Weeks 5 and 6!

in

Hi all,

It seems that some of you noted the absence of a 5 week email so here are weeks 5 and 6 together!

We had a very busy last couple weeks, including Izzy's first big road trip up to the Okanagan to meet his great grandparents.  Izzy is now smiling! I happened to catch his VERY FIRST SMILE on camera - it's the lopsided grin with him in the striped onesie. Enjoy!

Love,
Melisa, Evan, and Isaac

Izzy Week 4

Hi all!

Here is the next installment of pictures! Isaac is now just over 1 month old. He's starting to change and really look like a little boy (you'll see it in the pics for next week!). He seems to be a "spirited" baby and really likes to eat. Immediately. Although he can be pretty fussy at times we are lucky that he sleeps well during the night. He sleeps in his bassinet in our living room and usually feeds at 10pm, 2 or 3 am, and 6:30 am. I seem to be doing well off these chunks of sleep and don't usually nap during the day. He's also starting to be able to be a little more independent and entertain himself for short 5-10 min chunks. We're lucky that he loves motion - he falls asleep almost instantly in the Baby Bjorn carrier, car seat, or stroller, or when we dance around to music with a good beat! 

Love,
Melisa, Evan, and Isaac

Week 3

in

Hi all,

Here are some snaps from the third week of Isaac's life. Things are going well - we are settling into a nice routine! This week we went out on adventures every day, including Izzy's first trips to the beach, the park, and Langara College. He also went on his first road trip to Abbotsford to visit Grandma and Grandpa H.

Love,
Melisa

First 2 Weeks!

in

Hi all,

Here are some pictures of this last week in the life of Isaac. We're doing pretty well but next week will be the real test when it's just him and me all day!

Love,
Melisa, Evan, and Isaac

The Turkey, Redux

in

A couple years ago (and a couple blog posts ago) I made a big ol turkey dinner for Melisa and I and it turned out quite well.  I've made some others since then, all in the same method, but over the Christmas to New Years break we had another turkey, and although I prepared and cooked it very similarly, I did do a couple of things differently, which turned out to be quite successful! I thought I'd outline them here for your enjoyment. :)

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Weddings

in ,

Everybody seems to be getting married lately!  Well maybe not everyone, but a good chunk of them...  A couple of weeks ago we went to a wedding that had a full Chinese 12 course banquet dinner which was pretty crazy but also quite lovely.  (Pictures of said dishes are in a album Melisa uploaded to facebook for those that are interested and have access)  Yesterday evening we got back from a 6 hour trek to the interior of BC after spending a weekend attending another lovely wedding and visiting some wineries.  Something new I learned, people from that area refer to the Vancouver region as "the coast", as in "I don't really feel like driving to The Coast" which I thought was pretty funny, certainly not something you'd ever think to call if when you live here.  In a couple of weeks we're heading back out to the interior for another friend's wedding right before flying out to New York so we've got a lot of things on the go (mixed with work being super busy now that students are back at UBC).  I thought 3 weddings in 2 months was a lot but one of our friends is going to five! so that's kinda crazy.  Fun times though all around. Noticed that wordpress switched over to their new jetpack service so I enabled that on the backend, from a user perspective you won't really notice anything different except for the twitter feed on the right is a bit cleaner looking now as it's integrated into wordpress itself and no longer relying on a third party plugin and there should be a couple of new sharing buttons on the bottom of this post which again are integrated into the site now.  Well another thing you'll notice is that there is a new post on the page, so there's that.  Maybe there will be more to come.

The Turkey

in

A couple months ago, around easter, Safeway had a deal where if you bought a turkey under 16lbs you could get it for 99cents a pound.  This price was too good to pass up so Melisa and I immediately trekked out and procured a 15lbs bird, obviously wanting to make the most of this sale.   Since then this turkey has been sitting in our deep freeze, waiting for it's time to shine, and today it shined so bright.

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The Butter Steak

in

For the past few years Melisa and I have been living in apartments that either don't have balconies or don't allow barbecues, this has not gone over well with my stomach as I love to BBQ.  I've been searching for ways to successfully cook up a good steak indoors and thus far have always met with failure.  This failure finally ended tonight after cooking The Butter Steak. Unfortunately I don't own a Cast Iron Skillet and have never gotten around to finding a good place to buy one in Vancouver, further to that I have no idea where the broil pan is that came with my stove so the two common high heat short cook time methods of indoor steaking have never been an option for me.  I've tried numerous times to cook a steak on the stove top in a nonstick pan but it has never worked out, yesterday though in the Something Awful forum's 'Goons with Spoons' section I stumbled across a thread dedicated to steaks and therein lay my answer, a medium heat long cook time approach to steak that I have never heard of before.  Basically it involves using the maillard reaction through butter to give the a nice crust even at a medium heat but also to keep the meat rare to medium rare with a long cooking time.  For a better explanation of the cooking process as well as instructions and fancy pictures I highly recommend you visit The Paupered Chef's page dedicated to the process.  This in turn will lead you to an egullet article on the methods that started the ball rolling and has more info on how to cook the perfect butter steak.

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