NUTMEG STATE OF MIND

Happy thanksgiving, Meghan.  I hope the day went well for you.  Can you make the pie without pecans?

Love, Your Favorite Uncle

Hey Uncle Rob - Absolutely you can! Just don’t add them into the brown sugar/flour/butter mixture =) Happy thanksgiving!

If you’ve ever met me, you know I’m pretty into tradition. Now that we’re approaching the holidays I am in tradition turbo mode. A couple years ago I made this pumpkin pie for thanksgiving - and now I’ve done it every year since. Enjoy!

Once you’ve got all the ingredients go ahead and preheat the oven to 350. In a medium bowl, combine 4 tablespoons of butter and 1/4 cup of brown sugar with 1/2 cup all-purpose flour and pinch into moist crumbs.

Once you’ve got crumbs stir in 1/2 cup of pecan halves.

In a large bowl, using an electric mixer, beat a stick of butter and 3/4 cup of brown sugar at medium speed until light and fluffy.

Beat in 1 1/4 cup of pumpkin puree, 3 egg yolks, 1.5 tablespoons of cornstarch, 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon, 1/4 teaspoon of nutmeg, 1/4 teaspoon of ground cloves and 1/4 teaspoon of salt. Then beat in 1/2 cup of milk and 1/4 cup of bourbon.

(ignore the bowl change - i realized i needed my stainless steel one for the next step). In that stainless steel bowl, take the 3 egg whites (made while separating the eggs for the yolks earlier) and beat them until stiff.

Then fold into the pumpkin mixture until no white streaks remain.

Pour the pumpkin mixture into a flaky pie shell. (Try and find a deep pie shell - I find that the mixture tends to expand quite a bit while in the oven)

Sprinkle the pecan streusel on top.

Bake the pie in the middle of the oven for 1 hour, or until risen and golden and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out with only a few moist crumbs attached. While it’s baking I tend to take that time to enjoy a little cocktail: ginger ale and bit of the extra Maker’s Mark =)

1 hour later and voila! Bourbon pumpkin pie with pecan streusel! Top it off with a bit of whipped cream and you’re all set!

hi pea…i really like the pictures of your place, can’t wait to come and visit!  love ya, mom

beautiful, poignant couple of posts, pud.  made me v. v. happy.  love dad

This was a very very busy weekend for us. You can see a couple posts down that there is a new couch (!) the first I’ve owned in easily a year. Now seeing as I have a mini, there was obviously no way, no way, that I would be getting that bad boy home in my vehicle. Sean has a VW Jetta, so I figured that maybe his car would work. As all things come home from IKEA, the couch was segmented into 3 separate boxes. I’ve been planning on getting this specific couch for weeks now, so of course I had to stop by IKEA a couple (and by a couple I mean at least a dozen) times to admire it. I even took their little paper measuring tapes and measured the boxes and Sean’s trunk just to make sure everything would fit - and according to my calculations it should have. keyword: should.

I am wishing so hard that I would have taken pictures on Saturday, I would love that photo evidence of how ridiculous we must have looked. So the couch is purchased, we’ve got 3 boxes: 1 is 6’x3’x1’, the other is about 3’x2’x2’ and the third is just a tiny package that had the cover in it. Sean and I each have a cart, wheeling the boxes out to the car. We open up the trunk, throw the backseats down and go to put the big box in. It doesn’t fit… SHOCKING! And it doesn’t fit by a good 4-5”. Sean and I look at each other like what “the hell are we supposed to do now??”

A couple minutes of brainstorming later we realize - hey, why don’t we just take the parts out of the boxes? duh! So there we are, in the middle of the IKEA parking lot, ripping apart these huge boxes and fitting the unassembled pieces into the car like a jigsaw puzzle. Good news: everything fit! perfectly! Somewhat bad/funny news: Sean and I were packed into the front seats like sardines. About an hour and a half later a fully formed couch was in my living room =)

So that was Saturday, Sunday was a bit less hectic, but still pretty full. Sean and I drove over to New York to visit his brother and sister and their families. This was my first time meeting everyone and they were FANTASTIC! We drove up in time to see Sean’s niece Ella play her final soccer game of the season. It’s a bit different than Ava’s league I think, there are about 10,000 kids in the program, with 800 in Ella’s division alone. She’s 5!! Anyway, it was very adorable to watch, they were on a mini field and they looked like a flock of geese chasing after the ball =)

Ella’s team did technically lose, but they don’t keep score and everyone has a good time. We all cracked up when the fastest the kids ran was to the sidelines for their halftime snack =)

I think it is time to move to SOUTH DAKOTA ; no snow here YET!! Love, Gma 

What a Monday. I woke up this morning to about an inch of snow on the ground. I kept waking up throughout the night hearing this tittering sound, I had some delirious thought that some kind of rodent had gotten into the walls and was skittering around (remember the gerbils mom and dad?) but no rodents, instead it was sleet hitting against the windows. So not only snow, but freezing rain. Usually I’d be all “hurray! snow! christmas!” but I couldn’t enjoy it. I’ve been warned by all of my coworkers that people in Connecticut don’t know how to drive in unusual weather, and sure enough I look at my estimated drive time to work this morning, take a guess… just guess. 2h15m. oi.

So I’m finally at work, the snow has melted off (though it’s still raining) and I found out that I need to invest in some audio books before winter really sets in.