Posts Tagged ‘family’
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Personal chef
Yesterday Mike and Mark and I went skating at Steinberg park, an outdoor skating rink in Forest Park. The rink was a little dicey since it was about 60 degrees yesterday and we had rain and tornadoes, but we still had a good time.
Then we went and had lunch at Whole Foods and got some ingredients for dinner. Mike is a chef so he came up with the menu: Togarashi encrusted beef tenderloin, edamame puree, braised sesame collard greens and a roasted red pepper coulis.
Um, what? Ok, here’s what we did:
Chopped the collard greens
Stuck them in a pot with heated oil, seasoned with salt and pepper, and then turned the pot down from medium high to low and covered the pot. At the end (about 30 minutes), sesame seeds were tossed in.
Shelled the edamame
Then processed with a little oil, salt and pepper
The blogger and the chef!
Roasted the pepper on an open flame
Removed the roasted skin, and took out the stem and seeds. I got in trouble with the chef for washing off the char and learned an easier way – gently brush a chef’s knife backwards across the pepper.
Process and season with salt
Mike got beef tenderloin that apparently was rang up wrong – we got a 50% discount.
We had to go to an specialty store to find this Japanese chili. It was smelled really spicy – next time I use it I would definitely recommend covering the pan or roasting this in the oven – the particles filled the air and were making our noses run and making us cough! I was worried at this point that this exotic hot stuff was going to kill us when we ate it but it wasn’t that hot, it’s just ground chili. I think it’s such a fine grade that it gets in the air easily.
Plating
Yum
The meal was a success. The beef was really tender and perfectly cooked. I really liked the pepper and the edamame puree – I thought that was a clever way to add some color and vegetables to the plate. Mike is going home today – no more personal chef for us.
Now I have a bunch of roasted red pepper – I think some roasted red pepper hummus is in my future. 
I don’t really know what we are doing today other than being kinda lazy. We’ve been hanging out in front of the tv all morning. I think we might brave the mall, although the mall has been scaring me lately – it’s always crazy crowded!
Hope you’re having a good year so far
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NYE 2010 adventures
Happy New Year! It’s 2011 and a year of new possibilities is here.
And now, a brief foray into the past… A recap of our activities yesterday. We had breakfast and slowly woke up. My brother Mike told me that he usually wakes up at 4 am but had been getting up around 8, and I was right to be skeptical… He came down for breakfast at 10. Not much longer after breakfast, a tornado warning showed up and the bad weather was coming our way. Although I planned to go out and do things, Mark thought it would be better if we stayed home.
It turned out that Mark was right – later in the day we found out that tornado damage hit a church about 1.5 miles away from our house. Scary!
The bad weather went through quickly so we headed out for lunch. We went to Schlafly Bottleworks.
Mark likes to pretend that he’s posing and then quickly wave something to ruin the picture….
For an appetizer, we got goat cheese dip and veggies and pita bread. This goat cheese dip is incredible and I always get it when I go to Bottleworks.
For my entrée, I ordered a soup & salad combo. For the salad I got the field greens salad.
The dressing on it was way too sweet. I still cleaned my plate anyway.
The soup I got was white bean and chicken chili. It was really good. After lunch, we headed to the St. Louis Science Center, where I heard they had a “Grossology” exhibit. But by the time we got there, all the shows were sold out and they were only open for another 30 minutes. Almost as soon as we got there, we decided to go to the Bodies Exhibit instead.
I liked the Bodies Exhibit, but the consensus among us is that we would have liked a section called “How’d They Do That?” that explained how they extracted and preserved the exhibits. I know that there was some controversy over the bodies and how they were obtained, but I really wanted to know, for example, how they were able to extract the arteries of a lung or heart and were able to keep it all intact.
We came home and hung out for a while before we headed out again for Mexican food and a comedy show. Here are some pictures of us right before midnight…
Robin and me
During the show, Mike was heckled a little bit by the comedian! He made fun of his beard and said he looked like a lumberjack. Mike didn’t seem to mind too much. I had a feeling one of us was going to get called out since we were front row.
Happy New Year!
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A belated Thanksgiving post
Thanksgiving pictures are just a couple of days late – but that is pretty typical when I’m out of town. It’s hard to get plugged back in when there is so much going on. My parents’ house is packed with me and Mark, my brother Ken and Andi, and a total of 4 cats and 2 dogs. There have not been many dull moments. I did get a few shots of the action.
Here’s the place setting.
We used my parents’ wedding china which is 36 years old. It’s still in great shape. And now, I will introduce you to my family.
This is my sister in law Andi and my nephew Elliot.
My brother Tom (eating shrimp)
The bird. Oh wait, that’s not a family member.
A blurry picture of Andi, my brother Ken, and my Dad rapidly grabbing a biscuit.
My mom, filling up her plate
The handsome devil I married
My sister in law Mel and the youngest family member, Daphne
Grammie (my mother’s mom) and Tom
Daphne – in between smiles.
There is a tradition of names surreptitiously being written in pumpkin pies. Somehow the dogs got the raw end of the deal this year –
After we ate, we skyped with my other brother Mike – here are the three together.
Somehow, I didn’t get any other pictures of food in there. If you’re really dying to know what I ate, google image “Thanksgiving dinner” and I’m sure you can find something similar.
In Nebraska, I’ve been playing with the dogs, playing with my niece and nephew, watching football, running with my dog, and eating a lot of food. Tomorrow we hit the road to head back to Missouri. I’m going to hit publish and get back to more hanging out!
About Me
My name is Michelle and I like to write about running, food, and fitness in general. Check out my About Michelle section for more!
