Royal Wedding

My very proud Canadian mother insisted that I get up to watch the royal wedding. It started at 10AM London time, which is 3AM our time. We got up and watched history in our pajamas. We also had some toast with Nutella, because Nutella is the closest thing we have in our house right now to a European/British food (well, I have both earl grey and English breakfast tea, but it's SO HOT OUT, so tea was out of the question).

We don't have cable, so we pulled up two live streams: one on the royal youtube channel (yes, that exists) and one on bbc.co.uk. They showed a lot of the same footage, but at a few key points we got to watch two things at the same time. I decided to snap a few videos, for funsies.

I spent most of the morning on the phone with my mom, checking out all the fancy hats the British diplomats and royal family members were wearing.





Did anyone else get up super early to watch the royal wedding?

Dos-Ritas

Sometimes you just need to get out of the house. When this is the case, Christine is really good at convincing me I need to put on a dress and go have a drink with her. Surprisingly, the boys are often on board for this.
I must not dress up very often, because whenever I put on heels, or necklace, Christine gets all excited and starts taking pictures of me:

So. We all went out for Dos-Ritas. This is a margarita with a Dos Equis beer tipped upside down in it. No, I'm not kidding:

As you drink, you pull the beer out to let more of the beer glug into the margarita, and they mix. It sounds really strange, but it's actually quite delicious.

Brandon got a Blue-Moon-Rita,

And I got a sake-Rita. I was instructed by the waiter not to drive after drinking this, and I didn't. 

 

There was the usual bar food, which was delish. 

And by the end of the evening, I had had enough of my sake-rita that I felt pretty proud of my dress, too.  

Yyyyyyep.

Passover/Easter

We had a lot to celebrate this weekend! This past week was Pesach, this Sunday was Easter, and it also happened to be Rory's birthday!

We decided to push our religious celebrations into one party, for a combined Passover/Easter party. It worked out quite nicely. We started with the Seder, which was not a kosher meal, by choice. Since everyone was contributing dishes, we decided to just keep it simple.

 The Seder plate with the Haggadahs. 

I don't have a Seder plate with me in Texas, so I had to improvise. Brandon said it looked a little "Fischer-Price." Whatever, it did the job. 

 Behind, we have the Charoses, the stand-in cup of Elijah, and the matzohs are covered by paper towel.

The meal was great. I think everyone really had a good time.  The Seder itself was super fast. I think my edits were a bit hap-hazard, so I'm going to have to put more thought into it for next year.

We did brisket in the crock pot, which worked out really well. It was mostly gone by the time I thought to take a picture. 

Rory made a salad with a delicious aioli dressing, which I need to learn how to make!

I tried my hand at noodle kugel (forgetting that noodles count as leavened bread). It turned out a bit dry - I need more practice. 

I always try to make note of all the components of the Seder, even if we don't include them all. Something we did include was reclining! Although my mom will probably still complain that I need to buy a second chair for Christine.

For dessert, I found a flourless chocolate cake recipe online. The cake turned out AMAZING (I'm adding it to my dessert repertoire), but the icing sort of got a bit weird. Lately I'm in a piping phase. I want to learn to pipe icing - I want to make little roses and leaves and other designs. My piping is fine, so far, but the icing I use is too runny - especially in hot, humid Texas.

The piping got a bit... drippy.

 For those of  you who can't read Hebrew, the top says "Pesach," and it's about as legible as the "Easter" at the bottom. 

After dinner, we started the Easter part of the celebration. First, we had a combined Easter egg/Afikomen hunt!

"Brandon? How do I take pictures of an Easter egg hunt? Here, hold up the ones you've found already and look triumphant."
"No, Amanda, I should be puzzling over where to find the rest!"
"... Rory, hold up your eggs triumphantly."

Rory is a bit more willing to play along.

Everyone complained that I hid the Afiokmen too well. Christine only found it after I gave multiple clues. Then, she insisted that I take an awkward victory photo, so that everyone would know that I hid it too well:

In my defense, I was hiding it for a bunch of grad students. You'd think it would need to be hidden pretty well.

Anywho! After the Easter egg hunt (and sugar headaches from all the chocolate hidden in the eggs), we then dyed eggs!

I'm hoping someone will see this and say "Amanda, your walls are awfully bare," so that I can complain to Brandon that I want to put my posters and paintings back up. 

The finished products. It's hard to tell, but the one at the bottom is polka-dotted. Brandon worked on that for a while.

After egg dyeing, we played Settlers of Catan! It was a surprisingly fierce game (i.e. everyone kept ganging up on me!)

It was a really fun party. We all went to bed early, super full of food.

We hope everyone had a lovely holiday!!

My Dad Came to Visit! On Our 3-Year Dating Anniversary!

It was a coincidence, but it ended up working out really nicely. I know I said I was going to cook for my dad, but our plans changed back and forth multiple times. In any case, we ended up going to a restaurant downtown called Fogo de Chao. It's a Brazillian steakhouse, where your first course is a salad bar, and the rest of the meal consists of waiters coming to your table with various cuts of meat, wonderfully displayed on... well... basically, swords. Anyway, everything was delicious and we had a great time. Photo dump!

Honestly, it was great to just hang out with my dad and catch up. It was relaxing and fun, we talked about everything and nothing - and I was reminded that Brandon gets along great with my family, which (WARNING: MUSHY STUFF) really warms my heart. It was so nice of my dad to take us out somewhere nice for our dating anniversary. And: if you love red meat, if you ever get the chance, try a Brazillian steakhouse. It's a really cool experience (not to mention, delicious food).

Thanks dad for visiting, for treating us, and for supporting us. You rock. ^_^

Anniversary Date

It's probably quite fitting that the last entry was about how Brandon and I never go on dates, because this one is about how we finally went on a date!

Our 3-year anniversary is on Tuesday, so we wanted to do a little something this weekend to celebrate. Brandon kept pointing out that it's just a dating anniversary, so we don't have to do anything big. But I still wanted to do a little something. So, the theme became: Let's just step slightly outside our normal schedule. Nothing fancy. And we did just that!

I got Brandon a small gift, and he opened it yesterday morning. He's been talking for a little while about making a solar charger for his tablet, but he doesn't want to spend a lot of money on the project. So I got him some of those little lamps you put in your garden - the ones with the solar panels on top. They were really cheap; he's probably gonna need about 4 or 5 of them to complete the project. I grabbed two, so he could practice pulling them apart and figure out how to wire them in series.

 Geeking out.

Immediately, the toolbox came out and one of the cells was popped open and being broken apart.

After about an hour of fiddling with the solar panels, we decided to head out. Our plan for the day: Comic book shopping! If you're friends with me on Facebook, you'll know that I am UNREASONABLY excited for the X Men movie coming out this summer. I've been watching old X Men cartoons, and we've been renting movies that have James Mcavoy and Michael Fassbender in them. So I decided I wanted to pick up some old X Men comics, too. 

We went a couple places. The first comic book shop was a bit pricey, so I only grabbed 2 or 3 comics. But they had a decent selection and some GREAT vintage Star Wars figurines. I remember the TV commercials for some of the toys they had on their shelves. And no, I'm not afraid of calling that "vintage." 

Besides, I think the selection of Star Wars figurines is really the standard by which you measure a comic book shop, so I was excited to see a lot of vintage toys in their original packaging. Sorry, I didn't get a photo.

Next, we headed to a flea market. They had two stalls that sold comic books. The prices were WAY more reasonable, and they had more X Men comics from the era I was interested in (Read: the 1990's, which of course was when I grew up and when the X Men cartoon aired). 

There were also some stalls with cell phone chargers, so Brandon grabbed one on the cheap for his solar panel project. 

Being a flea market, they also had the obligatory "vintage junk..."

... and "kooky stuff."

We then stopped for lunch. It was SUPER hot out, so I found myself craving a hot dog and some ice cream, which is really out of character - I NEVER crave hot dogs. So, Brandon googled "kosher hot dog" and we found a great little burger stand that has Hebrew National hot dogs, Blue Bell ice cream, and delicious burgers, fries and onion rings. It's called Fattboy Burgers. 

I might have to bring my brother there to do a burger review when he comes to visit. We ate WAY too much. We were about to head home, when we realized there was yet another comic book shop in the same strip mall! This place was extremely disorganized, but they had the best prices by far. I grabbed a handful of X Men comics, and then we headed home. 

They had a store cat! He was very sleepy.

In keeping with the "slight departure from our normal schedule" theme, I decided to bake another chocolate cake. I bake about once a week (I know, I need to cut back or we're all gonna gain weight), but I normally do something simple like cookies. So I think a cake, which is more technically complex, counts as a slight departure from the norm. I also wanted to practice piping (I've never done any fancy piping before), so I made a small batch of white buttercream icing and piped little... flower... blobs... on the side of the cake. It was fun practice, and it turned out pretty nice. 

Of course, when we got back home, Brandon went straight back to working on his solar panel project.

But really, I expect nothing less. ^_^

Dates: Who Needs 'Em?

I'm so lucky Brandon is so flexible.

Today we made salads for dinner, packed them in tupperware containers and headed over to campus, because I had some late-night lab work. There's no food allowed in the lab, so I set up my samples in the cell-counter, and we sat on the floor in the hallway and ate dinner while the cell-counter beeped and booped away.

I said "thank you for dinner," and Brandon said "thank you for science-date."

<3

Mint Cookies

Back in Kalamazoo, my friend Hal found an amazing recipe for thin mint cookies, like the girl scouts sell. I asked him for the recipe and made a batch this week. They're DELICIOUS.

First you make the dough into logs and freeze them. 

Then you slice them,

Bake them,

Melt chocolate and butter for the coating,

Coat them,

(Oh, also, I got a haircut! It's purely utilitarian, it was 90 degrees three days in a row last week.)

Anywho, then you have to keep the cookies in the freezer, because the chocolate isn't tempered. I decided in high school that I wanted to learn how to temper chocolate, and it's still on my to-do list. But for now, un-tempered mint cookies are just as delicious straight out of the freezer.

Yum!