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OK, so it's time to talk about my best-ever birthday. This year was a great life landmark - three decades! These sort of birthdays deserve parties and I'm lucky enough to have had Katie and Nuno throw me a Christmas in Mexico themed birthday!

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Incase you're not on our Christmas card list (you should be!),

We Wish You A Merry Christmas!!

Our home for the holidays seems to look better every year. I took lots of photos today and yesterday because the weather was so bright. ( OK, I went a little photo crazy... )

Last Monday was my mom's birthday and two days before the big day I still hadn't found the perfect gift. I was getting a little stressed wondering what to get her. As we were driving back from Blue Mountain I saw a sign for one of our advertisers called, Granny Taught Us How. Their ad is always so cute and my coworkers and I always talked about how much we wanted to visit this store. But its in Violet Hill, where the heck is that? Well, it's somewhere between Collingwood and Brampton! So I veered off and went nuts in this store. It was there I found the cutest handmade rug and bracelet for my mom. For myself, awesome Christmas decor (which I will try and blog about later). My mom loved the gifts but also part of the gift was dinner at my place. Last night I had the family over for my mom's favourite meal - Eggplant Parmesan. I made two different squares for dessert, lemon squares and baklava.
So good!

I was so lucky to get away this past weekend to Blue Mountain Resort. What a way to get into the Christmas spirit! Mind you, it didn't come easily driving 30 km/hr from Barrie to Collingwood resulting in a 5 hour drive. But once we got past that we woke up to the most gorgeous coating of 3 feet of snow.

The resort has an adorable village of boutiques, restaurants and bars.
Our suite had everything from a jacuzzi to fireplace. Ice wine made it perfect!

We're not into skiing but this get away was perfect. It was the off-season before the slopes are open, so the resort was quite empty and all the restaurants were discounting meals.

Day or night, it was truly beautiful.

Saturday afternoon we decided to take a trip to a brewery. Microbreweries offer informative tours similar to wine tours only they have an all you can sample policy (not that that's the reason we took it, just sayin'). We found out about a WNY brewery from Mike who had this awesome creme brule beer, so it piqued our interest. Once we found out the address we plugged it into the GPS and it said that it was 2 and a half hours away. That almost swayed us out of it, but thought, why not? The GPS told no word of a lie, it was a very long trip. At one point I kept driving down the road and ended up in Pennsylvania. But we arrived in time for the tour so I'll share some photos.

The tour was filled with middle aged male beer nerds. They were only too excited to ask in depth questions about yeast cultures and details on fermentation.

Probably the coolest thing about this tour was the tasting straight from the cask. This beer was not filtered or carbonated and will be ready to finish and bottle next Monday.

We decided to buy a growler of IPA (India Pale Ale) along with gifts for Mike for Christmas.

For Tot's winning costume, the prize was 2 plush pug toys. One was a beanie baby and one a life sized pug. We decided to display the costume on Tot's prize... but I think she may be a little jealous somebody else gets to wear her costume.

I realized it's been a while since I posted a recipe. With the time change and leaves falling from trees it's really feeling like winter will soon settle in. This is the time of year where using the oven warms the home and comfort food feels best. Of course, the ultimate in comfort food is Macaroni & Cheese. After trying so many homemade Macaroni & Cheese recipes I found that many don't have much of a wow factor or are too laborious to be bothered. I came across this recipe and have tried it several times and found it to be the easiest and quickest (as in - get home from work and eat dinner at a reasonable time). From Nigella Lawson's 'Nigella Express'

Macaroni & Cheese
half a small package of shells (or your pasta of choice)
half a brick of aged Cheddar and half a brick of Gruyere (or all Cheddar, of course)
3/4 can of Evaporated Milk
2 Eggs
Sprinkle of Nutmeg (or grating if you actually use fresh)
Salt & Pepper

Preheat the oven to 450. Cook the pasta according to package instructions, drain and return to hot pan. While pasta is cooking, put cheese, evaporated milk, eggs and nutmeg in food processor and blitz (or grate cheese & mix everything by hand). Pour cheese sauce over pasta, stir well and season with salt & pepper to taste (admittedly, I add quite a bit of salt, I feel it needs it)
Bake in a large shallow baking dish in a very hot oven for 10 - 15 minutes, or until bubbling and blistered on top. Don't over-bake or it will become dry.
In the photos I added seasoned breadcrumbs for extra flavour - it doesn't come highly recommended.

Halloween is over and this one was just as memorable as previous years. It started with the time spent gluing a bald-cap to Nuno's head. This was very labour intensive but turned out amazing.Our theme this year was the movie Taxi Driver. I'm Iris (Easy), Nuno is Travis Bickel and Hot Tot is a NYC Checker Taxi cab.
Believe it or not Nuno and I almost abandoned Tot's costume several times, but as soon as one of us got fed up, the other one would dream up a solution to complete the costume. I'm not sure we will ever try and create a dog costume this involved in the future.

Shaun and Leslie had the most festive and creative Halloween party this past Friday night. Check out this spread!
It was tons of fun with a crowd of somewhat obscure costumes. Like, the new, as of yet to be officially released Green Lantern character universe.

The Halloween fun continued Saturday at Pug-O-Ween. Pug-a-lug Rescue put on a fundraiser as well as costume contest at the leash free dog park. What a turn out they had! And oh my gosh, the costumes. ( Here are some of my favourites: )

Katie somehow whipped up an entire zine in past couple weeks. I don't quite know how she did it between work and school, but she managed to squeak it in just in time for Canzine this past weekend. The day before the event she needed me to design the cover from the cool illustration Blair drew and print it off for her. I started thinking about the table set-up at Canzine and pulled out light strings, made a quick banner and used a duvet cover as a table cloth. Here's how Katie's table turned out. Looked great, eh?
Katie's zine turned out fantastic - here's how to get a copy.

Now that Halloween is in full gear I'm finding it hard finding time to blog about it. The costumes are really taking shape and the house is all decked out in Halloween. I held back with the decor this year as we aren't holding any parties. Just the usual holiday decor of candles, mums, gourds and pumpkins.
When not working on costumes I've been spreading a new Halloween fashion trend - glittered spider rings. I made black, orange and silver rings and they seemed to get a lot of notice. So I've started a cottage industry and made some for family, co-worker and co-workers daughters.

We've only heard good things about the annual Welland Food Festival. The Smokin' Buddha, who catered Karissa & Kevin's wedding, were scheduled to be sampling and Anna Olson was to be having a cooking demonstration so that pretty much sold us.
We decided to check it out on Saturday afternoon. After seeing Anna's demonstration on preparing celery soup, we went in for the food tastings. The set-up was not really easy to figure out, so we walked... and walked and circled several times looking for The Smokin' Buddha. We finally decided that they must have been a no-show. And nothing else looked even remotely appetizing. After feeling finicky, I finally chose the Rex, a Welland staple for Italian cuisine. I bought a sample of Gnocchi, tasted it and had an immediate reaction of being transported to childhood, "Tastes like Scarios." Which means they were really yucky.
It really ticks me off when I pay money for disappointing food. If I can make something yummier at home, why bother have someone else destroy my love for food?! Some of you may suggest that the simple luxury of not making it yourself is enough to justify it. Not the case here - it's just a real piss-off that a restaurant would think they should be making money off less than great food. It's not even a matter of personal taste here - there's just poor quality, lack of imagination and questionable taste buds.

Oh, and back to talkin' Scario's. I found a total 80's flashback ad for Scario's and UFO's on You Tube. I can just picture these cans on the shelves of Welland's old Valdi, Pupos or Bargain Harolds.

Yesterday Tot joined Nuno and I to Olson's for lunch. The Ravine location is all decked out in fall, including their menu items.
This sandwich is a fresh turkey with a cranberry dressing. I brought back tarts for my coworkers, maple, pumpkin pie and apple crumble. I had to show my appreciation for their coolness for having Tot join us in the afternoon. She was very well behaved and did me proud. She was loving everyone up and cuddling like crazy. Becky made the mistake of dropping her head too low and Tot took a dive right into her nose for a slimy kiss.
Tot just couldn't relax all afternoon with so many new and distracting sounds. A couple times she thought it was a good idea to bark and say, 'hello' while we were on the phone. Good thing she was pooped after a day at the office, so we put her into her room and headed to Toronto for the Wedding Present show.
It was awesome - just so spirited. I don't think it's possible for the band to disappoint live. Although the new album is a stinker, I would never give up on them.
See the set list didn't include our wedding's first dance? That's OK, David knows how much the oldies like Dalliance, Kennedy, Lovenest and Gone mean to his fans. Interstate 5 was pretty great live. I wish I could suspend time during songs like those.

After the show Nuno said that David 'shreds' on his guitar. I looked at him puzzled and giggled. I'm not sure who uses that term... but I guess I can picture Gedge shredding a carrot and his guitar is a box grater - so, um, it kinda works. After a while it made me die of laughter reminicing of the time my uncle took my cousin, sister and myself (we were going to see Jeff Buckley and Juliana Hatfield in grade 6) and he went nuts over the opening band, Cold Water Flat. After the show he went up to the lead guitarist/vocalist and proclaimed, "You guys wailed!". I don't know, we thought that might have been appropriate if he'd been cast in Wayne's World, but it was *so* not alternative rock of him to say. Last night I downloaded this song of Cold Water Flat's and now that I'm a bit older, I think my uncle wasn't so far off, wailed may just be appropriate.