Delayed Valentinefication

Yesterday Jen and I celebrated Valentine's Day. Yeah, it's a little late. However, I had gotten her tickets to go see Brian Regan for Valentine's. Yesterday was the day. We went down to Marco's Coal-Fired Pizzeria, which I had heard much about, and had ourselves a good meal. The pizza there is very good, but unlike any other pizza I've ever had. It was almost like high quality antipasti on naan bread. Different, but very yummy. We followed it up with some high quality tiramisu. The service was great and very fast. I've waited longer at fast food restaurants, I think.

We then went down to the Denver Performing Arts Center to the Wells Fargo Theater to see Brian Regan. We had a bit of a time juggling parking. The meters had two hour limits, but the show would last about that long, and it would take us about 10 minutes to walk to the theater, not including navigating the entrance line and finding our seats. So after a lot of walking around and calculating, we decided to just take the chance and leave a gap at the end of our parking time. Fortunately it all worked out and I didn't get a ticket.

Brian Regan was quite funny, as was his brother Dennis, who opened for him. The theater was huge, and we were pretty close to the back, but fortunately they had big screens up to display the act. Jen and I really like him as a comedian. He's clean and stays away from sex, drugs, and poop, though his encore was the true tale of him urinating out the back of a station wagon while one brother drove and the others held onto his belt loops. Good stuff!

Less rewarding was my bread making adventure. After my last failed endeavor, I took to heart some of the advice given to me by fellow bakers. This time the dough rose magnificently, almost to 4 times its original size. I punched it down, as directed, and ... well that was the end of my glorious bread. I put it in to rise again, and it just flattened out. If I were making biscotti, this would be the optimal shape; not so much for bread. In fact, it's even flatter than the bread where I killed all my yeast by having the liquid be too hot. As Jen pointed out, even though we couldn't make sandwiches with it, we could make one big sandwich by using each loaf as a slice of bread. Back to the drawing, or rather kneading, board.

More Breading, More Better

Yesterday Jen was teaching a spiritual direction class, and I was helping Isaac and Elsa move into their new place. It looks like a good apartment in a nice complex. It certainly has more room in it, which means I am looking forward to good games and food there. And I certainly am looking forward to the desk in their upstairs never moving again.

That night, we did more breaded pork chops. This seems to be my current obsessions. Jen got a jar of cranberry chutney from one of the people at her class, so we did some pork chops with Indian flavors to go with it. I'm very pleased with the breading I made for it:

2 large pork chops

4 T. flour

2 tsp. curry powder

1/2 tsp. peppercorns, ground

1/4 tsp. coriander

scant 1/8 tsp. ground cloves

2 T. sesame oil

I just mixed the dry ingredients, put it in a bag with the pork chops and tossed until coated. I then fried it in the oil. We then topped it with the cranberry chutney. Good eating!

This morning, surrounded by the surprising amount of Sunday morning snow, Jen and I exchanged presents for Valentine's Day. Jen got me a much needed scarf and a sweet leather jacket. I can now look like a young tough with more authenticity. I got Jen tickets to go see Brian Regan on the 20th. We are excited for that!

Tonight we will go have dinner at Cafe Brazil, which David and John have talked of in reverent tones. I was worried the snow would make for a treacherous drive down, but in true Colorado fashion, the 2-3 inches from this morning have melted off the streets that are now almost dry. I'm looking forward to some good food tonight and loving this amazing woman God has brought into my life. Today is the 1 year anniversary of our engagement, and 2 years of knowing each other. It's so remarkable that it's only been that long, as I feel we know each other so well. What a blessing Jen is to me! Thank you, God, for this love and the time I get to spend with this amazing woman!

The Classics

Last night we had dinner with Jen's parents and I was treated to finally watching The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. What an awesome movie! They certainly don't make them like that any more. No one would think a scene without lots of cuts and no dialog would work any more. It builds the tension and gives a better sense of context to what's going on in a movie. Sure the fight choreography needed a lot of work and the sound was not so hot, but that's some good cinema right there.

We got the XBox back and up and running yesterday, so we'll be able to watch movies at home again. The timing of its arrival was great. I had been watching the UPS site all day to see when it would go out for delivery, and it apparently never left the center in Commerce City. However, when I got home, I walked in, closed the blinds, turned on the heater and went upstairs to make some dinner. The UPS truck had just pulled up right then so I rushed to turn on the lights so they wouldn't think we weren't home. Then I received my XBox with joy. I was chortling with glee each time I walked passed it as I made dinner and set up for recording the Chieftain.

Speaking of the Chieftain, I guess I haven't mentioned any good stories lately. Mainly it's because they've been depressing. However, the story of some dumb criminals was good. Here's how it goes. There was a woman who was in jail awaiting trial. She arranged with her boyfriend, while using the police-provided telephone system in the visiting area, to have him smuggle her some prescription painkillers. They devised a scheme to hand off the drugs in the courtroom where she was to be tried. The boyfriend snuck into the courtroom before the trial, dropped the drugs in the jury box, and then was apprehended as soon as he tried to leave by police who had been monitoring the whole thing. I'm not sure how she was supposed to grab the drugs out of the jury box, but needless to say, that detail was the least of their problems.

This is Good

Today, I felt like a fog has lifted from my brain. All of the sudden, I feel like I can think again. I can pay attention to my work and to traffic when I drive. I feel I have clarity and focus again. This feels real good. For the past week or so, I have felt dissipated, unfocused and stupid. I don't know why it's changed, but it feels good to be back to feeling normal. It certainly makes it a lot easier to do my work. Thank you, Lord!

Coincidentally (and I mean that) today was (hopefully) my last dose of blood thinners. Jen and I went out to celebrate to an Indian restaurant that was recommended to us. It's called Viceroy, and it is fantastic. The owner was quite charming and attentive. And there's a fantastic deal with restaurants.com where you can get a $25 gift certificate for $10. If you're in the Boulder area, check it out!

Oooh, and our XBox should be coming back from the shop tomorrow. We are stoked!

Oh, Yeast, You Fickle Beast

Perhaps I've been a bit too ambitious this weekend. I came home from getting some good Vietnamese food with Dan and set out to make bread. I've never had luck with yeast doughs, but one bread has worked for me, so I thought I'd start out making that recipe: pepper cheese bread. So starting at about 9 and with one foot in a food coma, I attempted to make bread. After a series of missteps and miscalculations, I ended up with two vaguely round, misshapen dense loaves. They taste good, but we're not going to be able to make sandwiches out of them.

So, I then added another attempt at bread into the already crowded cooking schedule for today. Jen had a series of get togethers today, so I started the bread again, and then moved on to making a couple of pies. The first pie (hamburger pie) turned out decently, but when we tried to take it to the neighbors with a new baby, they weren't home. The second pie (pear ginger) was a disaster when it came to the crust, which was dense, stiff, and crumbled and tore with every attempt to work with it. Rage bubbled up. How long have I been making these pies and I still get inconsistent results? It didn't help that I committed my chronic mistake of not putting the dots of butter in before laying over the top crust. And with this disastrous crust, that was not a good mistake to make.

After the pies came dip, which is (thankfully) hard to screw up. It is destined to go in one of the loaves of bread in a bread bowl/dip set up. We'll see how that works, because I don't see being able to make a bowl shaped out of the bread; maybe a platter. See, I overcompensated for my mistakes with the first round of bread, and although this bread rose better, I left it largely unformed to avoid folding in tougher bits of dough. This meant however that rather than rising up into a nice round loaf, the bread expanded outward into a flat blobbish shape. I don't see sandwiches coming out of this either. We'll see if it can manage being a dip container.

Outside the kitchen, my journey through Angle of Repose continues. I'm really loving the writing and am sad to see the characters climbing towards the summit of pain in store for them. I enjoy sad songs and even many sad movies, but I don't like my books to be sad. I don't want to spend all that time to be left depressed and mourning, and when I empathize with the characters as much as I do with Stegner's Ward family, I really want it to turn out well for them.

One passage concerning the Victorian social morés and those of today caught my eye as I read this past week:

We have only switched prohibitions and hypocrisies with them. We blink pain and death, they blinked nudity and human sex, or rather, talk about sex.

It seems to me an astute observation. I'm looking forward to seeing this story through to the end. It is incentive for me to get up onto the exercise bike each morning and pedal alongside these people carving out a life from the West.

Epicureal Bliss

This blog is threatening to become a food blog with the amount of recipes and cooking tales I am posting, but I must MUST sing the praises of the dishes that Jen and I cooked tonight. Taking some recipes from Sunset magazine (thanks to my parents for the subscription) we made celery soup with apples and blue cheese and spiced orange and date salad. So. Freaking. Phenomenal. Even better, these were some pretty easy recipes to do. The salad is merely a chop and mix type affair. The soup is pretty darn easy too. Other than dates for the salad and blue cheese for the soup, there were no ingredients even approaching exotic. And for those with food limitations, unless you have a nut allergy, the salad is friendly to all. And make sure you toast those almonds. They really make the salad!

Oh, my gosh, these were so good. I was doing a little dance of joy in my seat as we ate. Of course, the good gewurtztraminer (Laughing Cat)I was having as my weekly imbibement also helped. Many of Sunset's recipes require a good chunk of time and investment of funds to execute, but this was easy epicureal bliss in little time at all. So good!