the weekend of not-what-I-expected

Happy Monday, friends!  Can you believe it's Thanksgiving week?  I always love the days leading up to a holiday. 

 

As promised, I would like to report on the new recipes we tried out over the weekend.  On Friday, I made Spicy Pork Sandwiches with Cilantro Slaw.  The pork cooked for six hours and made the house smell great.  I honestly couldn't wait to eat it.  So I sampled a little bit before dinner time and BOY was it spicy.  And I know that it's called "Spicy Pork".  But really- this was serious.  Not at all what I expected.  I even used less peppers than called for, as suggested in the recipe for those that like less heat. 

 

It was really the sauce that was spicy, and, thankfully, the sauce ends up being separate from the pork.  Each time we ate this pork over the weekend, we used a little less sauce, until the final time when we just ate the meat with some plain old barbecue sauce on it.  The meat was super tasty and, if you like to sweat while you eat, the sauce had a nice flavor too. 

 

Saturday night we went to see "Babes in Toyland" at our favorite community theater.  Do you know the storyline?  No?  Well, I didn't either.  But I'd certainly heard of it and assumed, wrongly as it turns out, that it was a holiday play.  Am I the only one?  It has "toyland" in the title, for goodness sake! 

 

"Babes in Toyland" is not a holiday play.  There is one song at the end where they mention the word "Christmas", but otherwise it is a sort of Mother Goose story variation with several love triangles and a couple of evil villains who turn out to be halfway decent guys.  Thankfully, Steve can make almost anything fun, so we laughed our way through it and made friends with the people seated next to us. 

 

Last night, we cooked dinner together and tried the Chicken with Mustard Cream Sauce.  It was so, so good.  Five stars.  The sauce has whipping cream, and wine (plus the whiskey we added for good measure), and lots of garlic, so it really would be hard to go wrong.  I am seriously looking forward to eating it again tonight.  As the sauce is semi-heavy, we made some green beans with pearl onions as a side dish and it was just right. 

 

Today I am making chicken stock and sewing up some more men's scarves for the shop- we had a run on scarves this weekend and are all out!  Possibly early Christmas shoppers, or just people who are cold.  Speaking of Christmas shopping- have you started yet?  Steve and I worked on a list over the weekend, but haven't really gotten serious about it.