'Tis The Seasoning

Today we drove into New Jersey to go food shopping and to make our semi-annual giant shopping expedition to Target which hurts the wallet, but not quite as much as the soul. After about twenty minutes the Target fatigue hit me pretty hard and we had to make our exit quickly, running through the last few items on our shopping list as if we'd suddenly been the winners of a shopping spree.



Our travels brought us through many of the "fields" in New Jersey. Let's just call this little dandy of a town Sketchfield.



After dropping off all of our purchases we ran up to 181st street to pick out this year's Christmas tree. 181st was all doctored up for the event. Apparently the UPS store wasn't feeling the cheer as they were closed at 5:15PM. More support to launch into one of my venomous City-That-Never-Sleeps-My-Ass tirades.



For dinner we started with an arugula, crab, sunchoke, and shallot salad.



We also had this olive bread that we preferred to call "fougasse" after a similar bread we'd had in France. It's my favorite because it sounds like an Italian insult. "Hey, get away from my marinara, you fougasse!"



For dinner I made a Bologenese(ish) sauce with garlic, onion, carrot, celery, thyme, basil, ground beef, and a little skim milk. I also cooked some tri-colored linguine while Jen began stringing up the tree. Jen and I are all about smashing down the restraints of typical gender roles.

Just about the only thing we used from the farm was some of the leftover garlic since that's all we have left.

We watched both The Muppet Family Christmas and The Muppet Christmas Carol which gave us an adequate dose of The Muppets, though I could still go for a little more Michael Caine. If only Hannah and Her Sisters was a Christmas movie.



I also made one of the best batches of hot chocolate I've ever made. I just melted some semi-sweet chips and then added in some skim milk and a touch of cinnamon. I also put a small scoop of chestnut ice cream in mine.



After Jen strung up the lights (we opted for the large, old-school, painted lights for the first time this year), we both hung all of our ornaments, and topped the tree with our traditional stuffed reindeer (not a read dead reindeer, a fake one). This is one of the first years that we seemed to have a semi-adequate number of ornaments for the tree. Still, I must remember to loot some of the ornaments from my parents in a few weeks when we visit for Christmas.

It's a little late but we're toying with the idea of watching another Christmas movie before we turn in. White Christmas may be on deck next, though we could easily polish off How The Grinch Stole Christmas since the DVD with no commercials is about twenty minutes long.

$19.99 for a twenty minute DVD. Now that's what Christmas is all about.