Saucy clams and shrimp with wild mushrooms

I asked Dave to pick out a few recipes I've saved over the years to try. This one came from Food & Wine.

I thought this would be okay because Dave loves shrimp and he likes clam chowder (although he prefers the weird tomato-based clam chowder to the correct New England clam chowder).

I liked it. After trying it, Dave said, eh, I don't know if I'm a fan of clams. Yep.

More Plated

Another box from Plated brought two more yummy meals. First I made spicy calamari linguine.

Dave said this was the best Plated meal yet. It was delicious. Next was blackened tilapia with tomato rice and a creamy sauce.

Also good. The tilapia was excellent, and the rice was fine. I left the cilantro out of the sauce because I don't like cilantro.

YUM!

Color Me Mine

Dave and I checked out the Lehigh Valley Color Me Mine recently. In case you aren't familiar, you pick a piece of pottery and paint it. Then they fire it in a kiln and you come back later to pick up the finished product. It was hard to decide what to paint! Dave and I went with Christmas pieces so we could put them out every year as decorations.

Before...

Mine is the odd colored reindeer. Dave's is a gingerbread house that has an opening in the back so you can put a light inside. The colors you see aren't the colors as they appear after they've been fired. The finished pieces are much darker.

After!

They turned out so cool! They ended up being much better than I expected. Dave and I are both very excited about how they look.

It was fun! It took a lot longer than I expected. We were there for over three hours. The people who work there were very friendly. They suggested at least three coats of paint for the pieces not to turn out streaky.

We wrote the date on the bottom, and Dave suggested coming back every year to paint more Christmas decorations.

Trying Plated

I like to cook and try new things, but meal planning and food shopping aren't fun. I found a great coupon for Plated, a meal delivery service, so Dave and I gave it a try. This isn't the first time we tried a service like this. Last year we tried Blue Apron. The first box was missing ingredients and one of the meals from the second box made Dave violently sick. That was the end of that.

So what happens with Plated is that you pick a meal plan and choose from 20 meal options for the week. I chose two meals/week for two people. They send you the recipes and the ingredients, and you do the rest. Easy peasy! Something I liked was that each recipe gets its own bag inside the box. When we tried Blue Apron, they put all the ingredients loose in the box and I had to sort through them all, dividing them up among three recipes. This way is much easier. I grab the recipe bag for the meal I'm cooking and I'm ready to start.

The first box had salmon, potatoes, and kale with a creamy dill sauce.

YUM! This was delicious. The second meal was roasted chicken with mushrooms, garlic, onions, and orzo.

This was tasty, but I liked the salmon better. On to the second box! The first recipe from the second box was butternut squash and black bean quesadillas. I only used black beans on my portion because Dave thinks black beans are gross. I mean, he's wrong, but since he picks them out if I make something with them, I've learned not to try to get him to eat them.

Very good! I didn't get it to crisp up on the top like it should have...because I wasn't thinking and turned off the oven after the squash roasted and didn't have the patience to wait for it to fully get back up to temperature. Oops. The second recipe from this box was Lebanese cod, rice pilaf, and red peppers.

I know that doesn't sound very exciting. It doesn't look very exciting. Well, it was fantastic. Dave took one bite and said HOLY %#&! THIS IS GOOD.

We really like Plated, but it is kind of expensive. It's not something we'll do often, but we'll keep getting boxes every once in a while.

Oreo meringues

Dave and I really like forgotten cookies baked using my grandmother's recipe. When I saw a recipe that was similar, but used oreos, I thought they might be good.

Dave said he could eat a million of these. They were pretty tasty. 

Pupdate November 2018

Jedi continues to be his hyperactive, sweet, loving self. During the day, he hangs out in my home office with me while I work. Around three p.m., Jedi wants attention so he starts knocking things over. He knocks over books, photo frames, my box of the Endless figurines from the Sandman...anything in range. One day he swiped at these books with his paw, turned around, and looked at me.

Hellooooo! I demand attention now.

Crazy beagle. Sometimes I want a change of scenery so I sit on the couch downstairs with Jedi while I work. This turns into a constant battle. I like to sit on the end of the couch next to the end table. I can have my tea within arm's reach, my phone, etc. Jedi likes this end of the couch, too. Any time I get up, he immediately makes his move.

The look on his face...

Dave wanted to get Jedi used to swimming. Of course I got Jedi a life vest. He wasn't super thrilled about this development.

He didn't hate it as much as I thought. That's it for Pupdate November 2018!

Roasted chicken legs with potatoes and kale

I saved this recipe from Food & Wine ages ago and finally got around to trying it. The good news: We actually had leftovers! The bad news: No one wants to eat them.

I'm not a huge fan of dark meat, and the chicken was bland. Paprika didn't do anything to add flavor. There wasn't much in the recipe to add flavor to the chicken. The potatoes and kale were very good. The drippings from the chicken did add flavor to them.

It's too bad this isn't better because it's very easy and all done in the roasting pan.

Doctor Who: The Mutants

This one is long and mediocre. It's your standard cartoonish bad guy, occupiers oppressing the indigenous people of Solos, etc. The twist here is that the indigenous people mutate as part of their species' natural life cycle and they don't know it.

Skip this one. I remembered it being bad and that's why the Whoathon had such a long break. I kept putting off watching it.

THE RUNDOWN

Doctor: Third
Companions: Jo Grant
Episode: #63, "The Mutants," six parts
Adversary: the Overlords and the Marshall

Classic Lines: scientist: "Earth is fighting for its survival. The side effects are of no importance." the Doctor: "Genocide as a side effect! You ought to write a paper on that, professor."

Tuck This Away to Impress Your Friends: The Doctor goes to Solos on a mission from the Time Lords.
Next Up: "The Time Monster"

Two T's Mini Golf

Dave and I went to Two T's for mini golf recently. I haven't played for years, and I was hoping this local place would be fun. We played the outdoor course, but there's a glow in the dark indoor course of 18 holes, too.

It was so much fun! The course was great. There were fun obstacles (including the obligatory windmill) and a neat cave. For one of the holes, you had to hit your ball into the water and let it be carried along to the second part of the hole. Cool.

The winner gets a free water ice. If you live in the Lehigh Valley, check it out.

Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge

Last weekend Dave and I visited Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge in New Jersey.

We walked the trails near the visitor center, and then we walked the trails and checked out the bird blinds in the wildlife observation area. Well, the trails near the visitor center were peaceful and we saw some cool birds.

great blue heron

The wildlife observation area was a bust. It was crowded and the wildlife were nowhere to be found. I'm glad we went, but it's probably not worth the drive there to go back.

Mom's chocolate cake

No, it's not MY mom's chocolate cake. This recipe is from Food & Wine. It's supposed to be one of the 40 best recipes in their history. Um, no.

This cake was bad. I didn't finish it. Let me repeat that- I didn't finish a piece of chocolate cake.

What else needs to be said?

New York cheese pizza

Dave surprised me one day with the book The Elements of Pizza, by Ken Forkish. It's full of pizza-making techniques and a variety of dough and pizza recipes. I've made pizza with store-bought dough, but I've never made a pizza completely from scratch. For my first one, I decided to go with something simple: a single dough ball for a New York cheese pizza. I used 00 flour and baked it on a pizza stone, but I couldn't get my oven past 525 degrees and I don't have a pizza peel or an instant read thermometer (to check the temperature of the water and the dough for proper yeast encouragement).

YUM!

Most of the dough recipes yield three balls of dough and take more than a day, but this one you can start in the morning and have pizza for dinner. You have to give the yeast time to work so most of the time that this recipe takes is waiting for the yeast to do its thing. It's actually quite quick if you just count the time you're actively doing something.

SO GOOD!

Kneading the dough was kind of fun and easier than I expected. When it was time to stretch it and shape it into a pizza, it did look more like a pizza than an amoeba...but it had a slight accident going into the oven so the shape changed a bit then. Haha.

DELICIOUS!

Okay, so how did it taste? HOLY CRAP. It was so good. So, so good. The dough was amazing, and this was the "quick" dough in the book, not one of the doughs the author considers the "better" doughs (that take longer). It wasn't just the dough- the pizza was delicious. Dave said it was better than the pizza from our usual pizza place.

It's time to get a pizza peel. I'll be making my own pizza more often.

Orpheus Chamber Orchestra

Last night we went to see the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at the Williams Center for the Arts in Easton. 

Dave really liked the Danish String Quartet so I figured I'd press my luck and see if he liked this. The performance was great! They started with something modern, then pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii joined them for some Chopin. After intermission, they played some Tchaikovsky. 

Tsujii was outstanding. Remarkable. So was the orchestra. I'm a big fan of Chopin, so it was great to see his work performed in person. It was a good time. 

Medieval Times

I've wanted to go to Medieval Times for years but never have. When I heard that they updated their show and a queen was in charge instead of a king, it was time to pull the trigger!

Oh yes. It's a castle.

Dave and I went to the one in Lindhurst, NJ. When you get there, they assign you a color and a table. We were in the green section, rooting for the Green Knight.

I was happy to see that everyone gets in the spirit and wears the crown of their section. I didn't really know what to expect, but I knew that you had to eat with your hands. They say it's because they didn't have utensils in medieval times. I doubt that's true...but you have to eat with your hands here. They give you wet wipes, but we brought extra napkins and needed them.

Yummy

The queen came out to say hey and the knights were introduced.

Long may she reign!

Then the feast was on and there was dressage and a falconry and drill team demonstration while we were eating. Pretty cool.

the Queen's Guard doing drill team maneuvers

Time for the games. The jousting was neat.

There was sword fighting, too, and a bad guy who had to be defeated.

It ended up being a lot of fun. Before we went, I was concerned that it would be geared too much toward kids, but it was a great time. There were a lot of adults there without children. It's definitely worth a trip if you have one close by.

Wyoming adventure

We went to Wyoming a year ago, so I guess it's about time I blogged about it. Here are some of the highlights. We flew into Montana and entered the park through the Roosevelt Arch.

"For the benefit and enjoyment of the people"

We checked out the terraces at Mammoth Hot Springs. This is where we got our first taste of the smell. Oh, the smell. Some parts of Yellowstone smell like rotten eggs. SO BAD. You get used to it. Thanks, supervolcano!

Mammoth Hot Springs

Yellowstone is huge, so we stayed in two different areas of the park. Also, we went during shoulder season but it was still packed. I can't imagine what it would be like during the summer peak. The next day we went to Norris Geyser Basin. There were bubbling lakes and smelly gas. In some places, you could hear the steam/smoke escaping from the ground. One of the lakes sounded like the crackling of rice krispies.

Porcelain Basin or Mordor?

The Porcelain Basin area was much more crowded than Back Basin. We did see this little guy disobeying the sign there.

This squirrel laughs at danger.

We also went to the Museum of the National Park Ranger because I love museums and I generally drag Dave into every museum we encounter.

me and Dave

Like all NPS rangers, the ranger in the museum was very friendly. She took this photo. I imagine she does this a lot. I made us drive all over so I could collect my National Parks Passport stamps...and we got stuck in our first bison jam. Bison are everywhere in Yellowstone. We saw them every day. They will stand around in the road blocking traffic. Dave said he got tired of them, but I never did.

Yellowstone bison

We saw all kinds of beautiful wildlife in Yellowstone- bison, coyotes, pronghorns, magpies, ravens, elk, mule deer...but no wolves. We drove around Lamar Valley up until sunset looking for wolves, but alas, they were not to be found.

Lamar Valley at sunset

I didn't expect to see mountains at Yellowstone. I thought there would be geysers and smelly bits, but not this majestic beauty in the northeastern part of the park. It was dark as we drove back to the hotel, and the bison were in the road again. I could have reached out and touched them. They were grunting and snorting and kind of intimidating up close!

Something else I didn't know- there's a giant canyon in Yellowstone.

Yellowstone Falls

The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone is pretty cool. This view is from Artist Point, but we did hike down to the brink of the Lower Falls to get an up close look. Now it was time to leave this part of Yellowstone and head to the geyser part. The next part of the trip felt much more touristy. When we stayed in Canyon, we felt like we were in the wilderness. Staying right next to Old Faithful felt overrun with people.

Old Faithful

Old Faithful was neat, and we saw it erupt A LOT. It goes off every ninety minutes or so, and since we were staying right by there, it was easy to catch it when we were walking around or coming and going. It wasn't my favorite, though. Grand Geyser was my favorite.

Grand Geyser

I told Dave that time passes more slowly when you're waiting for a geyser to erupt. The National Park Service has a great app that shows the predicted eruption times of some of the geysers around the Old Faithful area. However, Old Faithful is called Old Faithful for a reason. The margin of error is very small. The margin of error for the others is pretty big. We waited over an hour and a half for Grand Geyser to erupt. WORTH IT. We saw Grand Geyser erupt in the distance when we were waiting for Castle Geyser to erupt and thought- we have to see this one up close.

Walking on the boardwalk by the Grand Prismatic Spring

I had been looking forward to seeing the Grand Prismatic Spring, and it didn't disappoint.

detail of the Grand Prismatic Spring from above

You can walk around the boardwalks right next to it, and you can see it from an overlook. It's pretty neat. Even the steam is multicolored. And you can feel the heat coming from the water.

See the tiny people?

A lot of times when I see photos of this, the saturation looks too dialed up. But this is what it really looked like. Dave's dad recommended we hike to Fairy Falls. The bad weather that would plague the rest of our trip was moving in, but we managed to hike to the falls before the rain hit.

Fairy Falls

Fairy Falls was beautiful. It's hard to capture in this crappy iPhone photo (didn't bring my big camera on this hike). This hike was through grizzly country, and it was the only time I was uneasy hiking the whole time we were there. We had bear spray, but still.

And here is where I tell the story that embarrasses Dave. We were hiking along, and all of a sudden Dave jumped in front of me with his arms out to cover me. He thought he heard a grizzly and instinctively moved to protect me from it. AW. That was nice since otherwise he couldn't stop joking about how he didn't have to outrun a grizzly if we saw one, he just had to outrun ME. Haha.

On to Grand Teton National Park! I liked Yellowstone, but I loved Grand Teton. It's too bad it rained or was overcast most of our time there. Sometimes we couldn't even see the mountains.

stormy view of the Tetons from our room

It didn't even matter. The Tetons were the most majestic mountains I've ever seen. Breathtaking. And we saw so much wildlife! I desperately wanted to see a moose, especially a bull moose. We talked to one of the rangers, and she took out a map and circled areas around the park where they had been seen lately. She was SPOT ON. I think we saw moose every day, at every place she mentioned.

It was fantastic. We drove around looking for wildlife everywhere and found it. We even saw baby moose investigating a great blue heron. We saw female moose more often than males, but we did see a couple of bulls.

bull moose

There were elk all over the place.

elk

We saw a lot of elk right near our room. One morning a couple of mule deer were hanging out a few feet from our window. One of the times we were driving around, we saw a solitary elk, and he bugled! They sound like tea kettles. You don't expect that sound to come from an elk. We heard a few more bugling during our trip. Another time we stopped to see a pronghorn who was standing right by the side of the road. I didn't even get out of the car.

pronghorn

He was gorgeous. I kept waiting, and he finally looked right at me. We saw a couple of black bears, too.

Look at those claws!

He wasn't as close as he appears in this photo. This one was hanging out eating berries, but one ran right in front of the car another time. We saw a fox in a parking lot, too. Animals everywhere! I think I startled Dave when I yelled STOP THE CAR!!!!! because I saw moose right next to the road. We were the first ones there, but soon a crowd gathered. That's what happens- either look for a crowd and you'll find animals, or if you're the first, soon a crowd will appear.

The weather kept getting worse, and it even snowed.

cloudy, snowy Tetons...and Dave

Those mountains, wow. Our flight was so early that we had to get up and drive to the airport in the middle of the night. The sky was clear for the first time during our trip so we pulled over to look at the stars. So many stars! We even saw the Milky Way. We saw a fox, too. See, animals everywhere. I'm completely in love with the Tetons, and one day I have to go back.

If you want to see more photos from the trip, check them out here.