The World Surrounding Me

These little lettuce seedlings appeared on our windowsill yesterday. Soon, we’ll be eating home-grown microgreens! From Blog Photos I’m using the technique described here.

Just over two weeks into our fitness goals for January, here’s where we stand: Matt has done 9 of 14 workouts for January. I have completed two weeks of 60 minutes of workouts, and am 30 minutes into this week’s goal. I slipped a little bit on stretching last week, but caught up over the [...]

Matt & I finally got around to signing up for Knife Skills 101 at Central Market cooking school. Our class, held last night, was pretty good. I’m not sure I learned any concepts I didn’t (intellectually) know from watching Alton Brown on Good Eats, but having practice and somebody there to check my technique was [...]

My parents are visiting us for a few days, from Connecticut. We’ve had fun going shopping, watching Nebraska win their bowl game, and eating BBQ & Tex-Mex together. Here’s mom, making corn tortillas, from scratch. This was the first time she had ever made them. We ate them with homemade posole and green-chile-chicken-breasts on Tuesday [...]

I took the day off and did a little baking & cleaning yesterday. The baking was far more successful and rewarding than the cleaning! This picture shows some of the chocolate cookies I made. My favorites are probably the one on top: dark chocolate candy cane cookies. The recipe comes from the Wisconsin Dairy Board [...]

Last night, Matt and I tried to come up with a list of our favorite 10 restaurants in the world (alas, we couldn’t think of any outside the US worth putting on the list). Here’s roughly what we came up with: (order is approximate) Frontera Grill – Chicago Alan Wong’s – Honolulu Chuy’s – Austin [...]

Here’s Matt holding one of the pies we made for Thanksgiving dinner this year: buttermilk delight. It has a buttermilk interior with a coconut-chocolate-pecan topping. We also made an apple pie (or, as our friend Robert put it a “brown sugar pie”) – it turned out way too sweet. And, if that weren’t enough desserts, [...]

This weekend, we made Chicago-style Italian Beef sandwiches from scratch (roughly following this recipe). It’s quite the process! Didn’t turn out quite like Portillo’s, but it was still pretty good. The picture looks like a blob of meat, I know, but it tastes much better!

Shortly after we got married, Matt did something both wonderful & horrible: he took me to New York City and while there, we visited Daniel’s Bagels (not far from Grand Central Station). Since that fantastic trip, I have been forever spoiled on finding a quality bagel in Austin. As I learned in a very influential [...]

I know I’m not the only person who had to work this Labor Day (just listened to my brother anchor the evening news, for instance). But, despite putting in hours answering emails and planning for the huge event I’m coordinating next weekend, we got out of town twice this long weekend. Our first trip was [...]