Catch-up

Since it has been almost a month since I posted (yikes), here is a quick catch up as November gets ready to come to a close….

We tried a thick crust, chewy pizza dough recipe that turned out to be pretty tasty. Topped with a basic tomato sauce, Salumi pepperoni and a blend of mozzarella and parmesan cheese. I have half a crust left in the freezer, so that might be making a repeat appearance in the next couple weeks.

We also used an Alton Brown recipe for chili and made it work with ground beef and beans rather than cubed beef.  The best part of the chili was the base (pictured above) that starts with lots of fresh peppers and chilies and gets pureed before the meat and beans go back in.  The spice in the final dish had a sweet freshness to it that was so addicting we didn’t even freeze any leftovers.

I had a birthday! Woo! There were presents from Matt and Santana. Somehow, Santana’s wrapping job AND handwriting seem more advanced than Matt’s….hmmm?  Also, they both chose to use my Christmas wrapping paper instead of the birthday wrapping paper.  Fun!

For my birthday (and for the heck of it), we took a road trip to La Conner…a small town north of us about an hour or so.  We did a little shopping (lots of artsy and antique-y shops) and just enjoyed spending the day together away from the chores and errands at home.  We followed it up with a tasty, semi-fancy dinner at a wine bar near home. 

Of course, the big excitement of November is full of food as the holiday season kicks into full gear.  We paired up with a couple friends to make lots and lots of food.  There are probably enough leftovers to last all of us at least a week.  My main assignment for the dinner was the turkey:

The recipe was from the most recent issue of Cook’s Illustrated.  A butterflied, glazed turkey with an Apple Maple glaze.  So so crispy and moist.  The sweetness of the glaze gave a nice twist to the resulting gravy and went well with everything else we had to eat.  Cook’s Illustrated’s recipes are consistently wonderful, so I also used their bread stuffing recipe.  I missed my usual cornbread stuffing, but this was delicious!  I love Thanksgiving! 

And now that Thanksgiving is over, we’re moving right along…the menorah is out and ready for Hanukah and the Christmas tree is up and decorated! We need a tree skirt apparently, but that is on our list for the next batch of errands.  Excitement!

Santana is also getting ready for the holidays.  It makes me miss my family in NY a lot, but I’m excited to spend our first married holiday season relaxing with Matt and Santana and not stressing about travel and plans and weather and all of that mess. 

We also embarked on a new food experiment this month, but I’ll save that for a later blog (that will hopefully happen in less than a month). Stay tuned!

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 27th, 2010 at 4:54 pm and is filed under Blog Fun, Family, Freezer Food, Fun, Holidays, Leftovers, Life, LOVE, Matthew, Puppy, Seattle, Yum. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.