7 Hours of Solitude

Christmas Morning First: waking up with no fam around.  I thought that I'd be bummed but with Wessy and Club to fill the void, I should have known better.  After a round of coffee and snickerdoodles on the couch,  Kristin came over and we had a festive morning with homemade waffles, bacon, oj and coffee.  It was a Christmas morning feast and no worries, we kept the Christ in Christmas, Wes wore his Raptor Jesus shirt:

Happy Christ Christmas Christ Steven Colbert!

So after a final trip to the dog park, and after leaving my bathroom cleaner than it was when they arrived, Club Fun departed.  They did not depart however until Sabra and Murlester forged a friendship:

JoeJoe never left the bedroom during Sabra's visit but given his history with doggies, we can only respect this. 

With the egress of Club Fun we have entered our 7 Hours of Christmas Solitiude.  7 hours until my parents arrive from their bastion in the frozen tundra of Minnesota and the Kukulka Christmas festivities begin!  I think perhaps a nap is in order :) 

Hello There Christmas Eve

I woke up this morning to the delightful smell of brewing coffee. I snuggled up to Wondie-ful Boyfriend for a few minutes and just enjoyed the sound of the kitties purring.  After a few minutes of what one can only consider pure contentedness I wandered out to the kitchen and found not only freshly brewed coffee but my Ashleigh.  I started to wonder at this point if it was possible that I had in fact made it to heaven but then I thought back on my past year, had a chuckle and poured myself a cup of coffee. 

Today has not been my traditional Christmas Eve but darned if I didn't enjoy it all the same.  After some lounging around on the couch with coffee we took my God-Dog Sabra to the dog park to meet a Bestie, Meredith and Step-dog Roobert.  Not to long ago I would have considered a trip to the "large dog" park to be on par with an enema but since the advent of the Tilda-Roop it's become, dare I say, enjoyable.  I'm not exactly sure what I want to do with my life in its entirety (I think I've got some time before I need to know this) but I do hope that I can find something that makes me as unadulteratedly happy as dogs are when they play.

Now, I was planning to take today off from running because my knee's have been sore lately and also because it's a holiday and I'll take any excuse not to go running.  Then Ashleigh, the trooper that she is, decided to run the four miles between Matt's parents house and my house.  I just can't be outdone / miss a run with one my fave running buddies and so I ran out to meet her and we had a lovely 1 1/2 mile trott together.  We do have a 5K to train for after all. :) Next stop, Stubbies and Steins for a few Belgian Beers and some Pome Frittes.  Just your traditional Christmas Eve is all.

Home from Stubbies, Wes lit the fire and I put some Snickerdoodles in the oven.  Snuggled up on the couch with the last glass of spritzer, a fire and the smell of cookies in the air I was completely content.  Little did I know but the Beef Log was coming home to me...holy GOD.  I know that the English have gotten a lot of shit over the years for their, how shall I say, lack of cooking prowess but when it comes to Beef Wellington I must say that they have gotten something entirely right.  Add in the whole Earl of Sandwich thing and quickly the Brits are climbing in my esteem. 

It's been a non-tradional Christmas Eve for sure, there's been no pirogi and there's been no family but if this Christmas Eve was to be joyful while lacking in family, this one has been it.  My parents will be here tomorrow, there's the gig-hugenest piece of beef sitting in my refrigerator just waiting to be roasted and I'm surrounded by people I love.  I couldn't be more contented. :)

To offend, or not to offend

You can't avoid offending people from time to time. When you don't mean it apologize. When you do mean it, accept the consequences.

-- David Schaner, Physician, New York, NY, USA

Word of the Day:

Diplopia: commonly known as double vision, is the simultaneous perception of two images of a single object.

okay, how much effing fun is that to say! 

Operation Peirogi

To complete the weekend of ill advised cooking adventures, yesterday I attacked pirogi. This is a first for me in that while I'm an expert pirogi eater,  I've never made them myself and haven't seen them made since I was in elementary school.  So despite a distinct lack of hands on experience I ventured forth armed with my Grandma's recipe, a gray, cold Sunday and cleaning the house to procrastinate.

Mary Kukulka's Pierogi Recipe

The Recipe (yes this is a proper noun) was supplemented with some scattered verbal instructions (when in doubt double, better yet triple the butter) but also did a little Googling to fill in the gaps in the hopes of missing a few common pitfalls.  This guy is way ramped up over his pirogi making as it is apparently very, very serious business.  While he should probably cut back on his caffeine intake, there was helpful information buried amongst the passion.

There's all sorts of stuffing for these tasty little suckers and while I'm sure I will attempt the others at a later date, potato and cheese are favored by my fam so I went with those.  The potato pirogi stuffing was made the night before per the practice of Grandma.

She always said that it was best to get it out of the way and after all the rolling, stuffing and boiling that was about to commence, she was right. 

Thankfully I had become quite well acquainted with my mixer the day before because I ended up making three batches of pirogi dough.

Apparently one batch of potatoes requires a triple batch of dough - duly noted. And can I just say that there was nothing more I wanted this weekend than a KitchenAid mixer?  I spent a decent amount of both Saturday and Sunday cursing my sister for not registering for one when she got married so that I could have borrowed it this weekend.  Sigh...the girl just doesn't think ahead!

According to my Mom (hi Mama!) I showed a penchant for rolling out this dough as a 12 year old, so 25 years later I attacked it again.  I mean, it can't possibly be as hard as making Grandmother's pie crust right?  right?!?  Right:

It isn't nearly so difficult as that stinkin' pie crust, maybe I'll try that one when Mama's here next week.  Stay on the edges of your seats and keep a tight hold on those nipples, this is thrilling stuff. 

Stuffing placed:

Sealed with water, finger pinchin' and then finished off for good measure with a fork:

Boiled: 

and laid to rest:

Four and a half hours and four explosion casualties later I had 83 hand-made pirogi to gaze up on with glee.  It sure looks pathetic for 4 1/2 hours worth or work.  Then we ate them:

Not quite as good as Grandma's (as was expected) but a sight better than Mrs. T's if I do say so myself.   Plus a whole load frozen for later consumption once the fam arrives.  

This Christmas will be a lot of firsts for me  It will be my first with Wes- yay!  It will be the first one where I do not wake up with my parents in the same house - boo.  It will also be the first one in over a decade that I won't be at my Grandma's house. My Grandma passed away this past summer, peacefully and without pain which is exactly what she deserved.  I haven't found a way to write about her, it's hard to know what to say about a woman who I knew for my entire life but only a tiny portion of hers.  I'm still working on that but what I do know is that of the things that are quintessentially Christmas to me, my Grandma's pirogi is a big one.   My Grandma is not here this year and I think that I can speak for my whole family when I say that we miss her terribly.  My Grandma is not here this year but the tradition of her pirogi 's (imperfect as they are) will be.

Grandma, Christmas 2009

This post brought to you under the supervision of Kitchen Cat. 


He iz slepin' in ur kitchen



Wotchin' u kook and tipe



Christmas Cookie Bake 2010

There are some movies that just never ever get old.  I'm not sure what it is about them - but there's a handful of movies (Ocean's11, You've Got Mail, Love Actually and S.W.A.T just to name a few)  that I can just watch over, and over, and over without ever getting bored.  I know what happens and by this time I could probably recite most of them but they always help to pass the time when time passing is needed.

I'm thinking about this today because while I'm generally opposed to just having the TV on in the background, but I've been baking and cooking all weekend and have kept movies on in the background to keep from going absolutely bonkers.  It's the weekend before Christmas and along with my questionable decision to take on several large cooking projects about 30 seconds before needing the house to be so fresh and so clean clean, there are thankfully movies galore on TV to keep me entertained. 

Yesterday's task was cookies, cookies and more cookies.  Topsises of the list was my quintessential Christmas cookie: Julie Kearny's Gingersnaps.   Apparently these gingersnaps are the same as those made by my Great Grandmother on my Mama's side but hey, I know Julie and I remember eating hers and so I maintain: Julie's GingerSnaps. It just isn't Christmas until the Gingersnaps are made.  Second on the list was by request: Peanut Butter Chocolate Kiss Cookies for the Wes.  I also made and froze some homemade sugar cookie dough to make Snickerdoodles later this week for Club Fun (they're an Ashleigh fave) and my sister who also loves them.  The amount of butter I went through on Saturday alone is sinful, but the results were tasty and festive: 

Cookie Exchange Boxes and some extras for the Wes :)

Today's project was Grandma's Pirogi but that, is a whole other post of it its own. 



QotD: Holiday Edition

"Around the holidays I have a few really important rules, one of them is ALWAYS serve cocktails.  The other is to serve things that I can make ahead."

-- Ina Garten

The Barefood Contessa



The Disapprearance of the Glitter

 When I was a kid, I quite honestly LIVED for sleepovers, sleeping bags and a tiny tv in the damp, half-finished basement of someone else house and we were seriously happy. Every weekend was an exercise in convincing my mom that I could sleep over at a friends house and not get sick or be cranky the next day.  One of the worst parts about middle school and high school was that asking for a sleepover was far more mine-fieldy than it had been in elementary school.  Something about puberty made asking someone of the same gender to spend the night was far more loaded of a question.  First was the fear of rejection - what if they don't want to come?  Or even worse, what if they DO come and then tell everyone else at school how disappointing or uncool the whole thing was?  Then people started having sex.  Granted this was way before I was even thinking about it (later life conversations have indicated that I was a bit of a late bloomer if not outright back-asswards in high school, I however prefer to think of it as a lack of boyfriend options especially after eliminating boys whom my friends had already dated) and the chances of being accused of being a lesbian if you asked the wrong person too eagerly, were pretty good.  It occurs to me that being called a lesbian shouldn't have carried the unspeakable horror that it did.  I'll admit that I didn't want to be called this, in part because I'm not in fact a lesbian but far more than that was the disdain and disgust with which the accusation was thrown. 

A while back I came across this website called  WriteYourPrincipal.com.  This movement encourages people to write to the current principals of their former high schools and ask one question: what is your school doing to stop bullying and support GLBTQ (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and queer) students and their allies?  It's all very warm and fuzzy to think that our society is open minded and tolerant but the rash of teen suicides because of bullying indicates that our children aren't, which to me is a pretty good indication that we as a society aren't either.  Up to this point I've only thought about sending a letter of my own, mostly because I just didn't know what to say. I've never ACTUALLY been discriminated against because of my sexual orientation and while I'm sure some of my friends must have experienced this, I don't remember actually seeing it first hand in high school.  I think I know what to say now, and to hold myself accountable I will post whatever I end up sending here in the near future. 

I digress however and my original question still stands: when did sleepovers lose their lure?  Is is since we moved out on our own and now home isn't necessarily a place that we can't get into nix level shenanigans?  I'm not sure but I do know that the fun of staying up late in someone elses house, sleeping on the floor and on couches and waking up far away from my own shower has lost its glitter and lure. A while back a friend of mine had a truly heart wrenching turn of life and needed some overnight company.  While I am glad that I was there, she truly needed other hearts beating around her that night, I didn't sleep and I ended up sick for over a week.  It was misery and I have to wonder, is this the first sign that my soul aging?  Or is it just that I've become that darn attached to my own bed?

My First British Thanksgiving

I bet you didn't know that those crazy Brits celebrate US Thanksgiving.  Should you toss the bull shit flag on this you'd be right (at least according to Wikipedia ) but if you think that Club Fun is going to let that fly, you'd be seriously understimating us. 

Meet Club Fun:

I think this might be the night that I learned you can put butter in rice
Deeeelish !

Matthew (former El Presidente del Equipo de Divertido, recently replaced by yours truly for survices rendered this past weekend) formally came into possession of a hard earned MBA from UF this past weekend.  Club Fun always endorses higher learning and celebrations were in order.  As is  par for the course with Club Fun meetings, funsies ensued. There was no cheese but there was beer, white wine spritzer, sushi and (a slightly belated) Thanksgiving, British style. 

Now, Matt is is your quintessential American guy.  He (rightfully) refers to football as football (none of that football-that-is-soccer nonsense pepetuated by the rest of the planet,) he quotes the Simpson's with inspiring accuracy and giggles when Harry Potter says "boogies."  Given all of this, it's usually a bit startling to meet his family who are all quite English.  Spend enough time with them and you'll find yourself using the words lovely and charming with increasing frequency.  This year, they had a belated Thanksgiving (awesome though they may be, they are Brits and thus are okay with having Thanksgiving in December) while Matt and Ashleigh were in town and I was invited to join.    This is nothing short of outstanding for me.

So you see, I've been hearing about the English Thanksgiving menu since I met Matt almost a decade ago. His American-ness encomapasses a zeal for Thanksgiving that puts most Thanksgiving enthusiasts to shame.  His enthusiasm stems from a love of gravy and he all but waxes poetic as he describes the house made of stuffing balls that he plans to fill with gravy and then roof with sausages.  Sausages you say?  Yes, British Thanksgiving includes sausages:

I have to say that they are an OUSTANDING addition to traditional Thanksgiving fodder and there will be sausages at Thanksgiving next year, this I can promise you.  British Thanksgiving was everything that I had dreamed it to be with tasty wine and amazing food made by Matthew's quite lovely and charming mom.  They don't have to include me in these family events but it certainly gives me warm fuzies that they do. 

And, because this was technically a Club Fun meeting, this entry wouldn't be complete without some Sabra lovin'.  She is the mascot after all.  And so I leave you with the unbearable cuteness that is Seniorita Sabra:

She's WAAAY bigger now but this is so unbearably
cute that I just have to post it :)

Finally something worthwhile...

In other news, the FDA grudgingly granted approval for the use of more alcohol to cure early morning hangovers.

Glad to see they're earning their paychecks.

(tehe hehehe he he he)

QotD: something greater than yourself

"If you can look at one of those waves and feel this wind and you don't believe that there's something greater than we are, then you've got some serious analyzing to do and you should go sit under a tree for a very long time." 

The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean 

by Susan Casey

Ashleigh. AKA My Easy Button

Meet Ashleigh!

It came to my attention today that Ashleigh might just be my own personal Easy Button.  Regardless of how random or odd the dilemma or question at hand is, Ashleigh always seems to have a suggestion or solution that actually works!  It's the effective part of her solution that always amazes me, it's like she has the Bat Phone to problem solving central. 

When I was looking for a good book....

 ...here's a book that you'd never have 

even thought of picking up yet you will love! Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan were all results of the Ashleigh  recommendation hot-line.

I need Christmas music that won't drive everyone around me insane...

 ...try A Very Special Christmas 3.

It's no John Denver and the Muppet's but it's Christmas-y and a little less of an assault of other people's ear drums. 

I'm having trouble confronting a friend about how their actions are hurting me and people I love....

 ....here, based on what you told me 

I wrote a well reasoned, kind and balanced email to said friend explaining in a fair and measured way, the issues that you're having. 

I need jeans...

 ....oh, there are designer jeans on sale

at TJ Maxx right now...btw, you're a size 29.

I want to go on vacation before tackling graduate school...

 ...let's go to Mexico!  I'll organize it!

I found us an amazingly beautiful hotel, rented a car for about 35 cents a day and oh wait...here's a bunch of outrageously nice snorkel gear that we can use while we're there! 

There are many many more instances that I could use to prove my point, but I'm guessing that you pretty well have the gist of it.  It's a wonderful twist of fate as it were, I get this lovely person as a friend AND a myriad of solutions too boot. 

Happy Feet

Just sharing my morning smile with the inter-tubes :)

My Charlie Brown Christmas Tree

With Thanksgiving all said and done I turn to decorating for Christmas. 

This is my very favorite of the holidays (I mean, who doesn't love twinkle lights!) So as soon as the turkey fryin' peanut oil had be scrubbed from the kitchen counters, it was time to find a tree. I know that some people decorate for Christmas before Thanksgiving but I for one oppose this.  As fabulous as it is to have twinkle lights and decorations up, it's just positively brutish to brush over perfectly respectable and enjoyable holidays like Halloween and Thanksgiving in the rush to begin celebrating Christmas. Christmas has the whole of December dedicated to it, there's just no need to go encroaching on November. However, November is now over and  I see no reason to drag my feet. 

I really love to celebrate: holidays, birthdays, seasons, presidents, natural phenomena...I love them all.  I've written about Birthday Month before (here and here) and how so very often this penchant for celebration is seen as selfish or egocentric and maybe it is.  Still, if we don't celebrate the good times, then how will we remember them? How will we be able to stock pile them for future use during the bad times?  This (and I say this with the appropriate amount of humility and gratitude) is a good time for me and come what may, I want to remember it.

I've never really even thought twice about getting a Christmas tree but this year I have to admit that I was a little nervous about the havoc Murry might choose to wreak over said tree.  I'm okay with some innocent batting at a swinging branches or two but I'm just not looking forward to coming home to the tree toppled and crashed through the coffee table.  Joe Lewis is a pretty laid back kitty and I don't worry so much that he might kamikaze dive bomb the Christmas tree while we're at work but Murry has been a bit of a maniac as of late.  He's developed a propensity for turning kibble into a huntable substance in order to maintain his energy levels for attacking the toilet paper rolls and then celebrating his triumph with a celebratory writhe amongst the masticated bits of conquered t.p.  Thus, our tree may be in danger and a plan was formulated. 

Wes purchased our tree (a first for him!) and we decided to set it up and just leave it for a day or two to let the branches settle and test run the determination of Mur-Monster in conquering the tree.  It was thusly I discovered that an undecorated tree is just a creepy tree lurking the corner of my living room.  Not quite the festive aura I was hoping for and so only 24 uneventful hours passed until, fortified with a glass of Malbec and the Muppet's (with John Denver) singing Christmas carols in the background I created my Charlie Brown Christmas Tree 2010.  Not to be confused with Charlie the Christmas Plant of course, but festive all the same.

And so replete with twinkle lights and stockings for the kitties we snuggle down and prepare to enjoy the holidays.