Pre-adventure Adventures

It is now less than two weeks until our departure! We thought we'd start off this blog by sharing a few things that we've been up to lately.

It was our first Christmas on our own, without either of our families, which was an adventure!

We spent it at our place with a couple of our housemates who were also around, and together we cooked up two enormous feasts: Mexican food for Christmas Eve, and for Christmas dinner each of us prepared something traditional from our own family. Rosemary chose to make a Bûche de Noël, which is something her mom has been making for many years. She's always made it gluten-free; since Rosemary found out last year that she had to go gluten-free as well as dairy-free, this cake was full of substitutes (coconut cream beats cow's milk any day, in her opinion). It came out really delicious! Chris decorated the finished cake with some nuts and dried local plants (some from our garden) that were lying around to complete the picture.

His own contribution to the meal was the hors d'oeuvre, something that is a custom in his Dad's cuisine. For this, he made some amazing grilled, marinaded eggplants, and nut pâté, which we put on rice crackers. Our drink was one of the last bottles of pear mead that we made earlier in the fall, with pears from our pear tree.

Going back to a few days before, we celebrated the Winter Solstice by stomping out a labyrinth in the back yard. Not quite enough room for a full-sized one, so we adapted it a bit.

Another recent project of ours was our first large-scale apple cider mead! We fermented a whole five-gallon carboy full of fresh-juiced apples, honey, sugar, molasses and spices. It took some time to bottle! Though it's still pretty young, we made quite a dent in the stash a couple days ago for Chris's birthday.

We wish a Happy New Year to all, and we hope that you'll come back to read about our new adventures in Europe and beyond!