lo siento, too

I wonder how it happened that I used to blahg excessively... I mean, every day, multiple times a day... before it was called blogging... and now, despite reading other people's blogs everyday, I so often just completely forget about my own.

But here we are!

So let's talk about Thanksgiving!

G and I spent Wednesday night visiting a friend of his in Champaign, then on Thursday we woke up and drove to St. Louis where it started snowing right as we got into town! Yay! Snow quickly turned to sleet but we were quickly tucked away in G's sister's kitchen cooking up a storm of our own.  We made pumpkin-walnut and sweet potato+walnut+goat cheese wonton things with a cranberry lemon sauce, a very savory leek and shitake bread pudding, maple brussels sprouts, bourbon candied sweet potatoes, pumpkin kugel, and pumpkin pie, all from scratch, then also this weird but very tasty hazelnut loaf thing we grabbed from Whole Foods (we were the only vegetarians in attendance so we needed our own protein!).  Y U M.  Seriously, it was all really good.  And we drank a lot of Great Lakes Christmas Ale (always a pleasure) and... wine... and... other stuff.  Lots of everything. Yay, Thanksgiving! Yay, 8-hour coma!

Friday morning we stopped at a market and then got outta town and headed south to a cabin we rented in the Ozarks.  I cannot recommend Big Spring Lodge and Cabins enough, and I can't wait to go back when it's greener and warmer (aaaand again when it's back to cold and sparse).  We got to spend two days and nights in a little cabin with just a fire place and a cozy living room and a bedroom that was toooo far from the fire and a teeeeny bathroom and a teeeeny "kitchen", all in the middle of the woods, well off the beaten track, in the mountains, wonderful.  There's something surprisingly awesome about waking up a few times through the night to tend the fire and throw on more laughably oversized logs.

We took a ton of pictures but right now I only have the few I snapped with my phone...

Cabin in the woods!

Cozy living room

Forest path

A CAVE!!!

The beginnings of cabin cranberry sauce

We made some really stellar food while we were there, mostly thanks to G's ambition and dedication.  Fancy greens each night, plus a potatoey cheesy bready savory thing, and the rest of our Thanksgiving roast, and a grilled cheese sandwich, and his special tofu with my cabin cranberries, and a weird but delicious lentil-based desert that G would not give up on. What a trooper.

So that's that. An epic Thanksgiving post! Theeeee end.