Some food-related (mostly) things we enjoyed this past week:
After the show “Homeland” won so many Emmys this year, we figured we should give it a shot. Â We downloaded Season 1 so that we could watch a couple of episodes on the iPad when we flew to Chicago, and have been obsessed with the show ever since. Â Almost as obsessed as Carrie herself is with exposing Brody as a terrorist. Â She missed something once before, and she can’t let that happen again.
Our roses are thriving in their Fall bloom stage. Â This is an unedited shot of our coral-pink roses; we also have light pink and peach ones.
Some of you may be surprised to learn that Dan briefly had a part-time job as a clown, back in the day. Â (If you know him in real life, you will not be at all surprised by this fact.) Â As part of his clown duties, he learned how to make balloon animals. Â He doesn’t do it very often, but couldn’t say no to the opportunity to help raise some money for the United Way campaign carnival at his office this week. Â Being out of practice, he made a few at home the night before the carnival while I made our favorite shrimp dish.
We were lucky enough to attend another movie screening this week — we saw the movie Lincoln at Studio Movie Grill and thoroughly enjoyed it.  Even if you’re not a history buff, it is a very entertaining film, and Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance as Lincoln is absolutely incredible.  Five (out of four) forks up!!  (This is the only photo I could get to memorialize the occasion because we had to leave our cell phones in the car — and they searched purses and wanded us before we went into the theater — they were serious about preventing any illegal recording!)
I’m always on the lookout for any type of kitchen gadget or tool that will make cooking easier (for me.) Â This cookbook stand turns out to be even more handy than I expected it to be. Â It will hold cookbooks (even heavy ones), printed recipes (you can display 2 different recipes at once!) and the iPad, and having the recipes sitting upright instead of flat on the counter makes them SO MUCH easier to read and follow. Â And makes me less likely to spill food on them while I’m cooking. Â But the best part? Â The stand folds up into a small book shape, so when you’re not using it, you just put it on the shelf with your cookbooks. Â This makes my clutter-hating heart happy.
During a recent trip to the grocery store, I was delighted to see tiny olive trees for sale (cheap!) and couldn’t resist buying one for our patio. Â It probably won’t ever actually yield any olives, but it’s cute and reminds us fondly of Italy and Napa, some of our happiest places on Earth.