Something savory, something sweet, and something to wet your whistle

Excess is a word that captures this Thanksgiving pretty well. We had such an excessive amount of food that we've got meals covered for the rest of the long weekend and the next week, easily. But we also found ourselves surrounded with an excess of good company and laughter, something it's been harder for us to find since landing in the US a few years ago. Sure, a pandemic hitting just after Nicolas hit his one-year in the US didn't help, but overall this country has been the loneliest place that we've made home as a couple, so yesterday was a beautiful change in pace, with over twenty guests joining us for our very first party in our new home - pix on that to come soon!

A sneak peek at our Thanksgiving tables at our new home and some portion of the meal as we all dove in.

We prepared the turkey, as usual, but among the other dishes we prepared were a few delicious and definitely blog-worthy specials. I won't bore you with a typical recipe-blog-post style multi-paragraph story about how this food and drink transformed their lives or some other nonsense I always have to scroll through to get the good stuff. With no further ado, some classics - one that first made our Thanksgiving repertoire in 2020, and two new ones that made their debut yesterday: Cream Cheese Mashed Potatoes, Vanilla Orange Candied Cranberries & a Cranberry Gin Fizz

Cream Cheese Mashed Potatoes

Pre-mashing: get a load of all that cream cheese!

Ingredients (10 servings):

• 5 Pounds Russet Potatoes
• 8 Ounces Cream Cheese
• 1 Stick Butter
• ½ - 1 Cup Milk
• 1 Teaspoon Salt
• 8 cloves of minced garlic
• ½ Teaspoon Pepper

Instructions:

1. Wash and peel the potatoes. Cut potatoes into 1 inch cubes. Place in a large pot, covering them completely with water. Boil the potatoes for 15-20 minutes until tender. Drain and return to pot.
2. Add cream cheese, butter, milk*, and seasoning. *Start with just a half cup of milk. After mashing, add more milk as needed to achieve desired potato consistency.

Vanilla Orange Candied Cranberries

Ingredients (12 servings):

• 3 3/4 cups sugar, divided
• 1 3/4 cups water
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 teaspoons Grand Marnier
• 12 ounces fresh cranberries

Instructions:

1. In a sauce pan, mix 2 ½ cups of sugar and all the vanilla, Grand Marnier, and water. Heat over medium until all the sugar has dissolved into a simple syrup without allowing it to boil.
2. Remove from heat and mix in the cranberries, ensuring they are all submerged in the simple syrup by placing a plate atop the sauce pan.
3. Leave the sauce pan in the refrigerator overnight.
4. Strain the cranberries, saving the vanilla-orange-cranberry simple syrup for cocktails!
5. Place the remaining sugar in a rimmed dish. Roll them in the sugar until they are coated, transfer to a baking sheet, and let dry for one hour.
6. Once the sugar has hardened, store in an air tight container in the fridge until ready to serve.
   

Cranberry Gin Fizz

Ingredients (8 servings):

• 2 lemons
• 1 orange
• 3 cups dry gin
• 2 cups ginger beer
• 2 cups vanilla-orange-cranberry simple syrup
• handful of candied cranberries (garnish)
• mint (optional garnish)

Instructions:

1. Squeeze the lemons.
2. Mix the lemon juice, vanilla-orange-cranberry simple syrup, and gin.
3. Slice the orange, add to the pitcher, and muddle with a wooden spoon.
4. Mix.
5. Top with candied cranberries, ginger beer, and mint (optional).
6. Enjoy!

Those three recipes are just a small sampling of the multitude of flavors that filled our day. Hope that you were lucky enough to have an equally warm and yummy Thanksgiving surrounded by wonderful people.

Boosted!

Vaxxed and now boosted. Bring on the holidays!

me: 3 / Covid: 0

News!

By now this is week-old news, but here you have it!

I'm not sure this answers the question posed at the start of this blog - how does an expat "come home" after a decade abroad? One thing we've learned is that the US will never be 100% home. We left our hearts in Paris and probably won't "find home" until the day we move back, but our finances and our careers have other ideas for now. What does feel special is that we've broken the holding pattern we've been in since moving to the US: hunkering down, lining our savings accounts, living in tiny spaces with roommates, and paying our monthly rent in places that would never be ours. The roommate situation might not be changing for now, and we'll still be adult-bunk-bedding in our king size loft, so this isn't a 100% leap into full adulthood. But there are some big wins: we'll finally have a slice of our very own outdoors, a major gift to the fur babies. And we've finally escaped that landlord middle-layer. After the trauma of our arbitrary eviction back in 2017 from a beloved home for which we'd always paid rent, just because our landlord felt like taking it back, these keys in hand feel like a massive weight off my shoulders. It's funny to think that this is what home ownership looks like. I'd always imagined the big day would involve falling in love with the perfect home. This isn't that, but it's the right next step for us, and a very sensible two-bed two-bath in a charming community in a nice part of Emeryville, just a few miles from our previous place in downtown Oakland. And it'll soon be home. Here's to next steps, even if they aren't the big leaps once envisioned.

A few more themes

The ink has dried on our notarized contract signed two full days ago, and the final countdown has officially begun! While we wait to get our hands on the keys, I've been getting mine on a few more works of art. Etsy is just such a magical place.

 Theme: Boss Ladies with Fins
Remember those "few charmers" I off-handedly introduced at the end of my last post? Don't ever trust me to let the strays stay that way. The mermaid riso print from Four Eyes Illustration is now paired up with another mermaid riso print from artist Doriane Millet. I'm expecting these works will land somewhere around my desk space in a corner of our future bedroom.

Theme: Black Girl Magic
I've been trying to be more conscious of the default whiteness that exists in art depicting people. The fact that not all of us get to see ourselves equally reflected in art really eats at me, and I want to make sure that our home doesn't further propagate that issue. So when I stumbled across Tabitha Brown's prints, whose beautiful designs, vibrant colors, and modern style work perfectly with the look we're building for our living/dining spaces, I knew they were a must-have.

Theme: My cup of tea
The top of this pair, a piece from Anne-Julie Aubry, isn't entirely new to me - it's something that's been hanging in our current home for a few months now, but I'd like to port it over to our future home. I'm imagining it'll fit snugly into a corner of our bedroom, maybe near my desk and those riso mermaid prints. After a very long hunt for a proper pairing, I was excited to come across the works of Carlos C. Lainez. I had put a rule down that I wouldn't buy any new cat art for our home since the three feline residents already do enough to express our cat crazy without our walls doing just the same, but I found this piece to be so unique that it was worth bending the rules.

Theme: Cats!
Last but not least, these limited edition prints that I'd purchased from Jane Ormes back in 2016 for our big move to Brighton might just make the cut - we'll see once we've begun settling in.

We've also managed to frame the little piece of Brighton art that we'd used as the marker for our table of honor at our wedding back in 2017 as well as a photo or two from the big day, something that's never actually reached any of our walls in the nearly 5 years since. The only thing left on the docket is the potential purchase of a decorative clock or two. Nicolas may have won the fight on the front to actually have me wait until we move in before purchasing something. But there's still time, so no promises. 😅

T minus 4 days until - yes, I'll put it in writing - Nicolas and I will officially become home owners!

Themes 2.0

 Who are we kidding, was I ever going to stop with a reasonable set of three different decor themes for different walls? Releasing me into the depths of my Etsy app is like sending an unsupervised kid into a candy shop. Zero self restraint. So what the heck, why not, here are a few more inspirations and charming internet finds from the past half-week.

How about a wall of Parisian cityscapes from UK-based Emy Lou Holmes on Etsy?

Or maybe some California landscapes from Netherlands-based Laura Amiss?

And why stop here when you can toss in a few random charmers into the mix?

I need all these right? From top to bottom, a limited edition print from our favorite Danish brewer Mikkeller, an original mermaid riso print from Four Eyes Illustration, and an image of one of the most uplifting moments from the day we said goodbye to Trump sold by Etsy's kto Art Studio.

Themes

I've been spending more time than usual lately on Etsy and RedBubble, pairing art works to create themes:

A places-we've-called-home theme from Good Egg Print Studios on Etsy

A foodie theme from Teo Zirinis's Red Bubble shop

A monsters theme - and yes, that's a raccoon between Godzilla and Big Foot 😂- from (clockwise from the top) Etsy's Studio 2 is 3, Zum Heimathafen shop, and Annie Bailey Art.

I'm very intentionally trying to steer clear of my penchant for excessive cat decor. I'm afraid the three-cat household already speaks volumes when it comes to my crazy cat lady status. The least I can do is build a slightly more diversified decor. 

By now you know where I'm heading with all this. After all, I did mention that our Eurotrip led to some bigger post-trip news. Still, let's wait until we've dotted all our i's and crossed our t's before we make it all blog-post-official.

A Pandemic Eurotrip

By mid-July, it seemed pretty clear that we'd actually be allowed to take the France portion of the trip we'd booked back during our Christmas "vacation," which we'd spent primarily on our couch in our living room in Oakland, California, thousands of miles from our standard Christmas crowd. England, on the other hand, wasn't looking so bright. On their big July 19 re-open, quarantine-free border crossings were opened up for all of western Europe *except* France. After four hours on hold with customer service, we managed to change our SF → Paris/London → SF round-trip to a simple SF ↔ Paris, we re-worked our easy week-in-Paris/week-in-England to a grand Tour de France, and everything seemed set. That is, until the week before our departure when England had a change of heart. Suddenly we had to sort out how to squeeze a quick stop across the Channel.

This entire trip was originally planned around two weddings just twelve days apart, one in Brittany and the other in Southern England. With all pandemic-related travel restrictions lifted with mere weeks to spare, we could hardly miss either. Nor could we cancel the Tour de France and let down all the very enthusiastic family and friends along the route. Suddenly our much awaited trip became a jam-packed adventure. Forget relaxation, this was a Eurotrip on steroids.

For lack of mental bandwidth, I'm afraid this post won't be much more than a photo dump. But, given that this blog is my glorified photo album, I think that will suffice. And after all, the most exciting part of this pandemic Eurotrip unfurled in the weeks since we've returned Stateside. Stay tuned!

We spent our first weekend abroad in Brittany to celebrate the wedding of Odile & Tancrède.

After Brittany, we got to enjoy a couple of days in the City of Lights, spending time with old friends and discovering a fantastic new ice cream destination in Alain Ducasse.

Next stop, Beaune! Only took me 8 visits to finally check out the Hospices, a rare example of a perfectly preserved medieval hospital. We met up with Nicolas's dad, Serge, on this leg of our journey.

Serge took us over the border to Geneva for a day filled with hiking, swimming, and fine dining.

Southward-bound, we next hit up Lyon where I fell in love with an adorable little tea salon called Le Luminarium.

In Crest, Nicolas and I finally got to meet his youngest (for now) nephew, Merlin, who's had some time to do some serious growing up since the start of the pandemic.

Our final destination in France, the Ile de Porquerolles, gave us our first and only day of proper vacationing, a world away from all our responsibilities, in a perfect slice of Mediterranean France.

We managed to cross yet another international border, entering post-Brexit England for the very first time to see Emma and Pete finally tie the knot - third time's the charm! (Third not for the actually getting married bit but for the scheduling and planning it all out.) En route to Battle, we squeezed in an evening in London with old friends and a proper British pub dinner, followed up the next morning with our breakfast of champions: scones and clotted cream.