Pictures Dec 23 - Dec 29 2011

I had last Friday off and went shopping for some last-minute Christmas presents. Here's what I was greeted with when I walked out the door, finally!:

In the evening we went to Three Amigos for Carlo's supervisor and friend Phil's birthday with a few other people:

On Christmas Eve Carlo's mom drove me to my parents place and had lunch with us. Here's my mom:

Here's Carlo's mom with my parents:

My sister in front of my parents house:

I brought the dog for a walk after lunch and took some pictures of two of the three buildings (the third is just a bungalow across the street used as a hall for meals) of the Orthodox church down the street from my parents place. Here's the "winter church", which is also a skete which was built first, it's the only one of the two that's insulated:

And here's the "summer church", seen across the cemetery:

In the evening my sister's boyfriend came over and brought homemade gnocchi and I made some tomato sauce to go with it:

I took a nap on the couch with the dog afterwards:

On Christmas morning it was snowing again, here's the view out my bedroom window at my parents place:

And that's the last of the pictures I took while I was at my parents place except for the ones involving a special recipe I made, which will be put in a separate post.

My dad drove me back to Montreal on Monday evening, and stayed to have dinner of adobo and potato salad at Carlo's grandfather's house with us and watch us open some presents, my sister came with too. Here's Carlo with this:

Carlo's grandfather:

Carlo's mom:

My sister:

And guess who:

I got Carlo's mom some flowering tea and a glass teapot, it's so pretty!

Here's some pretty chocolates I got. I love blueberries!

Then yesterday I went to my friend Stephan's house for a Naruto Shippuden marathon. Here we are toasting some good cognac in the chocolate shot glasses my sister gave Steph for Christmas:

We watched a good 25 episodes or so. I brought some of the tourtiere and pasta sauce from my parents place and he had some good venison steak and filet mignon of caribou as well, it was amazing!

Today I worked, and I'm working tomorrow and Friday as well. I've started defrosting my turkey to make the turkey-stuffed-turkey for the NYE dinner party at Steph's and I'll be able to use my new meat grinder for that too :D I can't wait to start making it! We tried making it two years ago at my parents house but lack of proper planning, preparation, organization, proper tools and listening skills made it completely inedible lol. It took us 3 days to make it in between all the other activities, when we tried to grind the leg meat it took forever cause we weren't using the right blade and the grinder just plain sucked (which was why I wanted a new one this year!). Then my dad over-brined the meat and it became inedibly salty and we ended up having to use it chopped up in cubes in (delicious!) soup. I might have to make that soup again with leftovers from my mom's NYE butterball.