Wonderful
Wonderful. That pretty much sums up the past couple of months while I’ve been absent from the blog. Erik, my exceptionally hard working and good looking husband, was home for several weeks, so all the festivities of the season seemed extra special. (If you remember, Erik was in Iraq last Christmas.) I could go on and on, but I’ll just leave you with a few little snippets.
There was our Ukranian Christmas Eve supper, which was fantastic. We pulled out all the stops and cooked up a traditional 12-course meal, including holobtsi (cabbage rolls), perogi, borscht, salmon, breads, and a huge assortment of other goodies (most of which I had never made before, which I know violates the rules of hosting a dinner party, but everything turned out delicious).
While we were cooking the aforementioned dinner, our new wood-burning fireplace insert was installed. This was especially welcome, as we had no other heat in the house besides an old, inefficient baseboard heater, and the weather has been unusually cold. Temperatures in Gold Beach rarely drop to freezing, yet we had a couple weeks where night time temperatures dropped into the low 20s, and daytime temps never reached 40. Brrr!
Not including all the holiday cooking, my friend, John, and I have been keeping the kitchen hopping with canning almost every weekend–and sometimes more often–since we started in November. Here are a few jars of delicious spiced applesauce we made, along with a huge batch of honey whole wheat bread. Here’s my new favorite recipe for wheat bread.
And just this week we celebrated Gavin’s 4th birthday with pizza and rootbeer at his favorite pizza joint in town. This kid. He just won’t stop growing. He’s so much fun. He’s developed such a great sense of humor, and he’s always talking (although we can’t always understand him) about something REALLY interesting. (These days that something is almost always centered around Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, his favorite Japanese amime; the box in the picture contains a scale model of his favorite character from said anime, up for nomination as Best Gift of the Century.)
There are a few other notable events from the past couple weeks which I would be remiss to not mention:
My hard working, handsome husband turned 26.
We successfully navigated our way through another BHM deadline (look for the March/April 2010 issue in your mailbox in mid-February).
I passed the half-way mark in my pregnancy with our little Baby Dango, I’m finally over most of the exhaustion of the first trimester, and I’m starting to feel a lot of movement.
It’s going to be a wonderful, busy year here on the Tuttle place. I hope you are all enjoying yourselves as much as we are.
is that one of those inserts that goes into an existing natural fireplace? if so, how do you like it, how much was it, and do you think it would work well in WI where it gets really cold? i’ve been eyeing them (about 5 grand, though, from what i’ve found), as i love having fires, but if it’s below 25 or so, i don’t build them as then it’s really just for looks as all the heat gets sucked out of the chimney.
@mamafitz
Yes, it just slips right into an existing masonry fireplace. I love it, both for looks and efficiency. It has a fan that automatically kicks on when the firebox gets hot enough. As our only source of heat, it does a great job. This particular one was around 3K, including a new steel chimney liner and labor.
Your dinner sounded sooooo yummy! At some point, could you maybe please share some of the recipes with all of us?
OOh, now I am craving cabbage rolls! Everything looks so nummy!