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.  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.  Almost as obsessed as Carrie herself is with exposing Brody as a terrorist.  She missed something once before, and she can’t let that happen again.

Our roses are thriving in their Fall bloom stage.  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.  (If you know him in real life, you will not be at all surprised by this fact.)  As part of his clown duties, he learned how to make balloon animals.  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.  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.)  This cookbook stand turns out to be even more handy than I expected it to be.  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.  And makes me less likely to spill food on them while I’m cooking.  But the best part?  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.  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.  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.