Grandma's birthday

We're back from a day up at Grandma's. She celebrated her 88th birthday yesterday!

This weekend on the calendar also marks our extended family's annual hayride. Lots of rain over the past two days threatened to thwart that plan, but the sun popped out in time for a hayride, albeit with a modified route to avoid getting stuck in the mud. We had a wonderful afternoon.

More pictures to come later this week. Just one for now:

Cheers to this thoughtful, funny, compassionate, spirited, inspiring woman, who has taught me a great deal about our world.

Cookies (the first of many)

Yesterday a bunch of us (minus my dad, who is on the road for work) met at Mom and Dad's house to begin some holiday projects - including cookies!

The primary focus was on making cookies - we made sugar cookies and molasses ones - but by the time we left, the Christmas tree had also been decorated and a chainsaw had been used.

There was also enough time to start eating the cookies - and there were a lot of them.

Wish was there, too. He got to take a few laps off-leash outside in pursuit of his football and then spent most of the rest of the afternoon relaxing directly under the cookies (and trying on decorations). He loves this new place.

Hey! Help my family settle a debate. Would you rather have your cookies a little overdone or a little underdone? Would you like the dough in the oven for 8 minutes or 11? I think I was the only person cheering for the 11-minute batch in my family. What do you say?

Thanksgiving

Happy belated Thanksgiving! Josh and I spent the holiday in Minnesota. We missed being with family in Colorado, but we had a great day, first at my parents' house and then with a big group of extended family at my grandma's (29 of us, I heard by one count).

Here is an abridged recap via photo collage (counterclockwise from top left): my sister completing the Star Tribune turkey coloring contest as dictated by tradition, our caramel rolls at brunch, the popcorn, cranberry and orange strands we strung for display on the pine tree outside my grandma's kitchen window, Josh in the comfiest chair in my grandma's house, me proudly displaying my pecan pie.

This Thanksgiving marked the first holiday at my parents' new house. After brunch and before leaving for my grandma's house, my mom requested some time for the first family holiday photo in the new house. We are well, well versed in this particular tradition. We've done at least one for every year I've been alive.

I have a hunch, though, that it's actually getting harder, not easier, to corral all of us. My mom and I were setting up the timers on our cameras for the photos while these goofballs were goofing around, and we were both laughing so hard we were crying.

And finally:

We have so much to be thankful for, this year and always. I hope you had a great holiday.

Sibling hangout

Earlier this year, my brother and sister and I made a pact that we would make fun plans at least once per month among just the three of us. (I think "make a pact" sounds more serious than it actually was, but it also sounds like a total sibling thing to do, doesn't it?)

Now that we've been successful for three months running, I think it's working. Important to note: We don't see our parents less than usual! These hangouts are strictly in addition to our larger family activities.

May: We ate ice cream at Izzy's.  I definitely set up my camera on a counter and put the timer on for the first picture. The second is the patented Long Arm photography technique.

June: We met for happy hour in Uptown and got to sit outside.

That was also the site of one of my favorite photos ever:

This month, the only day that worked for all three schedules was tonight - that's right, July 31. We planned for dinner at my house, specifically to use our CSA vegetables because my brother and I have boxes from the same farm, but we didn't plan too well. We set the dinner for a Wednesday night, when we pick up our boxes on Thursday, so we both had to fetch vegetables from the grocery store for our seasonal menu.

My brother made salsa and I made a slight variation of this chicken and summer vegetable tostada, with chicken off the grill and black beans on the tostada instead of on the side. Dessert: blondies (like brownies but with brown sugar and pecans instead of chocolate) warmed up and served with vanilla ice cream. (Yes, I did want a reason to make blondies!)

Wish got to participate this time - and by participate, I guess I mean get held by my sister.

I very much like this new tradition with these sweet siblings.

The Easter Bunny's hunt

Ever since I was a baby, my dad has arranged an Easter egg hunt. There exists a home video of me toddling around my old yard, picking plastic eggs out of the sandbox and behind trees, and ultimately finding the grand prize: a tiny white patent purse. As I got older and my brother and sister joined the festivities, the hunt got more intricate, and my dad made us work for our Easter baskets by sending us all over the yard and house (and sometimes into the adjacent cornfield) to get from one clue to another. As you can imagine, the hunt ramped up another level when I got my driver's license. We got sent all over town: to the water tower, to a bridge over a highway, and so on. As we got older, we also got to hear some behind-the-scenes details about how a father's good intentions can sometimes be confusing to local police officers as he lays out one clue after another around town late at night before Easter morning. Really, the whole thing is amazing.

And then last year it all halted abruptly! Not because we were all well in our 20s - don't be silly - but because Dad was out of town for work. We all gave him a healthy amount of guff but also wondered if 2012 was the end of the scavenger hunt.

We heard murmurs of a hunt this year, but the cards were stacked against the hunt again when Dad left for another work trip days before Easter Sunday. I think my dad planned out a couple of scenarios, and I heard rumors that my brother was being briefed to lead the effort. Luckily, Dad came home just in time, and I mean just in time. He flew in Sunday morning and got back to our house minutes before the scheduled start time!

We started with a new element for 2013: a quiz (20 questions, I think) incorporating Easter Bunny jokes, trivia from previous family vacations, and impossibly hard questions such as the number of steps to the second floor in our house. I thought that was the replacement for the scavenger hunt given Dad's travels. But then a mini-hunt began!

We pondered the first clue over caramel rolls. (Photos courtesy of my mom, by the way.)

That clue sent us downstairs. I forgot to mention earlier that the clues usually aren't little index cards. Sometimes they're in a huge plastic egg. Sometimes they're...a gigantic cardboard rabbit.

This one had text on it welcoming Wish to the group, and we were given instructions that he was to accompany us for the duration of the hunt.

Per my request, we paused briefly to snap a First Family Easter photograph with the pup. Wish hated the cardboard rabbit and stayed as far away from it as possible for the rest of the day.

That clue led us to the mailbox. Argh! I wish I had copies of the clues. They usually rhyme, poke fun at us for being one step behind the Easter Bunny, and tell more Easter Bunny jokes.

And that one sent us to the park, to Wish's favorite off-leash tennis court. He went wild while we retrieved our next clue. I wish I had a photo of that. I think he hip-checked my sister mid-air.

The off-site clue is key, because it gives the Easter Bunny a chance to bring our baskets out from hiding. We were directed to each of our rooms, where our baskets were waiting!

Wish might have been the most excited about his, because 1) he did not know he was getting a basket and 2) it was filled with dog treats and a new squeaky toy. I think he is trying to eat his basket:

My favorite part about that photo might be the mega-creepy rabbit shadow in the background. Oh, my.

Kudos and thank you to my mom and dad the Easter Bunny for another great year, for one of my favorite family traditions.

Opening Day 2013

Opening Day is one of my favorite days of the year!

There is so much energy and excitement and hope, no matter how your favorite team performed last year or what lies ahead in the new season. In Minnesota, of course, Opening Day is also the door to all kinds of glorious warm-weather ballpark memories: ice cream cones melting faster than you can eat them, sunscreen, ice cold sodas, and so on. And that's all kinds of refreshing after a long winter...

...even when Opening Day weather conditions aren't so summery. Yesterday's game just missed the Twins' coldest Opening Day on record, with temperatures in the mid-30s at game time. I was seriously bundled up: winter down coat, ski hat, snow boots. It reminded me of another Opening Day outfit, from 2008:

But that was just for the mid-snowstorm trip to the Metrodome. Now the Twins play outside, at Target Field, and I hope you'll never catch me complaining about outdoor baseball conditions. It is a wonderful place and I always try to remember what a dream come true it would've been for my childhood Twins Superfan self, to imagine that the home team would someday play in this beautiful stadium. I went to my share of games at the Metrodome with my dad and, as I've written about before, listened to zillions of them on the radio and really settled in for the evening for the rare Twins games on network TV.

So you see why, for me, it's really a treat to go to a stadium with this view, even on a chilly afternoon like yesterday.

A stadium with conditions that create real late afternoon shadows!

I almost always take the bus over to Target Field and meet Josh there after he's done with work. Yesterday I nearly missed it because Wish practically demanded an impromptu photo shoot. I got the idea in my head that I'd send Josh a little photo message with Wish wearing a Twins cap. But then, when I was deciding what jersey to wear, I looked at the jersey and decided it was perfect for my little dog to model.

It is our only first Opening Day with him, after all. Indulge me?

I acknowledge that he doesn't look thrilled. But then he rolled over onto his back to catch a bellyrub and then just stayed there. I think the jersey grew on him.

I had to scurry over to catch the right bus but arrived at Target Field with plenty of time to find fried pickles (YES), take in the scene, and settle into my seat. For the first couple of innings, the sun was shining brightly, and I was downright comfortable. Later in the game, the sun dipped behind the stadium, and I started to feel the chill. We were always blocked from the wind, but the folks sitting out in center field, I suspect, were feeling it more.

Two bad tidbits: I forgot to get our apparently not so traditional Opening Day photo for the second year in a row, and the home team lost. Nonetheless, I am happy to continue our Opening Day streak (I think Josh and I have attended seven years in a row) - the latest little chapter in nearly three decades of being a Twins fan.

Tamale time

We had a tamale party!!

Tamales are a tradition in Mexico and other parts of Latin America, and they're eaten year-round but especially popular during winter holidays. They aren't technically difficult to make at all, but the preparation and steps make it a day-long project - so people in Josh's hometown know who is selling tamales and then buy them by the dozen.

Josh's family used to make them - I got to hear about the bevy of tamale tips and tricks Josh's gramps used to have up his sleeve! - but had mostly stopped doing it regularly. I was very excited when I heard rumblings that they were going to bring the tradition back at Christmas 2012. The plan was set: Sunday, the day before Christmas Eve.

When we arrived at Josh's aunt and uncle's house, the husks were already soaking in the sink. You buy corn husks at any Mexican market, I hear, and then soak them to soften them up. They eventually serve as the tamale wrapper (you don't eat them). I liked their faint smell because it reminded me of the cornfield in my backyard growing up.

And then you prepare the dough, with masa (in the Maseca bag, the same stuff Josh and I use to make corn tortillas), a dash of salt and baking powder, and lard, which in Spanish is called manteca. I will use manteca going forward because it sounds so much nicer than lard! Masa is something like a flour made of corn - not the same as cornmeal, but kind of similar.

This is Dawn, Josh's sister-in-law, kneading together the masa and manteca and liquid reserved from the pork in the crockpot.

I think this is her official Miles and Laurel debut, by the way. (Welcome, Dawn!) This is also a good time to mention that I'm kind of particular about not posting names and pictures of people here unless they know M&L and have given wildly enthusiastic consent. (Wish is exempt from this policy.) Something about "I posted this picture of you on the internet without you knowing" just doesn't garner many favors, right? Anyway, you can't totally tell this from the pictures, but there was a gaggle of us working on the tamales - seven or eight of us rotating through the kitchen - and that was a big part of the whole fun of it. Josh and I will try to make them again, but making tamales practically begs to be done with a bunch of family.

You pour in that reserved liquid and/or plain water in case the liquid is too hot, and mash that dough up. It needs to be smooth in order to spread well - in fact, our post-tamale analysis was that we kept it too thick.

If it can do this, it's definitely too thick!

(P.S. If you can't already tell from instructions like "It's too thick if you can wear it on your thumb," please don't treat this blog post as a source for an authoritative recipe!)

Next up: spreading the dough on the soft (or shiny) side of the husks. This is the test to see if the dough is the proper consistency: it should spread pretty easily along the top half of the husk. It was a little tricky for some of us - the first hint our dough was a little too thick. You leave the bottom half of the husk without dough, because that's the part you'll fold.

Toss each husk into a pile.

Now we reach for the filling! You can fill a tamale with different ingredients - I heard about jalapeno and cheese and even a sweet tamale with dessert filling - but the traditional way is with pork.You can get the pork ready in any number of ways, and for this rendition, some of our tamale chefs had prepared the pork ahead of time by cooking it in the crockpot. You shred it and then send to the stovetop to simmer with tomato sauce and chili powder. (The quantity of chili powder is how you adjust the heat level. I tried a way spicy tamale earlier in my visit - this batch was more mild.)

Drop a spoonful of the meat into the middle of the husk:

Roll it up tightly, so it's a little tube. Then fold the bottom half under the rest of the tamale and stack them up in a pan as you go.

Close up, they look like this:

And from the other side!

Sometimes little girls want to be part of the fun:

The last task is steaming the tamales, a step that can vary wildly in duration but roughly takes a couple of hours. We stacked them up in a double boiler, like this, and then covered the pan so they could steam:

Ours took longer to cook because the masa was spread thicker than usual. You don't want the masa to be mushy or undercooked - it has to be pretty sturdy.

Then we took a break for the Broncos game, and then we ate our tamales!

The funniest part about the whole project was how quickly our reviews degraded as time went on. As we were gobbling them, the consensus was that they were a little thick but overall pretty good - but by Christmas Day, the verdict was that our crew had totally, unabashedly botched the tamales. (I think this is the great kind of memory that will only get exaggerated with time, so as the years go by, the over-thickness of the masa will only get worse and worse.) It cracked me up, even though I am not yet a tamale connoisseur and thought they tasted pretty good in my book!

But if our first batch wasn't successful, Josh and I left resolved to finesse our tamale-making skills back in St. Paul, so we can bring our A-game to next year's tamale festivities. Any local taste-testers interested?

Christmas Day

Merry Christmas if you are celebrating today, Reader!

Don't you think it's fun to hear how different families spend their holidays? (I do, anyway!) In Josh's family, the tradition is to get together for a big breakfast on Christmas Day - his mom and her three siblings take turns hosting - and then go in different directions (usually in smaller family units) for the rest of the day. I love this tradition. I also love the breakfast, which is definitely Christmas Day's main meal.

This year, as everyone was arriving, it was snowing, which made for an extra-nice Christmas Day atmosphere. (I don't think a white Christmas is a guarantee in southern Colorado, even though last year - my first Christmas with Josh's family - brought a mega-blizzard, so now it's 2-for-2 in terms of my experiences with snowy Colorado Christmases.)

(Someday I will become proficient at taking a photo that successfully captures how beautiful a lightly falling snow is, or I will finally give up and just accept that that moment is better spent just watching said lightly falling snow.)

After breakfast, Josh and I went to his brother and sister-in-law's house to open stockings and more presents with Loco and Lala. We also relaxed and napped and played with the new toys and decorated gingerbread houses with the kids. (More successful than last year, but only marginally so!) Then we visited aunts, uncles and cousins to say goodbye, because we leave town tomorrow. It was a great trip.

Tomorrow brings a long travel day, but by the time we get back to my parents' house in the evening, my family will be waiting to begin our annual evening of Slovenian bread-baking! We will spend a few days there before heading back to St. Paul, and I can't wait.

Hey! If you celebrate Christmas, how did you spend yesterday and today? Do you have any traditions that you love? Please share!

Sunday with the family

It's toffee-making time...

...and I love these goofballs!

Marvelous Monday: Week 50

We preface the regular Marvelous Monday format with two vital announcements.

Important announcement #1
Reader, first of all: I goofed. Last week I went on about this year's Christmas tree being our second annual tree in our apartment. As I dug through some photos over the weekend, an image surfaced of the actual first Christmas tree Josh and I had in our home: the 2010 version, making this the third annual tree! Oops! How quickly I forgot about the first and littlest tree!

What is this blog for if not to provide archival records, right? Keeping that in mind, our three years of trees:

Important announcement #2
Well, you can decide the level of importance for yourself - I think it's just kind of fun - but I marked my 500th post at Miles and Laurel on Thursday without even knowing it! Fitting that it was a cloud picture, huh? I think at least 100 of those posts must involve a cloud photo in some form.

Now, on to Marvelous Monday business - but this week, let's call it 2012's First Post-Snowstorm Marvelous Monday, to be completely accurate.

1) St. Paul is beautiful right now with a big layer of snow. Today the temperature slid down, but the blue skies (and bright sun) were out in full force.

2) My favorite jeans wore out. (That's not the marvelous part.) I was hemming and hawing about buying a new pair of my JCrew favorites for a pretty penny - after all, once I find jeans that work, I stick with them. Then I looked on Ebay and found a gently used pair of my beloved JCrew favorites - for $20. Yes!

3) Reading report: I am slowly working on The Master Butchers Singing Club by local author Louise Erdrich. My mom passed a copy on to me and I think my grandma also read it, too! I'm only about 100 pages in - I've been reading 10 or 20 pages every night before bed instead of reading big chunks at a time - but am enjoying the story and the author's writing style.

4) I love holiday cookies. I am hosting a cookie exchange this week and my home is already totally flush with cookies in preparation. I tried one tried-and-true recipe (sugar cookies) and one new recipe (which I think I will tell you about post-party).

5) I squeezed in a 30-minute run tonight after work: my first facemask-wearing, icy eyelash run of the winter. It felt like a big, healthy, invigorating (and cold) dose of fresh air - and that's one marvelous reason why I try to run my miles outdoors whenever possible through the winter.

Hey! What's marvelous about how your week is beginning, Reader? Any book recommendations for my upcoming holiday travels back to Colorado? Also, if you live in Minnesota, any snowshoe trails you'd like to suggest? (Bonus points if they're within 30 minutes of St. Paul!)