Land of the giants.

Hello there. I should be ironing, or finishing the laundry I started, or doing my exercise video, but instead I'm blogging. Go figure (more evidence of me having the shortest attention span of anyone I know, and also the time management skills of a... well, of someone who can't manage her time for beans). I thought I'd blog about Easter, though, since I have such great footage to share.

Doug and I went to Easter at my sister and brother-in-law's house down in Norwich, CT, so it was a Connecticut Easter. Easter is a no-pressure holiday (at least for me, since all I do for it is cook some desserts); it's like a vacation day in the middle of the week. There's no build-up and you can just relax and go with the flow. And I love the food at Easter - it's one of my favorite holidays for food. Antipasto salads, fruit salad, regular salad, ham, lamb, potatoes, green veggies, applesauce, pasta, breads, and then the desserts! Definitely a feast. And this year was no exception. My sister and Mike had 36 (yes, 36) people at their house on Sunday and we all sat down to a 4-course (or was it 5?) meal. Mike and Laura do most of the cooking, with the rest of us bringing a dessert or a side dish. I feel only slightly badly that all the cooking falls onto my sister and brother-in-law's shoulders - they really do an outstanding job with the food. Mike is the kind of cook who will mince his own garlic cloves and the little pieces of garlic will be perfectly uniform in size. He has such patience in the kitchen. He's amazing.

Being that there were 36 people at this dinner, everything was giant-sized. We had a giant ham a giant salad and all sat around a giant table . Me, I tried to start a giant-sized wine habit (move over coffee, wine may just take your place as my vice of choice!) but I realized too late that the screw-top has to be off the cheap bottle of wine that I bought in order for the wine to have any effect on me at all. I did have fun seeing the family again; some people, like Amy and Mike, I haven't seen since last fall. Here's a photo of me, my sister, and Amy, sharing a smile. Awww, it's like a Hallmark card. Here's another Hallmark-type photo - my sister and Mike cooking amidst a sea of smoke. I was soooo glad that Mike kept setting off the smoke detector while cooking the ham. The sugary glaze probably was running off the body of that giant piece of meat onto the oven bottom, burning it and causing a giant smoke attack. We opened all the windows, fanned the house out, etc., but the smoke kept coming. The meal was still delicious, of course, but I was so pleased that someone like Mike made his smoke detector go off while cooking. That means that the next time mine goes off I will tell Doug that the high-pitched screeching of the alarm is really a compliment, the highest praise a cook can get. Finally, look at these fine desserts! Note that in the key lime tart there's a mark where my finger had been. There's a story behind this tart (as there is with all of my attempts at baking), but to keep this blog relatively short I'll just say that I needed to stick my finger in the tart to see if I had totally ruined it. It tasted fine, so I brought it to Easter anyway. I think Doug and I ate most of it by ourselves. I slaved over that thing. Squeezed eight slippery little limes by hand, swearing never, ever, to squeeze my own lime juice again. The tart was good, though. It really was.

I suppose in the spirit of Easter I should also post this photo of the treat Doug and I found in our driveway on Friday evening. Isn't there some kind of biblical story around Easter-time relating to fish? How when Moses parted the Red Sea one lowly fish popped out and Jesus turned it into a feast of fishes in order to feed people facing famine? Anyway, as we drove into the driveway on Friday night I see this strange shape. We park the car and get out to inspect it. It takes us a while, but eventually we figure out what it is: Now how in the world did this thing get here? First of all, we don't eat fish, at least not whole fish. And second of all, even if we did we wouldn't toss the body out onto the driveway to decompose like this. So this little dried-up feast of fins must have been some kind of present from the many critters who run around our yard. Like the squirrels or the birds. We didn't move the body; left it there for the kind soul who dropped it off in case it might want to take it back. And sure enough, by Sunday night the carcass was gone. Poof! I swear, it was an Easter miracle. Maybe each year the fish body will come back and we can charge admission for this most holy of events. If it gets me out of Pain Capital that much faster, then it's a done deal!

Fireplace Feast.

In celebration of making it through one month of my new job, Doug's vacation, Valentine's Day, and our one-year anniversary, Doug and I at the last minute decided to trek down to the Salem Cross Inn's Fireplace Feast this weekend. I had been several times with my extended family as a kid and so to do this again was a treat. Nothing has changed about it, either. The first part of the evening consists of a horse-drawn wagon ride around the grounds of the inn, appetizers, hot cider/mulled wine, relaxing in the basement of an old barn while watching your prime rib turn on some kind of colonial roasting device, roasting yourself in front of a roaring fire, and participating in the making of the fish chowder. Once all these things are done, everyone goes upstairs to the top level of the barn to sit around and eat. And I mean eat. There is no end in sight to the food that is served to you, and it's all so tasty that you have no choice but to eat it. This meal is the reason why I had to sleep sitting up - if I lay down my whole meal felt like it was going to come back up from whence it came. Doug and I enjoyed ourselves and certainly enjoyed the food; we just wished we didn't have to drive so far to get back to our house after the dinner. Neither of us could walk, let alone feel alert enough to drive a car for over an hour, so it is a miracle that we are back in one piece. We definitely were in a bit of a food coma after the cheese & crackers, mulled cider, fish chowder (two bowls for Doug!), homemade breads, two giant slabs of prime rib, spinach pie, butternut squash, roasted potatoes, and a heaping helping of homemade apple pie. Just writing about the food makes me ill again. As a matter of fact, I am still not totally recovered from the dinner. I may never again get my appetite back. But it was worth it! Here are some photos of the evening:

I was still in the midst of a food coma the next morning, so I decided to plunk myself down in the beautifully warm sun that shines through our dining room windows. The cats love these sun spots, and since I am convinced - and so is Doug - that I am part cat (the slightly aloof kind, the kind that for the most part keeps to herself until she can't take it anymore and has to attack you for some attention), I decided to see what it was all about. I have to say, the cats are on to something. Lying on the floor with my back perfectly straight so that I could feel each and every vertebrae restoring itself to its natural position was heavenly, and add to that the warm sun... please god, in my next life let me come back as a spoiled little house cat! Of course, one of our own spoiled little house cats didn't take too well to me hogging all of her sun, so she decided to take matters into her own hands: But how can I get mad at this face?

So today is our actual anniversary. Doug and I have been married for one year, and I won't get into all the crazy things that have happened since we got engaged a year and a half ago. Our lives have been running on warp speed since then. It is my supreme wish that things slow down a little this year, but I think that I am just wishing for something that may never happen. When I was a kid I never wanted to be anything but grown up, whatever that meant. I never wanted to be a ballerina, an actress, a singer, a teacher, a nurse, a doctor, a lawyer, a pharmacist, a writer, a director, a hairdresser, a model... nothing. I just wanted to skip childhood and move right into adulthood so that I wouldn't have to bother with the aches and pains of figuring life out. I was such a naive child! Now that I am that "grown up" I wish that I could go back to being a kid. Life moves fast for a kid, very fast, but without all the strings that adulthood attaches. Of course, if I were to go back to being a kid I'd have to relive middle school (the horror), high school, college, the dating game, graduate school, etc. I probably wouldn't have the three little kitties that I have now, or the husband I have now (who has decided to celebrate our anniversary by organizing two Craigslist deals, one that involves a woman named Jean coming to our house to purchase something for $35, and the other that involves us driving to the South Shore Plaza to make a trade in the parking lot like some kind of suburban drug dealers), or the friends that I have now. So I guess I really wouldn't like to go back to being a kid. Maybe what I hope for is just a little perspective - and a little time for reflection now and again.

But, before you come away from this post thinking that I don't love or appreciate my husband, take a look at the flowers I got for Valentine's Day/our anniversary:
Aren't they beautiful? For him I'll spend my afternoon sitting in the parking lot at the mall.