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.

Scotland steps

Did we mention that we walked a lot on our trip to Scotland?  I didn’t use the GPS feature on my watch, and based on the GPS routes Jack was able to download, we think that my watch overestimated our mileage because we were taking shorter than average steps on the wet rocky terrain.  In the table below, the steps below are accurate and the mileage is not.  However, we also deserve credit for carrying all of our stuff, all of the time, outside of Glasgow and Edinburough.

20ish miles!!    The 13.44 mile was actually harder for me becuase we started in the afternoon and my feet were recovering from having been soggy throughout the previous day.

The long distance walks we did were part of the West Highland Way (Tyndrum to Kinlochmore in three days)  and the full Dava Way (Grantown-on-Spey, to Dava, to Forres in two days).  The West Highland Way felt pretty remote.  We were very rarely in forrests and could see long distances.  Most of the time there was one road in sight, though it was often far accross a valley.  The first night we spent at a hotel that was one of a handful of buildings miles down a dirt road in the middle of nowhere.  The second night we stayed at a hostel that was next to a ski slope.  The Dava Way is a former railway route that has been improved by volunteers over the last 15-20 years.  We passed farms and some houses, but not a single business other than the Dava Schoolhouse B&B where we spent the night.  Our tranist routes are shown in orange in the map below.

In terms of packing, I think we did pretty well.  We each had about 2.5 outfits, our hiking boots and a second pair of lightweight sneakers.  My boots especially weren’t cut out for the wetness, because I sadly had to give away my nice heavy duty boots post-pregnancy.  Buying new boots before a week of walking is not a good plan.  We brought some boot dryers which didn’t make it with the voltage differences in Europe.  We also brought a water filter for peace of mind but never needed it.  I am kind of obsessed with having enough water while hiking, but in the cool weather I wasn’t as thirsty as usual.   If we did it again, I’d bring our gaiters and my hiking poles.  A lot of other people used poles and they really help offset the weight of the backpack, in addition to making it easier to walk on wet ground.  We booked airbnbs with washing machines at several points so our clothes weren’t too dirty. 

coupons

I quite enjoy using our Chinook book,  which is a collection of “local, sustainable coupons.”   This is our second year buying the annual book and the only downside is that the coupons expire on Halloween so they can’t be used for Christmas shopping.  We paid $14 for the book at Costco and saved  $146.

There are some high-flying coupons that can pay for the entire book in one go such as a buy-one-get-one free admission to the science center, but there are also plenty of grocery store, and drugstore coupons that are quite easy to use.  We also used a couple café coupons and several for Goodwill.

Though we didn’t use any this year there are coupons for nice bookstores and clothing stores and all kinds of other things.

They've totally got my number!

West Highland Way day 3

Kings House to Kinlochmore

We think this was more scenic than day 2, but it was very close. It was really, really raining this morning, so we got to experience that.

Scotland trip so far

We're having a great time. Weather has been cold and drizzly much of the time, which is how we planned for it to go, and how we like it.

I'm writing this from Glencoe, 2/3rds of our way along the West Highland Way. There hasn't been any internet available for the last two nights, so hopefully I can post this once we make it to Fort William. No internet also means we haven't been able to call D, who we miss terribly!

We missed our connection in London (Cari is now 0/3 making connections in Heathrow... please wish us luck for the return flight). We ended up delayed from 7:20 am until 12:00 pm, but for our trouble (the flight in was a bit late, but really it was the customs line that got us), British Airways gave us a prepaid £450 credit card. Thanks!

We managed to make it to Glasgow in time to walk around town and eat, then briefly walked through the necropolis there the next (Sunday) morning before catching a train to Tyndrum to start our trek.

Presented without comment

Testing, testing. 1,2,3?

Update:  Jack figured out how to get pictures from our nice camera to his phone via bluetooth, in preparation for our trip to Scotland, where our phones will be our only computers.

kitten update

We've had the kittens for a little over a month.  Emo is still not friends with them, sadly.  Her bubble of personal space has been reduced from anywhere in the house down to about six inches though, so we're making progress.    D has a lot of fun with them and we're working on his technique for picking them up.  Toru is 6.5 lbs now, at 3.5 months, so he is rapidly approaching Emo's size.  

mushroom tarragon soup

We've made this enough times for it to qualify as a blog-worthy favorite.  Don't put in too much garlic!

Mushroom Tarragon Soup (from epicurious.com)

Ingredients

1 tbs butter

4 minced shallots

1 minced garlic clove

6 cups cremini mushrooms (minced?)

1  1/4 cups vegetable stock

1  1/4 cups 2% milk

1-2 tbs fresh chopped tarragon

2 tbs dry sherry

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp ground black pepper

1 sprig fresh tarragon for garnish

Parmesan cheese

• melt butter in dutch oven, add shallots and garlic and cook over medium heat for 5 minutes
• add mushrooms and cook gently for 4 minutes, stirring 
• add the stock and milk and bring to a boil
• lower heat, cover and simmer for 20 minutes, until mushrooms are soft
• stir in the chopped tarragon, salt and pepper on low heat
• immersion blend
• stir in sherry
• serve and top with Parmesan and more tarragon

a bunch of plants

We're officially done with construction now that we've replaced the plants we took out (nasty old bamboo) on the border between our property and our neighbors.  It took them a while to agree on a plant amongst the four townhomes and then we waited until the beginning of the rainy season to plant them.  They are lemon lime nandina and now that I'm familiar with them I'm noticing other nandina all over the neighborhood. 

For ourselves we planted sarcococca which will have amazing smelling white flowers in the winter.  I hope this area is shady enough for them.

We also planted a winter-blooming daphne, which should have fragrant pink flowers, and a Beijing Gold lilac tree.

We really have a lot to learn about plants, but I have done a fair bit of gardening and weeding for other people.  I must say that making our own decisions is kind of a thrill.   

Friday Harbor!

In the last week of August, our day care closes.  This year, freed from the grind of building our house, we were able to take advantage of the week, to go on a little trip to Friday Harbor, in the San Juans.  We drove to Anacortes and took our bikes on the ferry on a Sunday, which helped us avoid some of the rush. 

After we arrived, we rode six miles around Pear Point, which is just SE of Friday Harbor.

The next day we rode out to American Camp, at the SE part of San Juan Island.   We hiked down to the beach for a picnic, through a beautiful wide open field.

On our second full day we rode to Roche Harbor (on Roche Harbor Road), and then English Camp, and back to Friday Harbor on West Valley Road. 

Most of the road shoulders were good, the drivers were considerate and the weather was fantastic.  Riding to a destination and then going on walks of a mile or less worked well for all three of us.   Including the rides to and from the ferry terminal and Anacortes, we rode 52 miles (3.5 + 6 + 18 + 21 + 3.5).

new kittens!

We now have one cat per person in our household.  Our friend was fostering some kittens for Seattle Area Feline Rescue and we’d been thinking of getting a kitten this fall.  It is encouraged to get kittens in pairs so now we find ourselves with three cats.  Emo, who is now 14, is not thrilled but I think she’ll come around be glad that they have each other to play with so that she can continue her grueling 22 hour sleep routine.

Toru is black and white and about 33% larger than Luna, the calico.  He’s named after the main character of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami, which we both recently read.  Luna is a character in Harry Potter.  They were born June 19 and are still mostly confined to our extra bedroom.

Sometimes we pretend we have four cats!