Simon's birthday, Nowruz, hide and seek (by SEA Zara)

We cooked today.

Literally.

It was Simon's birthday! He was turning 20, and we wanted to host Jeff for dinner, so we did a huge feast thing. Simon said he didn't want anything special for his b-day, so we said, "Amazing. We'll just decorate the house and also invite Jeff (environmental history and policy prof) and also do a seven course meal for the Persian equinox, also known as Nowruz." Simon said, "Perfect, sounds great, I'll help cook." 

The menu:
Senjed (dried oleaster): love and compassion - we made charcuterie for this; didn't have oleaster, so olives were a very close substitute
Seer (garlic): health, medicine, self-care - we made bruschetta, which was quite garlic-y and delish
Somaq (sumac): color of the sunrise, the triumph of good over evil - cuke salad with feta, sumac, lemon, garlic, s+p; topped with crushed red pepper and fresh mint
Serkeh (vinegar): patience, wisdom, aging - fish and chips were attempted. chips were consumed. need i say more?
Sabzeh (lentil sprouts): rebirth and growth - our lentils were of the unsprouted variety, but we made dal, which was so so good. I think it may have been the favorite real dish of the night...
Seeb (apple): beauty, heath, vitality - apple cake with brown butter cinnamon cream cheese frosting (mostly sour, not too sweet), pictured below as Simon blows the candles out
Samanoo (sweet wheat sprout pudding): affluence, strength, fertility - shockingly, we couldn't find germinated wheat sprouts— or pre-germinated wheat sprouts— so we made a thoughtful substitute of rice pudding! It was theoretically going to be brown rice so it was nutty, but we only had jasmine rice. And I put so much cinnamon... yum. And there was caramel on top! I also made that, so it was the hard + sticky kind, and I had softened it before serving, but it got really hard really fast because the pudding was cold...

We started around 8:30 this morning, or as Capt. Allison would say, 0830. The first step was to brown the butter, because I wanted it to set before making the frosting (foreshadowing). We did a bunch of other prep so that there would be less to do later which was mostly dessert stuff. I baked the cakes, Simon chopped one million very juicy tomatoes for the bruschetta, and the butter browned. When it was done, I poured it into the bowl and was looking for a spot in the fridge. We went shopping pretty recently, so the fridge was quite full (foreshadowing). I poured the freshly browned butter in a nice glass bowl (foreshadowing), and put it on one of the open door shelves in the fridge (so much foreshadowing, ohmygod). 

Probably two hours later, I was eating a little lunchy snack, and I opened the fridge. The bowl had inched towards the edge of the shelf, dangerously close to falling off (do you get what's about to happen?). I pushed it back, naive to the world. 

Not even two minutes later... CRASH! The delightful glass bowl filled with delicious browned butter was now on the floor, all intermingled shard-wise. Tragic. 

We made more. 

Don't worry. 

The rest of the cooking went pretty seamlessly. Again, shoutout to the dal I made, it was fire. Very tasty

Lowkey, the fish might have been bad too... the votes were pretty even across the spread as loosely demonstrated here:

"For the record, the fish was definitely bad." - Lyra
"This is just what tilapia tastes like" - Sophie
"I couldn't even choke it down. It might be poison." - Simon (fish chef)
"It's normal." - Natalie

Pictures to prove it happened:

Simon's b-day and Lyra singing.

The plan.

Dinner party with Jeff!

So much food. There was way more than was in this pic.

Everybody had a delightful time. (Tenny, Etta, Natalie, Ciaran, Cami, Lyra, Kate, Jeff, Quin, Everett. Me, Simon, Liam, and Sophie did not make the photo...)

More party.

And we decorated the night before! We all stayed up quite late to make it all fun for the next day.

Sardines. We hid in the archives in Madden basement and all squished into some crazy places. What's crazy is that the round before when we were doing normal hide and seek, I hid in the rafters and people walked underneath me approximately one million times. And no one found me! You must understand how surprised I was when the exact same hiding place was filled with people when we did sardines. *sigh*

So I totally forgot to write about hide and seek, I realize. We ended up playing three rounds of normal hide and seek (I was the seeker, got found once, and then hid in the rafters and didn't get found) and then two rounds of sardines. The first was inside (pic above), and the second was outside. The outside round was so fun until we realized that we might all be covered in a thin layer of ticks crawling everywhere. Apparently MA has ticks. Gross. I feel violated by the tiny buggers. 

That's all for now, maybe I'll do another post before I go to sea.

Tour de New England: Ski Edition

We've got Ikon Passes and we're not afraid to use them!

Some of us - the under-employed and under-enrolled (at the moment) subset of the family - took an epic 9 day sojourn up to Maine and Vermont for some truly excellent (though yes, still east coast) skiing. AJ and I remained home holding down the fort at school and work, and since I don't know because I wasn't there, all I have to present to you, dearest readers, are a smattering of pictures. Perhaps Z will hop on and tell a few stories.

In the meantime, the short version is Z and W ventured to deepest, darkest Maine aka Sugarloaf. Met up with Nick, had a blast skiing some Glades and some Moguls and some Terrain Parks and some Ice Rinks and all of the rest of the mountain, too. Since 5 days is the limit for Ikon at Sugarloaf, they took the party on the road to Killington and spent another 3 days there. As fas as I can tell, everyone had an awesome time. And for context, the last picture is a dramatic rendering of the knee pain/injuries that would have ensued had our crew taken a particularly dodgy run they opted against. NO actual knees were busted in the takng fo this trip!

Snowshoe Party!

Some of us have to go to work, or school. Other of us are peeps of leisure who are in between projects or on a slightly extended winter break since they don't leave for semester abroad for another month. Guess which ones of us got to go on a day trip to Snowshoe??

Happy Solstice-ukah!

And the holiday collabs continue. This year the 8th (and final) night of Chanukah very conveniently fell on the (winter) solstice. So we got to combine 2 different fire rituals in one super fun (and luckily not super cold) night. We're still working out the details of our solstice celebration, but we've got the key element of beautifully decorated log containing each person's "leave behind in this year/bring into the next one" written and folded and tucked in notes that we then burn in our fire pit... and also that somehow solstice bonfire is the perfect time to burn up excess yard waste as well. Not so sure that's a formal celebration element more just a happy coincidence? Top 2 pics are the majority of our celebrants and aforementioned log, and bottom ones are the various fires. Darkest day is now behind us, nowhere to go but light!

Welcome to U16

AJ's team won their bracket at the Blue Ridge Cup!

It's a good thing there are other parents who take good soccer pics, because I simply cannot. Thanks to Jen and Crystal and I believe Heather W for the awesome snaps. Much appreciated!

Return of the Mystery Maze

Z was going to go climbing in the Red (aka Red River Gorge) with their Obie buddy, but that plan fell through which was kinda sad for Z as they love to climb, but was also nice for the rest of us because we got a surprise bonus week of Zara time!

We took the opportunity of said bonus Z time to do some fun Fall things, and that includes going to the corn maze. When the kiddos were younger we'd often do the "big" maze at Liberty Mills, usually at night/by flashlight, but we've since moved on to a new challenge. These days the group seems to prefer the "mystery maze" which is basically 8 acres of mapless madness, designed to challenge the most inherently direction centered peeps. In a previous incarnation we had 5 for the maze, and this time it was just 3 of us so one of our primary strategies (leave one person behind while everyone else fans out and checks for dead ends vs the way through) was less effective since we either had only 2 checking paths or 3 of us would go but the water bottle we left to mark out place wasn't very responsive to our cries of "Marco." It took us 2:20 to finish the maze (about 30 min longer than our last attempt, though also that was different maze?) and we "lost the plot" at least twice. There was a bit of (educated?) guessing involved, but I generaly stand by our maze conquering skills.

First Day of School: 15th Grade (3rd Year at Oberlin)

Ok so actually only one of these pics is a first day of school, but dorm move in and bike acquisition are key moments in college life. Z's back in Tank, in a single this time which they are THRILLED about, and taking 3rd year at Oberlin by storm. They are only on campus for Fall term because they will be spending Spring term in Woods Hole (Cape Cod) and then on a 6 week blue water voyage between St. Croix and Cape Cod researching micro-plastics in the Sargasso Sea, but that's another series of posts. Have a kickin' Fall term, kiddo!

First Day of School: 10th Grade

AJ started 10th grade, and drive themselves (heavily supervised by Wes, of course) to school today to start off their sophomore year of high school. Have a fantastically amazing school year, kiddo!

Have I mentioned the Rocks?

Hanging out at Second Rule, getting ready to climb

A random cave with a bunch of animal bones - something that looked pelvis-y, maybe dog sized, and lots of smaller bones too.

Z and N sizing up Winter Harvest

This was truly unposed, and at the time I didn't even realize Nick and Z were "standing" on Charlie's feet! Wes checking either food hours or weather. Possibly both.

Had a super fun time at Reed's Creek! Everyone climbed the 5.7 Second Rule (Zara led it, Charlie cleaned it) and then a combo of Zara and Nick lead Winter Harvest, which included some extreme MacGyvering of running the stick clip up to Nick who was 50 or so feet in the air, but apparently they've been there, done that and have already perfected this technique and it just seemed awesomely improv'd. Charlie slayed the top rope version, with yours truly belaying, and while Wes would have liked a crack at it, it was getting late and people were getting hungry. We ended up grabbing a smorgasbord of random but real food at the Sheetz in Petersburg, because even on a Saturday nothing is open after 8pm out here. A good day off was had by all.