Hope we don’t get stuck up here, it’s really coming down.

My recent spate of vacation time is continuing, hence my lack of a timely update this week.  I was busy all day yesterday with more important things, as remarkable as that may sound.  I’m still on vacation today, but honestly not so busy.  We had a pretty laid-back weekend.  Donette finally got back from her travels, I’d been a bachelor for nine long days.  I picked her up from the airport Saturday, and we spent the rest of the day cuddling on the couch and watching Gone With The Wind.

Sunday afternoon we drove back down to Sacramento and met up with our friends Ed & Kim, who were able to come out for a visit.  We randomly decided on lunch at a place cleverly named “Burgers & Brew,” which turned out to be a fine choice.  Myself and Donette were particularly happy with it, there honestly aren’t a lot of great restaurants around our house and we’ve been in a state of food withdrawal for a while.  This place fit the bill very nicely though.  I wouldn’t call it exactly fancy, but good and also quite reasonably priced compared to the places around us.  I would guess we will suck it up and make the horrific 20 minute journey again sometime in the near future.  After lunch we headed back to our house, then took their little ‘uns up the street to the park to enjoy the beautiful weather for a bit.

Monday we all headed down to Old Folsom and had a good lunch at Samuel Horne’s.  It occurred to me that perhaps there actually are some decent places to eat nearby, I just might have to broaden my current 3-mile travel radius a bit.  That’s expecting a lot, 3 miles is already triple the area of my circle in KC.  Quite an inconvenient situation.  At any rate, we got some more food in us, then they loaded up and headed east to spend a few nights at Tahoe.  We are hoping to join them in a few days if it works out, we’re sort of playing it by ear.  We still haven’t found a good option for dog-sitting, although we do have somebody who can come by and check on her.  That might just be the way to go, we’ll see.  In the meantime, Donette had brought me back a glorious 13 lb. USDA Prime brisket, so I’m spending my free time cooking that.  (Inter-state beef trafficking….  were any laws broken there?)  Time to show these Californians what’s up.

Here’s the new kegerator with some chalk-work by a young ‘un in my buddy’s house.  I like the frowny-faces under the empty taps, she must think we’re slackers.  Those are hop flowers on the top and to the right, I like it!

I guess the whole California weather thing was a big ruse.  It’s freezing here!  Literally, freezing!  As in BELOW 32!!!  I’ve obviously been fed some erroneous information.  There was for-pete’s-sake FROST on the grass this morning.  Not cool, not cool at all.

I don’t have anything to work with as far as “what I did last weekend” so I thought I’d go on a random weather rant for a bit there.  Seriously;  Donette is out of town so I pretty much watched endless episodes of The Rifleman all day, every day.  I did leave the house on a few occasions.  Saturday morning I made my triumphant return the land of the gym.  Holy moly, I am in pathetic shape.  But, I guess the only thing to do about it is to start exercising;  An unfortunate but apparently true fact of life.  I struggled through 30 minutes on the treadmill and made a rather embarrassing effort at lifting some weights, then went next door to the grocery and got some biscuits and gravy fixins.  Know your strengths, people.  The workout was an unmitigated disaster;  The b’s & g’s came out pretty darn well.

Sunday the extent of my outdoor adventures was a walk to the park with Teagan.  That dog, I swear.  I honestly thought she would be a little more laid-back here, as I think I exercise her a lot more than I ever did in KC.  It seems to have had the opposite effect though, she just wants to play more and more.  Oh well, gives me a reason to go outside I suppose.  She chased the ball for a solid 30 minutes or so, then we took a long walk, and she STILL was acting up by 8:00 that night.  What can ya’ do.

Gotta like a nice long weekend.  Actually it was broken up with some intermittent work, but that’s OK.  We had a quite nice Thanksgiving, if a bit unconventional.  Since we just got out to CA recently, we’re not really ready to absorb the financial (or mental) impact of travel just yet, so we stayed home and had a quiet holiday at home.  We originally had a turkey breast on the menu, but decided to go whole-bird because A) Mom sent me some fancy brine that I wanted to use and B) we wanted some leftovers.  So, we picked up a 12 lb. bird and rounded out the menu with green bean casserole, garlic potatoes and gravy, stuffing, and crescent rolls.  We also had egg noodles on the list, which we had to do a considerable amount of shopping for.  Apparently they aren’t too widely available here, and I wasn’t going to go to the (admittedly small) effort to make them.  We finally found them at, of all places, Target.  All that trouble, and then we forgot to actually take them out of the freezer and cook them.  I’m not sure but I think that’s a regular occurrence for us.  Anyway, everything that we actually remembered to cook came out well, it was a fine feast.  I think the brine saved me on the turkey, as I brutally overcooked it.  Following the recipe in my Weber cookbook, I didn’t take a temp on it until 2.5 hours, and by then it was far overdone.  Brine works miracles though, it was still plenty juicy.

Friday sort of escapes me…  I went to work for a bit, and we hung out on our back patio for a while.  We’re gonna squeeze every last bit out of this 70 degree weather;  To hear everyone talk it’s not the norm here.  Saturday was quite warm too, so Teagan and I played a good round of fetch at the park and then I spent the rest of the afternoon working on an immense pot of turkey & sausage gumbo.  It came out good enough, and we’ve pretty much got enough to last us the rest of our natural lives.  I definitely miss the andouille sausage from The Store in Raytown though, there’s just no substitute for it.  I’ve considered ordering some from Louisiana, it’s not terribly unreasonable, but I always forget.

Sunday was spent brewing up a few more batches of homebrew, as well as kegging the two batches from a few weeks ago.  We only have three kegs available, so I’m not sure what we’ll do with the fourth batch when it’s ready…  We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.  I elected to make a rather generic Irish stout, while my co-brewer went with a ridiculously elaborate clone of the semi-famous Pliny the Elder.  Hope it comes out good, it was a lot more effort than I ever put into my batches.  We also hooked the kegs up to the snazzy kegerator, which was completed last week.  It looks good too.  I’m not entirely sure his wife is overly fond of it’s prominent location in their formal dining room, I couldn’t get a read on that.  But it does look nice, and the stain even matches the dining room table.  The only thing left to do is to get somebody with handwriting much nicer than ours to put the styles under the respective taps.  We should probably come up with some catchy names too, but so far haven’t gotten past “beer #1” and “beer #2.”

The re-purposed deep freeze