Exactly one year ago today, I made my first post on this blog. Cue applause.

Since then I have…

- written 138 posts
- gotten over 1,000 comments
- had nearly 25,000 visits from just over 15,000 visitors

… and discovered that I absolutely love the creative outlet this gives me and the discussion we are all able to create here.

There have been times since then that I have thought I’ll absolutely be doing this for the next 10 years – I just love it so much. And there have been times I’ve thought there’s no way I could possibly even make it this far. But I’ve learned not to worry about any of that any more and just let it come naturally, as it should. As I’ve said here before, I really charged into this thing without much preparation whatsoever, and the whole year has been more or less just seat-of-my-pants type writing. None of that has changed.

So I take the time now to look back at that first post and I’m pretty happy to see that I’ve stuck fairly well to my initial intentions. And I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my wife, my producers, everybody at the Academy, all my followers on Twitter, everyone who likes me on Facebook, anyone who has ever commented on this site – past or present, and all my quiet readers who merely suffer in silence – thank you for a great year!

ALSO: I am going to be switching web hosts this weekend. I hope to be able to do this without any downtime but if you are unable to access the site, that would be why. If all goes well you should notice absolutely nothing different about the site. Exciting, isn’t it?!

The Oatmeal put it best the other day when they/he posted a strip about the worst thing about Valentine’s Day. And though it basically mirrors my feeling on it, I can hardly seek to improve on his eloquence.

So instead I’m taking a different tack and spending a moment to talk about the history of Valentine’s Day. It’s not, as often charged, a conspiracy by Hallmark to take all your money cause they made up some holiday. It’s actually quite legitimate – as legitimate as any other holiday, anyway – even if people seem to be quite comfortable with the conspiracy paradigm and have no desire to look any further.

Like most major holidays that we celebrate today, Valentine’s Day is an amalgamation of many different traditions and legends. There are three possible actual people, in the early years CE, that could be attributed to the naming of the day – three separate Saint Valentine’s. Nobody knows for certain really what these people did – apart from being martyred, as all three were – or what could have earned them the day in their name, but legends do exist.

The first tells of a Roman priest who continued to marry young men to their wives against the wishes of the emperor Claudius II. The emperor had decreed that men with wives made lesser soldiers, and promptly outlawed all marriage for young men. Valentine, seeing the error in this, chose to continue to perform marriage ceremonies regardless of the emperors decision. He was then killed.

The second tells of another priest who helped young men escape from being harsh and possibly false imprisonment. He was jailed himself, fell in love with a young girl while in prison, sent her what is arguably the first Valentine’s card, and was then executed.

The third Valentine saint traveled through Africa, and even less is known of him. In fact, that’s it. Most likely, somebody killed him too.

Were all these three saints killed on February 14th? It’s unlikely. What’s more likely is that, in a similar fashion to the decisions made on calendar placement of Christmas, the Christian Church made the choice to celebrate Valentine’s Day – then a feast day – in the middle of February to preempt another pagan holiday. See, in the Mediterranean region, February is the beginning of the spring. And the festival Lupercalia fell in the middle of this month, as a celebration of the changing of the seasons – again, much like the pagan festival celebrated slightly before what is now our modern day Christmas. Lupercalia began on the ides of February, the 15th, and was a fertility festival honoring the god Faunus – god of agriculture. It was also a time of purification – a “spring cleaning,” if you will. It’s easy enough to connect the dots here.

So next time you feel compelled to sneer at the endless heart shaped boxes and teddy bears plaguing you at your every turn the minute the New Year has begun, consider sacrificing a goat – for fertility. Or a dog, for purification. Then you can dip the strips of goat hide into blood, and take to the streets to slap young women in the face with it – thereby blessing them with the gift of fertility for the coming year.

On second thought, maybe the chocolate and Hallmark cards aren’t so bad after all.

This is a pretty simple, but wonderful, recipe that I got from Barbara Kingsolver’s book “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.” It’s a fantastic non-fiction book cataloging her move from Tucson, AZ, to her childhood home of Virginia – and the subsequent year that she and her family took it upon themselves to become real honest-to-god locavores. They produced the majority of their food themselves on their farm, eating seasonally and learning the skills that allowed families of the past to make it through the whole year with such a method. What they didn’t raise or grow themselves, they traded with their neighbors in the community. The book is full of lots of great ideas for reigning in your own food miles, and each chapter ends with a handful of recipes that were her family favorites.

The spinach lasagna recipe has become one of my family favorites. It’s quite easy, generally lasts a couple days with leftovers, and is perfect for Meatless Monday. Only trouble is, lasagna can take a bit more time than I have available on occasion (particularly with pre-cooking the lasagna noodles). So I’ve broken down the recipe into it’s simplest form – a basic pasta dish – and will replicate it below for you.

You can really use any kind of long noodles that you like – spaghetti, capellini, vermicellini – it’s up to you. I do recommend whole wheat pasta though, any chance you get. That white flour stuff just really doesn’t have much in it for you.

So this can actually be made in about 30 minutes, and my pictures prove it. Generally I tend to turn my nose up at the whole “30 minute meal” thing, because I feel pretty strongly that trying to minimize the amount of time you have to spend with food per day down to the smallest possible unit is the wrong approach entirely… but then again, I don’t have kids (yet), so what do I know?

We begin at 8:30pm. I eat my dinners too late, I know, but it is what it is.

Prep time: 10 minutes
Cook time: 20 minutes

Ingredients…

- pasta
- about 25-30oz fresh spinach
- 1/2 cup fresh ricotta cheese
- 1 cup pasta sauce
- 1/2 cup shredded mozzarella

Optional…

- 1/2 cup mushrooms
- 1/2 cup diced onion, sauteed
- basil, oregano

1. Trim the stems off your spinach and wash well, cut the leaves a bit if you prefer smaller bites. This took me 7 minutes cause I got distracted washing dishes.

2. Wilt the spinach over low/medium heat with some salt and olive oil.

3. Bring a pot of water to a boil, and cook your pasta as you regularly would. If you’ve got stock (chicken, duck, vegetable, etc), you can cook the pasta in that instead of water to impart a bit of a stronger flavor to it.

4. While pasta is cooking, warm up the sauce in a small sauce pot over low heat.

5. That’s really about it. Start plating with the pasta and sauce first.

6. Then add the ricotta.

7. Home stretch here. Add the spinach, then more sauce, maybe a little more ricotta, and top with the shredded mozzarella.

8. Don’t forget about the garlic bread you had time to whip up while the pasta was cooking.

9. Done. 30 minutes.

It’s not the most photogenic meal, I’ll readily admit that. But it’s damn tasty.

Two years and one day ago, I married the most wonderful woman in the world. Today, she *is* my world.

As yesterday was our anniversary, I spent most of the day with her and not particularly doing much writing. We actually had a pretty simple night, going out after work to tour the maternity ward where Aedan will likely be delivered. I say likely because our OB is actually affiliated with two hospitals – one which is slightly closer to our work and one which is slightly closer to our home – so we will be pre-registering with both. They seem to be pretty similar though.

The tour was fun, enlightening, and very real. It’s funny how when these major life events are sneaking up on you – marriage, kids, etc., – each progressive step on the march towards the event has this ability to make it all get more and more real as you see things and realize things you probably already knew, but didn’t really *know* know. If you follow me. Seeing the hospital where we will first meet our daughter, seeing the very rooms where she will be delivered, filled us both with a strange mix of excitement, anxiety, and – well – intimidation.

Next step: baby classes.

Anyway, I thought I’d share a few of my favorite pictures from that perfect night two years ago. If you were there with us, I thank you for helping to make it the best night ever.

So it’s that time of year again. The time of year when everybody – even those of us (*cough*) that aren’t into American football (*cough, cough*) – get together to watch the Big Game, eat food, and drink alcohol.

This year the game actually falls one day before my 2 year wedding anniversary, February 7th. This year it falls on a Monday, so Amanda and I have no big plans. There’s also the little detail that Aruba (and a certain furry someone who hurt himself and had to go to kitty ER) have all but cleaned out my bank account at the moment. Instead, we’ll be celebrating our anniversary with the romantic activity of touring the hospital where our daughter will be born. That works, yeah?

Anyway, so, football, eating and stuff. Here’s a small collection of links from some of my favorite food writers (myself included, naturally), for some good vittles for this coming Sunday.

– Mushroom Pockets from MSCK

- Whipped Sweet Potatoes from The Confused Homemaker

- Spanakopita from Sasasunakku

- Peanut Butter and Bacon Jamwiches from Saint Tigerlily

- Texas Caviar from kara cooks

- Smoky Sweet Spicy Wings from Steamy Kitchen

- Teriyaki Chicken Wings from White on Rice Couple

– Adorable Little Football Shaped Oreo Truffles from Three Baking Sheets to the Wind

- Chocolate Chip Cookies from MSCK

If that’s not enough, then let me refer you to my friend Krysta over at evil chef mom, who has written up a great list of Super Bowl snacks from her blog.

As far as drinking goes – well, it’s sort of gotta be beer, right? Can I make a recommendation?

So cheers to you and yours, be safe this Super Bowl Sunday. May the best team (that doesn’t have Roethlisberger on it) win!

Every once in awhile I get emails out of the blue, on account of being Somebody with a Blog, asking if they can send me free things and I can review their product and – of course – write an amazing, glowing review here in this space so all 19 of my readers (that’s you!) will immediately drop what they’re doing and go buy a life’s supply.

I’ll admit, even just that is kind of cool – although 98% of the time the product they want to send me is some highly processed new super food stuff that I’ve never heard of, which I can tell you off the bat is just not for me. In these cases, it really never gets much farther than that initial contact. But I recently got my first contact that was actually something worth following through on.

The contact was from a representative from POM Wonderful (it’s pomegranate juice, but yes that’s the full name of the company). He wanted to send me a case of their main product – bottles of 100% pomegranate juice. I’ve had this stuff before, and it’s good. I’m a pretty big fan of pomegranates in general. So I was already inclined to accept the offer. Reading through the email, the second thing I noticed was that there wasn’t even any caveat for some sort of reciprocation. I mean, obviously the tacit implication is that I’m then going to go ahead and write about it here, but there was no quid-pro-quo deal explicitly necessary for them to send me some product. This might seem like a small detail but it made an impression on me.

So – naturally – here I am writing about it. I like POM Wonderful pomegranate juice. I liked it before I got the free stuff (a case worth, not too shabby) – and I still like it after. I tend to use it for mixed drinks, a LOT. It’s great with some vodka and a bit of seltzer. But it’s also pretty great for cooking with, too. I thought for awhile about what my dish would be to showcase it, and I felt like a nice crispy roast duck would make a perfect delivery vehicle for it.

Since I’ve never talked about duck here and some people find it intimidating, I thought I’d do a little step by step for my roasting process. Two of the best things about roast duck are – 1) the crispy skin, and 2) the fat you can save. This method works great for both.

Prep time: 20 minutes (or a couple hours if you include the thawing/bringing-to-room-temp of a frozen duck)
Cook time: 3.5 hours

Ingredients…

- 1 whole duck, fresh or frozen
- 1/4 cup olive oil
- salt
- pepper
- pomegranate molasses (can usually be found in the Middle Eastern/ethnic foods section of a grocery store – if need be, sub in regular molasses but tread lightly with it)

1. If frozen, move the duck to the fridge for a good 24 hours before the day you want to cook it. On the day of, take it out of the fridge about 90 minutes before you are ready to start roasting it. The roasting will take about 3 hours, so be sure to plan accordingly.

2. As the duck is coming to room temperature, dress it up with some olive oil, salt, and pepper. Remove any giblets from inside the cavity and save with the heart for stock, save the liver for paté (quick paté recipe coming soon for bonus points!).

3. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees fahrenheit.

4. Cut the neck skin and fat from the body and reserve. You can render this while the bird is roasting to get the most amount of fat out of this as possible. More details follow.

5. Make diagonal cuts in the skin of the duck all across the breast side and the back. Do not cut all the way into the flesh, just cut through the skin and the fat. This will make it easier for the fat to drip out into the roasting pan when you’re cooking it. Use the image below as a guideline. Make sure you have a sharp knife.

6. Next you want to truss the duck with some twine. You can truss a duck the same way you would a chicken – it’s pretty easy. Snip yourself a nice long piece of twine (you can always cut off extra if it’s too long, but you can’t add more), and start with the duck breast side up. Place the duck down on the halfway point of the twine, and wrap once around the wings (the top half of the following image). Then wrap one more time around the legs and knot in front of the cavity (the bottom half of the following image).

7. When it’s ready to go in the oven, place it in a roasting pan with something to raise it off the base of the pan. This is critical for keeping the skin crispy and for reserving as much fat as possible. It should look something like this:

8. Just before it goes in the oven, brush it with pomegranate molasses and poke it all over to make small holes in the skin for fat to drip out. Then roast for 1 hour at 300, breast side up, and it will look a bit like this…

While it’s roasting for the first hour, you can prep and start reducing the pomegranate glaze.

Ingredients…

- 1 cup pomegranate juice
- 1/4 cup pomegranate molasses
- 2 serrano chiles, diced with seeds removed
- 1 minced garlic clove

1. Add all the ingredients together and then pulse in a blender until smooth.

2. Put in a small sauce pan over low-medium heat and reduce until desired thickness is reached.

NOTE – you still have about 2:30 hours left to go before the duck will be ready, so be aware of this as you are reducing the glaze. Either keep it on very low heat and make it a nice long process, or wait a little while before starting the heat. I’d leave yourself at least an hour to reduce it, though. If it gets too thick, just add a little more pomegranate juice.

9. Pull the roast out of the oven, and flip the bird – CAREFULLY – so that it is now breast side down. Prod the sides of it gently for the fat to drip out into the pan. Roast for another 1 hour at 300 degrees fahrenheit.

While the duck is roasting for the second hour, you can make some easy duck liver paté on the stove top using the liver which you set aside at the outside – if you roll that way, that is. And I definitely do.

Ingredients…

- duck liver
- 1 tbsp duck fat
- 2 small shallots, diced
- 2 small garlic cloves, grated
- herbs – I recommend thyme, fennel, basil
- 1 tsp cognac

1. Put the duck fat into a skillet over medium heat for 2-3 minutes until it’s good and warmed up, then throw in the diced shallots.

2. Sweat the shallots in the fat for just another few minutes, and add in the garlic, herbs, and duck liver.

3. Cook over medium heat for about 3 minutes, flip, and cook for another 3 until the liver is well browned.

4. Remove liver, herbs, and shallots from the pan and throw them into a blender with the cognac. Pulse until smooth.

5. Put into a jar with a lid or covered bowl and refrigerate for at least 3 hours, or overnight. Spread it on some nice toast to serve.

The paté will keep in your fridge for about 3 to 4 days, but it probably won’t last that long anyway.

10. After the duck has roasted for the second hour, take it back out of the oven and crank the oven to 350 degrees fahrenheit. Prod again to get those fat drippings out of the duck and into your pan.

11. Flip it back to breast side up, and put it back in the oven for about 50 minutes.

While it’s roasting for this final hour, take the skin and fat from the neck that you reserved earlier and render it to get a little more duck fat out of it.

1. Pour just a little bit of water into a skillet – about enough so the bottom is covered but not much more.

2. Bring the water up to a low simmer while cutting the skin into small pieces.

3. Drop the skin into the simmering water for about 5-7 minutes or so. The water will evaporate out will the fat gets rendered.

4. Remove the skin from the skillet and discard. Carefully pour the fat out of the skillet into a measuring cup or mason jar.

12. For the final ten minutes of roasting, raise the oven temperature up to 425 degrees fahrenheit, and then take your roast out of the oven. Prod it one final time all over to release the fat into the pan.

13. Move the rack out of the pan, again – CAREFULLY – and set aside on a plate or carving block. Using a baster or spoon, carefully lift up one corner of the pan so that all the fat and drippings run down into the corner. Use the baster or spoon to move the fat into your measuring cup or mason jar that you’ve set aside from when you rendered the neck fat earlier.

Yummy duck fat…

You can see here that the burnt gristle pretty much falls to the bottom once the fat has had a minute to settle in a container. You can use a strainer to pour the fat through to remove that stuff, but if you just put it into the fridge as is the fat on top will congeal and it will be pretty well separated anyway. Note that when it goes into the fridge for a couple hours, it will turn into a white, semi-hardened substance, not unlike butterfat. This is normal and it doesn’t mean it’s gone bad or anything. When you take it back out to cook with it and it comes to room temperature, it will return to it’s more oily state.

More on what to do with the duck fat at the bottom of this post.

14. Now that the duck is out of the oven, let it rest for a good 20 minutes or so before carving into it. It should be thoroughly cooked, but if you’re a paranoid thermometer type then you can check to make sure that spot between the thigh and the body (this is the last spot to cook) has reached 165 degrees fahrenheit.

15. Give a nice final brush all over with the glaze, then carve and serve. You may also want to plate the meal with a little of the glaze spread out on the plate, but be warned that the glaze is fairly sweet.

16. As always, when roasting a bird be sure to save all the bones and the carcass to make some stock the following day. Duck stock is fantastic, can be made exactly the same way as any chicken or turkey stock, and not doing so should be a crime.

So what can you do with all that duck fat you saved? A better question is: what CAN’T you do? Duck fat is seriously a wonder drug of cooking. You can make nearly anything 10x better just by cooking with duck fat instead of oil, or instead of butter. Even better, duck fat is actually healthier for you than butter in quite a few ways. Duck fat contains more linoleic acid and less polyunsaturated fats than most other fats, making it more like olive oil than anything else.

Here are a few of my favorite uses:

- any kind of potato dish – fried, roasted, mashed, baked – will be excellent with duck fat
- caramelized onions
- deep fried won-tons or dumplings
- popcorn – with artisanal salt
- mix it with half butter for biscuits
- any kind of savory pie crust, like shepherd’s pie or chicken pot pie
- scrambled eggs with scallions
- rub for any other kind of bird roast – chicken, turkey, quail, etc.
- hamburgers: a bit mixed into the meat, or smeared onto a toasted bun, or both!

There’s no end to what you can do with it. Be creative. Anything you could cook with oil or with butter, you can cook with duck fat. As a general rule, if you’re worried then stick to savory – anything savory cooked with duck fat will be exceptional. But don’t forget – rules are made to be broken.

I had this really cool post planned out for today with a great meal that I was going to cook last night, but the weather had other plans.

Yesterday, starting at precisely 3:30pm, a snowstorm began pummeling the DC area. I know this because 3:30pm was exactly the time I picked up my wife from her office and started driving home, exactly the time most federal government employees were sent home, exactly the time the HOV lane on our drive home became closed to us, and exactly the time the light, drizzly, non-threatening rain turned into furious hail and then huge snowflakes.

Very quickly, our commute home from work became a disaster. The snow piled up faster than I have ever seen, and the amount of cars on the road to begin with made for a truly nasty situation. After about two hours, we had traveled less than half the way home and there was probably a good 3-4 inches of snow on the roads. This wouldn’t have been a problem for us in our new all-wheel drive CR-V, except for the fact that there were so many other cars on the road that couldn’t handle it. And given the fact that we were all moving no faster than 5mph at any given time, whenever there was the slightest upward slope the traffic would get hung up on it for a good 30-60 minutes or so. My favorite part was the idiots who felt the need to change lanes randomly and get stuck in the snow piles that had accumulated between the tire tracks.

We made it home in about 5 hours. FIVE HOURS. And that’s what should have been a 45 minute trip. Just about everyone I know seems to have been caught in it in the same way, with their commutes ranging anywhere from 2 or 3 hours, to upwards of 9 or 10. I’ve never seen a storm come on so fast and trap so many people. Cars were being abandoned everywhere. We used 3/4 tank of gas driving home over those five hours, and were on empty by the time we finally reached the gas station down the street from our house. I had been mentally preparing for the moment when I’d have to trudge out on my own and leave Amanda in the warm car to go buy a gas canister somewhere, but thankfully it didn’t come to that for us. I’m afraid it did come to that for many others though, and I know there had to be lots of people waking up this morning wondering where exactly it was they left their car.

Unfortunately, that’s not even the end of it. We got home after our five hour commute just short of 9pm, to find we had lost power at home. So instead of the meal I had planned, we instead had non-toasted bagels and cream cheese for dinner. And beer. And chocolate.

So we lit candles, played some board games, and got cozy. It would have been more relaxing and easier to appreciate the moment if our cats hadn’t been going totally stir crazy the entire time. And of course it’s just about impossible to come back from a 5 hour commute home. Losing interest in the games quickly, we settled on the couch and I started reading Neil Gaiman’s Stardust to my wife and prenatal daughter. She is developed enough now that she can actually hear me talking (the daughter, that is), and is very reactive if I start speaking or reading to her. She flips, rolls, kicks, generally doing whatever she can to react in some way or another. It’s cute. I plan to do more and more as time passes. The three of us shared the evening together in this way and passed out shortly thereafter.

It wasn’t until 11:30am this morning that we got our power back – everything restored *except* the internet. I spent about 45 minutes on the phone with Verizon FIOS trying to troubleshoot the issue until they gave up and said they have to send a technician. Who will be coming out on SUNDAY. Awesome.

Meanwhile, so much snow melted today on the main roads that both my office AND my wife’s office are open today. So not only did we have that mess to deal with yesterday but we’re forced to take PTO hours for not getting in to work today, meaning we’ll ultimately have less time to take for maternity/paternity leave. Which is why we’re both now camped out at the Starbucks instead of at home actually enjoying the snowfall.

So don’t get me wrong, I love snow. I love snowstorms. I love being trapped at home and digging out. But this is officially the worst and suckiest storm ever. Ever.

In other sucky news, the US did not medal in the Bocuse d’Or competition. We came in 10th. Our best performance remains 2009 when we placed 6th. The Scandinavians swept the medals, with Denmark taking gold, Sweden taking silver, and Norway taking bronze. They must know something I don’t know.

I did discover that A&E has been documenting the event, and will be broadcasting a four part series somewhere down the line. Don’t know when, but I’ll be sure to make a mention of it on my twitter feed or facebook page.

More info on the Bocuse d’Or can be found on Ruhlman’s blog, the All-Clad facebook page, the links on my last post, blah blah blah…

Yesterday, I posted on my Facebook page about the Bocuse d’Or – which, incidentally, starts today in Lyon, France.

I got no responses or interactions on the comment at all… not particularly surprising, for sure, but it’s motivated me to write a few words about the famous (in most places outside the US, anyway) competition. In a culture where reality show food challenges are de rigeur, it’s a bit of a shame how little awareness there is about some of the larger scale competitions that happen in the greater international world of cuisine. Of course I am no different myself, having only learned about stuff like this recently through some of Michael Ruhlman’s novels – and not through some general overall worldliness and amazingly endless cultural knowledge. I’m still working on that.

Occurring every other year in France, the Bocuse d’Or is a world chef championship. Started in 1987 by Chef Paul Bocuse, it is generally thought of as one of the most prestigious chef competitions in the world. The unofficial culinary olympics. Yes, it’s like that.

Unfortunately, there’s not much for television coverage of this event here in the states. Which is to say – there’s none at all. Never having placed within the top three nations (we took 6th in 2009), it’s undeniably stiff competition for the US team. It generally passes by without much fanfare around these parts.

But there’s definitely more attention from the US this year than ever before. The Bocuse d’Or USA Foundation is making a huge effort towards a good show in the 2011 competition. With Chefs Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller helming the effort, they put together a council to select the chef team to compete on behalf of the USA. This council included such famous names as Grant Achatz, David Chang, Tom Colicchio, Eric Ripert, André Soltner, Jacques Pepin, Charlie Trotter, Jean-Gorges Vongerichten, and many more. In short, we’re talking créme de la créme here. The selected chef team trained for three months in a special facility built at Keller’s French Laundry, where they had full access to his kitchen, farm, housing, and a paid sabbatical from their own jobs.

The honor has fallen to Chef James Kent, of Eleven Madison Park in NYC. Each chef competes with a commis, or chef assistant, which will be Kent’s Sous Chef from Eleven Madison Park, Chef Tom Allan.

The competition consists of two dishes: one meat and one fish, and lasts over a period of two days. The chefs can not prepare any food before the competition, with only a few small exceptions: you can peel garlic, measure out oils, flours, powders, and you may bring your own prepared stock. The scoring is based on many factors – technique, taste, style, presentation, lack of waste, etc. There are 24 competing countries this year, from all over the world.

I would love more than anything to see some kind of televised or documentary form coverage of a culinary event of this scale, but I’m afraid that – at least for now – I will have to rely on the written word after the fact. In the meantime, I hope I’ve managed to grab at least a little of your interest, and I leave you in the hands of those who have written better and with more knowledge on the topic:

Grant Achatz: A Real Life Iron Chef Tells It All

Michael Ruhlman: Bocuse d’Or 2011

Eater.com on the Bocuse d’Or

And some other related links:

Bocuse d’Or 2011 Official Site

Bocuse d’Or USA Foundation

Bocuse d’Or Wikipedia Entry

So now that I’ve had a few days back home again, I’ve had some time to get through my photos and – sadly – re-adjust to life back at home. Cold weather (but no beautiful snow), work, “the grind,” etc., etc. But let’s forget about all that for now and spend some time re-living our wonderful long weekend getaway.

This trip was something I had been conceptualizing since just about the beginning of the pregnancy. I had no idea there was a hip, trendy name for what we were doing until Amanda told me so. I just figured it would be a great time to make an escape. Amanda actually didn’t even know about it until Christmas – I gave her a copy of our itinerary on Christmas morning along with a maternity bathing suit and some other beach wear. She opened the gift and saw the swimsuit, then read the paper in silence. And her first words of response were…

“What the hell?”

After explaining that yes, it’s true, what she was looking at was actually real, I let her know that I had also already sorted out her days off from work for her and that the trip had been entirely paid for already and we wouldn’t see any of it hit our shared credit cards or anything. So there was truly nothing to worry about, we just had to go and enjoy it.

Two weeks later and we’re packing the night before. The day before our departure, two major snowstorms hit the east coast and caused all kinds of air travel issues – but thankfully we only ran into a slight delay on one of our connections. No major problems. It’s actually not so bad traveling with a pregnant woman – even though Amanda didn’t want to, I made sure we got all the advantages we could to make it as easy as possible on her: pre-boarding flights, trading for aisle seats, getting a ride in the beeping trolley through the airport terminals. It wasn’t so bad, really. The normal inescapable air travel rudeness was at least slightly alleviated by the sight of a woman with a belly.

We arrived in the evening and ate our first meal at Pincho’s – a restaurant on a pier out on the water.

A word about the food in Aruba. The restaurants are generally a step above typical resort food but it is *very* expensive in most places that are worthwhile. For what you pay there for a moderately decent meal you could be eating at a top of the line restaurant here in DC, or even NYC. So it’s a bit of a let down when you see the prices on the menu and then get served food that definitely doesn’t meet that price. Unfortunately though, that’s been my experience to date in most of the Caribbean.

Still – the atmosphere is pretty hard to beat. That’s what you’re really paying for, so it’s best just to keep that in mind. I did have some pretty good local seafood though.

We also ate at the Flying Fishbone where you can dine right by the water in the sand, which is a bit further south from Oranjestad in a town called Savaneta…

… as well as a bit further north at Simply Fish, where the tables are actually up front on the beach and actually in the surf.

We stayed at the Marriott Renaissance, which is in downtown Oranjestad – the capital of Aruba. It had no beach front, but instead a boat that came into the lobby every 15 minutes to ferry you out to a private island that was only open to people who stayed at the resort.

This was great because it meant that the island was pretty much all ours, all the time. There was very little in the way of crowds in Oranjestad in the middle of January, almost surprisingly so. We had a crowded day on Saturday, when there were three huge cruise ships lined up in the marina, but other than that it was pretty empty. Oh, and that private island? It looked like this…

Okay, so we didn’t have the island *entirely* to ourselves.. we had to share it with a bunch of the local fauna, too.

I took one of my favorite pictures ever while we were out on Renaissance Island on the second to last day there. This is Amanda at 24 weeks…

I love that.

So that about wraps it up. Five days in the sun of just about nothing but beach and dining. One of my favorite things about Aruba is that even if you *wanted* to go do things, there’s really not that much to do. There are watersports, sure, and some hiking and a little bit of sightseeing but the island is pretty tiny, so you couldn’t spend much time doing all that even if you wanted to. I tend to be a bit of a busybody on vacations (and in life in general, really) – so sometimes I need to be forced to relax.. and this makes Aruba a pretty good destination for me. It was a very refreshing trip, and we are coming back re-charged and ready to take on the third trimester.

Speaking of which, one more thing I forgot to mention… our daughter’s name. This name is a fairly common boy’s name now, but it’s much more rare for girls, even though it’s actually gender neutral (think like Kelly is gender neutral). The spelling is also a traditional spelling but is less common than the typical one.

It’s Irish for “Little Fire.”

Amanda and I just got back from a little extended weekend getaway to Aruba. It was a fantastic trip, we had a great time, and it was the perfect refresher for us after the holidays and gearing up to start the 3rd trimester – we are at week 24 right now.

I have a bunch of great photos to share and stories to tell about the trip, but we didn’t get home until about 2am last night thanks to the snow and ice (welcome home, huh?) – and I’ve got nearly 500 images to sort through. So for now you’ll just have to be patient and maybe daydream about it a little, if you’re so inclined.

More to come on Thursday.