Jen and Nate got married. The next week, they started their first-ever farm share. This is the nerdy story of their marriage and their vegetables. With a focus mostly on the vegetables.
Today was the latest in a long string of days the world was supposed to end. I couldn't really be bothered with this as I was far too busy to deal with that nonsense. I had to work, pick the kids up from day care, do the dishes, and get some sleep. I seem to have contracted whatever cold Elliott has and starting last night I started feeling like warm poop.
After work we had our normal feeding session where we stripped down the Womabts, fed them, and then wiped their bodies clean of all dribbled cereal before reading them a few Christmas stories from a strange Christmas story book Jen had.
I opened up at random and found this story about Lord Octopus going to the Christmas Fair.
It sounded like it should be the best Christmas story ever told. In actuality it fell a little short.
When they came home from day care the boys had ornaments that they'd made us. This was pretty amazing. Look at how advanced their penmanship and craft skills are! I am a proud, proud father.
With all this excitement it left us with enough time to heat up some frozen pizza and frozen linguine to eat for dinner. We were pretty starving so we also had to supplement with bread and cheese after dinner. Finding time to eat these days is precious and after eight or nine hours we're generally a bit on the peckish side.
The last time it was supposed to be we were not able to find the beer I wanted. About six months ago I purchased La Fin du Monde by Unibroue in order to secure it for the latest date in which the world was supposed to end: today.
I haven't had this beer since 1998. It was one of the first craft beers, and first Belgian-style beers, I'd ever had. It made a huge impression on me and I've always remembered it fondly. Having it again fourteen years later it is still extremely enjoyable, as are most beers from Unibroue.
And so it was that another supposed end of the world day comes to pass with little in the way of fire and/or brimstone. The Wombats are sleeping in the next room, Red Dwarf is playing on the television. All is right with the word.
I've had a lot of dumb ideas. One idea I particularly like is having a meal themed after a particular event, especially with friends. I guess you could say I'm kind of like Heston Blumenthal's much dumber and less-skilled younger brother.
We made plans last week with our good friends, Paul and Caolan, to watch White Christmas togeter like a family. All four of us became increasingly excited about this event as it approached given that we are all fans of the movie and of each other's company. We would make great eighty-year-olds.
This is apparently not a new phenomenon. Two years ago we had a similarly idiotic meal with our friends when we celebrated a movie that none of us had actually seen by making Croque Monsiuers and watching 'It's Complicated.' So there is some precedent.
So it was that I found myself tasked with trying to find the foods in the movie White Christmas and plan a meal around them. Any fool would have stopped here after realizing that there is precious little mention of food or actual food in the movie at all. Reading the script reveals there were actually a few references to food that were removed from the final movie such as mentions of lamb chops and tuna sandwiches that were cut from the movie. They were probably left out because Bing Crosby was just winging the scenes in between rounds of golf.
Before starting the dinner we played with the boys for a while, got them off to day care, and then went about our daily chores.
After picking them up we got to eating dinner and watching White Christmas with Paul and Caolan, but not before getting some presents for the Wombats and getting them to bed.
The boys got a sweet ball from Caolan and Paul which they immediately got to work playing with.
Then it was on to our bizarre dinner. So I present to you the foods of White Christmas. Since they are so scattered, and mostly involve sandwiches, they didn't make for much of a meal. Jen hates sandwiches for dinner, Caolan is a vegetarian, and Paul is mostly fond of pasta and Ethiopian food. So it was that I felt the need to present these foods in a mostly symbolic manner so that they may serve as a sort of Seder plate during our regular meal.
The items are listed as they appear in the movie, chronologically. We did not eat them in this order because I felt it would be odd to begin a meal with eclairs and coffee.
In the beginning of the movie the sheriff is delayed by Wallace and Davis's manager with eclairs and coffee. I only know they are eclairs from reading the script. In fact, for years, I thought he was eating dinner. I guess this makes sense given police proclivity toward morning pastries.
For dessert I served eclairs from the bakery down the street along with piping-hot coffee.
In the "drafty old club car" Davis gets Wallace to lose the hard feelings he has toward the ladies and they bark out orders at the poor club car attendant who has to to fix them club sandwiches, lemonade, and a malted.
Given the nature of recurring sandwiches I felt it would be redundant to make sandwiches twice so I stuck to the lemonade and malted. Lemonade is easy, you just pour it out of a container marked "lemonade" but I had never made a malted milk shake before so I had to look up a recipe. Apparently this is also very easy and merely consists of combining milk, malted milk powder, and ice cream in a blender. I topped them with crushed malted milk balls.
The malted turned out quite well. It may have been one of the only parts of the meal that was not openly revolting. In fact, I'd even consider making it again!
In this scene Wallace also mentions, "Hot buttered rum, easy on the butter." So as an after dinner drink I made some hot buttered rum bu whisking some brown sugar, butter, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and salt, placing a dollop in each mug, topping with a little rum and boiling water. I made hot buttered rum once before in 1997. I remember thinking it sounded delicious but ultimately being extremely disappointed in the rather nasty results.
This version of the drink was better than I remember but I don't think I'll be rushing to make it again. I think I can wait another fifteen years.
In probably the most famous food-related scene in the movie Wallace explains to Betty how different foods make him dream of different things. Ham and rye makes him dream of a tall, cool blonde. Turkey makes him dream about a brunette. A little on the scat-back side, but oh, sexy. Liverwurst makes him dream about liverwurst.
Apparently the only foods he eats are sandwiches and the only thing he dreams about is women.
And liverwurst.
I was pretty sure I was the only one who'd eat these sandwiches (and probably for lunch the following day) so I presented them and had a few bites of each. I made the turkey simply on white bread with butter, lettuce, and avocado. I doubt there was avocado on the sandwich in the movie as I don't think avocados were invented until the 1980s.
I also made ham and Swiss on rye bread with mustard and, of course, liverwurst with mustard and lettuce on fresh Italian bread.
The part I was dreading was drinking the buttermilk. In the movie Bing tells Betty to "bring the cow" referring to what I thought was milk but Betty distinctively calls it buttermilk in a later scene. I have cooked with buttermilk many times in the past but I've never had it as a beverage. It just seemed that one should leave buttermilk as an ingredient, not a beverage.
You may be saying, "Keep buttermilk in your way and let me keep it in mine." If you are, however, you are wrong. It is no good as a drink.
As it turns out it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Actually, it was mildly enjoyable.
In the scene where things go sour between Wallace and Betty, Davis is sitting over a fire roasting hot dogs while Judy holds what appears to be an inappropriately large basket of hot dog buns for two hot dogs.
This was one I struggled with as we do not have an open fire in our home -- thankfully.
I also have never associated hot dogs with the holidays but, for completion's sake, I roasted a couple over the open flame on my stove and served them with a much smaller "basket" of hot dog buns.
Nothing says Christmas like poorly roasted and even more poorly presented hot dogs.
There is no beer mentioned in White Christmas but I couldn't have that. Luckily there was a release this year of White Christmas Ale from Sam Adams. This was a pretty standard spiced wheat beer and it was very tasty. Jen, in particular, really enjoyed it. It's a shame it's pretty much sold out for the season.
After dinner we exchanged present. We got Paul a really crappy paperback book purporting to be a "high quality paperback."
We also got them some chocolate D&D dice.
They got us a certificate for free babysitting so that we could go out for dinner some night in January or February.
Last night, after putting the Wombats to bed, Jen made an interesting discovery.
Martin, after a short time, had turned his tiny sleeping vessel into a disheveled mess.
Elliott, on the other hand, had left his sleeping area in neat order like a perfect, well-organized gentleman.
Not sure where he got that from.
Tonight we moved on to the next phase of cereal, this time with an oatmeal, spelt, and barley cereal.
They seemed to enjoy it more than the cereals of days past.
Elliott was also a fan, smearing it all over his face as quickly as possible. This was pretty much how he looked after the first spoonful.
After the feeding we needed to give them both a bath and we had to use a little elbow grease to scrub their little faces with a cloth to get off all the caked-on cereal we could. It seems like we've moved on to the next inevitable stage whereby we need to bathe them daily. With the formula it was a lot easier to give them a quick hand-and-face wash before bed. Now there is an intense need for head-to-toe cleaning.
If there was any way I could shirk this responsibility, believe me, I would.
After heating up some frozen Chinese food I settled back with a Holiday Porter from Samuel Adams. We are a bit behind in our Christmas movie watching but, for some reason, we have found ourselves watching through back episodes of Red Dwarf instead.
All that will change tomorrow. For tomorrow we have a Christmas movie event planned so exciting I can barely contain myself.
Tune in tomorrow to find out what I'm talking about . . . if you can stand the suspense!
Elliott started getting sick as soon as I brought him home last night. He was extremely congested, fussy, and slept pretty terribly all night.
The thing about Elliott is that it's very hard to tell when he's sick because he's generally so happy. You can tell he's sick by his temperature or the fact that he is sniffling uncomfortably but generally he still displays his normal joie de vivre.
Last night after picking up the guys, entertaining and feeding them, and Jen getting home late from work we only had time to heat up some leftovers and enjoy this extremely potent The Mad Elf Ale from Tröegs Brewing Company. This was a very flavorful, full bodied beer with a deep red color and a subtle flavor of the cherries used in its brewing. I'd highly recommend this one for anyone's Christmas Beer list. It goes particularly well while rocking your sick child with one foot.
Tonight I threw together some of the items Jen had prepared for making chicken pot pie. I sauteed some onion, celery, and carrots, threw in some poached chicken breast, used some turkey stock which I thickened with roux, and topped it all with a biscuit crust and topped with chopped parsley.
To go with this we broke into another Christmas beer, this Old Fezziwig Ale from Sam Adams. We enjoyed this one quite a bit and I pushed Jen to point out that it had "roasty toasty" notes. She learned this term the other day when she watched an episode of The Master of Hoppets. Much to my surprise she really enjoyed this show. She liked it partly because the Master of Hoppets himself is very charming, and partly because she likes the idea of a Danish guy using the term "roasty toasty."
We've watched a few versions of A Christmas Carol already this year. As the Wombats sleep we will go through our Christmas movie archive in hopes of finding another version for tonight to celebrate our Old Fezziwig Ale. Then we will unwind and drift off to sleep.
Then we will be awoken by the Ghost of Christmas Fuss!
Yesterday morning began like any typical morning except for the fact that we knew we were planning for an exceptionally ambitious day. Jen's tendency to lean toward the overly ambitious was being put to its greatest test to date. We had a day planned of three different visits in New York: on in Manhattan and two in Brooklyn. Jen seemed to think that this would be easy and I thought it sounded impossible. The truth ended up being somewhere in the middle though probably closer to impossible than easy.
Act I: Twins²
Our friends Danielle and Eliyanna had twin boys shortly after we did and we finally got a chance to visit them yesterday.
There was a brief, miraculous moment where we even got all four of them to sleep at the same time. That left four adults not knowing exactly what to do with ourselves. As a new father I have to say that finding a moment where I don't know what to do with myself is just about the greatest thing I can experience.
Before we left we attempted to clumsily pose all the boys together. Martin and Elliott are almost able to sit up on their own so they provided a good leaning post for Hugo and Leo who need a little additional propping.
Martin and Leo hit it off particularly well commiserating over the struggles of being older brothers.
Act II: Die Koelner Bierhalle
After this visit we headed out to Die Koelner Bierhalle to visit our friend Jennie on her birthday. It took us about and hour-and-a-half to get there from Manhattan, about twice as long as it should thanks to some pretty awful traffic and a circuitous journey around Park Slope and Prospect Heights.
The boys dealt very well with the extremely loud volume in the beer hall. In fact, the place was packed with toddlers and small children.
There were people in Santa hats passing out cookies and stolen and we had a nice Bratwurst as well as Spaetzel with cheese to accompany our beers.
Jen had the Maisel's Weissbier and I had the Zwick'l Kellerbier. Bother were served in obscenely large serving vessels that were actually much smaller than they appeared. It really was only a standard pint of each beer but when you drink a pint from a comically tall mug it makes you seem like you're drinking more than you actually are.
This was a really nice biergarten. They had a specific mug/glass for each type of beer and matched them up perfectly with the corresponding beer. This is something that pleases me greatly. It always disappoints me when I order a beer in a restaurant and they serve it in a glass marked for a different beer, say an Amstel Light. This annoys me for the simple fact that I'm incredibly anal but also because seeing the words "Amstel Light" on a glass that I'm drinking from detracts from my enjoyment of that beverage by about 25%. Just imagine how disappointing this would be for me if I were actually drinking an Amstel Light out of an Amstel Light glass. I think I may prefer a shooter of hamster bile.
Martin had a great time at the beer hall chatting up the ladies.
Elliott also had a good time when I wasn't clumsily changing him on the floor in the men's room. That was not his favorite part of the evening. I must say it wasn't mine either.
Act III: The Christmas Party
After some very unsuccessful feeding attempts we left the bier hall and headed to our final Brooklyn destination: the home of Auntie Caolan (Aunt Tequila) and Uncle Paul.
The guys were a pretty big hit with partygoers. Jen was worried that the Wombats were going to steal the spotlight at any party or gathering. I reminded her that since none of our friends are five or under that no one would be terribly upset about the babies getting a lot of attention. Babies are attention-getting. Twin babies means that pretty much everywhere we go we are stopped by strangers and the guys get a lot of attention. That is unless there are triplets present. This has yet to happen.
Elliott's favorite part of the party was hanging out with his Uncle Paul and watching the "fireplace" in action.
Or was it snuggling with Auntie Caolan?
Or was it when his father retired to the kitchen to help himself to a Smuttynose Old Brown Dog Ale? Or was it when they slept the entire way home and tricked us into thinking they were going to have an extremely restful night's sleep only to be up all night? It's hard to tell. One thing is for sure though, ambition leads to very little sleep.
Remember that the next time you try to accomplish something!
