Food!

Happy Thanksgiving! We had our big dinner a couple weeks ago (with a 28-pound turkey!) so we've already enjoyed a solid week of leftovers and get a couple extra weeks to recover before the Christmas meals. Still, in the spirit of the holiday and the fall season, here are some recipes we've enjoyed recently:

We went on a barley kick for a couple weeks and made this barley soup and this wonderful (Rob really liked it) risotto-style barley.  

To prepare for our Thanksgiving dinner for 30, Erika whipped up a practice batch of this stuffing, and then did it again a week later. That's a lot of stuffing. No Cuisinart over here, but it would have been nice. Twenty minutes seemed a little long for the lemons - we'll peel them a little next time and cook them for only 15.

If you can believe it...we're cooking brussel sprouts now (even Rob- of course, everything's better with bacon). 

And just another plug - the butternut squash lasagne is perfect for the fall. Good eating!

Snowstorm in Amsterdam!

We knew something was in the air yesterday when it hailed twice (for a total of 90 seconds):

But we weren't prepared for the total blizzard that hit the city this morning. Just look at our car! It's going to take us days hours minutes seconds to dig out of that:

Apologies to Rob's parents, who have already had one real blizzard this year and to those of you who can look forward to many more!

Remember

It's Veteran's Day, and since there aren't any sweet old vets selling poppies here, we thought we'd post one here for our dads, granddads, and all of our friends who still serve.  Speaking of which, our friend Duffy is home again.  You should check out the link at the right to see some very happy little girls. Welcome home, Duff!

Last Boat Trip of the Year

Incredibly, we had a beautiful sunny day yesterday and so we jumped at the chance to take one last boat trip before the winter sets in. We bundled up with blankets, (spiked) hot chocolate, (spiked) coffee, and some (unspiked) hot apple cider and tried to capture the quickly fading fall colors. We took turns with the camera, but Erika got most of these:

There's a whole in the world like a great black pit

We hope everybody had a great time this Halloween.  We got together with a some other Americans and crowded into a dutch bar and forced our holiday shenanigans on the bewildered locals.  Can you guess who we are?

If you guessed Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett, you are correct. If not, don't feel too bad.  We had to explain it to a lot of folks- basing your costume on a year-old musical movie is fairly obscure. Still, it was a lot of fun.  Did you notice the meat pie Erika's holding?  Nice, huh?