A Holiday Weekend

Thanksgiving was great this year. We headed south about 1 hour to hang out with the husband’s cousins. The wife is a horse vet and they have a nice, new spread with lots of land, 4 horses, 4 dogs, and 2 cats. Most of the dinner ingredients were either grown by the cousins or bought locally and you could really taste the difference. Dinner included turkey, stuffing with andouille sausage, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, fresh baked bread, squash soup, roasted squash, roasted beets, green beans, asparagus, and cornbread. Despite the copious amounts of food, the 6 of us at dinner managed to make a big dent in the food. For desert we had a pumpkin roll and a pumpkin-chocolate-pecan cake I made that was actually quite good (NY Times recipe). And of course, there was a lot of great wine (I sniffed a lot of good wine). The wine provoked a couple hour discussion on the biggest American band of all time. I’m not sure what the consensus was.

There weren’t a lot of Thanksgiving leftovers, so I didn’t have an over-fill of Thanksgiving food, and now I’m craving turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy. I don’t expect any restaurant will have food that’s as good as what we had over the weekend.

The rest of the weekend was spent doing not very much. I had a super long to-do list but didn’t get many items crossed off my list. My friend Christine and I went shopping in Union Square in San Francisco. We checked out the huge Macy’s Christmas tree and hit a bunch of stores. I didn’t buy any Christmas presents, but mostly bought goodies for me. I used to think I wasn’t much of a shopper. And I’m not when it comes to clothes for myself. But I love shopping for house stuff. I bought a paella pan and a Spanish paella and tapas recipe book. I can’t wait to try out my new toys this weekend.

I have some pictures. These aren’t relevant to anything I’ve written about in this post, but I haven’t put up pictures in a while, so here you go:

Here’s Monkey sleeping on the warm dishwasher door. She has a funny way of sleeping where she likes to place her chin flat on the ground, instead of propping it on her paws.



And here is Monkey wearing her Santa’s Little Helper shirt.



To end on a depressing note, did anyone watch the Patriots vs. Steelers game on Sunday? The first half was good. The second half was a joke. I lost track of the Patriots’ turnovers and horrible plays. The worst thing about the loss was losing to the Steelers. I really don’t like Steelers fans. The Steelers are a good team and they deserved the win, but the Steelers fans went crazy happy when Welker was taken out of the game with a late hit. The hit wasn’t that dirty, it was just late. And it was little Wes Welker vs. a huge Steelers’ player. Still, a good fan would not cheer when a player is injured. But then again, I am talking about Steelers fans.