• Home
• Me & Food
• Recipes
• Blogroll!

RSS

Archive for November, 2009

November Has Been Good To Us

As November wraps up, I’m realizing that amid some craziness, stress and worry, there has been a lot to be thankful for.  Matthew and I have had a really great month.  We got our holiday flight for Christmas nailed down, watched the Yankees win the World Series and got a brand new comforter for our bed…we are easily impressed 🙂

Mid-month, around my birthday, we flew to Hawaii (a  partial work trip) and took full advantage of the sun, relaxing atmosphere, tourist-y goodness, and amazing food.   Here are some pictures to share: 

Love 🙂

    

Some of the food….

Sampler (for lunch) at the Kona Brewing Restaurant. Lots of pineapple at the Dole Plantation…where we tried to refrain from chomping them right of the stems :)   

   

Fancy dinner at Roy’s, where we had an AMAZING meal:

Free spicy edamame appetizer. Pineapple martini (that piece of fruit had been soaking in vodka for days).

Macadamia-crusted Mahi Mahi w/ lobster butter sauce.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Caramelized scallops with a blueberry vinaigrette and some bacon-wrapped sweet potatoes I think. The scallops were cooked to perfection.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, pineapple upside down cake, which you give them 30 minutes to prepare because they make each one fresh.  They sliced the pineapples thinly so there were juicy amazing layers of pineapple on top of the cake.  On the side: vanilla bean ice cream in a burnt sugar cup.  All in a caramel sauce.  Unbelievable.

———-

To wrap up our wonderful November, we are in the middle of a spectacularly relaxing Thanksgiving weekend.  We’ve been together almost 3 years and this is the first time we’ve spent Thanksgiving together.  It was wonderful.  We went with turkey tenderloins, sliced into medallions, marinated in Annie’s Natural Tuscany Italian dressing, breaded with Panko breadcrumbs and pan fried.  Really yummy.  With some comforting sides and homemade stuffing/dressing….yum! We went with a nice mix of new/more-involved things and easy standbys. Matt was in charge of the traditional green bean casserole and did a great job!  I made some dinner rolls from a Cooking Light recipe, and my favorite was the turkey knot…

Here are the rest of our pictures, including pumpkin pie that we were so excited about we made 4 days earlier, and some gorgeous orange flowers we got for $5 on sale!

 

Thankfulness all around!  Happy Thanksgiving!  Let’s cross our fingers for a December that is full of pleasant surprises, healthy families, lots of love and new adventures.

A Pumpkin-Filled Halloween

Since it is nearly the end of November, I figure it’s about time to get my Halloween post up.  We were very un-halloween-y this year.  The wonderful Dori was in town, and we didn’t eat any Halloween candy at all! We didn’t dress up and we didn’t trick-or-treat (and since we’re in a secure building, no kiddies stopped by for our non-existent candy).  However, we kept the spirit of the holiday alive with lots of pumpkin!

So that is actually a picture from last year’s pumpkin t-shirt.  It is one of the most adorable Santana pictures ever.  But she did wear it this week to celebrate!  This year she was actually a scary scary green monster…

Last year she also attempted to be a bat….this got mixed reviews.

Instead of eating out for Dori’s whole visit, we made a fun asian-inspired dinner one night. It included peanut butter pumpkin curry noodle.  It was…strange. But mostly good.  At first, the flavor of the sauce was very off-putting, but once we thinned it out and added a bit more peanut butter, it was pretty tasty and made a nice side to the coconut shrimp soup we made.  This was a really light, pretty soup that I enjoyed quite a bit and had for leftovers the next day.  In the original version of the soup, the shrimp was cooked perfectly, nice and soft, but of course when reheated it got a tiny bit rubbery. Bleh.

 

We also tried these fancy juices called “First Blush”.  They’re basically grape juices from wine grapes…chardonnay, merlot, etc.  We did a group taste test. Including one that was a juice-tea blend.  I think we all agreed on which one we liked best…but I can’t remember which it was at this point.  Dori, do you remember???

To round out the pumpkin-y-ness of the weekend, Dori had french toast stuffed inside of a pumpkin for breakfast one day. Insanity!