(Some of my) Life's journeys logged...: November 2011

I am certainly thankful for all things in life, including the opportunity to celebrate and be a culinary part of the Thanksgiving experience with my host family! Almost the whole conception of the menu was from Shana, and I made tofurkey and cheese-cake with chocolate covered strawberries...Also helped with the mashed potatoes/gravy and stuffing preparation which were pretty much out of a box/package.

Dinner menu included real turkey, stuffed tofu-turkey, stuffing, mashed-potatoes with gravy, creamed corn, honey corn-bread, spinach and mushroom lasagna roll-ups, mixed greens salad with pomegranate topped with rasberry dressing, butternut squash soup which was so thick everyone just used it as a gravy. Dessert included cheesecake, but there was also pumpkin pie which people sort of forgot about...

I may have forgotten something unintentionally. We were supposed to have herb roasted potatoes but most of those became a little too roasted (burnt) and inedible.

Almost forgot to mention one of the appetizers which was all just eatten with the rest of the foods...Crostinis! (Apparently it means "little toast" in Italian). Somewhat similar to Bruschettas, these are little toasts of bread (we used french bread/baguettes), and topped it with goat cheese, and then a fried blend of sundried tomatoes mixed with some other things...they were pretty delicious!

Oh, and we also had some devilled eggs.

My partner in crime also made a delcious cranberry and orange-zest jam that was pretty good.

May be some of these shall be worth developing. Decided to keep someone's fancy camera and use it while possible. Unfortunately we had quite a bit of rain today, or else we would have gone to a nearby hiking trail at Alum Rock park... (by we, I mean myself, Shana and her younger brother). Shana is around my age and her brother is a junior in high school.

Took a few snaps today of random photographically pleasing inanimate objects around the house, and went outside to show you a little bit of the mountains that practically surround us everywhere around here. I believe what I pictured was Mt. Hamilton which is apparently about a 30 minute drive from here. Oh, and we live so close to a primarily Hispanic neighborhood that there are Mexican grocery stores and good authentic Mexican restaurants around here. Granted, we did stop in what I would think would also be a pretty authentic Mexican restaurant in Liberal, KS en route to the west-coast, while mostly travelling down US-54 west and then finally catching I-40W.

Photos from the Canon rebel to be posted shortly :)
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GALLUP, NM. Day 2 of road-trip and first instance of cannon rebel usage.

Souvenir from the drive the day before-- it's a tumble-weed that had gotten stuck in this part of the vehicle! I can't even tell you how many of those dangerous looking tumble weeds we dodged, and how many (just a few) we had to drive over or knock. We did see one car having an impressive tumble-weed stuck to it's hood. Little did we realize my car had a bit of tumble-weed stuck to it also.

It was right around Alburqueque onwards that the mountain ranges started populating our drive's views. This may still be NM (but in or outside Gallup, NM by this point)

And a quick look at the passenger before I got back to my cruise-control managed but yet attentive driving. Oh, and I am happy to say that I was honored with some of the best parts of the drive (i.e. the winding parts of the roads as the highway encircled one of the mountain ranges around garlic-rich areas in Gilroy, CA. In fact, the town almost smelled very garlicy. Now my writing is not just imagery infused, but perhaps scent-infused also).