More Yummy New Year

We gave only one gift to each other this year and it was a Cuisinart Griddler Gourmet. Honestly the only reason we'd consider setting up a wedding registry is to put this somewhat frivolous kitchen gadget on the list.

While out on our NYE holiday walk around the neighborhood the day before, we slipped into our local grocery store and bought up some of our favorite sandwich fixings for a memorable New Years Day pressed panini sandwich.

After doing a test panini of peanut butter and banana we were ready to make a real sandwich. We have been dreaming of making our own pressed muffaletta sandwiches for awhile and here was our first one!

Seemed easy enough - assemble sandwich and press. And it really was that easy.

Later that evening we decided to try another sandwich we have been dreaming of creating at home - a traditional Cuban Sandwich. We managed to snag some of the carnitas from our NYE's tamalero, add a few pickles, some swiss cheese and a slice or two of Virginia ham, press and bam! A pretty darn good Cuban sandwich!

If this is what we're eating 24 hours into the New Year, here's to a gut busting 2011!

Yummy New Year

2011's New Year's celebration was the complete opposite of our 2010 dancing in the rain to a latin marching band outside a makeshift rave tent. We decided to take it easy and ring in the new year doing something else we enjoy - eating food we made.

2011 New Year's Eve started with sunny-cold weather, which was the opposite of the deluge of rain we received last year shorting out the electrical equipment (hence dancing in the rain outside the tent in 2010!) We started with a nice walk through the neighborhood, allowing us to take in the holiday decorations without the holiday crowds.

It was a wonderful way to start the holiday weekend and new year just strolling through the quiet streets, while taking care of errands.

Since we didn't have plans to meet up with friends until after 10pm we took our time and our afternoon of walking errands turned into a 2-hour-post-holiday-get-your-body-moving-or-you-will-freeze-but-its-nice-I'm-freezing-with-you kind of afternoon. Plus we knew we tonight we will be stuffing ourselves with tamales!

Our good friends had invited us to a tradition they had wanted to re-visit for years and this year was going to be the year of the tamalero! We arrived as the first test batch was being pulled from the steamer. This was a holiday tamalero in the truest sense in that we brought over all our holiday leftovers to make tamales with.

We got the masa ready for our first batch of tamales made with our left over mashed potatoes, a bag of frozen peas and carrots and a special chili powder mix.

As soon as those were wrapped up and placed in the steamer we moved on to chicken mole, from our Christmas Chicken Mole dinner and Albert's perfected carnitas.

Once they were in the steamer we ready to toast and ring in the new year! We quickly lit fireworks, toasted and ran back inside to warm back up and wait anxiously for our tamales. Not a bad way to ring in the new year - going home with bags of tamales for the freezer, family and tasty new year day snack!

So, is it easy to make tamales? Goodness yes! The secret is to use some sort of lard or fat like bacon grease or straight up lard, you can totally feel the difference in the masa mix!

Holiday Traditions

Holidays have their ups and downs and this year was no exception, but the long weekend with cold rainy weather kept us inside, well fed and comfortably cozy.

Over the years we have lost many of our holiday decorations and to make holiday decorating easy we simply put out more candlelight, but next year we'll invest in some evergreens (missed the smell) and maybe a wreath.

We don't have any holidays traditions we do each year other than eating. You could say our holiday tradition is to eat whatever we've been craving with wild abandon.

Although recently there has been one event that has repeated itself the last few years...possibly the beginning of a holiday tradition? Eggs Goldenrod for breakfast on Christmas morning.

This egg-based-gravy over toasted English muffins tradition has us thinking maybe there's something to this whole holiday tradition thing. We could easily imagine having chicken mole for Christmas Day Dinner every year like we did this year.

And end the holiday with an epic game of dominoes and beeritas.

We are much more into what we will be eating during the holidays over what gifts we may receive. Enjoying an overindulgent meal with loved ones, all the while knowing we don't have anywhere else to go for a while is what the holidays are to us. But we did get some cool stuff too. Like this cute little birdy bottle opener. It will make a great addition to our newly set up bar.

And this bad boy 10 inch copper tamagoyaki pan from Japan.

Maybe homemade tamagoyaki could be our next holiday tradition!

Happy Holidays!

Since we're buddhist we don't celebrate much on Christmas Day, everything happens for us on Christmas Eve. And since we're somewhat Heathens we'll take any reason to celebrate! Hope everyone has a great Christmas Weekend!

Fall Rewind

Whoa! What happened to the last 6 weeks? Life happens like that for us, we look down and blur, blur, blur. Like most Pacific Northwesterners our moods go downhill after daylight savings happens, which occurred while we were trying to catch some sleep in the Atlanta airport. Something about getting to work when its dark and leaving when its dark that makes people go crazy here.

That didn't seem to happen to us this year. We're really enjoying the dark cold winter weather, maybe it has something to do with the fact that we finally figured out how our radiant heated floors work making our house a balmy tropical oasis where you'll find us lounging around in t-shirts! Unheard of previous years!

We started the fall with a bang! Temperatures dropped slowly and gradually letting us wind down with the weather, taking in beautiful autumn walks through the park. Seriously we enjoyed this everyday for weeks!

Then the heavy rains came and all the leaves were gone, turning our neighborhood into large flood zones. Not due to the large amounts of rain, which we guess made national news, but due to the large amounts of leaves clogging up the gutters. It seemed like any typical late fall to us.

A way-over-hyped-mini-snow-storm, some more rain, more cold temperatures gave way to a few days of cold, but crisp, clean and gorgeous sunny days.

Just enough time to assess the garden, yard, and weather proofing. There's always something to do around here to "prepare" for the weather. But mostly our preparation this year has consisted of trying as many bowls of Japanese pork raman we can get our hands on!

That's our early fall in a nutshell. There was also much wedding planning, a smoked turkey, car bombs (the drink) and wet dark bike rides with the sounds of windchimes guiding us home.

Hope everyone is having a fantastic fall! Here's to winter! Winter Solstice was pretty fantastic too with the eclipse, which was clouded out here, but we could feel the gravitational pull! Yes, pulling us indoors to enjoy some couch time, wool socks, library movie marathons, wassail cocktails, and candle lit relaxing!

Back to Reality

We are officially back from our time in Costa Rica. Did it go by too fast? Of course it did. We arrived home with a renewed sense of the world. How do you ask? Well, we realized there is a much better place to vacation than Mexico or Hawaii and that we really need to start exploring places south of the US border.

Yes, there will always be a dreaded layover, but if you have family to visit in any of the southern states it makes killing time in large international airports worth it. Plus we got the bonus of a mini-tour of Atlanta and a nice Thai food dinner.

Unfortunately the flights schedule was a bit off and we ended up overnighting it in the Atlanta airport for 9 hours. We tried to sleep away the time, which proved pretty difficult.

In the end it was totally worth it. We were able to see family and that's always a good excuse to fly indirectly home from a vacation.