4-27-2011

We all know that it's adorable, but is suicidal bunny cake vegetarian?

4-26-2011

I'm sorry if my readership (all two of you) is getting sick of seeing pictures of mushrooms, but for the rest of morel season, that's pretty much all I'm doing with my freetime other than running (which I'm sure you're also sick of seeing pictures of).

4-25-2011

I got running stuff for running stuff.

4-24-2011

I go to church a handful of times a year. Today is one of those big exciting days. Baby Lily was about as excited to go as I was. At least it was a pretty walk after we parked. I think we parked somewhere over there by Wolverine. I'm glad this didn't happen to our car. After church, we went here for our more common Sunday ritual of b-b-br-br-br-brunch. Baby Lily was also very happy about Easter brunch. She showed off her baby bunny teeth and told us all about the religious history of the holiday while dressed as the pope. My mom really wanted this picture. Then she wanted a nap while we made an ill-fated trip to furniture Costco. Baby Lily is too cool for Costco. I think this says something political, but I'm not quite sure what. I know that this says the cheesesteak place we wanted to try was closed for Easter. Then is was back in the car for a long long drive home where we only stopped at magical rest stops where children hover to appreciate the indigenous wildlife.

4-23-2011

After a few miles of huffing and puffing under pretty bridges, we went to this place for gourmet perogies (I'm not sure how gourmet you can actually make a perogie, but they took it as far as it would go). We didn't go to become Freemasons, but we did the next best thing. We took Baby Lily to go see the Crayola Factory for the first time. Beyond lots of crayons and paper to color on, they give you these tokens that you can put into various machines and get supplies out of for fun crafty projects. Baby Lily's hand print came out pretty well, but her foot print came out a little funny looking. She wanted to make a dental mold, but she doesn't have enough teeth yet. So we taught her how to vandalize (clear) walls and crawl though (colorful) sewers without faceplaning instead. She was only good a the first part. She's very good at waving, unlike my mom who isn't so good at taking pictures. There was a bunch of informational stuff like stories about racist crayons and the one hundred billionth crayon (pictured here), and the biggest crayon in the world, but I really just looked at all of the colors and didn't read that much. There were colors everywhere. Even places where they're too old to be. Speaking of out of place things, have you ever been to Ferrari church? Or had good Thai food (I ordered for the name alone) in the middle of nowhere? Nicole likes Thai food, but she likes eating mushrooms better. I like eating cheesecake my sister made. Bunny likes eating Baby Lily.

4-22-2011

I guess Baby Lily read my last post making fun of her hair, so she made sure it looked nice for today before flying out of the house. I'm aware that it's super touristy, but we went to the Reading Terminal Market so we could eat food and I could pretend to be a street photographer. Actually, this destination was primarily guided by Man Versus Food Network shows so I could try Tommy DiNic's. I don't know if this is Tommy or not, but I know the younger guy is the one that was on the TV show that always makes me hungry. Hungry for this. I've eaten a lot of "omg you haf to try dis food" food featured on various TV shows in a lot of places, but this was really really "omg you haf to try dis food" if you're ever in the area food. But that's just me, Nicole likes cupcakes better. I like this lady because she makes very good cookies. I also like this lady because she's cute. Speaking of cute, Baby Lily decided she likes coffee, so we gave her her own one so she would stop trying to take ours.* Next, Nicole visited her holy place to go shopping with bunny. We get real excited about bunny. Baby Lily liked it so much that she wanted to steal bunny because she doesn't know what morals are yet, so we just let her do it.* More shopping in fancy stores in fancy places. I like looking at fancy buildings. Nicole likes being invisible with her sidewalk-cammo trench coat. Baby Lily likes noses. I liked this little bike and the ideas of a toddler bike messenger rolling around doing deliveries on training wheels. Are you ready for more food pictures? Because we're going to a fancy Food Network guy restaurant called Village Whiskey. It is named that for a reason, and I quickly ordered the most expensive scotch I've ever had in my life. I don't even know how much it cost for the bottle, but I'm sure it was more than I cost. They have lots of bottles, and truffle flavored mushroom cheeseburgers. That's right, Philadelphia Cheeseburger Tour! Cheeseburgers with foie gras and bacon. Then I quickly ordered the second most expensive scotch I've ever had in my life and let Baby Lily have a sip.* She was happy about that all the way until we got home when she could eat some meat cleaver and try my shoes on.


* A lot of the things that I write about Baby Lily aren't true. But the ones designated with asterisk all are.

4-21-2011

Look! I'm driving in a car. That means it's Nicole's job to take pictures while I drive us to our doom. Actually, I just drove us to the diner above. It may look really cool and classic inside and out, but it's really just a fancy Denny's. A fancy Denny's with hot waitresses and healthy road trip food. Can you tell it's my turn to take pictures again? You're not allowed to P or turn around over there. Or else you'll make trucks explode and then the firetruck will have to come and save people. After hours and hours of driving, we got to see the sleeping baby that we came to see. She wasn't too happy to see us at first, but then she got a grip and turned on her messy hair happy face.

4-20-2011

Easter bunneh gang colurz.

4-19-2011

I could look at pictures of morel mushrooms all day. Some days I kind of do. Today we were outrageously successful and picked so many that we left the little ones to hangout and grow bigger. We found more than I ever thought we would find in one day. Nicole won the prize for finding the biggest one so far this year. I really hope to beat this record.

4-18-2011

Are you getting sick of me posting pictures of all the little creatures I come across in their natural habitats? I hope you don't mind me posting more pictures of mushrooms, because today I'm explaining how Nicole cooks them. First, she cuts them lengthwise to make sure they're hollow and the right kind of mushroom, and to make sure nothing gross is living inside of them. Then she soaks them to rehydrate any dry parts and to clean off anything gross still stuck on them. Then she puts a ton of butter in a frying pan. We love butter. The mushrooms pan fry in butter, while she boils things and makes mushroom sauce until they're done. This is pasta with mushroom sauce dinner. We even used our downstairs dinner table that we normally just look at. We love mushrooms. We didn't know what our cat named Mushroom would think of them. We quickly found out that she's a cannibal.

4-17-2011

See this little green toad? This toad loves Nicole. He expressed his love by hugging her fingers very tightly and not letting go (pictured), and also by peeing all over my hand when he did let go. I'm now convinced that toad pee (and my trashy looking bandanna which I don't have pictures of) is good luck, because after finding plenty of puffballs, I finally found my first one of the year! And my second one of the year right behind it. The third one was behind that, but by then I stopped taking pictures (and crying tears of joy), so you get the point. Yeah, that weird looking wrinkly thing poking out of the ground is what we hike miles and miles in the wilderness looking for (and is also worth $200 a pound). I've had super vivid dreams about cutting the first stem of the year with my new knife. See, it's hollow inside. I'm aware that this all just seems super weird to normal people, but actually finding hidden little bits of wrinkly mushroom is horribly exciting and addictive (beside the fact that they're really good to eat). I would say we got found a pretty good spot when there are big ones growing this close together. Some are very small. I think I took more pictures of them than actually picked them, but Nicole also carries a knife for this reason. Bag of mushrroooommz. The bag is mesh so as you walk around, the spores can fall out and plant more for next year. This little guy was getting cooked in the sun. Totally unrelated, but I thought that this looked cool. This looks creepy, but this is also cool. This looks like a unicorn or a narwhal. I guess these cup mushrooms are related to morels. This newt is not related to morels. He is however engaged to Nicole. This is like a treasure chest to me. Then we went home to show our cat named Mushroom why she is a cat named mushroom.

Do you know what this bottle means? It means food feast at Momocho with out of town/state friends. I only take pictures of Joel when he's drinking while I point guns at Lorenzo.

4-16-2011

We're not so good at finding morel mushrooms, but we're great at hiking...so I'm going to say that we just went out to hike today. I supposed I could say we went out hunting for snails because we had good luck finding these guys, but false morels are the closest we got. All the conditions were right and we even found indicator species like this may apple and these fiddle heads. We should have found mushrooms growing out of mushrooms, but all we found were flowers and some alien thing that I have no idea what it is. This ravine salamander helped us look, but was confused as to which type of mushrooms we were looking for. We weren't looking for puffballs either, but these are kind of cool. They're hollow inside and full of spores. If you step on one they blast spores everywhere (including into your lungs if you're stupid enough to get super super close to take a picture while Nicole steps on one). Personally I think the mushrooms were climbing trees to hide from us. So yeah, we just went on a (long) hike today, but it was fun exploring places I've never been and driving around "roads" like this. We found this goat jaywalking on said road.

We aren't doing Cheeseburger Tour this weekend because Food Network related obsession sent us to Belgrade Gardens instead (and it looks like this). There's a sub genre of fried chicken called Barberton Chicken which is a bit of a local legend and has gotten a lot of press. People brave decor that looks a bit like a retirement home and go crazy over their coleslaw, "hot sauce" (it was really rice with some stewed tomatoes), and of course chicken. Now keep in mind, I've recently been the worst vegetarian ever, but for an entire year I made a mental list of forbidden foods that I really wanted to eat. Bacon took the number one spot by a long shot, but fried chicken was also very very high on the list. So the idea of a locally unique version of chicken deep fried in lard was something I lost a bit of sleep over last year. So I don't know if it was all the mental hype leading up to it, or the fact that I think I've lost my taste for chicken, but meh. I mean it wasn't bad, but for all the Food Feuds and food blog internet nerds building a religion around it...I liked the coleslaw pretty well. Sorry, Barberton.

4-15-2011

These are our funny looking futuristic running shoes from space. I took a picture of them with mud on them as proof of my first "running though swampy paths in the the woods" trail run. I'm proud of myself. So proud in fact that we decided to celebrate a three and a half mile run by eating a three and a half million calories at Melt. Actually, we had prior plans to go tonight because Nicole wanted to try their weekend special Squid Sandwich. Say it out loud a few times...it sounds fun. I decided to tease the heart attack gods and ordered this monstrosity. His name is the "Corny Beast" and he is what would happen if a grilled cheese sandwich and a corndog ate each other at the same time. I'm actually proud to say that I tapped out before finishing even half of it. I'm going to go die on the couch now. This may very well be the last post I ever write.

4-14-2011

I'm obsessive compulsively waiting for morels to sprout, but not finding anything. Nicole is sad because she found a (huge) dead snake.