Sunday, January 22, 2012

A house divided

We got up this morning to the wonderful smell of cinnamon applesauce.  I am a big fan of chunky applesauce, but the Vitamix makes it so smooth even with the peels that we've been having it that way more and more lately.  While I made breakfast, Will blended it up.

Smooth applesauce
Last week I served penguin-shaped sandwiches at Charlotte's birthday party, but that left us with quite a few pieces of bread with a penguin-shaped hole in the middle.  So this morning we used them to make french toast.

Penguin french toast filled with greek yogurt/applesauce mixture, a bit of smoked salmon on the side and coffee
 The only thing that wasn't delicious about breakfast was the coffee.  It tasted like soap, and I said as much when I had some.  Will shrugged and said he didn't really notice anything unusual.  I kept sipping it because I really wanted to have coffee with breakfast this morning, but it was just yucky.

I was about to decide that I did NOT in fact love everything we've ever gotten from Baltimore Tea and Coffee when I poured Charlotte the cup of tea she had requested.  When all sorts of little bits started swirling around in the cup immediately I figured I had gotten a ripped teabag or something, but as I investigated I realized that it was actually the water itself coming out of our hot water tap!  Ever since Will changed the whole house filter yesterday we've had air in the pipes and strange colors in the water but we thought we'd worked it all out.  I guess we forgot that the hot water tap has a reservoir and had to be flushed separately.  This is what the water coming out of the tap looked like:

Super-nasty
 Even worse was the realization that THIS was why my coffee tasted horrible.  It was made with water that looked like this, we just couldn't tell because the coffee itself was already dark and chunky.

This, among other reasons,  is why we have a house filter.  We originally got it to take the chlorine out because we are on city water.  City water is supposed to be "clean" and is tested yearly but we still end up with all this nastiness in our filter that is jarred loose when it gets changed.  Without a filter we'd be slowly drinking everything that is caught here, which does NOT look clean to me.



Anyway.

I seem to have forgotten to eat a morning snack since I was out running errands.  I did eventually acquire a decent cup of coffee at M.O.M. though.

Coffee and an orange slice
Lunch was another "finish up leftovers" salad.  I will probably be having a lot of these so I can finish up as much random food as possible before we leave.

Greens, cilantro, grated carrots, 3 jalapeño-stuffed olives, 3 black kalmata olives, 1 oz humbolt fog cheese, broccoli, 1.5 oz salmon, hummus + balsamic dressing.

Later in the afternoon (and after a failed nap attempt for Charlotte) we headed over to Lauren and Greg's house to watch the Ravens/Pats game.  It was especially fun because Greg is a Pats fan and Lauren is a Ravens fan so that added to the tension!  They each made a soup representative of their team.

Lauren's delicious MD crab soup (and on the side 2 whole wheat crackers with homemade hummus, some balsamic roasted veggies, and sweet potato beet latkes with applesauce)

I also had to try Greg's delicious New England clam chowder.  Wish calories would've allowed me to have a whole bowl of this too!
  Lauren was kind enough to share some of her kumquats with us too, the best I've ever had!  These guys were so sweet, nothing like the tart things you buy at grocery stores around here.

A kumquat picked fresh off the tree in Greg's mom's backyard in FL
The girls, wrapped in the correct blanket :-)

3/4 of our family

Wells banana bread beer

Greg, surrounded by his friends in purple

My second beer, Heavy Seas Märzen

My second bowl of crab soup

3 more kumquats, applesauce and a Leffe blonde beer for dessert
 Of course I would've preferred if the game ended differently (SO couldn't believe it!) but we had a great time this evening nonetheless.

Lauren ALSO sent us home with some peanut flour to try, so we had to make some Vitamix banana ice cream with peanut flour for second dessert once the girls were in bed and we were settled in to watch our show for the night :-)

Yummy alone
Even better with chocolate sauce
I will definitely have to order some of this stuff!  It meets Will's crazy requirements for grams of protein per calorie so it could help give me more options for meatless dinners.

I take back what I said about Star Trek episodes about Data's feelings.  The episodes where Captain Picard pretends to be a detective on the holodeck are much worse.

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