holiday pomegranate salad

We’ve made the Moroccan Orange Salad from this excellent cookbook, for several holidays in the last five years, including this Christmas.  I like how it tastes but admit that part of the appeal is that it is just so refreshingly pretty.

• 6 navel oranges (we often use cara cara oranges)
• 1 tbs orange flower water
• 1/8 to 1/4  tsp cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon clover honey
• pinch freshly grated nutmeg
• chopped fresh mint for garnish (the more the better…)
• pomegranate seeds (more is better.  We actually used 2 pomegranates for 8 oranges, I think)

Slice the oranges, catching the juice in the salad bowl.  Combine the orange flower water, cinnamon and honey and toss with the oranges.  Sprinkle with nutmeg and chill or serve at once, garnishing with mint and pomegranate.  This will hold for several hours in the refrigerator.

Merry Christmas from the cutest parts of our family

Luna is voluntarily inside the cat house D made out of carboard bricks.  He’s insisted that he wants to be an architect for at least the last six months.

Emo and Toru, almost touching but definitely still not cuddling …

my mom’s sweet seventieth

In late November my mom threw herself a big (and fun) birthday bash a few weeks before her actual birthday.  Little did she know, in June we had booked a three bedroom airbnb in the Fremont/Ballard area to surprise her.  We actually managed to pull off the surprise part too!

My dad cancelled her plans for the weekend, as she made them, and we all agreed to meet for dinner Friday night in Fremont.  The ploy for getting her from the restaurant to the airbnb was “let’s go look at Christmas lights.”  It was enough.  Jack, D and I go there first, and my parents and Becky drove up, at which point my mom saw us on the porch and was very confused, but then happy.

Saturday we walked around Ballard, ate lunch at Bitterroot BBQ and enjoyed not driving at all.  Jack was kind enough to take D home for a rest in the middle of the day to “check on the kittens” so that the rest of us could walk at an adult pace.  In the evening, Becky and I made a leg of lamb in my Intstant Pot and Myra continued the surprise by joining us for a nice dinner.

Sunday morning more good friends came for quiche and coffee cake.

Thanks for everything, Mom.

PEPS is still the best

Three years after our newborn PEPS group (see peps-is-best), I volunteered as a leader for another batch of new parents. It was a daunting time commitment of about four to five hours a week for twelve weeks.  I’m not going to pretend that I’m not excited to have my Monday nights back and my Monday nights’ sleep improved, but it was also a very rewarding experience.

As in the group Jack and I joined, it was an evening couples group.  That tends to mean very equal parenting and both parents going back to work during the twelve facilitad weeks.  Parenting a newborn is hard work for anyone, but it was nice to see the group supporting each other through similar challenges.  It made me realize how much we all need work-life balance role models.

Being a leader was of course different.  It was sometimes challenging to find the right balance between sharing my own stories while trying to fade out as they had more and more natural conversations.  PEPS is a very mature organization with great resources, so they have the group do a little survey in the middle.  Amusingly it was a split between feedback that I should fill up the occasional silences and that I should let them go on a little longer…

All in all, it was a great group and I am optimistic that they connected enough to keep the group going on their own.