forgot to take a picture of the results, and the product is long gone. Oak kept eating it and exclaiming “this is so good”, so even the leftovers didn’t last long… I’m sure we’ll be making it again sometime soon.
So, we’re now looking forward to receiving our next recipe. Maybe if we’re super-dedicated, Christopher Kimball himself will send us complimentary subscriptions to Cook’s Illustrated or Cook’s Country!! (OK, not happening, but we can dream, can’t we?)
Oak proposed going camping somewhere in our new tent. My immediate thought was “would like not to freeze to death” so I suggested traveling south to Myrtle Beach and Charleston. While I was researching Charleston I came across the Angel Oak. It is so named not because a divine nature, but simply because the last people who owned the tree were named Angel.
Well… of course when I saw this I immediately thought.. Hellow, that’s totally our Cosmic Tree! (If you don’t remember, we learned all about cosmic trees from our local river naturalist, River Dave). So, we had to go. It was very impressive indeed. Because it’s such a tourist attraction, maybe we didn’t get to bond with the tree as much as we might have liked, but at least we had the experience. I totally forgot about the part where you ask the tree a question… I thought it was that you make a wish. Ah well, I guess we will have to visit it again someday.
We explored downtown Charleston a bit…. it is so beautiful and quaint there. I hope we can spend a longer weekend there sometime. Our campground on James Island was very fancy. There was a holiday light show and a pancake breakfast! Wahoo! The only downfall was that our campsite was in the “primitive area” with a Boy Scout jamboree. Luckily they went to bed pretty early and we didn’t hear them for over 8 hours.. better than we’ve done at some other campgrounds! haha. On Sunday we went back through Myrtle Beach and played mini golf, ate at Wild Wing Cafe, and shopped around a bit at Barefoot Landing before heading home. It was a nice little mystic getaway!!
Here’s the pictures!
The final entry in my fall musical madness: Rent. I remember everyone obsessing over this one in high school (Everyone = the girls that did all the musical theater stuff), so I felt obligated to finally see it. Believe it or not, I hadn’t seen the movie either so I only had a vague idea of the story.
While I enjoyed the “rock” music – quoted because, of course, it’s Broadway-ized rock, I wasn’t a huge fan of the storyline. I don’t know why. Part of me felt a little annoyed with these people for throwing their lives away. All this complaining about freezing and whatnot, but half of them also do not work or actually “do” anything. Sigh. How conservative and un-bohemian of me. Mark did end up “selling out” by selling his film footage to some trashy TV show. I think we were supposed to be disappointed that he was now working for The Man ™ but I was like, hey, maybe you won’t have to live in an abandoned factory anymore! Sweet!
So, while overall, I enjoyed the show, I suppose the problem was that I did not feel a personal connection to any of the characters. Though, I suppose, what would a musical about 20-something professionals be about? Will there be… Office Space: The Musical someday? Don’t laugh too much. Besides all those Disney movies converted to musicals, I’ve noticed that Legally Blonde AND the Wedding Singer are now Broadway musicals. No lie, dudes. Milton may very well be striking up a tune in our near future… I can see it now… the opening song shall be “Ode to my Red Stapler.” Box office gem, people. I’m writing it here so I can get rights to the royalties someday.
Perhaps the highlight of the evening was seeing Mr. South African Idol (ie the South African who won their version of American Idol). Wow, an almost famous person! Ding!
Yet again, we attended the International Festival, which is this time every year at the fairgrounds in Raleigh. That means we chow down on lots of food, get our names written in several foreign languages, and watch native dances from all sorts of countries and cultures.
Of all the foods this year, my favorite was the Filipino food, particularly the pancit. Yum. It didn’t really look like the picture on wikipedia, it was more like a lo mein with very thin noodles. Oak was disappointed that the belly dancers did not groove during our time at the festival. Mon dieu! I guess we’ll have to try again next year.
So, I went to my first official crop at Archivers. A crop is basically any time you scrapbook with other people. I thought that this was going to be my first crop, but then I actually remembered that I have “cropped” before with Shira in high school. We did it in her family’s kitchen a few times. Well, scrapbook stores host cropping events also. You pay a fee to get in, and you get dinner, a gift bag, and they give out prizes and do demonstrations throughout the night. So it’s pretty neat. Plus you stay motivated to work the whole time you’re there. The one we went to was 5 hours but they host 12 hour and overnight crops too (for the extremely hardcore, we decided). Apparently you need one of the rolling scrapbooking totes to go to these things. It’s how the scrappy chicas travel in style. I have not invested in one yet.
I believe we were the only ones in the 20-30 year age range, but it was fun. We especially had a laugh when I questioned what the heck one of the scrapbook tools was, when one woman took it from me and said, “I think I get examined with this at the doctor’s office!” Yikes. I joined this recipe swap thing on scrapbook.com, and I finished one set of the recipe cards for the swap, so it was a very productive evening!! Yay.
So, we went to see Mamma Mia! last night at the Progress energy theater in Raleigh. What an experience!!! We bought some tickets at the Broadway Series South summer sale, where we got tickets to Mamma Mia, Rent, and Avenue Q for ridiculously reasonable prices. Overall, the plot line is pretty thin and silly, and the ending is pretty questionable (it seems like the writer was like, oh, the show is about 2 hours now, let’s tie everything together with 3 lines!), but it’s still a fun show. Especially enjoyable were the hot disco flash-backs with funky disco clothing. I’m sure it would have been much appreciated back in our high school disco era.
The seats were also pretty decent for $25, you can’t really complain! We’re going to see Rent this week. From what I’ve read the story line is much more complicated and might actually require some listening instead of just grooving to ABBA tunes. Note to self: study the synopsis this week.
This Halloween was filled with several days’ worth of spooky fun… Here’s my tech-writer esque bulleted list of activities:
- NextStep fall ball – Ah, yes, the yearly event for early tenure IBMers. We had too much fun working on the decorations this year. They were pretty hot, if you ask me! We even made Martha’s glitter pumpkins! Sweet.
- Pigs and Punkins - Mom and Dave came to visit, and we went to Pigs and Punkins again this year. It was fun, but we ate a huge breakfast at Waffle House before we went so we didn’t partake in the BBQ portion! Sigh. I did get some great shots of the cute little racing pigs though – especially Sarah Jessica Porker. She was the most fashionable pig.
- Spook-tacular haunted trail in Morrisville – Oooh, spooky. We were afraid it was going to be totally cheesy after waiting in line to enter for over an hour. Luckily our fears were not realized, and the trail was at least amusing, if not totally scary.
I especially enjoyed the singing Elvis who came out of his tomb. Apparently Elvis is a staple at any Morrisville event. - Carving pumpkins – In a mad rush, Oak and I carved our pumpkins. He made a puking pumpkin, and I made one of those complicated designs that uses a template. I don’t think it really ended up looking like anything. I’ll post the pictures so you can see.
- Trick-or-treaters -We had a disappointing number of trick-or-treaters. (like maybe 10 kids up to 7:45pm, when we gave up and left… ) My favorite costume though was a Colonel Sanders who, instead of saying trick-or-treat, exclaimed “It’s FINGER-LICKIN good!” He even had his fry cook with him. Quite clever.
- 3-D cookies - Belinda invested in the 3-d cookie cutter set from Williams Sonoma. This was a pretty ambitious project for Halloween night, but it was fun nonetheless. I was especially impressed with Oak’s ability to make royal icing without even using a recipe.
Exciting! So, everyone, what did you do for Halloween??
Update: Here are the Halloween photos!
