ALSO

It put a smile on my face.

Completely food un-related. Sorry about that.

I’ve been taking a little blogging hiatus since Thanksgiving. I think I got a little overloaded with cooking, and the dark, dark nights are getting me down. I mean, what’s the point of cooking anything if there isn’t enough light to get a good picture of it? The non-blogging streak began with Thanksgiving when I missed all sorts of good photo opportunities, what with the chaos of Thanksgiving, with people around, not to mention the wine. I did remember to capture one good photo of the meal, via my friend Abby’s plate. Here it is.

We had a potluck Thanksgiving at my folks house this year, which worked beautifully. (And you know I like potlucks.) Everyone contributed something, and no one had to stress out and get up at the crack of dawn to prep a dozen dishes. I’ll post about my contributions, namely the stuffing (gluten-free), the mushroom gravy (also gluten-free), and the delicious brussels sprouts with chestnuts in brown butter sauce from Deb over at Smitten Kitchen.

There’s a couple milestones to acknowledge today.

First, my husband and I have now been married for 6 months. That’s half a year. And it’s been great. I’m glad to be married to you, honey. You’re the best man I’ve ever known.

Second, my blog just reached 500 total hits! YEEHAW!!! I know that’s lots and lots of clicks from just a few people, all of whom I know personally, but there’s some of you I’ve never even met that are reading this thing. How awesome is that!

I organized a baby shower at work the other day, and picked up fancy cupcakes from the local gourmet grocery, Draeger’s. Like I’ve been saying, the macro setting on our little point & shoot does a pretty decent job when there’s good light. Aren’t these cute?

There’s always stuff I want that I don’t have. Now that we’ve got this great point & shoot little camera, I’m thinkin how great it would be to have a digital SLR, and then wouldn’t it be great to have Photoshop so I could do some real editing of my photos. Oh, and while we’re at it, how about a new Kitchenaid Mixer, granite countertops, and 3000 square feet of kitchen space, of course with lots and lots of natural light.

As my husband says, when he’s feeling a little feisty, “It’s good to want things.”

So in the meantime, I’m actually pretty pleased with the results from our new little point & shoot. No touching up or recoloring at all.

By the way, anyone know what kind of plant this is?

WOOOHOOOO!!!!!

I just passed 200 hits on my blog!!

Granted, 192 of them are probably from my husband. But still.

Next celebration at 500!

Then at 1000! Then 10,000! Then ONE MILLION HITS ON MY BLOG!!!!!!!!

MWAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!

Since I’ve been hecka lazy about cooking for the last few days, I figured I should post about something. What with my husband participating in NaNoWriMo, and all sorts of bloggers posting away for NaBloPoMo, I’m starting to feel guilty. So here’s a topic I love to share, and hell, it’s even food-related!

Anyone who knows me has probably heard me talk about my wedding at some point or another. My husband and I were vehemently opposed to going back into the depths of credit card debt that we’d been working so hard to clamber our way out of, just to feed a bunch of our friends and family some fancy food that probably wouldn’t be nearly worth the price per head that it would cost us. We were lucky enough to have some very generous friends donate the use of their backyard for our wedding and reception, so it just seemed all-around appropriate to have a potluck wedding reception. I highly recommend this to everyone!

Here’s what the buffet table looked like:

The friends whose backyard we were using had the brilliant idea of hiring a couple of servers to collect people’s potluck contributions on their way in, and then the servers managed everything getting plated, heated, and rotated appropriately. So this is just one snapshot of the buffet table, as it evolved throughout the evening.

If you’re looking carefully, you may be wondering about the brown items in the middle of the table. Yes, that is Chocolate-Covered Bacon. With Sprinkles. You’d actually be surprised, this concoction had it’s admirers. And no, not just the family dog, they don’t even have a dog. This fabulous dish was courtesy of Jeremy’s friend Matthew, and it served it’s purpose as the fulfillment of a drunken dream of the best food in the world. (It actually was kinda good.)

In addition to the buffet, we were lucky enough to have a friend make our wedding cake:

And another friend did the flowers (including those on the cake):

Let me just say, I highly recommend doing your wedding this way. Even if you have to pay for a cake and a florist, the potluck adds such a community feel to the event. Everyone gets to show off their favorite dish, and share in good food with friends and family.

Pictures taken by George Paginini and Jayanti Anand.

The Hub and I are drinking wine and watching Ghost tonight.

Carl Bruner just dumped coffee on his shirt so that he could expose smooth tanned muscles to a bereaved Demi Moore.

Classic.

I wasn’t planning to use my blog for rants, as I have a tendency to avoid things I think would look self-indulgent or make me look like I think I’m more important than I am. I don’t know where I got that, especially because I’m one of the biggest smarty-pants around, and I just about always think I really do know better than you or anyone else. (Just ask my husband, who, glowingly generous soul that he is, receives the brunt of my helpful suggestions, useful tidbits, and “no, sweetie, I’m right-you’re wrong” patronizing attitude.)

But I’ve just discovered Dooce, and she’s hilarious and cranky and witty and vulnerable, and then this thing happened today, and I was (inspired?… driven?) to write about it.

So here is the ridiculousness that I want to speak my mind on:

I ordered RECYCLED paper towels for work from Costco.com. Three packs of 6 rolls each. I do my best to keep our office as environmentally friendly as possible. We have these expensive water filters so people don’t use so many single-serve bottles, I hardly buy anything disposable that’s not recycled, you get the picture. I’d rather we didn’t use paper towels at all and people just carried around cloths like the No Impact guy, but the folks at work wouldn’t be havin’ it, so I concede and order RECYCLED paper towels. So, back to the matter at hand, the Costco guy brings in the items from the truck individually, cases of soda, big bags of trail mix (I order the big bag and make people share because it uses less packaging). And then he brings in 3 boxes. Each one is sealed up with ONE of the packs of paper towels, and 4 of those bubbly air bag packaging thingys. You know, to protect the paper towels. Because they might get dented.

Jesus, people. I’m trying to REDUCE my carbon footprint here.

I know there wasn’t just one person involved in the inane decision to send my paper towels in an obscene amount of protective packaging, but if there was, I want to pour organic earth-friendly sugar into the gas tank of their gigantic SUV.