Gettysvue has an awesome Santa Brunch every year. Bring the kids, eat brunch, meet Santa. Can you beat that?
Well, we got to shoot the pictures with Santa last year and had a blast! Santa was awesome! The kids just loved him.
The big kids love Santa too! 🙂
And after Santa had to leave to feed his reindeer, we photographed the sextet that played Christmas carols for us.
MMMMM….. Christmas cookies!
For the last couple of years, I’ve done print on site for the Ft. Sander’s Christmas Party. Everyone gets their picture taken as they arrive and we print a copy for each couple. Ft. Sanders pre-pays for a set number of prints, everyone gets a personalized party favor.
They also get delicious treats from the awesome Club LeConte kitchen.
So if you’re planning your Christmas Party, drop us a line.
I love Halloween! It’s my favorite holiday (after my birthday, of course)! Sometimes we miss it due to work or travel, but I still love it. 2007 was a great Halloween for us. We found these awesome track suits at Target, added some sweatbands, clipboards and whistles and thus our costumes were born. We thought of it as “crazy gym teachers” and went around demanding our friends drop and give us 20, run laps and do jumping jacks. A fine time all around!
So one thing I’ve been loving is sweet potatoes. But not drowned in butter and marshmallows. That’s silly. I recently baked sweet potatoes then mashed them up with parmesan and pine nuts. YUM!! But that’s not the recipe I’m talking about today.
Monday I decided I was eating sweet potatoes. I had some dried chickpeas I wanted to eat as well. So I chopped up the potato and threw them in to the crock pot with the chickpeas. Then I added smashed garlic, cumin, rooster sauce, pepper, fresh ginger, water, fresh dried mint ground, lemon juice, and I think that’s it.
I put them in the crockpot on high and let them cook all day. At the very end, I got out the potato masher and smashed it all into coarse chunky mush. Then I heated up some freezer naan (not as good as my wheat flat bread, btw) and had my friend Elizabeth over for dinner and a walk (not in that order). It was delish!
Like I said, I’ve been experimenting in the kitchen. So here’s what I made to go with the flatbread (actually, I made the flatbread to go with this, but who’s keeping tally).
Butternut squash/sweet potato/peanut butter Delicious Mush
I’m going to freestyle this one as I kind of just threw stuff in the crockpot.
1. roast your (gi-normous)Â squash & (smallish) sweet potato. This step may not be 100% necessary, but it sure is easier than chopping all that squash.
2. scoop the squash and potato into your crockpot (leave the skins behind)
3. Put a big scoop of peanut butter in there. Now add another. Does that look like enough? Squash & sweet potato really soak up the flavor. Better add some more.
4. Look around for interesting stuff to put in it. I used:
fresh dried mint from my garden, crushed
a LOT of that red rooster spicy sauce stuff (depending on how spicy you like it)
a healthy sprinkle of salt
ginger powder
cumin
pepper
ground nutmeg
ground cinnamon
some pomegranate wine I had laying around (about 1/4 to 1/3 cup)
agave nectar
lemon juice
smashed garlic
I put it all on high in the crockpot and cooked it all day. I didn’t add everything all at once purely due to not thinking of it at the same time. It turned out GREAT with the flatbread.
Honestly, there maybe some other ingredients, I really am not certain. Â I would just go taste it, look in the fridge and then put stuff in. My goal is to not buy food this week, although I have several meal time appointments coming up, so that may be busted. But it’s been 2 days of just eating what’s around. And it’s not too shabby.
Nate hasn’t been around, so it’s been kitchen experiment time. I made butternut squash/sweet potato/peanut butter mushy delicious (like a curry, but totally just made up) last night and made flatbread to go with it. I had to record the recipe before I forgot. It’s going to be a bit like getting a recipe from my grandmother, but here goes anyway.
3 heaping 1/3 cup measures of whole wheat flour
some yeast (maybe a teaspoon or two?)
a heaping spoon of sugar (like a big soup spoon, but not a giant serving spoon and not a little cereal spoon)
water (I’m guessing about 3/4 of a cup. Enough to make the dough doughy)
a sprinkle of salt (I used large seasalt, not tiny little salt crystals and took I think one big, three-four finger sprinkle)
fresh ground pepper (about a minute of grinding)
some olive oil
So now that the ingredients list is all cleared up, here’s what I did.
1. Put the yeast in a bowl with the sugar & water (usually you use water between 105-115 F to activate the yeast, but I had no patience for that and just got it straight from the tap. Well, from the water filter next to the tap). Mix them all around and wait until impatience gets you and then move to step 2.
2. Dump the flour in. Then the salt (don’t want to kill our yeast) and pepper. Mix it all up to make it doughy. I use my hands, but I guess you could be fancy with a mixer or something. I think that might be overkill for the amount of dough we’re making.
3. Form the dough into a ball so you can pick it up while you put some olive oil into the bowl (be sure to get all the doughy bits off the bowl sides before you put in the olive oil).
4. Rub the dough-ball around in the olive oil coating the bowl & the dough.
5. Leave the dough-ball in the bowl for a while. Hours I think. I got distracted by Cracked.com all evening so time lost it’s meaning. I put the dough into the oven with the light on to help it rise. When it wasn’t rising fast enough, I turned the oven to 170 F until it preheated then turned it off.
6. Lose patience and determine it’s risen “enough” (we are making flatbread here). Take the dough-ball bowl out of the oven. Preheat the oven to 400 F while you break the dough into sections & shape them and put them on a grease cookie sheet (I greased with more olive oil). I did 5 “loaves” and made them somewhat pancake shaped. I would show you exactly what they looked like, but I ate them before I got the camera out. Visually they look like dense pancakes BUT THEY TASTE NOTHING LIKE PANCAKES SO DON’T CONFUSE YOUR TASTEBUDS THINKING MMMM…. PANCAKES.
7. Bake for 10 minutes at 400 F.
8. Eat them ALL!!!! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Have you ever been to the Grand Canyon? Well, it’s pretty grand. I went with my dad one summer. The views were a bit hazy due to record heat and a fire on the opposite rim, but it was still pretty darn cool. These shots are from my Nikon days. That little D100 was a trooper. I think it’s still around here someplace. Anyone need a vintage digital camera? 😉
Last October, Nathan and I went to D.C. to photograph the Adams family. We had a fabulous time at the National Zoo and at a park near their house. I posted lots of pictures of the portrait, but I never got the Zoo pictures up. So, without further ado, The National Zoo:
Here’s my view from the back back seat.
I think free zoos are the best. St. Louis & Chicago both have amazing zoos that are open to the public as well. I hope you enjoyed the journey. Here’s my favorite shot to send you on your way.
SAY CHEESE!
So I just blogged our first Rocky Mountain road trip, and I didn’t include any photos of the journey out there and back. Here are just a few. Try to guess which pictures I took and which ones are Nathan’s.
Nate and I have been out to the Denver/Boulder area several times in the last few years. Its just so darn beautiful! These shots are from our first road trip (Week 1 & Week 2 way back in 2007). It was our first vacation together which is crazy b/c we’d been together for 6 years by that point, but work had always wrecked our plans. We finally said forget it, we’re turning down whatever comes and heading west to visit our friends. We did have to turn down a few jobs but it was totally worth it! I have to admit, these shots are all by Nathan. I was busy talking to our friends. Well, I took some photos between snowballs. Sometimes you just have to put down the camera and live life.
