Gatlingurg Birthday Celebration 2009

We went to Gatlingburg, TN to celebrate our 29th birthdays on Sept 24-28, 2009. We stayed at a wonderful cabin complete with hot tub, jacuzzi, cable television, a pool table, a newly remodeled kitchen, and an amazing view of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. We had a very relaxing weekend cooking in the cabing, drinking wine, doing some hiking. Map of the Park (This is a map of the entire park. All of the trails we were on are on the map but you are going to have to zoom in to see it.) On that Friday we went to the Cosby entrance and hiked down the Gabes Mountain Trail to Hen Wallow Falls (approx 3 mi one way). There is a large campground at the Cosby entrance but it's currently shut down due to the high bear traffic. There were signs posted "WARNING: BEARS" at the start of our trail. But there were several people around and no bears in sight. On our way back, with maybe a half mile or less to go, there is a bear in the middle of the trail just sniffing around. Brian and I turn tail and run like scared little girls. I don't think the bear even saw us or registered that the 2 of us were running for what we think is our lives. We go a long distance back and wait for 2o min (an eternity) before we try the trail again. This bear was keeping me from the comfort and safety of my car! We did not see the bear on our second attempt down the last bit of the trail, but we were certainly hightailing it out of there too.

On Saturday, it rained. No seriously for like 12 straight hours. The roof leaked slightly after about 8 hrs but that stopped when the rain stopped. The power went off for about an hour that evening but luckly we already had dinner. We played Nintendo Wii for several hours (was really glad we brought it), sat in the hot tub in the rain, played pool, watched TV and drank various sorts of wine all day.

On Sunday we drove out to Clingman's Dome (also on the map, just south of Gatlinburg) where we hit the Appalachian Trail (AT) for a few hours. Clingman's Dome is the highest point on the AT, so we started at the top and hiked down for a few hours, and then turned around and hiked back. We looked like rough and tumble mountaineers compared to the folks milling around in flip flops at the viewing platform. We had people asking us about hiking the AT ("Ummm... if you look that way you'll see Maine") like we actually knew something about it. I have no idea how far we went down the trail but we are guessing about 2 miles one way. We saw bear poop and I think a bear house (hollowed out old tree) but no bears until... on the drive out on this tiny road all of a a sudden traffic stops because a small bear is having lunch on the side of the road. It never really looks at the 10 or so cars backed up to look at it. I'm dangling halfway out of my window to get pictures of it feeling so much braver in the safety of the fearsome Saturn. That night we head into Gatlinburg for dinner at the Smoky Mountain Brewery. Good beer and decent pub food. and of course, I had to go get some fudge. :)

All in all it was a wonderful birthday trip!

Hiking in August 2009

We have been doing a lot of hiking in the last few months at many of the parks in Middle Tennessee. The pictures in the slide show are from Radnor Lake State Park. We made a circle around the lake starting from the Garner Ridge Trail on the east side, to the Lake trail, around the spillway to the South Lake trail. Map I'm not entirely sure of distances because we added several short trails together.

Next in this slideshow is Long Hunter State Park where we took the Day Loop Trail (about 4 miles). Map. We had plans to venture down the Volunteer Trail but these trails were a bit...primitive... and not well traveled. So it was slow going. We were used to the well maintained and well traveled paths at Percy Warner and Radnor Lake.

More Pictures

I'm playing around with how I post my pictures. Kodak Gallery is giving me some trouble, so I started playing around with Photobucket. I'm still learning how to use it but so far I like it. It's been really easy to get the pictures into my photobucket account and then really really easy to get those pictures to the blog. I would like some feedback on how I get the pictures to the blog- Did you like the Kodak Gallery better (See Quebec City post below) or some of the photobucket posts?

Late Summer 2009

Pictures from Late Spring/Summer 2009

Photos you see here are from Grant's birthday and our trip to the Nashville Zoo from May 2009 and June 2009.

Pictures from Quebec City

I'm finally setting down and updating pictures from the last few months. In July we traveled to Quebec City for Brian's conference NSREC. It was so beautiful there, and there was quite a bit to do. While Brian and his coworkers were doing conference stuff, I was left to wander the Canadian countryside with others from the group. My good friend Holly was there with her husband, and she and I spent quite a bit of time together eating our way through the various sites. They have top notch food there. :)

Click here for Pictures

There will be more pictures to come, but as this is technically a blog you will see those posts before you get to this one. It's a work in progress.

Bonjour!

Greetings from Quebec City! This is me in front of the St. Lawrence river. We are having a great time, and there will be more pictures to come. But we are doing well in Canada!

San Diego Pictures

I thought it would be a good idea to get pictures up from our last trip before the next trip, so here is a small selection of pictures from our trip to San Diego. We had over 1000 pics, and I tried to keep this under 200. :) Enjoy!

Click here for San Diego Pictures

Amish Friendship Bread

Our friends Jon and Holly gave us a starter for Amish Friendship Bread.  If you haven't had it before its a quite tasty "dessert" bread full of sugary goodness.  The starter grows in 10 day cycles.  At the end of the cycle the starter is big enough to seperate into 4 batches.  Each batch can be used to make 2 loaves of bread or start anew as a starter.  You can quickly see that if maintained, the initial starter will grow geometrically and produce ridiculous amounts of batches.  

How much growth?  Let us consider the a world in which I maintain the starters and hold off on making bread until Christmas.  There are > 220 days from now until Christmas.  That means the starter can go through 22 iterations.  After 22 cycles I will have 4^22 batches, approximately 17.6 trillion batches.  Forget Santa, an amish bread loaf for everyone on Christmas day.  This begs the question how much other ingredients do I need to bake (2*4^22) about 35.2 loaves of bread.  

Let's first examine the recipe.  To maintain the starter, you need to add ingredients on day 6 and day10.

For each Batch

Day 6

1 cup each of flour, milk, and sugar 

Day 10

1.5 cups each of milk, and sugar (no flour)

Every batch can produce 2 loaves of bread, the recipe for the bread is the following:

3 eggs

1 cup of Oil

1/2 cup of milk

1 cup of sugar

2 cups of flour

2 tsp. cinnamon

1 1/2 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp vanilla

1/2 tsp of baking soda

1/2 tsp of salt

1 Large box of instant vanilla pudding

Now I can calculate the approximate total amounts of ingredients for (2*4^22) 35.2 loaves of Amish friendship bread.  I converted teaspoons to cups (48 tsp in 1 cup).  Instead of performing all the calculations by hand a wrote a quick script in Python to figure this out for me.

Ingredients (approx.)

52.8 trillion eggs

17.6 trillion cups of oil

23.5 trillion cups of milk

32.3 trillion cups of sugar

41.0 trillion cups of flour

0.7 trillion cups of cinnamon

0.5 trillion cups of baking powder

0.2 trillion cups of vanilla

0.2 trillion cups of baking soda

0.2 trillion cups of salt

17.6 trillion large boxes of instant vanilla pudding

1 batch of bread (2 loaves) takes 1 hour in 350 degree oven.  Assuming I can find enough volunteers, ovens, and time, how much coal does TVA have to burn for me to bake 35.2 trillion loaves of bread.....

Sunny San Diego

It's taken me a few days to figure out how to post to the blog from the blackberry but here we are. So far things here have been just fine. Yesterday was Brian's presentation and it went well. We went to the beach on Sunday to walk around, and I've never seen so many people at the beach before in my life. Pictures will most likely come when we get home. Right now I am sitting at an out door mall drinking the only sweet tea in California and enjoying the shade. It's been unseasonablly hot here so far. I think the hot and dry is messing with my sinuses slightly. I'll just have to suffer through, right?

Go Go Gadget Metabolism

So in an effort to be more accountable about working out, I'm going to attempt to post once a week about my progress and/or laziness.

Last week I worked out Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and.... and... well I meant to workout more.  I really need to workout 5-6 times a week, but I can't really be too dissapointed in 3 times.

I worked out today too.  As usual it was two 30 minute sessions.  However, the heart rate monitor was having issues with transmitting/receiving, so the first 30 minutes I did on cardio mode.  It is a trapezoid of resistance.  I spent 18 minutes at level 11 resisitance, 6 minutes building up and 6 minutes building down.  The second session I was covered in enough sweat the heart monitor had no trouble doing heart rate mode.

I weighed in at 236.8 lbs.  I feel like I'm back on track on my goal of another 10 lbs.  This was only a few tenths of a lbs more than where I left off last Wednesday.  I suppose my metabolism is starting to increase.  Back in January and February any time off meant weight gain.  I was shocked last week that I really hadn't gained that much from being lazy for two weeks.  Regardless even if my metabolism is increasing, I can't count on it to keep me from gaining weight when I don't work out for stretches at a time.  It will decrease probably faster than it will increase.

I'm quite happy to be at 236.8lbs today.  This week I will get in at least 5 work outs and the result will be 232 lbs.

Damn You Scuba Steve

How dare you call me out!?!? The reason why there have been no updates is there hasn't been any progress, almost regression. After feeling that I accomplished something by losing 10 pounds, I celebrated by not working out. Its amazing how quickly you lose routine and how much of a chore it feels like to workout after you've stopped for a few days. Then you start to feel really guilty and slightly ashamed. You almost don't want to workout because you don't want to see how much weight you gained back. Sure I lost 10 pounds, but 238 isn't where I want to be, and I'm going to just go back up to 250 if I don't workout.

Anyway excuses really don't mean anything. They aren't going to help me lose weight. I regained my motivation again this evening. I got back on the elliptical and did another two 30 minute sessions. Afraid of being something like 245 I even had my wife turn away when I weighed myself. I was completely shocked to be at 238.5 lbs. So I consider myself lucky and its time to get myself down to 228 lbs.

Brian

10 Pounds!

I suppose you can call it a New Years resolution.  Since January 13th, I've been actively working to lose weight.  Today I've dropped 10 lbs since December 29th.   I'm quite excited since this was my first tangible goal.  

What are my goals?  Well I'm taking this in 10 lbs increments.  So my most recent goal is now 228 lbs.  Next I would love to be no longer in the "obese" category of Body Mass Index (BMI).  For a 6 foot tall person, dropping below 221 lbs the BMI category changes from obese to overweight.  I'm really shocked I'm considered obese.  That's the highest weight category.  I would think there'd be something higher, maybe fluffy or even just $@&#$.  I'm currently in the same category as some guy who can't even leave his bed because he's too fat.  Far off goals would include sub-200 lbs, and leaving overweight category of BMI and reaching normal (184lbs).  Those are so far off, I can't even image myself those weights.  I really don't have a timeline, other than steady improvement.  

How am I losing weight?  Well starting with Jan 13th, I've been exercising.  Each data point on the above chart corresponds to a day I worked out.  Back in January,  we dug out an old exercise equipment Anna owned, called Tony Little's Gazelle Edge.  I don't really recommend it.  I has nearly zero resistance.  In order to sustain a good workout I had to combine it with a heart rate monitor and 5lbs leg weights.  It took me 15 minutes just to reach my target heart rate and it was really easy for it to drop out of my target range.   However, I still worked at it and would do two 30 minutes sessions.  What I really liked about it was I could entertain myself with the TV and their was no impact on my shins.  At the end of the workout I was quite happy of not needing to ice my shins with bags of frozen peas.  At the beginning of February we upgraded to a real piece of exercise equipment, an elliptical,  Sole E25.  Yes it put a dent in our savings, and yes it takes up quite a bit of valuable space in our living room, but losing weight is really important to us.  We vow not to let it collect dust like most exercise equipments you see in people's homes.  Again I work out in two 30 minute sessions.  I usually have it on the heart rate setting, the Sole E25 has its own heart rate monitor that allows the elliptical to dynamically adjust resistance to keep you near your preset target heart rate.  I'll take a 5-10 minute break between the 30 minute sessions.  We monitor our progress using the Nintendo Wii Fit.  

  Anna said to tell you that she's extremely proud of me.  I'm proud of her also.  She is also working out with goals of weight loss.  Unfortunately, its much more difficult for her. The biggest issue she is working against is her work schedule.  While I'm able to work out in the evenings after work, she cannot.  When you work a 12 hour shift all you have time for outside of work is maybe a meal and sleep.  It unreasonable to think she would have enough energy (she doesn't) and sacrifice valuable sleep to exercise on days she works.  Anna is working on days she has off, but progress is much slower than me.  Regardless of all this, she keeps putting in a good 60 minutes on days she has off.  I do think we'll see progress, and I'm extremely proud she's keeps working at it.

Food Menu Feb 15th-21st

Thoughts on past dishes:

Wed (Feb 11):  We had pork, fennel, and roasted red pepper stew.  It went on top of rice, so I guess it really wasn't a stew.  I liked the fennel, onion,s and red pepper and the sauce was good too.  Using rice was a nice touch also.  Unfortunately the pork was dry and tastless.  I'm not really sure why, its a slow cooker shouldn't everything be juicy.  I may have over-browned the diced pork, or maybe we chose the wrong cut at the store.  I think we could significantly improve this dish, we just need to give some serious thought on how to improve the pork.

Thurs: We went to Baja Frash before the hockey game.  Tacos are always a solid choice.

Friday: Anna worked Saturday night, so we had our valentines dinner.  We cook quite often, so its a nice opportunity to have a great meal without the work or cleanup.  We decided to be somewhat more budget concious this year, so instead of going someplace like Margots, we went to the Commerce Street Grille.  Its the restaurant attached to the Renaissance Hotel.  They advertised a special at the hockey game of a valentines dinner, bottle of wine, free valet for $75.  The food was what I expected for the cost.  The salads were standard, nothing inventive/creative.  For main course I had grouper stuffed with lobster and Anna had filet mignon and bacon wrapped scallops.  At first I thought my dish was a bust, the grouper by itself was not anything special.  However, it became fantastic once I included some of the lobster stuffing with each bite.  I especially enjoyed the spice to the lobster stuffing, I think there may have been diced jalepeno in it.  Sides included roasted asparagus and dirty rice.  The asparagus was good, and the rice seemed more of an afterthought of trying to include a starch on the plate.  Dessert was fantastic.  The plate had a long skinny dark chocolate brownie with chocolate moose.  It was a great combination of bitter chocolate and semi-sweet chocolate.  A big thin sheet of chocolate in the shape of a heart and a layered chocolate "pastry" (I think it had marzipan in it) were on the plate.  There was also a few strawberries and blueberries.  The wine was a cheap pinot noir.  I like pinot noir,  even cheap ones, I just ignored the bitey finish.  When we drove home we stopped by the wine store and picked up a bottle of rose champagne.  We had never had a champagne that was a rose until our honeymoon and wanted to have it again. 

Saturday:  Anna tried to stay in bed to prepare for work, but ended up getting up at 3pm because she was hungary and had some leftovers.  I didn't want to make anything major since she would only pick at it before she left for work at 6:15pm.  I picked up already cooked chicken breast "fajita style", and we had burrito/taco/tostada thing.  Not really sure exactly what to call it, it was just your standard meat, cheese, salsa, sour cream semi-folded into tortillas.

Sunday:  We baked frozen lasagna.  Is there a better frozen lasagna than Stouffers?  I can't imagine that there would be.  One of these days I'm going to try to make lasagna from scratch.  I just haven't because it would be quite involved, and I'm happily satisfied with Stouffers.

Monday:  Hockey game, but Anna had to do a peer review at work.  We had to drive straight to the game.  We ate dinner at the arena.  The Sommet Center doesn't seemed to have any impressive food options.  I had bbq pork nachos.  Anna used our last meal voucher and got a slice of pizza.

Tuesday:  Anna worked.  We had frozen pizza.  There is one Kroger near us that carries a wider selection of frozen pizzas.  We managed to find a Spicy Chicken Supreme from Digorno's.  I don't think any of the other nearby stores (including some other Krogers) carries it.

Wednesday:  I prepared fettucini in spicy cream sauce Tuesday night, so Anna would have something other than frozen food before work.  We got this recipe from my sister-in law, Cara.  The cream sauce includes onion, bell pepper, jalepeno, and garlic.  That may be my favorite combination to include in entres.  We always seem to have these vegetables on hand.  Anna has always made this dish before, this was my first time.  I didn't realize how involved the recipe was, there was even a step of tempering the sauce with sour cream.  I only learned the concept of tempering recently, so I was shocked that this recipe needed it.  Tempering is a method of adding a dairy product or eggs to a hot liquid.  Essentially when you want to avoid a potential of curdling.  Instead of directly adding the dairy/eggs to the hot liquid, you slowly stir in spoonfuls of hot liquid to the dairy/egg slowly raising its temp.  After about a cup you've finished tempering and you can then add  the dairy/egg mixture to the hot liquid.  

Upcoming Meals:

Thurs (Feb 19):  Hockey game, we've had 6 home games this month, that is a lot.  We'll either go to Blackstones or Baja Fresh.

Friday:  Shepherd's pie.  Well not the real version, the one we're making is more a caserole with crescent rolls bake on top.  We're using some venison my Dad skillfully acquired back in November.  Anna's mother, Jane, is coming to visit.  A lot of times when we have visitors, we try to plan a special meal.  We had already decided on shepherd's pie though.  While it isn't fancy, or contains any advanced cooking method, its a great comfort food and thus we didn't want to change our plans.  I've been excited about it all week.

Saturday:  We may be going out to the movies and thus may have dinner out.  Not sure though, we may put something together.

Food Menu Feb 7-14th

In an effort to post more often to the blog, I am going to try to write about something that interest me, food. Dinner schedules can be complicated: Anna does not have a set work schedule, I'm rarely home when she leaves, and sometimes we have hockey tickets. Ideally we also use the leftovers for our lunches too. We've discovered that its a lot easier to cook during the week when we have a plan. Every Sunday, Anna and I, sit down a create a menu and go shopping. My sister-in-law posts a sidebar on her blog with their upcoming menu. I'm not really sure what I have planned, but I don't think a sidebar is enough. Formatting will be a work in progress, assuming I do this regularly.

If you're interested in any meal, just let us know. I don't think any of our recipes are secrets.

Sunday night: Chicken, Goat Cheese and Roasted Red Pepper Pizza
We made the crust ourselves. It was a success in that it wasn't too soggy in the middle. In the past our crusts were not cooked in the center. However the crust was bland, the ends were not tasty and seemed to dry out my mouth. I'm not surprised though, we decided to make this at the last minute. We didn't have time to do a true crust, one that sits over night and goes through a bench proof. The recipe for this crust came out of the KitchenAid mixer manual. We left it for 1-2 hours to rise and thats it. We roasted a red-bell pepper ourselves, its pretty easy if you know how. The bulk of the cheese was mozzarella with blobs of goat cheese. Anna put a light coat of a marinara that advertised itself as being from Lynchburg, TN (Jack Daniels). Overall the pizza was extremely tasty. Even though the crust was lacking, you could only tell when eating the ends.

Monday night: Slow-cooker beef ribs
One of our slow-cooker cookbooks hyped up its ability to cook ribs. We've never tried until now. It may be one of the easiest slow-cooker dishes you can make, although that isn't saying much since most slow-cooker dishes are easy to put together. Essential you put the ribs in the pot, cover in bbq sauce of your choosing (we used a couple sauces that had been in our fridge and added some honey). Then you cook on low for 8+ hours. While they turned out tasty (... I may need a thesaurus) they were also very greasy. We didn't trim the fat of the ribs and it showed. Also unlike an oven, smoaker, grill where the fat can drip away, it cannot do that in the slow-cooker. Maybe it won't be so fatty with pork ribs.

Tuesday night: Ham, peas, and penne pasta caserole
We thawed out leftover chrismas ham, tossed it into our dutch oven with cooked penne, frozen peas, and a tomato-onion-creamy cheese sauce, and baked. Its your standard caserole, almost all the ingredients can be swapped with something similar, and it produces good results every time. Unfortunately I didn't get this ready until 15 minutes before Anna had to leave for work. The sauce did not sit long enough to firm up and was more soupy than intended. Oh well, still tasted great, and makes perfect leftovers.

Wednesday night: Pork, Fennel, and Roasted Red Pepper Stew.
Another slow-cooker recipe, these work really well given our schedule. Anna and I are starting to become souped/stewed out for the season. I picked this recipe because it has a completely different flavor profile than anything we've had all winter. We're not roasting the red peppers ourselves, and instead are just using the kind you can get in a jar. I'm torn, I'm excited to try something new, but at the same time I'm tired of soup/stew.

Thursday night: Hockey game, we'll probably stop at Baja Fresh or Panera.

Friday night: We're having our valentines dinner at Commerce Street Grill. I hope the place is good. I've really been wanting to try Margot's, but we found a really good deal at Commerce Street Grill. Given that we've been budeting our money, it was difficult to say no to Margots. However we're probably going to spend 1/2 to 1/4 less.

Saturday night: Nothing planned. Anna works this night so she'll be counting on me to come up with something.

Well, I'm not sure if you really cared about what we're eating, but thats really not the point. I want to write to the blog more, and I may do so by blogging about something I love and is new each week.

Brian

Wedding Slideshow

This just came in from the wedding photographer not long ago. I have no idea how long this will be availalbe for so enjoy it while it lasts! Also, those of you who still have dial up might have a hard time loading it. I'm not sure I would try. Sorry, guys.


http://www.sonrisephoto.com/slideshow/anna_brian/

6 months of pictures

Ok, so I'm a little behind... but I did manage to get some pictures of the last 6 months downloaded into picture galleries for your viewing pleasure. Sorry I'm such a slacker.

View Me First

View Me Second

View Me Third

This should take you the Kodak Gallery, and just click on "View Slideshow" that should be somewhere on the right side of the page. hopefully.