Happy New Year!

New Year's Eve was pretty low-key for us this year. With all of the holiday celebrating we were ready for a quiet night alone and a nice simple meal. Jesse took Bob to the airport yesterday morning for his early flight home, so we all were jolted awake by the 4:30am alarm. I had another site visit, so I left around 8am for Salem. The site visit went fine, in fact the hospital campus was pretty quiet and I didn't have to worry about taking my time and getting things done. It was also nice that there were relatively few people around to see me dashing to the administrative offices to use any vacant bathroom available. (Note to self, don't eat spicy Indian food the night before you plan on hanging out in an open field for several hours). Anyway, I got home around 2pm and was exhausted and took a two hour nap.

Needless to say, dinner got started a little later than planned, but it made for a fun evening. We walked to the grocery store and picked up some food and wine for dinner. The meal was served in four courses (out of necessity rather than by design-- we were both starving). The first course was cheese and wine. We picked up two varieties of Oregon Pinot Gris to do a mini taste test along with goat cheese and brie. To accompany the cheese we had a homemade concoction of dates, pecans, and a little butter. I'm not sure exactly what to call the mixture, but it was damn tasty, especially with the goat cheese.

The second course was salad. It wasn't a very interesting salad, just lettuce, arugula, almonds, and some cranberries. However, it was a necessary part of our dinner to start the holiday detox with healthier food choices -- even if it only involved throwing a giant bowl of boring greens on the table. While we chowed down on our salad, we started the water for our third course, pasta. By this time it was nearly 9pm and we both gave a silent cheer, because there was a very good chance that we (or more accurately, I) might make it up until midnight to ring in the new year.

The shrimp, arugula, and tomato pasta was finished right around 10pm and we enjoyed it while thinking about how simple and relatively quick it was to put together each of our three courses. Since we nibbled throughout the night, we had relatively small servings of the pasta and there's plenty leftover for at least another large dinner. The fourth course was a plate of delicious cookies that Jesse's mom made for the holidays. As we ate our cookies, we also dreamed about all of the things we could do with the leftover brie and date pecan butter. I think we are going to make brie and apple paninis this afternoon for lunch. MMM. I can't wait!

We retired to bed around 11:30 to start watching Iron Man. I think I managed to stay awake for about 15 minutes before passing out. Damn. So close. I did wake up to the sounds of our neighborhood celebrating midnight with fireworks, cheering, and a lot of people banging pots and pans with spoons. Jesse and I both smiled and I went back to sleep.

Happy New Year!