Happy Holidays!

I hope everyone had a happy and healthy holiday season! Now that things are calming down I have a bit of time to write about my happy holidays. I've spent more time with my extended family in the past couple of weeks than I had in the last three years, and it has been nice! Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were spent at my Grandma's house, and we've made a number of other trips down there, too.

Mom, Mel, and me on Christmas Eve.

All the holidays have come at once! Which sounds silly, I know, but along with Christmas and New Year's Eve, we just celebrated graduation and my birthday! And to top it all off, Michael arrived in Seattle at 10:45 on New Year's Eve, just in time to ring in 2011!
 

Graduation cake. :)



Birthday cake! This one's from Dairy Queen--best ice cream cakes around!

I've greatly augmented my cooking tools--a rice cooker and mandolin slicer for Christmas, beautiful saute pan, graduated mixing bowls, and new utensils for graduation, and bamboo tools and a cookbook, The Enchanted Broccoli Forest, for my birthday! The only conundrum is how I'll fit it all into my car to move next week, but I'm sure I'll figure it out!

For dinner tonight we went to A Terrible Beauty, an Irish Pub in downtown Renton. The food was WONDERFUL! Both Mel and I ordered Death by Mac 'n Cheese, Mom had corned beef and cabbage, and Michael had a shepherd's pie.

This macaroni and cheese was incredibly rich. It was made with Dubliner, mozzarella, meunster, and parmesan cheeses, along with some garlic cream. It was fantastic.

Michael's shepherd's pie, which apparently contained a ton of meat in the bottom layer, along with the veggies.

and here we are, happy diners!

And, if I can get my act together, there will soon be posts about the vegetarian pot stickers my friend Katie and I made a couple of weeks ago, and my family's adventure to Poulsbo to document the farm records kept by my great-great grandfather.