I don’t know why I haven’t been blogging in the last week. The days are kind of just flying by for me right now; each one feels shorter than the one before it. The last few years have just seemed to zip by too fast for my liking. I worry sometimes that they’ll just continue to gain speed as I get older and before I realize it I’ll be 90 years old. (Yes, I’m going to live that long, even longer if I have any say in it.)

It’s only fitting then that we’re celebrating the passing of another year with Jeff’s birthday coming up this weekend. I’ve got some plans up my sleeve for this Sunday with dinner reservations and a small gift. His parents beat me to it though, they came down last weekend to take us out to dinner at Feast, a cute little Decatur gem that we’ve yet to try. We got to walk there which was lovely and got there just as they were dimming the lights to a dim candlelight.

We started with some cocktails. I had a Sazerac and Jeff had his usual Old Fashioned.

I love that these old “prohibition era” cocktails are in style right now. They’re all heavy on the booze but mild-flavored enough to have with dinner.

We also split some calamari. It was pretty tasty if not a little greasy, but calamari usually is.

Jeff got a dish with scallops that had some sort of port wine reduction on it.

And I got a duck confit pizza that was sadly disappointing. Way too much cheese and barely any toppings at all except for an overabundance of dried cherries. Absolutely drenched in olive oil too.

I think I just ordered poorly though. Jeff’s mom had a very tasty-looking salad with green apples and goat cheese that I would have liked.

We finished it off with a complimentary slice of chocolate cake. Super moist and moussey!

Overall Feast was very good and the atmosphere was lovely. Thanks Mike and Nancy for a nice birthday dinner out!

Also this past weekend, I prepped some chestnuts for a recipe I was testing out. Have you ever had roasted chestnuts? I’d only had them once and certainly had never roasted them myself before. I read online that you can boil them instead and they come out of their shells better, so that’s the technique I went with.

First you have to score the shell with a knife or they’ll explode from steam buildup when you cook them!

You then just boil them for about 15 minutes to let the shells really open up.

You’re supposed to peel them when they’re just cool enough to touch but still warm. I think I waited too long because I found them very difficult to peel. I ended up having to hack at them a bit with a paring knife and they fell apart from it. Next time I think I’ll try the oven roasting method because I think the moisture from boiling was part of what made the chestnuts just fall apart.

They were absolutely delicious though! They have a naturally sweet flavor and a creamy texture similar to a boiled egg yolk. I’ll post the recipe I used them for soon, it needs a bit of work before it’s share-worthy.

Tonight I’m headed to a blogger meet-up at Tuk Tuk thai restaurant. I’m excited to see everyone again and catch up a bit. I’ll fill you in on how it went tomorrow!

November 17, 2011 Alayna Discussion 5 comments

How was your Halloween?

Ours turned out to be just the evening I was hoping for – a night of drinking beer and watching Jeff play video games while we each took turns answering the door.

We had heard from a neighbor that they had over 300 kids show up last year, so I dashed to the grocery yesterday afternoon to pick up some more candy. I think we ended up having about 75 to 100 kids, and only went through half the candy I bought. It was really hard to not just eat fun size Twix for lunch today. 😉

It was really nice to feel like part of a community. Jeff and I were talking about how much we feel at home here. Even though we’re renting, it really feels like this is “our house.”

And it’s coming along nicely. We’ve made huge progress in getting things put away where they belong and setting it all up to feel comfortable. We finished clearing out the second bedroom which is being used for an exercise room and place to do our art and electronics projects. It was so filled with stuff that you couldn’t walk around in it.

I got my office set up how I like it…

All the knick-knacks are on the bookshelves, so until we get a full size dining table, the dining room is mostly done.

And the basement, which was pretty dirty when we moved in, is getting much more usable as we clean it out. I’ve got a laundry area set up and we’ve moved a bunch of long-term storage downstairs as well.

And we’re getting a few projects done around the house to make it more comfortable. Jeff hung the curtains in our bedroom and I spent some time crafting a drawer organizer to make the silverware fit better in the narrow drawer.

And the cats are loving it too. Liam has apparently just rediscovered sunbeams (our last place was in a basement so it was kind of dim.) I can be sure to find him in a different patch of light each day.

Lucas gets too hot in all the direct sunlight and has to occasionally take a break by stretching himself out languidly to diffuse the heat.

Handsome devil.

Today I roasted the other batch of pumpkin seeds I had from carving the jack-o-lantern. I tried to do a Japanese flavor using toasted sesame oil, soy sauce, mirin, nori kome furikake, and togarashi spice.

They’re alright, not good enough to share the recipe though. I think the toasted sesame oil is just overpowering the other flavors.

This year is just flying by, I can’t believe that Halloween has already gone by and we’re headed straight into the winter holidays. It’ll be 2012 before I can blink.

November 1, 2011 Alayna Discussion 8 comments

Jeff and I have joked before that right now we’re living in our “lost years” for holiday enjoyment. We’re not kids any more, so much of the magic has been replaced by general grumpiness at all the money spent around holidays and the work it takes to make things go off without a hitch. There aren’t as many raucous parties with friends anymore either and we usually end up doing a whole bunch of nothing on holidays. I know it’ll all change when we have kids and we get the chance to create the magic for them that our parents made for us on those few special days a year, but until then we’re just stuck in this lackluster “in-between” state.

It sucks because Halloween has always been my favorite holiday, and only in the last few years has it turned into a complete non-event for me. This year though, we at least have something to look forward to: Trick-or-treaters!

This is the first year that we live in a neighborhood with lots of young children and will surely be visited by droves of tiny ghosts and witches, superheroes and princesses. Maybe it’s a strange thing to be excited about, but it’s re-infusing this holiday that I love so much with the joy that it’s been lacking for years.

Yesterday, I carved a jack-o-lantern to put outside our door to let everyone know that YES, we do have candy!

After 2 hours of cleaning and carving, this:

Became this:

I don’t know what I was going for, but I kind of think he looks like a frog. Liam, of course, needed to sniff our new housemate…

Face. in. pumpkin.

I have named the pumpkin Robert; I have no idea why. Hopefully the trick-or-treaters will get as much enjoyment out of him (and the candy, of course) as we’ll get by being able to participate in the holidays again.

What was your favorite holiday as a child? Has your enjoyment of it changed as you’ve gotten older?

October 28, 2011 Alayna Discussion 7 comments