This post is not about ladybugs.

This particular family friend used to give my dad the same gift every Christmas – a shoebox wrapped in lovely holiday paper (she even individually wrapped the lid and bottom so that it could stay pretty all year) filled with almond roca. I freaking loved that stuff, but of course it was for my dad so I couldn’t have it very often. Usually just on Christmas and other holiday-type occasions that she felt like making it for. It wasn’t often.

After I moved out on my own, I realized I wouldn’t be seeing her as often and therefore would not get to partake in chocolate-toffee-almondy goodness. What followed was natural: I would find out how to make my own.

I found a recipe… somewhere. I don’t even know where I found it. I’ve been making it for about six years, though, and certainly am not straying from this recipe now.

Ingredients

1lb real butter
2 cups granulated white sugar
2 Tbsp light corn syrup
6 Tbsp water
1 cup finely chopped almonds
1 (11.5oz) bag milk or semi-sweet chocolate chips

Directions

Melt butter in a medium soup pot. While butter is melting, chop up almonds and toast them in a pan. (Alternatively, buy pre-sliced almonds and crush them in the bag before putting them in the bag; really saves time.)

Note: Once the almonds are toasted, I like to put them through a sifter or strainer to remove most of the larger pieces but keep the small bits aside to sprinkle on top at the end. This is totally optional as it is mostly decorative.

Once butter is melted in the pot, add sugar, corn syrup and water. Keep cooking the mixture, stirring constantly until it reaches hard crack temperature and turns the color of a brown paper bag. Remove from heat and stir in the almonds. Transfer to a cookie sheet (with edges) and spread it across the sheet until it is evenly distributed.

Let the candy cool for a few minutes (to harden) and then begin sprinkling chocolate chips across the top. (I like the mini chips; they are easier to distribute and the chips melt faster.)  Use a spatula to spread the chocolate over the surface as the chips melt. Once it is spread out, sprinkle the reserved almond bits across the top. Let cool at room temperature until candy is hardened and chocolate has solidified. It may take up to 12 hours for this to happen. (The candy can be put into the fridge or freezer to help it cool faster, but this will change the texture and may prevent the chocolate from staying solidified at room temperature.)

Some notes:

• I prefer unsalted butter just in general. I doubt this has much impact if any on the candy, but it’s what I use.
• I like the mini chocolate chips because it’s easier to get them spread out over the candy, and as such get a much more even coating of chocolate.
• Humidity is a bitch for this recipe. I’ve ruined more than one batch of candy because I didn’t take the humidity of the day into consideration. This wasn’t as much of a problem in Portland but has been a problem more than once in Cleveland.

I love this recipe. I usually only make it when I know I can share it with others, otherwise I end up eating a lot of candy in a short period of time. Not so good on the waistline. It has gone over very well at more than one potluck at work, and it makes a nice gift during the holidays.

Calorie content? Hell if I know. I’m not sure I want to know right now. If I did the work to figure it out, I might never make this candy again. Where’s the fun in that?

Ingredients

1 lb ground turkey (alternatively: ground beef or stewing beef cut into bite-size pieces)
2 cans kidney beans (light and dark together give it a nice color texture)
2 bell peppers, large dice
1 large onion, large dice
2 cans diced tomatoes
1 cup frozen corn
3 Tbsp chili powder
1 tsp cayenne pepper (or to taste)
1 tsp ground cumin

Directions

1. Cook ground turkey. Set aside.
2. Sautee chopped onion and pepper in the pan with the beef drippings. Drain pan.
3. Combine kidney beans, diced tomatoes, corn, cooked veggies, meat and spices in a large pot. Bring mixture to a gentle boil, then turn the temperature down to low/medium-low to simmer. The longer it simmers, the more flavor the chili will have.

Note: If the chili looks too thick after it is initially combined, water or stock can be added to thin it. It will continue to thicken as it simmers.

Serves 8.

My dad always serves cornbread with his. I’ve made mine and served pieces of french bread with it, that’s good as well. Most of the time I eat it with a bit of cheese mixed in and a dollop of sour cream, no bread necessary.  A serving of the chili is about 250 calories, which is not so unreasonable, considering the serving size is approximately 1.5 cups. It’s a very decent amount of food for a meal!

In reality, this is probably nothing like my dad’s chili. It certainly didn’t taste the same as the chili I had last time I visited my dad. The thing with this chili is that it changes. I’ve yet to make the exact same chili twice, and I’m sure he hasn’t either. Any modifications that you fancy making to the recipe would be perfectly fitting with the spirit and history of this chili. Go to town, and I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I have.

1 lb ground turkey
2 cans kidney beans (Kuner’s no salt added)
2 bell peppers, large dice
1 large onion, large dice
2 cans diced tomatoes (Hunt’s no salt added)
1 cup frozen corn
3 Tbsp chili powder
1 tsp cayenne pepper (or to taste)
1 tsp ground cumin

There was a main problem with this meal, however: it calls for Velveeta. I have nothing against velveeta in theory. It’s great for making queso, and who wants to slave over a roux and bechamel sauce when trying to whip up dinner in half an hour? Making the meal faster shouldn’t mean I have to do an hour’s worth of work in half an hour just to be able to call it a half hour meal. So, I understand the appeal of the Velveeta. It’s pretty impossible to ruin unless you grossly overcook it, and it melts easier than most cheeses do. My main issue is that it’s high in calories for what it brings to the party. Let’s not even get started on the sodium content. (I have a hard enough time excising excess sodium from my diet – I don’t need any help from the over-processed “easy” foods.)

Given this fact, I sought a relatively easy way of re-doing the recipe to bring the caloric and sodium content down. I did searches, most of which came up with either literal Velveeta replacements (the types that hardened into blocks of meltable cheese which seemed a little bit… icky to me) or bechamel sauces. I’m not interested in concocting a cheese sauce that I could potentially screw up, particularly when this was supposed to be a quick meal. I learned in the course of my search travels that muenster is a good cheese for melting. I wanted something other than muenster cheese in the dish, though, since we don’t usually buy it and frankly I’ve never seen it on the shelf where we usually buy our (admittedly cheap, fairly low-quality) cheese. That means it’s probably expensive, right? Well, we lucked out there. Helluvagood makes muenster cheese. We combined muenster, monterey jack and fat free cheddar to substitute the Velveeta. What we came up with ended up being pretty tasty!

Ingredients

1 lb chicken breasts, cut into bite-size pieces
1 lb frozen broccoli OR 2 heads broccoli, chopped into bite-size pieces
1 can Cream of Chicken Soup (adequate substitute here)
4 cups brown rice, cooked
2 tsp minced garlic
1/2 cup fat free cheddar cheese, shredded
1/2 cup muenster cheese, shredded
1/4 cup monterey jack cheese, shredded

Directions

1. Heat a large pan. Drizzle with olive oil and begin cooking chicken.
2. When chicken is cooked through, add broccoli and reconstituted cream of chicken soup mixture. (If using condensed cream of chicken soup, dilute according to the instructions.)
3. When mixture begins to thicken, add garlic.
4. After the mixture is hot, add rice and cheese. Mix well and remove from heat.
5. Cover and let sit for 5 minutes.
6. Enjoy!

Serves 6.

The original recipe calls for instant white rice. I substituted brown rice because I prefer the complex carbohydrates. We undercooked ours, so that was a bummer, but that’s obviously not a feature of the recipe. One other thing that I’m considering changing for next time is to replace the monterey jack cheese with a more pungent cheese. The fat free cheddar is mild, and the muenster also did not bring a lot of flavor to the party, so other than adding creaminess, it felt like the cheese was lost in the dish. Perhaps a swiss or gruyere would make an excellent substitute. Either way, it was a good dinner and it was excellently filling for the serving size.

One serving of this comes out to about 370 calories and while not sodium-free at 468mg of sodium, it’s much better than it would have been with the Velveeta in it. We’re definitely keeping this one in our arsenal, particularly with the re-design.

Ingredients:
1lb stewing beef, cut into bite-sized pieces (would also work with diced chicken or pork)
1 pkg Frozen Stir Fry Vegetables
1 medium onion, chopped
1 medium red bell pepper, chopped
1 Tbsp minced garlic

Sauce:
2 Tbsp Hokan Szechuan Sauce
1/2 C Light Sour Cream

Directions:

1. Heat a large pan to medium-high. Begin sauteing the beef and garlic.
2. Meanwhile, chop pepper and onion.
3. When meat is done, remove from pan and set aside. Saute pepper and onion in same pan.
4. Once pepper and onion are slightly softened, add frozen vegetables and reduce heat to medium-low.
5. Mix Szechuan sauce and sour cream together and combine with beef.
6. When frozen vegetables are heated through, combine vegetables and meat mixture.

Serve with pasta, rice or couscous, if desired. Makes four servings.

This comes out to about 300 calories for a serving of the szechuan stuff, so adding in a starch does make it a higher calorie meal, but it’s not exactly going to cause epic weight gain. It fits easily into my daily calorie “ration.”

Note: If you’re sensitive to spice, you will probably want to cut back on the Szechuan sauce. It is quite spicy, and while the sour cream helps to cut that, it doesn’t take away the spiciness completely.

Recently the bug to cook has started again. Well, I think it has. I’m thinking about food again and creative ways of using what we already have in the kitchen. I have a regular staple of things that I like to have in the kitchen, but they’re not very adventurous. Pastas, onions, certain vegetables (depending on what isn’t $5/lb at the moment), and certain meats. Sometimes jarred pasta sauces (GASP, I know). Canned tomatoes and canned tuna. We don’t do canned vegetables but I am amenable to frozen ones. (Actually, they’re kind of great. They’re easy and I like that.)

So, with health consciousness in mind, I am cooking again. There will be a lot of brown rice and a lot of searching high and low for recipe substitutions that won’t make me gain ten pounds overnight. I have about three recipes that I’d consider worth sharing, and hopefully there will be more to add to the arsenal as time goes on. Not everything will be healthy, but since I’m actually trying to lose weight (again…), there will certainly be health consciousness in mind.

Upcoming Recipes:

• Szechuan Stir-Fry (Sort Of)
• Almost Dad’s Chili
• Almond Roca
• Recipe Makeover: Chicken and Broccoli Cheese Rice

Finals were last week. I finished them all with a bit of a whimper. I was really ready to be done with classes. I questioned the point. I asked myself if grades really matter to anyone but me. (Do they, honestly? Is anyone going to care what grade I got in a random class in community college? I really doubt it.) I wondered why I was putting myself through all of this. I talked about school at the beginning of the semester, before things had started to overwhelm me. Reading it again, I seemed so positive, so hopeful! At some point, I lost that. Possibly it was when I realized that my theater teacher was making the class very difficult for working students. (A weekday, daytime meeting requirement, really? Isn’t that the point of online classes? That they’re flexible for working students? Meh.) Maybe it was when I realized that most of the students in my classes were basically incapable of analyzing anything, and that I was doing way too much work to get the same grades as they would get. Maybe it was just because I lost the plot somewhere after the midterms. I still got my stuff done. I managed ultimately to get, I’m pretty sure, three As (in history and my two music survey classes) and a C (in theater – I could say a lot of mean things, but I’ll just say this: if you want a paper that’s 5-6 pages, tell me that; if you say you want the paper to be 4-5 pages, and I hit 4.5 pages, do not say it is on the short side! No! It is not! It is right in the middle. So there). I’m pretty satisfied with that. The perfectionist side of me is kicking myself for every point that I lost in that theater class that would have given me a C. Despite the fact that I lost 100 points (of 1100) because I couldn’t justify taking four or five hours off of work to go and watch a video of a play I’d already read (and he offered no alternative other than trying for extra credit in the discussion boards), I still blame myself. Surely I could have done something else to make up the points, right? Yeah, whatever. I vacillate between kicking myself and being overwhelmed by apathy about it. Either way, it’s over. So, this semester is done.

Before the semester ended, I made a few decisions. I was not going to take full time classes through the end of the year. This was my original plan. I’d have an Associate of Arts by the end of the year if I did. It would look really great to achieve that much! But that’s for students who have part time jobs or even no jobs at all. I can’t justify the sacrifice of life and sanity to get a degree that doesn’t actually achieve anything for me. I won’t get a raise or promotion because I have an associate’s degree, particularly in arts! That’s just not what IT departments are looking for, I’m pretty sure. So I dropped three of my classes for summer term and registered only for two classes in the fall. I’ll probably need to do classes next spring and summer, too, just to make sure I get all the classes I need for my degree, but with every semester, I’ll be getting a little closer. And, since I wouldn’t be pushing myself so hard, I’ll retain my sanity. That’s always a positive, I think.

In the last week, I decided to read one of the books that I go to when I want some comfort. It took me about one day to read through it, so then I picked up one of the books I brought in and sat up on the shelf on my desk before the semester started, when I thought I would still have time to read now and then. (That didn’t so much happen. They’re all a little dusty at this point.) I finished that one the next day. That night, we went to Barnes & Noble, just because. I bought two books. I started that one the next day and finished it last night. Then I started on the other book I bought. I’m reading it today at work (Friday! Whoo!) with every intention of finishing it today, unless things get crazy and busy. I have two books on my shelf here at work and at least two at home that I haven’t read before. I’m predicting that I’m going to run out of new books to read before the new semester starts up.

What I’ve really discovered is that it’s amazing what you miss out on when you have to sacrifice self in a busy schedule like I was living. I lost track of myself, and I really bottled everything up, because I didn’t want anyone else to see how hard it was on me. Earlier this week, as I was driving home from work, I basically lost it on the way home. I started sobbing, and I couldn’t stop. I cried halfway home, then came home and cuddled Beethoven for as long as he would let me hold him. Then he deserted me. My kitties, for once, couldn’t seem to tell that I needed them. So I took a nap. And when I woke up, I still felt off, but better. We went to the bookstore that night, and I started to feel more alive than I’ve felt in four months. I was reliving interests that I’ve had to put aside, not only for lack of time but also for lack of money. (We’ve been pretty ruthless with ourselves, and there just wasn’t money to buy books or many other fun things in past months.) We got coffee and meandered through the bookstore. I remembered what it feels like to find so many books that are begging to be taken home and to have to practice the self-denial which usually still involves buying two or three books. (I only got two! I was so proud of myself!) It felt like a piece of myself came back to me.

Now I’m reading voraciously, and thinking about imaginary characters in imaginary places and disappearing into their worlds for a little while. And then when I come back to real life,  I feel more alive again, like it’s easier to handle again. I’ve missed books. I didn’t realize how much I missed being able to read because I wanted to read, not because I needed to for a class. And it feels like, with the re-introduction of reading to my daily schedule, I have regained a piece of myself that has been dormant for months. It feels wonderful. I’m hopeful that I can avoid a repeat of this mania at the end of every semester to follow.

Hello, me! I missed you!

I was looking for some new recipes to make, some with less fat and more complex carbohydrates instead of simple ones. I ran across the idea in my searches for once a month cooking. It seemed like an intriguing idea to me. We already do our shopping twice a month, but what if we did it only once a month and froze a lot of things to thaw and eat later? Interesting concept! The idea was that we’d have something at home to eat, even when were decidedly uninterested in cooking. Well, I picked out some recipes – mostly healthy ones, and very few which said anything about the freezability of the recipe – and made up a grocery list. We went shopping on the thirteenth of July for all of the ingredients for about twenty recipes, and commenced with the cooking the following weekend. The cooking went fairly well. I discovered that cooking and freezing up a few recipes on my own is a tall order, particularly as it leaves me less time to clean up after myself unless I literally want to be in the kitchen all day. However, when Johnathan and I did a bunch of cooking together things ran smoothly. One of us could clean up or do prep work while the other checked on recipe instructions or tended to something that was already in progress. We managed to use up nearly everything in our freezer with the exception of the frozen vegetables and fill it until it was absolutely packed 100% full. There was no more room in that sucker when we were done!

Now that we’ve done it once and experienced what it was like to do the work and reap the benefits, we’re going to go again this month, this time with some new knowledge. Some things we learned:

• Stuffed peppers do not freeze very well.
• White lasagna that includes a pesto sauce is pretty good but the whole thing gets oily if not baked right away because the pesto separates.
• The only way this actually works is if someone actually remembers to get something out of the freezer. Trying to quickly thaw things is a pain.
• Chilis, soups and stews freeze very well!
• Recipes that include just regular ingredients are more likely to be pleasing than those that require ingredients that we don’t even know how to find. (In other words, keep it simple, stupid!)

Overall, we’re both really happy about the whole experience. We’ve got a list of recipes already picked out to make for next month, and I expect we’ll go shopping for that pretty soon and use our experiences to our advantage. We’re making a bigger variety of meals and recipes with simpler ingredients – ones we’ve purchased before and know how to locate in the various stores. I expect we’ll come in under budget this time around, and hopefully be able to pack up our freezer just as much as last time.

I’m so glad we thought to try this. It has saved us so much time and frustration, not to mention a ton of money that was previously spent on eating out becuase we were too lazy to cook!

Now, if only we could get our hands on a bigger freezer so that we could have more storage.

With little counter space, we got creative with where we, er, stored things.

A dozen cupcakes, some thawing chicken, and a card table that's only kind of holding up the microwave.

We mentioned there's not much counter space, right? This is where the laptop lived so that we could access online recipes.

Cookin' some chicken. I have no idea which recipe this was for.

Produce storage overflow. (Note the bottle of vodka: that was for after.)

It was a long weekend, but the payoff is obvious.

Packed full. There was quite literally no more room in there.

The fridge remained pretty full throughout.

Let’s see: Johnathan and I signed the lease on a new apartment in mid-September. We painted two of the three rooms that we planned to paint before we ran out of time and interest in painting for the time being. We still plan to paint our bedroom, but we’ve got to unpack first. The living room, which was planned to be a nice, soft gold color, is more like a pumpkin. It’s not what I was hoping for, but it’s still nice, and I think it makes the room very cozy. The bedroom was supposed to be a rich blue, which… well, it’s definitely rich. It’s also bold. So bold that the room seems to glow in regular daylight. When we have the soft desk lamp on, though, it’s much tamer and it’s a very nice color. I’m now hesitant to see how our bedroom will turn out. It is supposed to be a kind of mocha color, nice rich brown. I’m hoping it won’t turn too dark, although I think it will still be okay even if it does. It’s just a little worrisome that we’re 0 for 2 on intended paint colors. We like both of them anyway, though, so maybe it’s not so bad.

We also had to pack up the old apartment and move everything to the new apartment. The packing part started out really well. I was cataloging everything so that we’d know where every one of our possessions was. I got about ten boxes put into the spreadsheet, then just gave up. With everything going on and working full time on top of it, there was just no way that I was going to have time to deal with trying to log everything at the same time. We got the bulk of our stuff to our new place before my family got into town, but at that point, everything started to fall apart for the moving business.

My dad showed up on Saturday while I was at work. They drove out from Portland and took a week doing it, but I had no idea when they were going to get to the Cleveland area. It was a bit of a surprise for me. Johnathan and I went over to their hotel room after I got off of work and hung out for a while. Some things never really change, and that’s all I’m going to say about that.

On Sunday, we went out for lunch at Red Robin with my dad and his family 2.0, and then my dad and my older half-sister came to our new apartment and we shot the breeze for a little while. Allison arrived while my dad and half-sister were still at the apartment, so there was more chatting as well as some perusal of Veggie Tales videos on youtube before they left. In the interest of my dad’s sanity, I lent them some DVDs so that he would no longer have to watch the same four over and over on the trip back. I’m sure they were just as tired of the new ones as the old ones by the time they took the trip back across the country with the two little girls.

That evening, Allison, Johnathan and I had what we called a Bachelor/ette party. I got to wear a sparkly crown that announced my “bachelorette”-ness, a bright red boa and attempt to use straws with little penises on them to drink beer. (I think that was the strange part.) We had some Harvest Moon and some Woodchuck, which Johnathan and I insisted on calling Chipmunk. We played Disney Scene-It, and Allison and I tied throughout half the game. We must have had at least ten tie-breakers, and at least one tie-breaker to break a tie from a tie-breaker. I still won, though! My record is still nearly perfect. Whoo!

The next day, we waited for my mom to come into town. We watched The Devil Wears Prada (hooray for cable!) and Dan in Real Life. Both are excellent movies. My mom didn’t get in until about 5PM, though we were originally expecting her to be up to the Cleveland area by about noon. They got lost on the way up from Cincinatti, apparently. We went to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory, which was very yummy. I’d never been there before. My mom and Allison and I were going to go shopping at some point, but after such a long drive up, my mom wasn’t up for it, so Johnathan, Allison and I trekked over to Avenue. I got a lovely jacket, a nice shirt and a very nice sweater, as well as some jewelry to wear while we got married. I so infrequently wear jewelry that I didn’t actually own any to wear. Now I do! Hurray! Afterwards, we went back to the apartment, Allison and Johnathan had a bit of alcohol (I opted for pop instead), and we watched Bernstein’s Candide. I do love that operetta so!

In the morning, I woke up way too early, as is my habit whenever I have a deadline. I was showered and pretty much ready to go by about 8:30, when we didn’t have our appointment until 11AM at the courthouse. Johnathan ran out for breakfast and coffee, and we hung out and watched HGTV until it was time to go. We were planning to get there early, and left even earlier than originally planned, getting there just before 10:30. Almost everyone else arrived just after we did, so we weren’t hanging around doing nothing. There were lots of pictures taken, none of which I’m interested in sharing at this time (maybe later!), and lots of semi-awkward family interactions as two divorced couples tried to make nice for our day. Nobody was rude or even slightly terse to anyone else, so I’d say it was a roaring success. The judge was running very behind, so even though we were there plenty early, our 11AM appointment turned into an 11:45 ceremony. The ceremony itself was short and sweet, with very little religion injected into it and not much outside of the vows themselves. It was perfect. We had a few pictures, and more hugs than I ever like to give in one day, and then we all headed to Buca di Beppo for lunch. Lunch was good, excepting that the families made things needlessly complicated by insisting that we split the checks. It was a good lunch, even if we had to look at a bust of the very creepy pope the entire time! Afterward, Johnathan and I left for the Red Maple Inn, and we holed a way for a few days. We had fairly good food, wine, cheese and a fair amount of scrabble playing. The vacation wasn’t as relaxing as it might have been due to the fact that we had a ton of stuff left to do when we got back.

The day we left the Inn, we went straight to the DMV BMV so that I could get my Ohio license with my new name on it. I called a bunch of places and got my name changed that day. We got new car insurance and purchased renter’s insurance (finally). We did very little else that day because once I was done jockeying with the phone, I was exhausted.

The rest of that weekend involved a lot of packing, cleaning, moving, more cleaning, some unpacking, and even more cleaning. We cleaned that old apartment from top to bottom. Every cabinet was wiped out. The stove was scrubbed until my fingers almost bled. The fridge scrubbed out, the carpets scrubbed and steam cleaned. We’re convinced we left that apartment in better shape than it was in when we moved in October of last year. It felt pretty good. Let me tell you, though, those late nights getting it that way were brutal. By the time I went back to work on Monday and Tuesday, I felt like I needed a vacation from my vacation! I still do, actually. We’ve been very, very slowly unpacking the new apartment. We should be doing more to get it unpacked, but by the time we both get home from work, neither of us is very interested in doing anything involving cleaning or tidying up, let me tell you. Especially with the added distraction of having cable television at home now, it makes it really hard to get motivated to do anything some days. I’d rather just veg out!

We’re finally back on track with our groceries, now that most of the kitchen is unpacked. We cooked for the first time in the new apartment this last week. We’ve made chili (a hacked up version of my dad’s recipe), mishmash pasta (or velcro pasta, however you like), and beef stroganoff. We used our brand new, empire red Kitchenaid Artisan Series Stand Mixer yesterday for the first time, too! We mixed pizza dough in it. It was gratuitous use of the stand mixer, but we’re totally okay with that. Imagining all the things that will be made in it in the months to come makes me very happy. Pies, cakes, cupcakes, cookies, breads… mmmm! Between the mixer that Johnathan’s mom gifted us with and the cookware that my mom gifted us with, cooking, even in our miniscule kitchen, is a dream.

So, that’s where we’re at after a long month of moving, packing, family, getting married and other assorted life chores. How’s everyone else?

Lately, we’ve eaten out a bit more often, if only to have something different. Since I moved out here, we’ve had German food once, and to have it, we had to go down to Columbus. I happened upon a mention of a local German restaurant on a Cleveland food blog and it’s been sitting in the back of my mind for a while. Finally, we decided to find this place and try it out.

To start with, the restaurant looked like a fairly typical, older-style German restaurant, complete with schmaltzy decor. The bar area was fairly nice, so while we attempted to flag someone down to seat us, we were hopeful as to the rest of the meal. The dining room was not as nice as the bar area. The seats were hard and actually quite shallow. The table was small and quite far away from the booth seats, which did not move. Since we were there for the food, I didn’t let this aesthetic aspects bother me.

I started out by having a white ale, which was actually quite good. After further investigation, we discovered that I was drinking a Canadian beer, so that really had no bearing on the fact that it was a German food restaurant. (Or, German-American, I guess. That’s what their menu said.) I ordered the sauerbraten, which came with spaetzel and red cabbage. Johnathan had a sausage platter with bratwurst and knockwurst. We also ordered a side of German potato salad. The dishes were rather pricey ($18 for mine and $17 for his), but this is the kind of pricing I came to expect from the German restaurant that I frequented in Portland. We both ordered the German potato soup for our first “course.” (Tell me, why is it that a German restaurant must append ‘German’ in front of the dish? Isn’t that the point of it being a German restaurant?) The soup was good, though I would have liked it to be a bit spicier. It would have improved it.

Our main dishes came fairly quickly afterward, and I was struck by how cheap everything looked. Looks can, however, be deceiving, so I was still hopeful. My sauerbraten tasted like it was overcooked and then covered in a barely heated sugar-based sauce. I wasn’t overly impressed with it. Suffice it to say that I’ve had better. The red cabbage was good, but I think it would be difficult to do red cabbage poorly. The spaetzel was good as well. Just a touch sweet which I enjoy. Johnathan liked his sausages, though I was wholly unimpressed by both of them. The German potato salad wasn’t very warm and to be perfectly honest, wasn’t very good either. The food, overall, was a disappointment.

I think the worst part was that it took for-ev-er to get our check and finally be able to pay and leave. We had to seek our server out in order to pay the final bill which was much, much higher than the service and food that we got was worth. The fact that this is apparently the only German restaurant in Cleveland is possibly an even bigger disappointment because it means that, unless we go to Columbus (or perhaps to Portland!), we won’t be eating German food. I wouldn’t recommend this restaurant to anyone because it would just leave a poor opinion of German food in general. I promise there’s better German cuisine out there – it just won’t be found at the one in Cleveland.

Next time, I’ll write about our experience at the Indian food restaurant that we went to this evening. I promise the next one will have a happier ending.

To this day, it doesn’t seem right to be puttering around the kitchen, making cookies, candy, cakes, whatever without hearing the swoon-worthy voice of Bing Crosby and the shenanigans of Danny Kaye in the background. I think it is my lifetime goal to be as beautiful and classic as Rosemary Clooney. Her voice is beautiful as well.

It’s silly and sentimental, but it doesn’t seem to matter what the season is – in goes White Christmas. I can probably boast having watched it in every month of the year.

Really, watching it again (because… well, I felt like it), I’m struck that people seem to act more convincingly in these movies. Maybe it’s that scripts have more natural speech and the people in the movies just move as if they’re in everyday life. So many movies made about present time involve people in jobs I know nothing about. I don’t know. I just think nothing can beat a classic like White Christmas.

Now I think I’ll get back to my movie and watch the actors work their magic.