So it has been about two weeks since my last post, due to a combination of wifely vacation, guests, medical stuff, Thanksgiving, and laziness. Most of the really good dog-snoozing snaps are on the high-tech Canon SLR that only NDM operates, but I've also got some pictures from the Camera For Dummies. There's no chronology here...
Our dogs are still cute. 'Dolon is finally allowing Mag to touch him when he's sleeping.
Unfortunately, as it happens, the man who is allergic to everything but dogs and feathers is now allergic to dogs as well. This kind of snuggling is part of what has been shutting my respiratory system down.
My allergist tells me I even have a sort of food allergy! When my lips and tongue swell up after eating kiwi, it is apparently
oral allergy syndrome. My lazy plant pollen antibodies are getting confused by the proteins in raw kiwi. Luckily I was still able to gorge on the blueberry muffins NDM made.
Our dogs have been total nightmares with visitors; their lack of training is a sad indictment of our failures as parents. However, when nobody is around and they have slept and eaten, we can occasionally squeeze a calm photo opportunity out of them. This is what counts as victory in our household.
Let's see... Turkeys are huge, and we only had NDM's father and our friend SAM for our Thanksgiving gorging, my parents having blinked in and out the weekend before. With the leftovers NDM made two risottos, I made some turkey chili, and we did the usual carcass-into-stock transformation. NDM won the wishbone pull.
When my parents visited we had some fantastic home-made pumpkin tortelloni in an alfredo sauce.
My mother helped me make some more
faux sourdough. Here her hands are, after much cajolling, elegantly presenting the loaves.
Recently 'Dolon has stopped coming up to bed with us, which given my newly diagnosed dog allergies is probably a good thing. Mag accompanies us upstairs but 'Dolon can't be bothered to get off the couch. Sometimes he'll come up in the early morning as the hunger pangs set in -- our dogs approach dangerously near to starvation at about 5am.
Mag is growing more cuddly, but is no better behaved. Her couch-back behavior, which was really cute a few months ago, has of course metamorphosed into unacceptable roughhousing that we are having a difficult time combating. When she drapes over the couch she is still cute, but she also vaults over it and attacks 'Dolon from a position of tactical superiority up high on the couch's back.
Our Thanksgiving meal was great. We cooked the turkey in a bag to keep it nice and moist, and squeezed some extra stuffing in the bag wrapped in cheesecloth. The cheesecloth stuffing turned out well -- crispier and drier than the interior stuffing, providing a nice textural counterpoint. We also had mushroom stuffing cooked in a casserole dish, dilled carrots, sweet potatoes, butter horn rolls, and creamed spinach. I made a "mashed cauliflower" dish out of cauliflower, Neufchâtel, and a little butter; it wasn't as much like mashed potatoes as I thought I'd be able to get it, but was still greeted enthusiastically. I also broiled Brussels sprouts and purple pearl onions with crushed garlic and some white truffle oil my parents gave us. Finally, NDM made some fresh cranberry sauce. NDM made scalloped potatoes but we ate before they were done.
Here's NDM's turkey-free meal.
Then, there were the deserts. A couple different pumpkin breads, a pumpkin cheesecake, and an apple pie with a delicious streusel top. I whined about the apples being diced too small in the pie, which meant slices didn't hold together very well, but the pie was still great.
So, it had been ages since I made a good meat chili. Not much call for it eating just with the veggie wife, after all -- I left my major impeti for cooking it, JPQ & EJB, in Champaign-Urbana. But we happened to have some frozen stew meat left over from the
Ukrainian borscht NDM made last month, along with a ton of turkey to dispose of, so I made something up.
I seared the stew meat in some oil with garlic, and then braised it with red wine before throwing in the already-cooked turkey.
I used chipotles to further season the turkey, and then a bunch of jalapeño powder I got as a gift for some additional flavoring on top of all the normal stuff I do. It came out nice and spicy, with very different textures than my normal ground beef meat chilis.
And that's all the pictures I dug out of the sleazy camera -- hope everyone had a good turkey day!
This Thanksgiving thanks to a visit from SAM I was finally able to move my desk into the room that is supposed to be my office. The massive and heavy barrister's desk couldn't make it through the door, which is one of the reasons I cut a big hole in the office's wall.
I had to build a device to keep the desk from destroying the drywall at the bottom of the hole since there was no way two people could dead-lift the desk.
I also needed to pick up a second furniture dolly so we could move the desk from the far bedroom to its staging area in the family room. The desk would only fit in one orientation, and it cuoldn't rest on its curved decorative front, so the fronts of the drawer sections were the only viable transport points.
Once in the family room we flipped it on its 2" thick slab of a top and lifted it up onto my carpet-covered temporary shim.
After that it was pretty easy to slide it into the office and lower the other end onto the floor.
It actually turned out to be pretty easy once the plan was in place.
