The Right Ingredients

Right around Thanksgiving and Christmas, one will notice a lot of harried individuals running through the grocery store to pick up those one or two ingredients that were forgotten during the big shopping trip.

Even though we didn't cook a large meal for Thanksgiving, that was still almost us.

Long story short: I started making Parker House rolls before checking to see how much all-purpose flour we had. The recipe requires around nine cups of all-purpose flour, but we only had three. But, we also had enough bread flour, cake flour, and whole wheat flour to make up for what we needed. We knew that the results could be disastrous, but neither of us really wanted to brave the trip to the grocery store the night before Thanksgiving. Our Franken-rolls turned out just fine. What can I say? In this house we walk on the wild side.

Our Franken-rolls, my steak au poivre w/ cabbage and
caramelized onion puree, and apple napoleon from Bistronomic

On Thursday, we went to Bistronomic for Thanksgiving lunch. We sat, talked, and enjoyed the food--happy that there was no mountain of dirty dishes waiting to be done back home.

Mark wants people to know that although he
ordered crab cakes for his first course, he did
order a traditional main course of turkey, mashed
potatoes, stuffing, and gravy

We tried to take pictures just outside of the restaurant, but the red background really threw off the exposure on my phone. So, um, here's a not-so-awesome shot of the two of us waiting for the car. We slacked on the pics of us this year. Whoops.

 Also, our Christmas tree is now up. I wasn't sure what we were going to do for a tree, since I was pretty set on picking up a really nice fake one on super sale just after Christmas. Mark talked me into getting a cheap little tree from Target, and it is doing its job quite nicely. There are a few more things I want to add to it, but this is what it looks like now:

Not too shabby--but I need to do some more
work rearranging the branches 

This post was supposed to have a theme and some story or something behind it, but I just can't remember what it was. So, to end a post that has become a random mishmash of updates from the week, I leave you with two random pictures from our brunch outing last Sunday:

Mark at our brunch last weekend at a new
local restaurant called A10 

Pumpkin brioche sticky bun 

 Well, that is it for this week, y'all.