Hi, I'm 27 and I live with my mother.

It's not so bad, really. She brings me coffee every morning with frothed almond milk. I actually get to work on time because of the coffee-in-bed ritual.

She's an excellent cook and great company. And she helped me clean out three years of abandoned hobbies and detritus friends have left behind from house parties and get-togethers. I feel guilty about that, but am so thankful that she was here.

So, it's been a while since my last post, and definitely not for lack of activity. Life activity increase = blog productivity decrease. C'est la vie.

I've been up to a lot! J finished grad school in December (yay!), schlepped through months of unsatisfactory work (boo) while searching for a satisfactory first-career job. He got an offer in May (yay!) right around our first anniversary. Who can believe I didn't blog about that one?!

J gave me some truly gorgeous anniversary flowers - birds of paradise, lilies and others - pictured here in case I never get around to dedicating a post to our anniversary... which is entirely possible.

Anyway, after months of anxiously awaiting news, a company that makes yogurt offered him a job! After ages of waiting, the usual "we need you to start... YESTERDAY." occurred. Chaos ensued.

Our anniversary trip to New York City turned into a frantic apartment search. We found a place; signed the lease; came home; rented a 22-foot Penske truck (her name was Penny) with a tow dolley; loaded almost all of our worldly possessions to said rental; drove in lightning storms and heavy construction maxing at 55 mph and listening to a crappy suspense book-on-CD through Tennessee, Virginia, D.C., Maryland, Delaware and finally Jersey; unloaded in the rain in New Rochelle, N.Y. (27 minutes by express train to the Big City and home of Dick Van Dyke on his show, apparently - things you learn from old people); unpacked; visited with our friends Christina and Daniel; and proceeded to sleep through three alarms and two phone calls from the airport cab driver at 4:45 a.m. on a Sunday morning.

Penny

I eventually made it home, exhausted, just in time to work on Monday to a cat on hunger strike. At my mother's house.

It's only temporary.

Holy hell, I need to find a job. I'm working on it.

It's only temporary.

More to come...

In the meantime:

• this is hilarious
• J started a blog! About food! We can blog together. Because, obviously, we don't live together right now.
• It's only temporary.
• I'm looking for work. if you're hiring.
• Charles is eating again. Her backbone still feels like a xylophone, but she is definitely perkier and eating her nom again. Phew.
  

Did you know that there are mobile truckers' chapels at certain truck stops?

Bejing

EF - Live The Language - Beijing from Albin Holmqvist on Vimeo.

(By the way, these all came from the ModLife blog, which is almost always interesting reading.)

I am fairly sure I'm more of a Europe girl than an Asia one, but this does make me want to explore the asian side of things as well... Can you study abroad for work? Sigh.

Spoiled rotten

Marrying a cook has its perks. Sure, the hours are unforgiving and after his slow Monday and Tuesday we pass like ships in the night most weeks, me trying to stay up to see him when he gets home and him waking up earlier to have some coffee as I bolt out to work.

But sometimes, he pulls out all the stops and cooks for me. And a girlfriend. At his restaurant. I'm talking a multi-course fiasco here, complete with sorbet palate cleanser and full wine pairings.

How 'bout a course-by-course review of last Saturday's epic tasting menu to end all tasting menus?

Like an idiot, I forgot to take pictures of the first two courses, so you'll have to use your imagination...But here is a nice sunset one overlooking the putting green and the rest of south Huntsville I got before I was distracted by our first glass of prosecco:

Course one:
Six fresh shucked oysters on the half shell - three Island Creek (tiny and fatty and briny - in a GOOD way, these were my favorites) and three Savage Harbor (also delightful, larger) - with a champagne mignonette, which is quite possibly my favorite condiment ever. Can I call it a condiment?

Course two:
Butternut squash soup, drizzled with a lemon agrumato and garnished with fresh parsley. Hey - this was a learning dinner as well... Did you know that agrumato is made when olive oil presses are cleaned with fresh citrus and the cleaning oil? Well it is.

Course the third:
A lovely, palate-cleansing lemon sorbet with mint leaves.

(Hey, guess what? I finally remembered to take photos starting... now!)

Course four:
Warm purple cabbage salad with goat cheese, walnuts and chicken sausage. I had a version of this salad at Mezza Luna last fall and let me tell you, it embodies everything that is the best about fall. Perhaps Mezza will feature it again this fall? You should definitely go check it out if this is the case. Purple cabbage reminds me of this Norwegian side dish my Grandma used to make (and my mom does now... surkal... better believe I had to look up the spelling on that one. Amazing dish.) The goat cheese/walnut combination added some delightful creaminess to the dish and the chicken sausage tasted homemade. Mmmm.


Course five:
The most amazing fried fish I've ever had in my life. This course reminded me of a fish fry, but the best possible fish fry ever. The flounder itself was everything I love about fried food (crispy, lightly bread-y, crunchy) but underneath the crust was amazingly cooked fish. Like, perfectly cooked. With the amazing fish was a honking hunk of grilled cornbread (the hush puppy), some super tart slaw with julienned granny smith apples and shaved fennel keeping the green cabbage company and some surprise sugar snap peas hidden under the flounder. This may have been my favorite course. Maybe.

Course six:
Braised short rib with fried gnocchi (which, as it turns out doesn't have to be made of potatoes can in fact be made of any sort of starch... who knew?) and roasted root vegetables, including turnips, parsnips, carrots, rutabaga and some other rooty veg. The whole thing was topped off by an amazing gremolata (another new food term for me) and the best, most concentrated jus you've ever tasted. The jus was everything that made the short rib amazing, combined with red wine and reduced down to its most intense form and drizzled all over the plate.

Remembered to take this photo before I demolished the short rib. Not in the most pristine state, but Kris give it thumbs up nonetheless.

Dessert course (course seven):
Pumpkin cheesecake. I'm not gonna lie. For me, sweets are typically an afterthought. If I get to eat an amazing meal, I'm usually so stuffed by the end that I don't have an intense desire for dessert. But as they were only six courses into a seven-course tasting, the dessert was inevitable. And wonderful. The cheesecake was incredibly light and airy and whipped. Not like the heavy brick-like ones you find sometime smothered in cherry goop. We got tiny little pieces and ate every last bite because we had to be polite. Naturally. The final glass of prosecco made those last bites go down quite nicely.

Hello there, Kris (and pumpkin cheesecake). The bubbles were the best.

I concur.

Since J will graduate in December, we hope that he will transition from cook to some sort of 8-5 food scientist position. I will miss the restaurant ambiance and J in his starched white chef coat (complete with embroidered name... le sigh), but I hope this will bring about a new round of experimentation in his free time that he's never been able to attempt previously due to a rigorous work/school schedule... I'm thinking charcuterie, bread making, at home canning and pickling. If all goes according to plan, there will still be plenty of ways for me to remain fatter than I would like to be. But happy. Yum.

Here's one of the man in action, making ravioli (not from tonight, but some other time. See what I mean about the starched white coat?) He's on the right.

Thanks J!

And because ALL I have been doing this fall is eating, stay tuned for my Taste of Atlanta recap.

Outstanding in the field

So, I found out about this program (organization? movement?) via a design*sponge post and now I'm riveted. How do we get these guys to come to Huntsville, anyway? Naturally, Alabama superchef Frank Stitt (of Bottega and Highlands Grill in Birmingham) has already participated... I know this thanks to OITF's handy Google map of everywhere they've ever had a farm dinner:


View Outstanding in the Field Dinner Site Map in a larger map

(I created one of these for our educators visits of all of the Alabama Math Science Technology Initiative hub sites across the state - love them!)

Anyway, thinking of starting a social media campaign to get them to visit Huntsville.
I'm thinking a Ledges/Mezza Luna collaboration. But of course I am biased. Nowhere in their FAQ does OITF break down how to get a meal in your area, so I'm going to go ahead and assume it's all contacts and convincing.

I would definitely save (and save, and save) $200 for an experience like this:

Outstanding in the Field is a roving culinary adventure - literally a restaurant without walls. Since 1999 we have set the long table at farms or gardens, on mountain tops or in sea caves, on islands or at ranches. Occasionally the table is set indoors: a beautiful refurbished barn, a cool greenhouse or a stately museum. Wherever the location, the consistent theme of each dinner is to honor the people whose good work brings nourishment to the table.

Ingredients for the meal are almost all local (sometimes sourced within inches of your seat at the table!) and generally prepared by a celebrated chef of the region. After a tour of the site, we all settle in: farmers, producers, culinary artisans, and diners sharing the long table.

The dinners generally begin at 3 or 4 p.m., depending on the time of the year, and wrap up around sunset. As the days get shorter in the fall, the dinners last until candlelight is required. Length of each event is four to five hours, and guests often linger at-table well past sunset, reluctant to have the magical evening come to a close.

So, who's with me?! Let's get this campaign started so we can have a fabulous meal at a table like this one, in the DC area...

Paradores!

Hi. I haven't posted since June 25. Holy crap. I need to pick up the pace. So here begins a spate of new posts.

I recently got engaged to a fabulous guy. One of my favorite things about him is his willingness to check out uncharted territories. He's a great traveler too - good sense of direction, go with the flow attitude about experiences - which makes life awesome. What bugs both of us is that we have never been on a large scale adventure together. I've spent the summer in London, visited Norway and Paris, all while in college studying abroad. He's been to China, seen pandas and walked the Great Wall, all with other friends while I worked in DC.

Naturally, we want to have our first major adventure together for our honeymoon. I'm thinking a tour of the Spanish paradores.

Paradores de Turismo de España are a chain of Spanish luxury hotels. They were founded by Alfonso XIII of Spain as a means to promote tourism in Spain, with the first opening in Gredos, Ávila in 1928.

A profitable state-run enterprise, the hotels are often in castles, palaces, fortresses, convents, monasteries and other historic buildings. They stretch from Galicia in the North West through Catalonia to Andalusia in the south of Spain, the Canary Islands and to the Spanish cities in North Africa. (Thanks, Wikipedia)

My parents met in the south of Spain. My mom was traveling with girlfriends, fresh off of a stint in Australia and my dad was stationed in Rota, Spain with the U.S. Navy post-Vietnam. They knew each other for approximately three months before my mom went off to Norway on a road trip with my dad's cousin. When she returned (by plane) he greeted her at the airport, and there it was decided that they'd get married.

So, Spain has definite appeal to me. What better place to start a marriage, than the Mediterranean coast? And on top of that, in the country where my parents met, and kicked off a happy 30-year marriage? There must be something in the water there.

My parents always used to talk about driving up the coast and having fancy dinners at the paradores - paella and fresh fish. Yum. And it looks like they're still at it with the food (uh, YUM!?)

The other day I began my online parador research and discovered the amazing, comprehensive and completely tantalizing Web site. Seriously considering going to the courthouse to push this marriage thing through so we can honeymoon next week. Ha. There will be some saving of the money before any of that happens, though. But if we do decide to go this route, I will have a goal to push me through the bitter Alabama winter: sunny May skies in Spain. :)

Here's what I'm thinking for the vacay: the site offers rates for routes, scheduled for either three or seven days. (Hello, did I not say that their site is amazingly comprehensive? It's an internet planning addict's dream). All of the routes are themed - culture, nature, WINE, legacy trails through other cultures... Anyway, one of the seven-nighters is a coastal trail. All the way from the northeast corner of Spain, down the Mediterranean coast to the southern tip.

They say on the site that this route takes visitors to some of the best beaches along the Mediterranean coast in Alicante, Murcia, Almería and Malaga. This area is well-known for its tourist attractions but still harbors many pleasant surprises.

I like it. Beach vacation plus culture in Spain. Beach honeymoon meets global trek. And they drive on the right side of the road, don't they?

Don't they??



By the way, I promise this isn't going to be a wedding planning blog from now until May. I have lots of other exciting stuff going on that I'll be posting about, including a Social South new media conference in Birmingham next Friday and Saturday and a trip to San Fran for the Dreamforce (Salesforce users) conference in November to learn how to integrate my work's Facebook, Twitter and other social media efforts with our Web site as well as with our non-profit Salesforce software. Interesting stuff. AND I just signed up for Santa's Village PR again. Whoooeeeee, here comes fall and winter. May will be here before I know it...

Ca$hville in photos

I've been feeling more visual than literary lately. So, here's Nashville in photos. Friend Michelle told us about cheap Opryland Hotel rates. Once we got there we were able to upgrade our room to an atrium view... lovely. If you get the chance to go, you should try to finagle an atrium room. It made the stay.

View of the Cascades from our room balcony.

Balcony view #2 - the waterfall. We originally were in a third floor room and asked to move because we were directly at eye level with everyone walking by on the walkway. Awkward.

We (and by "we" I mean "I") took a lot of time farting around in Opry Mills. Found a bunch of cute stuff... Just about made J terminal until we hit the end - the Bass Pro Shops outdoor store. That place is huge. And terrifying. Totally packed with taxidermy critters of all shapes and sizes. While J was examining the kayaks and gear I spotted this little beaver vignette that someone cleverly enhanced. It's hard work hacking logs with your teeth. Every beaver needs a value-sized Diet Coke to quench its thirst every once in a while.

So, the outdoor store was just terrifying on the whole. Behold, the biggest effing catfish I have ever seen. Apparently it's not unusual for them to get this large. Who knew? I was sharing my newfound knowledge with a kickball buddy, who then told me about catfish noodling (!!!) WTF. One more note about the great outdoors. J informed me that all the stuffed (and live) critters were strategically placed to remind shoppers what the real outdoor camping/hiking/fishing experience is like. And on that note, I've decided that my as yet unrealized camping career will never come to fruition. How about a block party instead? Or some bocce. These outdoor activities are more my speed.

Eventually we made it out of Natureland (alive and unscathed by the ginormous bottom feeding fish). After another prolonged wine and cheese session on our balcony, we headed out to eat. When in Nashville, check out Sunset Grill. We had an amazing prix fixe three course meal there for $20. It was quite the recession friendly vacation.

I am thoroughly enjoying traveling in this economy! You can do so much for so little expense. I'm thinking girls' weekend soon. The end.

NPR's eggnog public service

So, I SCHEDULED this to post during Christmas. But of course that didn't work. A little bit of final holiday rambling in early January...

Did you know that homemade eggnog is made with raw eggs?

Me neither.

I haven't consumed eggnog since the time when I was very small that my dad spiked my holiday beverage with pink liquid amoxicillin. You know the stuff I'm talking about... Not sure how everyone else was, but it didn't matter to me what flavor they tried to make it - bubblegum, cherry - it always was retch-inducingly disgusting. Anyway, nog did nothing to mask the flavor and the two in combination were a taste I will never forget.

I think that any attempt to work myself back around to getting back on the eggnog bicycle should be done with the best of the best. Homemade stuff.

NPR agrees, and takes it a step further - researching the potential dangers of drinking eggnog with raw eggs and determining (with the help of a microbiologist, no less) that nog is safter with alcohol, and plenty of it. This development encourages me to get back on the eggnog bandwagon...

Listen to the story here

And check out the experiment, which you can try at home!



Personally, spiking eggnog with lots of booze sounds WAY better than spiking it with pink medicine.

Pre-Christmas family extravaganza

So, today at lunch I'll be shopping for the first ever Pre-Christmas family extravaganza at our house.

We're thinking that Christmas Eve and Day will be a flurry of family related activites, so we're going to add one more to the mix tomorrow. A Christmas pre-party, if you will. Christmas' cool younger sibling celebration, perhaps. Um, yeah sorry. I'll stop there.

Anyway, I'm excited - J will be handling the big part - carnitas (yummmmy) braised in orange juice and various and sundry mexican spices.

I'm helping out with the additions, mainly, a salsa bar. And guacamole and queso and other dippy awesomeness. It's all going to be fresh and I'm looking forward to the adventure. Even though our only blending device is a hand blender (not a Cuisinart or an actual, live blender) I think that should cover my salsa making needs... right? Right?! Here's hoping.

So, fresh tomato salsa, salsa verde and a corn and black bean number will be available for garnishing the carnita awesomeness. Also whipping up a guacamole and a Velveeta queso (sweeet!).

Best of all will be the pomegranate margaritas and the (tentative) dulce de leche with ice cream! Sounds like a lot of boiling but I'm interested to see how it will work out.

That's the menu for our festive pre-Christmas extravaganza... A lot of it's kind of experimental so there's no telling how it will all turn out, but we're (and by we I mean J) pretty talented in the kitchen and if all else fails, the pomegranate margaritas will take the fams' minds off of the food. :)

I shall report back.