A Weekend of Food & Books

no more whrrk posts for awhile

Friday we had a really fun impromptu (as in - we started inviting people over less than 24 hours before) dinner party where I tried to recreate the excellent pork dish Emily and I made at her friend's house in San Francisco a few weeks ago for about 10 people. What makes this dish unique is the honey glace with dried apricots and cranberries that have been soaking in sherry cooking wine. It is simmered and reduced for about an hour and served atop of the pork loin steaks. Unfortunately, I entrusted the preparation of the meat to my Dad - and it ended up very overcooked - I think because pork isn't something he is used to making. Pork is hard to keep moist.

Regardless, we had enough risotto, asparagus, buttery rolls, and the glace (which is delish all on its own) to satisfy. Top that off with about 4 bottles of various red wine, carrot cake, and a few pots of French press coffee and we were set. We played boardgames until the early hours of the morning when our last guests were finally too tired to keep their eyes open.

Starting off the weekend like that certainly made it feel long. On Saturday we woke up late and enjoyed brunch at Denice's Place on 160th before shopping for some solar lights to try out in the yard and invitations for Tracy's baby shower. We went to Panera in Redmond for lunch because Kevin loves it, but it (as usually) disappointed me, this time with lukewarm soup. After some mandatory caffeine ingestion at Starbucks we went to the Macy's home store to look at couchs, and we were finally able to agree on one with a matching chair. My parent's gave us the gift of a furniture shopping budget for Christmas, so we've been meaning to use it since then. It is amazing to me (although I understand why) that it will take 10 weeks to have it delivered. Imagine how long people had to wait 200 years ago (it was probably made locally and took less time!). After that, we headed over to Whole Paycheck for dinner ingredients and I prepared some zesty fajitas using flank steak.

I was up until the wee hours again reading and Sunday morning I didn't crawl out of bed until about 11am. I took a brisk walk to the grocery store to pick up breakfast ingredients and then prepared a very traditional breakfast of eggs, hash browns, bacon and toast. Yay for cooking - and YAY for BACON! Today has been able more reading, writing, thinking, listening to music and re-charging for the week ahead.

So... that's a weekend in the life of the Morrills I guess.