2011 Here We Come!

It is only the second week of 2011 and we are off to a good start.

We ended 2010 with a trip to the East Coast. We first drove to Starlight where we met the rest of the Schenk family. It was a five fun filled days in the cabin. We played lots of wizard, eat great food, enjoyed Christmas with the other Schenks, and even had fun when the pipes froze and we had to carry our stuff out across the lake.

We then drove to DC for a quick stop. We enjoy early morning walks with Arthur's mom is the zoo, seeing Christine and Glenn, and relaxing.

It was back to Michigan to rescue our cat and to enjoy New Years. We rented a cabin in Waterloo with Joe, Anna, Gretchen, and Misa. There is no better way to ring in the new year with a camp fire, good friends, and a midnight walk through the woods.

Not even a week into the new year and I was off to Seattle. Bebeth, Mark, Bebeth, and Sabine, and Kuja were nice enough to put up with me for five days. I was a fun fill, jam packed trip. I visited three schools, interviewed at one, took three tests to transfer my teaching certification, went for a snowshoe (which was amazing), saw a concert at The Tractor, made sushi (well ate the sushi Bebeth made), and enjoyed being able to go for a run outside!

Now it is back to Michigan, 2011 here we come!

Here is some pictures from our fun filled past month.

Winter 2011

Butchering Lesson

Before the holiday I had an opportunity to learn how to butcher a pig. Why you may ask did I do this? One, to get to know my food better and two, why not? The reward, over the holidays we got to enjoy a delicious pork loin from the pig I butchered...yum! Here are some pictures from the day (warning, if you have a weak stomach you may not what to look at the photos).

The three pigs cut in half keeping cool

Me taking down my half of a pig

Step 1: take out the fat

Step 2: Lots of knife and saw work

Here is what it looks like with all the parts ready for cooking

Freezer clean out fun!

What happens when you need to clean our your freezer? You spend the day cooking and eating! Yesterday was our first pickup of our frozen CSA. That meant we needed more room in our freezer. This is what ensued:

Lunch: Homemade Potato Leek Soup (out of the freezer with local potatoes and leeks)

Afternoon cooking:
- Vegan pumpkin, oat, cranberry cookies (local pumpkin puree out of the freezer)
- Roasted banana ice cream (Bananas out of the freezer)
- Beet hummus (Just for fun with local beets!)

Dinner: Pasta with homemade tomato sauce (sauce out of the freezer with all local veggies)

and we kept going...

Sunday breakfast: Pumpkin pancakes (local pumpkin puree out of the freezer)

Sunday Lunch: Homemade Veggie Chile (with local tomatoes, beans, and veggies out of the freezer)

And now we have space to add the new local fruits and veggies we got yesterday and start this process all over again!

Vegan Cookies

Beet Hummus

Hooping it up!

This past weekend we had a fabulous weekend. This was largely do to a group we frequently mention on the blog, SELMA cafe. If you forget what that is check out our blog post about it here.
The weekend on started on Thursday night when I went to prep at SELMA. Prep is where you go to Jeff and Lisa's house to help the chef of the week dice, chop, and prepare the food for breakfast the next morning. You also get to enjoy a potluck dinner with the rest of the volunteers. Check out the meal I helped prep here.

The fun continued on Saturday when we went out to a hoop house build. This was the third build we have done. Check out the past ones here. This one was a beautiful (and unheard of) November day. We were wearing t-shirts! I will let Lisa's words and pictures speak for the rest of the day.

The weekend fun kept going on Sunday when we went to a benefit concert for SELMA preformed by Vienna Teng. Vienna is a wonderful singer, song writer, and song writer who now happens to be a first year in Arthur's program. It was in a small intimate setting and I fell in love with one of her songs, which you can check it out here. Once again I will let Lisa's words and pictures tell the rest of the story.

It was an amazing weekend and we have SELMA to thank for it.

Urban Gleaning

I think I posted last year about a coat rack that I made from used hooks and wood. I've made a few more items since then, all from used parts found at the Re-Use center, the woods in Ann Arbor, and yard sales.

Last year's coat rack.

A tree stump lamp, made with the help of Joe's woodshop and a deconstructed yard-sale lamp

My newest: a poster framed by an old window. Now when Courtney and I lie in bed we can pretend we're not in Michigan!

Lunch Share

My office does a lunch share. Once a week someone from the office cooks a vegetarian meal for the rest of the office (6 other people). This means that every Wednesday we come together to eat a delicious meal together. Today was my week. I made a polenta dish with mushrooms, sundried tomatoes, and kale (from our garden!). The recipe can be found here: http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/recipes/2469. To top it off I made chocolate chip cookies and swung by the farmers market before lunch to pick up a bunch of carrots to go with hummus.

I even managed to bring the meal to work on my bike. I am really getting a hang of this biking to work thing!

Borneo

Borneo. Even just saying the name makes us think of dense jungles full of huge bird-eating spiders and wild monkeys that have never seen a tourist. So we decided to check it out, but we had no idea what to expect. Would the airport be a dirt landing strip? Would we have to bring all our own food? Would we get eaten by giant cockroaches?

Well, the reality isn’t quite like that. The cities in Borneo are pretty developed, and the infrastructure is better than most places in Africa. For example, there was a Starbucks in all three airports we went to in Borneo (that counts as infrastructure, right?).

We first flew into Miri, which is in east Malaysia. Miri is an oil boomtown, and the entire place is seemingly sponsored by Shell and Petronas, including the shiny new petroleum museum. There’s also a very strong Chinese influence in eastern Malaysian Borneo, which we saw in all 3 cities we visited.

From Miri we flew to Gunung Mulu national park, the site of Deer Cave, the largest cave passage in the world and star of the Caves episode of Planet Earth. It was cool. There are 2-3 million bats living there, and almost every night they leave the cave to go hunting, a process that takes almost an hour because there are so many of them.

After a few days in the rainforest of Gunung Mulu, we headed to Kota Kinabalu, up in the northern part of the island. From there we took a bus across Borneo to the Sulu sea, then drove 2 hours into what used to be jungle, but is now palm oil plantation. Unfortunately, about 50% of Malaysian Borneo has been deforested to grow palm oil trees.

But there was a wildlife reserve along the Kinabatangan river, where we spent 2 days cruising the river spotting Proboscus monkeys, lots of birds, and even a wild Orang-Utan. We got close to pygmy elephants, but only heard them. The wildlife and the river there are beautiful, though the proximity to palm plantations was a grim reminder of how endangered many of the species are.

Once we left the jungle, we finished up our honeymoon with an upgrade from our normal budget hotel and backpacker accommodations. We went to a small island 90 minutes off the coast of Borneo, and stayed in a hut at a beach resort for 2 nights before beginning the long journey home.

Check out some of the amazing photos from our time in Borneo.

Borneo