Oh Yeah

I just realized I never posted any pictures from Barcelona or Paris.
Maybe I'll do that next week when I'm officially over and done with being on vacation for 11 days.

11 glorious days.

Dear Santa

Thanks for the snow! It's beautiful.
While we're on the subject of gifts from you, here is a short list of what I'd like for Christmas:

1. World peace.
2. Healthy and happy family and friends.
3. Healthy and happy pets.
4. An apartment in Paris (even a small one would be very nice)
5. More hours in the day.

Thanks, Santa!

Weekends in Winter

Weekends during the winter always seem warmer, happier, cozier and longer. I don't know why. Maybe because we live in a neighborhood where people are always walking in and out of the house during the summer, the peace and relative quiet of the winter calms everything down a little.

We spend a lot of time cooking in the winter. This year, Dave is recreating his own version of Julie & Julia. In the original version, author Julie Powell aspires to cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking cookbook in 365 days.

Dave is going to cook all the recipes in David Rocco's Dolce Vita cookbook. It will  be Dave & David. Get it? I fear that Dave thinks this whole exercise will somehow ingratiate him to Nina Rocco (as noted here), but what the hell, at least I get to eat really well in the meantime.

Lat night, he made Filletto di Manzo Con Soffritto. If your Italian is a little rusty, that means, "Really, Really Good Beef Tenderloin with Onions, Celery and Carrots".

Admittedly, it probably tasted a little better than it looked, but delightful nonetheless. It was the perfect meal for a cold winter night. 



After dinner, we had our annual viewing of Elf. Honestly, at this point I could probably recite the whole movie from memory, but it never gets old.

Then we tricked out the tree.

Creative people can work wonders with a tree. I thought black Christmas trees were ridiculous, until I saw one I lurved. I’ve also found myself impressed by purple trees with bright green ornaments and white trees with ice blue ornaments. But, we're boring, so we go the traditional route.

As our last name is not Griswold, we use only white lights.

Ornaments fall into two categories: Glass, or Santas with Moving Legs. I have a collection of them which I receive as gifts or which I add to sparingly over the years with additions from all over the world.

You may be wondering why you've never known that I collected Santas with Moving Legs.

I have a theory about collections. Part of the fun, most of the fun, is in the hunt. I love combing through ornament displays looking for the elusive Santa. If I tell everyone what I'm looking for, then my well-meaning friends and relatives will inundate me with Santas with Moving Legs because they're all kind and thoughtful and generous and that's just what they do. But then the fun will be gone. So there might be about three people in the world that know about my Santas with Moving Legs. Until now. Now it's five, I guess.

Then we top it with a slightly, ahem, unusual, Christmas angel.
 

We may be boring, but I have no regrets.

It's Christmas Time

It's cold.

So that means we must have decorated the house for Christmas, right? I like to imagine that the Motivation Fairy confirms the forecast for the coldest day of the year before giving me the mojo to bundle up and climb that cold, cold ladder 72 times.

But we beat that Motivation Fairy at her own game this year, because David's aunt and uncle sent us an early Christmas/Hanukkah gift - handmade hats and scarves! We were happy and toasty and warm the whole time we were outside.

Warm and happy.

And we really must have been warm and happy because there were no arguments disagreements discussions about proper placement, light spacing, bow size, swag depth, extension cords or theme.

With our house decorated (and all lit up like a...wait for it: Christmas tree), and the photo for our annual Christmas card nearly completed, my energies are now focused on finishing up decorating inside our home and baking mountains and mountains of cookies (I should have preceded that with a Gift Spoiler Alert).

 The tree is up, but I didn't really have time to do much else. It's nearly perfect, though. I might not ruin it by tricking it out like a $5 hooker...

I did, however, put a big silver bow on my giant, scrap-metal chicken.

I mean seriously: A giant chicken with a silver bow? 

How perfect is that?!

Thanksgiving At Our House

Although I felt like I was playing catch-up for the previous week, we did manage to pull off our traditional Ridiculously Complicated Feast this year, thanks to my brother, Jeff,  taking on more than his share of the advance preparation. It went something like this:

 

Thanksgiving Dinner at Our House

Tomato-Herb Soup
Mixed Salad with Pears, Walnuts and Blue Cheese
Roast Turkey
Grilled Beef Tenderloin
Gravy
Green Beans with Bacon Vinaigrette
Cauliflower with Hazelnut Butter
Corn
Creamy Mashed Potatoes
Dueling Stuffings
Orange-Cranberry Relish
Apple Pie

I don't have a special recipe for roasting my turkey, I try to change it up every year. This year I tried a new one called, "My Sister Roasted the Turkey". Best one yet!

I have to say that my beef tenderloin was perfect. PERFECT. I managed to get medium-rare all the way to medium-well in one, long tenderloin. Sure, it was a complete accident, but a happy accident nonetheless. At the last minute, I realized we didn't have any horseradish, but Jeff whipped up a reduced-wine sauce in about 12 seconds and that made it even better.

No surprise here, but we usually focus on the food. I'm trying to add in a few Thanksgiving traditions that relate to actual, you know, thankfulness, but I haven't settled on anything yet.

I skipped place cards this year in favor of personal wishbones for everyone with a little tag on which each guest wrote thing for which they were thankful this year. I'm going to collect them in a jar and fill them anew each year. Of course, nothing, not even wishbones, can escape the clutches of competition in my family, so we quickly determined the "best" thumb position required to win the wishbone pull every time. It's a sickness.

Next year, I'm going to tape a huge sheet of drawing paper to the refrigerator door around the first of November. All month long, we're going to write or draw things we're thankful for. Guests will be encouraged to participate too. By Thanksgiving, I think we'll have quite a work of art and we'll be reminded to be thankful everyday, rather than just one.

On the day after Thanksgiving, I skipped the crazy Black Friday shopping (gasp!), and slept in. But that night, I went out with some of my old friends from school who were in town for the weekend.
Best. Night. Ever.
Well, maybe not ever, but in a really long time. I hadn't seen some of my friends in more than 20 years and it was like we had just talked yesterday.

It was really a great weekend.

Thanksgiving also marks the beginning of the Holiday Season at our house. It is followed by David's birthday (which almost always falls on the Thanksgiving weekend), Christmas, my birthday, and ends with The Superbowl.
Can't wait.

Things I Learned This Year:

1. I used to think it would be better if guests didn't arrive until after everything is done, when I've transformed back to my human self, but everyone arrived really early this year and that made it a little more fun.
2. Having someone else make the turkey doesn't make Thanksgiving weird, it makes it better.
3. There is almost nothing better than getting together with old friends and realizing that the passing of time doesn't change the important things.

Florence

I had a crazy few days of traveling....Italy to Frankfurt to Zurich to Chicago to Zurich to Frankfurt to Florence, all in the space of just 6 days! I was pretty sure Florence would be a bust, especially because Dave had been "stop-dead-in-your-tracks" sick all week, we were way behind on laundry (yes, that again), and I was exhausted.

But we had been to Florence for a few days last summer and I really wanted to return. It's probably cliched to love Florence so much. It's really one giant tourist trap, but we couldn't help ourselves. It's a good place to get lost in, so we went anyway.

We got off to a shaky start because we happened to be flying on the same day those explosive printer cartridges were found in the cargo shipment in Europe. Our terminal was evacuated once. And then, after we had waited in an excruciatingly long security line and when we were only two people away from placing our bags on the conveyor, it was evacuated AGAIN. Then we waited in ANOTHER excruciatingly long security line. Then we missed our flight. It all worked out, though, because they put us on the next flight and we got to Florence around noon.

Our hotel had a neat little balcony (and free wireless!). Dave managed to procure a bottle of wine and some sandwiches while I prepped for a conference call.





















We got really lucky with absolutely perfect weather on the first day. Since we like to spend the entire day walking the streets, rain would have definitely put a damper on things. We ogled ancient architecture, walked all over the maze of streets, shopped, shopped and shopped, ate and drank and overall had a pretty good time.

I'd been craving gelato for weeks. We stopped at the third second first place we saw and got a healthy dose to tide us over for a while. Sensing our role as stupid Americans, the girl working at the gelato counter made Dave an insanely large cone and charged us about two thousand euros. He made very short work of it.



See? It's a mouse, with cookie ears!



Dave claims he's a big fan of David Rocco, the chef on the Cooking Channel, but I suspect that he's a bigger fan of David Rocco's wife, Nina. Here's Nina:

See? Anyway, David Rocco is filmed in Florence and we were able to find this cool dam in the middle of the Arno that we saw once on his show. We walked out into the middle of the river, hung out a while and wished we had thought to bring along a picnic lunch.

















There was this amazing market right outside our hotel and we spent approximately 9000 hours walking up and down the aisles. Dave watched patiently for 8999 hours while I picked up and inspected every single bag, glove, briefcase, scarf and key chain. I was determined to find a new laptop case, but I was having a hard time estimating the size of my laptop. Finally, I found the perfect bag. And then another. And some scarves. Happy day.

There was a large indoor market too. We had a private tasting of balsamic vinegars from 8 to 25 years old. Luckily, it took a lot less than 9000 hours to figure out which we wanted. There's also a pretty good story in which Dave tried to muscle in on another group's private tasting with bad results which he, of course, mulled over for days, but that's best left for a verbal re-telling. We'll tell you the story at the slide show.

Speaking of balsamic, let me interject here another cool thing about food stores in Germany. Balsamic glaze. Yes, that's a cool thing. They have it everywhere. You know when you get one of those caprese salads and the vinegar is scattered around the plate in swirls and dots? And when you try to do that at home it just pools in the bottom under the tomatoes? That's where the magic of balsamic glaze comes in....it's thickened vinegar, so it stays where you put it. I bought four bottles to take home.

Ok, after that brief interlude, back to Italy....

We went back to a restaurant that we had gone to last summer and it was just as friendly and welcoming as I remembered. The host (maybe the owner?) was delighted to see himself in a picture we took last year, so we took more and he was just as goofy as he was then.

Saturday ended up being much colder. We still spent a lot of time walking, though. We tracked down another restaurant, a panini place, that still makes sandwiches to order. This is a dying trend in Florence, where all the sandwiches now arrive in delis pre-packaged and you just pick out the one you want. Dave was intimidated by the prospect of ordering a sandwich in Italian, so I took one for the team. The counter guy didn't seem too thrilled with my combination of eggplant, mortadella, cheese, tomatoes, and mustard (Really, you want that?), but he made it anyway and I think it was ok. I'm not big on sandwiches, but it wasn't the worst thing I've ever tasted. I just realized I might be the first person in history to refer to food, fresh food, from Italy, in Italy, as "not the worst thing I've ever tasted."

Sunday was terrible; rainy, cold and miserable. We were totally exhausted (and maybe a little hungover). We changed our flight to one that left a couple hours earlier, hopped a cab to the airport and waited there for three hours - long lines, weather delays, and a futile search for my lost iPhone. The lost/found actually told us that they don't handle lost objects, they turn them over to the police.

Us:     Can we talk to the police?
L&F:  They don't like it if we call them.
Us:     Can we call them?
L&F:  No, they'll be here in 20 minutes
Us:     Our flight leaves in 10 minutes, can you write down their number or Lufthansa's lost and found info?

They finally gave us a form on which the information for Lufthansa's lost and found office was printed. This was also futile. This is how most things go in Italy. I think it's part of their charm.

For some reason, when we arrived in Frankfurt I had the insane idea that we would take a train home from the airport. This is a very do-able proposition, but maybe not such a great thought when we were soooooo tired. It took about an hour to get back to the apartment (but only cost 7 euros!) I can't even begin to describe how nice it was to sleep in my own bed away from my own bed (even with those crazy pillows). Heaven.

Looking back over our pictures, I still want to go back again. Maybe we'll rent one of those Tuscan country houses in a couple of years...:)

By the way, Dave wasn't trying to be coy in that bottom pic, he was just midway through the process of removing his sunglasses when the picture was snapped....

About time

I guess a new blog post is in order. But, it's not going to happen now.
Even though "now" would really be the perfect time because we're just sitting in the airport, waiting for the next flight to Florence after we missed the last flight because the airport was evacuated TWICE for security reasons.
Good times.