mission: use up all the food

We've reached the stage of moving where we're trying not to buy groceries unless absolutely necessary.  Along the same lines, we're using up what we can from the freezer and cabinets.   Why move more stuff than we have to, right?

There's been a fair amount of pasta.  I predict quite a bit of cereal this week, too.  Thankfully, we were able to break it up with a butternut squash that's been waiting patiently on the counter for a couple weeks and some pork from the back of the freezer.  There was parsley in the fridge from a recipe last week, so it even looked fancy. 

I can't wait to get settled in our new house, though, and have the world be our culinary oyster again.

Not that we'll be eating oysters.  Ew.

a very good day

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving with good food and good company. 

I'm thankful for lots of things this year.  I won't bore you with the whole list, but Mr. Cecil is certainly on it. The dog beach 10 minutes away is on it too. 

"Leave it!"

love letter to our house: exterior

As I mentioned recently, we're selling our house.

This means, among other things, that it's never looked as wonderful as it does now. The outside has been pressure washed and the landscaping was updated.  All the rooms have been re-done over the course of the past few years.  The living room wall paneling and orange shag carpet are long gone, and even the pink kitchen counter that hung on for a while has been revamped.  And of course we re-did the bathroom.  Oh, the bathroom...

So now's the time to post pictures of it, right?   One part show-off-our-hard-work, one part nothing-else-interesting-is-happening-to-me-right-now, and one part farewell-house-we've-loved-living-in.

First up, the exterior:

Before

After

next time i'll make cookies

You guys.  I found an amazing apple cake recipe that you should definitely try.  I don't recommend, however, baking it under the circumstances I did today.

We're selling our house, and this afternoon our realtor did an open house.  I had the brilliant idea to bake something autumn-y so as to make the place smell cozy, and at the same time ingratiate the property with any potential buyers.  Welcome!  Have some baked goods!  Now don't you want to buy this house?

So, interspersed with some last minute cleaning, I baked this amazing cake.  No really, it's amazing.  Applesauce cake with cinnamon cream cheese frosting?  Yes please.  I didn't change anything, so I'm not going to type out the recipe here.  Instead, go over to Smitten Kitchen and check it out.  Trust me.)

My plan was to put the frosting on top and cut the whole thing into squares, then put the squares on a plate for the open house with a stack of napkins.  No need for forks, no need for dishes.  Sounds like a great plan, right?

Right.

Except.

To accomplish my make-the-house-smell-cozy agenda, I waited until a couple hours in advance to actually bake the cake.  So right off the bat you've got some time crunch pressure for added excitement.  Then factor in that cake doesn't cool down as fast as one might think (ahem, as fast as I thought), and you've got cinnamon cream cheese frosting getting slathered on a still-warm cake.  Mind you, that combination is DELICIOUS, but the frosting gets a bit runny and the cake crumbs get everywhere and the cake itself doesn't have very much structure once you cut it up.  Not as pretty as I'd hoped.

With 5 minutes left before Mr. Cecil and I had to clear out so the realtor could work his magic and show off our house, I was trying to salvage what I could of the haphazard, crumbly, looked-like-a-five-year-old-cut-them cake squares.  That was pleasant.

So the moral here is that you definitely need to make this cake.  Learn from my mistake, though, and pick a day when you have plenty of time and there's no pressure on the cake itself.

And the second moral, of course, is that there's an awesome house for sale -- if you know anyone in the market for an adorable home in the Greater Portland, Maine area, let me know!

Now go bake that cake!

urban hiking

Now, I'm using the term "urban" loosely here.  This isn't a major metropolitan area by any means.  My point, though, is that we went hiking this weekend on a lovely wooded trail that's adjacent to my town's biggest commercial center.   You can go to the mall, and then a fraction of a mile away you can hike for a solid hour.  No joke.

You can hear cars going by, but visually you'd never know you're still remarkably close to civilization most of the time.  We even watched as an owl flew across the trail in front of us, landed on a branch in a nearby tree, and stared at us for several minutes.

overheard

"... Sure, honey.  I guess it does sort of look like the opening to The Simpsons."

Happy weekend, all!

earthquake!

If you live in New England and have any connection to social media at all, I'm sure you know already that we had an earthquake this evening.

If you're not familiar with New England, I'll say this: New England is not earthquake country.  Most people I know thought a very large truck was driving by.  And then, oh wait, that's no truck; perhaps the furnace is malfunctioning?  I think it took us all collectively several seconds to figure out what was happening.

So now we're all rather proud to have this badge of honor.  We -- my state, even! -- had an earthquake.  4.6 on the Richter scale!  We're no San Andreas, but that's not too shabby.