Battle Cookie

This weekend the hubby and I went head to head in Battle Cookie. I have been going through recipes to print in the next newsletter I layout for work. I work for a non-profit that inspires hope in people with kidney disease. If you are on dialysis you have to follow a strict and bizarre diet. Renal patients are always looking for new recipes so we did our research and came up with some cookie ideas. Ed made Gooey Caramel Cookies with butterscotch chips. People on the renal diet can't have much potassium or phosphorus therefore no chocolate or raisins or peanut butter (or a ton of other things). I made Crispy Butterscotch cookies with cream of wheat cereal. I am cookied out!

Waffles & Beer & Snails, oh yum!

Because I am the slowest person ever to post photos I will be posting food photos of our Europe trip for years to come! The other day I was really craving a Belgium waffle. Not the kind you eat for breakfast with strawberries and whipped cream, powdered sugar and maple syrup but a real one. The kind you buy from a window or street vendor in Belgium where you get just powdered sugar on if anything because the sticky bread is already super sweet with a slight carmelized crunch on the outside, and it is still warm from being cooked in the iron....mmmm. I had 3 waffles throughout our Belgium stay, this one was the second best and was bought from a window stand in a French-Belgium city south of Brussels. After we went on a hike through the French-Belgium countryside, got lost in a cow paster, and passed a group of high school aged kids on a field trip (the only other people we saw on the trails) we were thirsty. Enter Belgium beer. Believe me, this was not our first beers in Belgium, maybe more like our 10th or 12th. I just find it interesting that each beer has its own glass it is served in. It seems like it is considered a sin if you don't serve it in its designated glass. Each bar or restaurant must have a whole special room just to store all of the different types of glasses for each beer they serve. We returned to Paris a little earlier than we expected which gave us a great opportunity to go back to the last restaurant we ate at in Paris on our way out at the beginning of the month. We loved the lunch there so much we had to go for dinner. I went adventurous and ordered the escargot. I have tried it in the past but never ordered my own. I was very glad I did!

Mmmm Memories

When a trip is long over and you have settled back into the daily grind of work and home the details of your trip seem distant. It felt particularly rush to me because once we returned home there was a mad rush to make our new home livable. We lived our of our suitcases for several weeks until we found and opened the boxes of our clothes. This mad rush lead us right to Christmas when were finally had our housewarming party. And the holiday craziness lead almost to now. I try to reflect on our travels whenever I get a moment. This time I am reflecting on our anniversary meal in Venice. Our wedding anniversary was actually on Aug. 28th, two days before leaving for our trip and one of our worst days of 2009. We had mutually decided not to get any gifts for each other. The trip and the house were our presents enough. Somewhere in the mess of the days before we left and the excitement of the beginning of our trip we made unofficial plans to celebrate our anniversary with an expensive and fancy dinner near a canal in Venice. After our first miserable day in the city of water, canals and flooding the anniversary dinner plan did not look promising. Luckily our second of two and a half days was beautiful and inviting. We had seen two cute restaurants right next to a little canal near our hostel the night before but looked around the entire the next day for other options. Other than the really big expensive restaurants along the grand canal which did not excite us we could not find anything we liked. So we went back to the two places near our temporary home base. We could not have been more satisfied. It was beautiful and delicious. We ordered the fish. we got a kick out of them presenting us the whole, raw fish before and after cooking. Then they proceeded to delicately dish equal portions of the fish on each of our plates. Yum! and what a beautiful place!