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The goose is getting fat

I've never had goose, actually …

I've had a busy few holidays. We made our annual fruitcake. I told Oz, "No more fruitcake. We're not doing that again."

He said, "Oh, you'll forget by next year."

"What, is that 'fruitcake pain', the kind of pain you forget?"

He may be right. This evening, I read an article about black cake and the wheels started turning.

We ran around town taking pictures at night.

Christmastime skyline, from the floodwall

We headed over to downtown to check out the enchanted reindeer forest. I parked on 10th Street, hopped out of the car, and looked over my shoulder. I saw this:

Virginia State Capitol, from 10th and Bank Streets

This shot may be tucked into the (late) holiday cards this year.

I took some pictures of the capitol and the skyline with us in the foreground, but we came out garishly orange thanks to the sodium vapor lights. Color correction just made us green. The solution? Black and white! I'm planning to try a few other things to see if I can get a shot of us in color, and colored like actual human beings.

Now I'm up in Alexandria again despite a Freudian brain fart during which I forgot which Mixing Bowl exit gets me to my apartment. I called Oz from the road to ask him if he remembered. He didn't, but managed to find my forgetfulness highly amusing. He accused me of having a bloggable moment.

Anyway, thanks to the vicissitudes of accumulated annual leave here in Real Job land, I am maximizing my continuous days off and minimizing the amount of leave taken by working on the 26th and 27th, then going back down to Richmond for a long New Year's weekend. More photography, more cooking, and the Kohaku. I love New Year's. It's my favorite.

Happy Holidays to all!

Break time

When I was heating up my lunch in the break area at work today, the guy with the very large lunchbox (he eats many small meals a day and uses a lunch carrier the size of a small suitcase) was setting up his lunch. He was opening a can of tuna. Jars of mustard and peanut butter sat on the counter beside him.

I said, "Oh. You're not having a peanut butter and tuna fish sandwich."

"No. I'm making toast to go with the peanut butter and I'm eating the tuna from the can because I didn't have time to make food today. I've never tried peanut butter and tuna, but I bet the peanut butter would cover up the tuna taste."

"Ugh." Now I'm wondering why, if he dislikes tuna, he's eating it right out of the can. And how he could think the addition of peanut butter would be an improvement.

Flavors

Yes! I have found the sweet spot in my apartment where I can get a fairly consistent internet connection. The sweet spot is less than ten feet from where I had been using the computer, and my landlady's house is pretty small, so I can't be that much closer to her wireless router. Conclusion: Seriously wimpy router plus elderly Airport card == not such a good combination.

Anyway, I did go ahead and make up more cranberry sauce with that extra package of cranberries. As in the earlier version, I used apple cider, chopped pecans, cinnamon, ground ginger, and nutmeg. I subtracted the currants since I didn't have any left and replaced a couple tablespoons worth of brown sugar with blackstrap molasses. I also threw in a wee bit of dark rum, just because. The result was a darker tasting, but more cranberry-flavored cranberry sauce. Sophisticated and tasty, but without the cherry pie goodness of the Thanksgiving Day version.

I brought some up to Alexandria with me to eat by the spoonful since I don't have anything to put it on.

Then I went grocery shopping and bought the smallest (yet still startlingly huge) container of Honduran sour cream available in the Latin American section of the grocery store. The awesome Plato Tipico at the El Salvadorean place near my apartment has taught me the glories of Central American sour cream. So creamy, rich and sweet! If there's something horrifically disgusting about the way they make it, don't tell me.

And this huge thing of wonderful sour cream needs to be consumed by the end of December, so I'm looking for things to put it on. Like today's lunch: drunken beans (pinto beans simmered with beer, tomatoes, onions, garlic, and chipotle peppers in adobo sauce) with corn tortillas on the side. (The smallest pack of tortillas in the Latin American section was a thirty count pack. I'm going to be eating them with everything.)

This evening for dessert I decorated a little plate with a few spoonfuls of cranberry sauce beside a few spoonfuls of sour cream, kind of a yin-yang thing, then transferred the sauce and cream bit by bit to a Stoned Wheat Thin delivery medium and ate it up.

I'm going to run out of cranberry sauce before I run out of sour cream. I suppose I'll have to make more.