What happens when you drink too much wine.....

Thanksgiving dinner was wonderful. Of course the traditional turkey but for the sides I tried some new ones and some from the cooking light magazine. The one that I really liked was the vegetable strata.

Vegetable-and-Cheese Strata
Buy canned, quartered artichoke hearts because they're less expensive than whole artichoke hearts. Buy presliced mushrooms.
1 teaspoon olive oil
2 cups diced zucchini
2 cups sliced mushrooms
1 cup diced red bell pepper
1 cup diced onion2 garlic cloves, crushed
3/4 cup chopped drained canned artichoke hearts
8 cups (1-inch) cubed Italian bread (about 8 ounces)
Cooking spray
1 cup (4 ounces) shredded reduced-fat extra-sharp cheddar cheese
1/4 cup (1 ounce) grated fresh Parmesan cheese
1 1/2 cups egg substitute
1 teaspoon dried Italian seasoning
1/2 teaspoon dry mustard
1/4 teaspoon salt1/4 teaspoon pepper
1 (12-ounce) can evaporated skim milk
Oregano sprigs (optional)
Heat oil in a nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Add zucchini, mushrooms, bell pepper, onion, and garlic, and sauté vegetable mixture 6 minutes or until tender. Remove from heat. Stir in artichokes, and set aside.
Arrange Italian bread cubes in a 13 x 9-inch baking dish coated with cooking spray. Spoon zucchini mixture evenly over bread cubes, and sprinkle mixture with cheeses.
Combine egg substitute and remaining ingredients (except oregano sprigs) in a large bowl; stir with a whisk. Pour egg mixture over zucchini mixture. Cover mixture with foil; chill up to 1 day.
Preheat oven to 325°. Bake strata, covered, 1 hour or until bubbly. Garnish with oregano sprigs, if desired. Yield: 8 servings
CALORIES 229 (19% from fat); FAT 4.9g (sat 2.3g,mono 1.5g,poly 0.3g); PROTEIN 17.5g; CHOLESTEROL 14mg; CALCIUM 336mg; SODIUM 570mg; FIBER 1.9g; IRON 2.7mg; CARBOHYDRATE 29.1g

Absolutely wonderful. I have been having the left overs from this for breakfast. Anyway......
So it's Jerry, Scott, Angela, Kyle and I at the table for dinner......there is a ton of food and lots of wine. I think we went through 5 bottles of wine that night. Eat, drink, be merry. After dinner and dishes Angela and I went to our beds - she to hers and me to mine - and went into a wine induced coma. Scott and Jerry on the other hand decided to go up to the airstream and play wii. For those of you that don't know, we live on land in the country. We have an airstream that has been converted into a gaming room on one side and Scott's recording studio on the other. Scott and Angela also live on teh property. So, Jerry and Scott are up there playing the guitar Wii. Scott is taking his turn playing, Jerry is sitting in the chair near the door......it is getting colder and colder outside so Jerry reaches over and closes the door which is open a crack. Once the door is closed Scott stops playing. He asks Jerry "did you just shut the door". "yes, it was getting cold in here". Scott has this look of panic on his face and informs Jerry that we cannot open that door from the inside. We are locked in. They both stare at each other for a couple of seconds....do you have your cell phone on you? no, do you? no. shit. Scott's idea is that they open the back window and yell out the window for Angela or I to come and let them out. Little do they know that Angela and I are in our wine induced coma and would have NEVER heard them. They play with the door for awhile to no avail. They decide to weave their way through the mass of wires and equipment on the recording side of the airstream to the other door.....which was also locked and wouldn't open from the inside. They spent a good 45 minutes up there in a panic on how they were going to get out when Jerry fiddled with the lock long enough to get it open. They were free!!! The next day Jerry went up there and fixed the door so it would open from the inside. It did make for a good story the next day tho.

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy turkey day to all. I was at the grocery store at 6:30 this morning getting the rest of the "stuff" for the dinner tomorrow night. At least it payed off because there were very few people there and no lines at the checkers. I hate it when I go there and there are all these people and inevitably some old man parks his cart right in front of the one item that I need. I say "excuse me" he of course cannot hear me because he is stone deaf and refuses to get a hearing aid because there is nothing wrong with his hearing, everyone is mumbling and that is why he cannot hear......(learned this from my father)......so I have to scream "EXCUSE ME" and this practically scares him half to death and I fear that he is doing to drop dead right there in front of me making it impossible to get the thing that I need off the shelf unless I step on his dead body to get it. So going very early in the morning keeps the old men alive. And I would also like to point out while I am at it that all the people in the store this morning getting groceries were women. When did this happen? Who made the rule that it is women that make the thanksgiving day meal? This is just not right.
But I digress......We will have thanksgiving dinner here and I will cook. duh. As Kyle has reminded me several times, this is his last Thanksgiving dinner before he is off to bootcamp. This makes me so very sad. My baby is going off to the Army. Also the last Christmas. Oh this is going to be very hard.

Under da Sea

So a little while ago Rice http://voodoonotes.blogspot.com/ (you HAVE to check out her blog. Funny, witty, great writing and photos) put out a challenge to do some sidewalk drawings. I was waiting for a) a sunny warm day so we wouldn't freeze while doing it and b) Bridget to be available to do it with us. Bridget is our 9 year old neighbor and is so very talented. There are days I want to go next door and ask if Bridget can come out and play. She has a box filled with art supplies here in my studio so she can go and chose her medium of the day and bring it out and create whatever she wants. So we chose the theme of an under sea world.

above is Bridget's mermaid which I think is pretty spectacular.

We added jelly fish and to the left is Bridget's star fish reef. Such a clever girl.

Here she is working on her mermaid.

Jerry came out to see what we were doing and we insisted that he add to it. Here is his boat with fisherman and dog. He also did some of the fish and sea horses. He really is an excellent artist and a good sport.

Such a fun day and now I have this wonderful piece of artwork right outside our front door.

Trick or ???????

Scott and Angela came home from work in their costumes. Angela made her own costume and she made a great bee. Scott was, well, scott was....um.....I'm not sure but with those glasses I am going for dork.

Living in a rural community we don't have many trick or treators. We had three children come last night.....a snow queen, a flaminco dancer and Jason. I had made special bags for them with both candy and other stuff in them.

I loved seeing these kids dressed up. Reminded me when we were kids and would dress up and go trick or treating. There were hoards of kids back then and we would run from house to house with our trick or treat bags and practically stand in line at the door because there were so many of us. Our parents never went with us, we didn't have glow in the dark sticks or reflector tape on our costumes. We were with our friends and everyone knew everyone because the housing area where we lived was small. Then we would all go back to one house and dump all the candy out in front of us and trade the ones you hated. It was fun and part of our childhood. Like playing baseball in the street. Can't do that today because 1) you will get run over by a car that is going way too fast through the neighborhood and 2) if that ball hits someone's car your parents are going to get sued. Back then we didn't think of that, the cars drove slower and were aware of the kids playing in the street and people weren't sueing people left and right just because they can. I had this magical childhood where my friends were right down the street from me, I had my horses and would ride through all the fields around the houses (they are no longer there - there are houses where the fields used to be), in those fields too we would dig forts underground - how we didn't die in those is beyond me. Those fields were places to meet your boyfriend, dig forts, ride motorcycles and horses. The children living in that neighborhood don't have that. They will never experience building a raft out of junk lumber and floating it on mud lake - which was really just a huge mud hold about as deep as your calfs but to be able to make something and float out on it was really something - they will never take tadpoles out of mud lake and bring them home and fill your friends bathtub with water and tadpoles and have her mother scream at the top of her lungs when she finds them. We would catch horneytoads out in those fields and keep them in shoe boxes filled with sand and feed them ants. The fields were magical and now the magic is gone. There are now houses on top of houses on top of houses. There is no place for those children to make their own magic. I am so grateful that we had those fields and the halloweens that we had. They made for magical memories.