countries visited by eva

photo time

anyone else totally obsessed with my new camera (thanks, lynn, ken, elizabeth, parker, erin, kyle, stephanie, jeff, kim, and kate!)!!!  see below for some thanksgiving shots!

cranberry + bourbon = delicious!

kyle, erin, and nic drinking cocktails and watching the cowboys (and dog show) 🙂

walt starts his brine.

walnut/cranberry dip, celery with peanut butter, and peppermint salt water taffy!

 

dessert is done! (oh wait, turkeys are done…)

it’s now 12:45, the gallette has baked, and the pumpkin pie is finishing up.  our friends, erin and kyle, have stopped by for a spiked apple cider (huge success), and we’re watching the lions lose again.  nic has come over – again with his folding chairs – and he had prepared the stuffing to cook in a few hours.  parker found a new turkey recipe from the martha stewart book that nanny gave us last year.  it calls for brining the turkey, which is new to us this year!  parker took the turkey out of the brine at noon, and now it must sit for two hours before we put it in the oven – it looks great!  kyle named the turkey walt this year (you will remember that kate and i made tony the turkey last year), and walt is looking juicy and full.

in thirty minutes we start preparing the turkey and making the stuffing – all coming together!  dinner is at 5, but people are coming over early to watch the game and for general merriment.

happy thanksgiving – expect some photos soon!

The 2nd Annual Thanksgiving live-blog — Part 1, “The Calm Before the Storm.”

Hi, everyone,

Those of you who faithfully follow this sporadic little blog may remember that Eva not only cooked an entire Thanksgiving feast last year, but also live-blogged the entire process (I would link to those entries, but I’m not sure how). At any rate, I have stayed in Los Angeles this year and we will once again be cooking Thanksgiving dinner for some friends. Eva is currently in the shower and I’m about to make some coffee, but in a mere few hours we will be running around like turkeys with our heads cut off. Oh yeah, and we’ll blog about it, too.

Happy Thanksgiving!

P

Adventures in cooking.

I know, I know, this blog has been very food-centric lately, but I feel like cooking is a big part of our lives out here, it’s only natural that we would want to write about it. I’ve thought about why it is that we’ve taken to cooking like we have, and I think it comes down to two reasons.

First, although we obviously had both had roommates before moving to L.A., we had never been in a food-sharing situation before. Second, eating out in L.A. is damn expensive. So, cooking it is.

I was at this pretty awesome butcher’s shop by us the other day (McCall’s Meat & Fish Market on Hillhurst, what what) to buy some pork shoulder for the pulled pork tacos that Eva wrote about earlier today, and the guy behind the counter asked me what restaurants we like to go to in the neighborhood. I kind of stammered a bit, because we cook so much more than we eat out. I ended up half-heartedly listing a few places, all the while thinking that I genuinely like to cook more than I like to eat out.

It doesn’t hurt that the only customer of Chez Hevron has, literally, never once said a single negative thing about the food I make. Actually, I take that back. I made some gazpacho in our food processor not too long ago that was not well-received. While some people are connoisseurs of fine wine,  or experts on modern art, Eva is the world’s foremost authority on chilled, tomato-based soup.

At any rate, cooking is fun. It is something that I look forward to (almost) every day. Also, Albertosn’s is giving away a stickers for every $10 worth of food its customers purchase. Collect enough stickers (like 50 or something) and you get to choose between an exciting array of cookware, such as a wok or a grill pan. Everybody wins!

ou/tx

ay yay yay.  i think i just lost a year or two off my life span after landry dropped that ball.  since we couldn’t be in dallas this week, we tried to recreate as much as possible: pulled pork tacos with margaritas.  aaaaand, we won.  perfect (minus the mild heart attack).

also, really?

whoops.

parker just brought it to my attention that turkey burgers are not vegetarian.

more (strange) recipes

days 2 and 3 of the week of recipes brought two meals i wasn’t very excited about.  the first involved eggplant and the second involved turkey burgers.

week 1, day 2: penne with tomatoes, eggplant, mozzarella and…mint!  this one was delicious and included crushed red pepper for an added zing – i’ll send you the recipe if you want.  added bonus: parker made (mediocre) mojitos with the extra mint!  and on a school night!  (which reminds me – gq named the top 25 cocktail bars in the US and my three favorite bars in LA made the list!  check it out here.)

in related news – and mainly because you guys are probably already bored about reading what we eat – we’ve started watching ‘how i met your mother’ at the recommendation of many friends.  do you guys watch this show?!  it’s hysterical. and clever.   i wasn’t a fan at first, but after three or four episodes, i’m totally hooked.  the britney episode was golden.

aaaaand, week 1, day 3: turkey burgers with tangy carrot slaw.  i do not have a vegetarian bone in my body (besides a mild obsession with falafal, thanks to marfalafal in marfa, tx) and turkey burgers just didn’t sound tasty to me.  i gotta tell you, though, these were great, and i think even my texas-beef-fed fiancé felt the same way.  side note: those are baked cheetos and i’d like to send a special shout-out to erin weber who introduced me to them.  and also to laura deaton, who probably ensured their quality circa two years ago.  if you haven’t eaten them yet, you’re missing out.

out of the recipe rut

this month, real simple magazine published a collection of recipes called “your four-week dinner plan.”  they had me at their byline of “(no thought required).”  basically, they provide four weeks of five separate, interesting recipes, with easy and organized shopping lists for each week.  you take your list to the grocery store on sunday night to prepare for the week, with the perishable foods being eaten towards the beginning of the week so you don’t have to return to the store (major pet peeve of mine).

so here we go!  week one, day one: roasted tilapia, potatoes, and lemons.  we added some bread and green beans since our tilapia was slightly smaller than the recipe’s suggestion.  added bonus: tilapia on sale this week for $1.99 per pound!  huge success, though next time i’ll go easier on the paprika.  🙂

summer is (finally) here!

well, june gloom lasted longer this year than usual – all the way until labor day.  for those of you who don’t live in LA or aren’t familiar with june gloom, it refers to to the cloudy, chilly, gloomy days that overtake los angeles in june.  typically, they go away in july as the hot weather rolls in.  this year, however, the cold and gloomy weather stayed with us until…september. blegh.

but here we are in the middle of september, and the weather is finally beautiful!  sunny days every day and even the nights have been slightly warmer.  becca visited me last weekend for labor day, and it was simply delightful.  we went wine tasting in the santa ynez valley (see photo below!), sunned and read at a park overlooking the ocean, and walked over 17,000 steps in one day (i bought a pedometer, so it’s true).

this weekend has been similar in its awesomeness.  as most of you female readers know, vogue’s ‘fashion’s night out’ (FNO) was friday night!  this was the second year LA participated, and it was huge, with fashion events happening all over the city. some friends and i hung out at the los feliz festivities, particularly at confederacy (with the beautiful people, fabulous drinks, and famous dj – see photo below) and happy (with its free wine, free cheese, and amazing company).  we also discovered bar covell, the new wine bar in our neighborhood which is quite good.

saturday started with parker waking up 7:45am and insisting we begin my training for the us bank stair climb (somehow erin weber – in her sly way – convinced me to climb 75 flights of stairs in about two weeks…mmhmm). we headed over to silver lake and proceeded to climb the endless maze of stairs that snake their way through the hills overlooking the reservoir, downtown, and sunset blvd.  we came back to the apartment to watch my SOONERS beat florida state!  these are the sooners i remember!  boomer!!

to celebrate the sooner victory, we went out with some fellow oklahomans to the LA derby dolls game – aka the roller derby.  ok.  if you have not been to the ‘doll house’ (as they call it) before, then you are not doing this right.  it was SO MUCH fun, and we got really into it.  the games are always sold out, food trucks abound, and you can yell and scream as loud as you want for gori spelling and laguna beyatch to jam their way through the blockers.  yowza – this was FUN!

this morning we had a glorious mass in griffith park for the church’s annual picnic. unfortunately, we had to leave the picnic early because bees started swarming and…well, you know me with bees.  currently parker is gloating as the rangers are about to sweep the yankees in texas (gag) and he’s getting psyched for the first cowboys game tonight.  i, on the other hand, will celebrate my sunday night with a friend at the hollywood bowl seeing RUFUS WAINWRIGHT, PINK MARTINI, and…wait for it…the CAST OF SESAME STREET.

do weekends get any better than this?  (well, the yankees could win…)  thank you, summer, for finally showing up.