Gobbla Gobble Tor-Key!

Bork Bork Bork!

Still working on my shucking

This has been a pretty big year for Kelly and I. She got a tenure track job, we got married, we renovated our living room, and then for good measure, we moved to Alaska. None of that really compares though to our first Thanksgiving together. Thanksgivings in Pennsylvania meant bouncing around between families and general craziness. This year though, we had the chance to make our own dinner and start some new traditions. Our first new tradition is watching the Muppets. Wednesday night we saw the new Muppet movie. It was absolutely phenomenal. There was an excellent balance of nostalgia and Muppet style humor. As excited as I was about the Muppets, I was that much more psyched to prepare our first Thanksgiving dinner. We planned a menu starting at lunch that included dilled creme fresh and smoked Alaskan salmon on crackers, steamed clams in white wine sauce, Alaskan Oysters, and fried herbed almonds. Served with Alaska barleywine.

Brining the turkey the night before

Roasted deliciousness

 

Halfway carved/halfway butchered

I should've eaten more.

After lunch, the afternoon flew by doing the rest of the prep. The turkey was joined by beet and sweet potato stacks, stuffing, cranberry-persimmon sauce, mashed potatoes and mushroom gravy. We both ate entirely too much. Fantastic! It was a big strange having such a quiet dinner and we both missed being around family, but for Thanksgiving on our own, I think we did an awesome job.

Bubbling Away

Every once in a while Anchorage gets serious about snow removal. That was the pile in the middle of our cul-de-sac

Sorry for the gaps in posts that seem to keep popping up. It's cold and dark almost all the time now (the sun is out for 6hrs everyday, but it's a half-hearted effort). Consequently, we haven't been doing much outside of working and watching tv. Last week, however, we had some of our new friends over for a home brewing session. Kelly and I were the only ones who had brewed before, leaving us to be the experts on the process. A scary proposition if you're familiar with my homebrew "success."

A Dunkel kit ready to go.

Sanitizing - the most boring, but most important step.

We got started once everyone arrived. There's not much that's exciting about the brewing process - it's just standing around watching the water boil. Most of the process involved drinking beer and sharing recommendations for places to eat and drink around Anchorage. We came up with quite a list, I should've written them down.

"I know I know the name of that place..."

Just finished steeping the grain

Once we finished steeping the grains, we added the malts and boiled for an hour. After the boil cooled the wort, pitched the yeast, and racked it to the fermenter. Two days after racking, our yeast really took off. Thanks in part to prior experience, I knew we could have foamy beer shoot out of the air lock on top of the fermenter. I took the precaution of covering it with a trash bag - good thing too. It foamed for almost two days. As long as I add the right amount of sugar when we bottle, we should have a pretty good brew. Stay tuned.

Grains after steeping. One of our friends made a nice loaf of spent grain bread

Swaddled the beer in the remnants of my Beaker costume to keep it warm.

...And What are you Supposed to Be?

It was a very nerdy Halloween

 Our first Halloween in Anchorage was one for the record books. Living in Narberth we never had many trick-or-treaters. Something about living on a poorly lit, dead end street made parents hesitant to come by. Not so in Anchorage. We had nearly 50 kids, which, when you consider it was dark at about 6pm and snowing, was a pretty good turnout. It was tough to tell what most of the kids were supposed to be - everyone was bundled up against the cold.  Even still, it was fun to answer the door in costume. Some of the kids got it, almost all of the parents did.

Maybe a muppet combo next year?