Here are Lisa, Mike, and little Zoe sporting the leopard print.
Here's Mike, already taking on the fatherly duties...very impressive! Mike and I go way back to first grade. We were both in the same Sunday school, and had our first communion together. I like this snapshot...it almost looks like he got stuck wearing a veil with flowers too!
Congrats Mike and Lisa! We are so excited for you two...can't wait to see Zoe!
The guided tour took about 16 minutes and then you were free to roam the place as you wish...Jeremy just wanted to find the tasting room. In fact, we ate lunch just before going inside and we weren't allowed to order any kind of drink with our meal so that we could "save ourselves to drink as much soda as possible!" I was not a big fan of this technique...but Jeremy is a big proponent of making room in the belly!
"Pop Art"...get it!
At last, we have found the final frontier...the tasting room!
The room was divided into continents and you could go to each circular dispenser to try the different soda brands by region.
I'm pretty sure these flavors were the ones from Africa!
This is Jeremy on his first round of samples...notice he is still happy.
I just fought off ten 8-year olds to get a very bad soda sample from the Asia area...definitely not worth the work or the fact that my feet are now stuck to the floor because it is so gosh darn sticky! Imagine what the floor mush look like with 500 people all trying soda from over 1,000 different fountains!
Okay, here Jeremy's smile is fading a little bit...we have made it to the back of the room where all of the American colas are!
Okay, he officially has a sugar headache...notice the grimace. "Get me out of here!" But just so the record shows he did drink his souvenir coke bottle about 6 hours after this photo was taken!
Here I am setting up for the first interview!
Skip, one of the shooters, is checking out the scene behind me, while I'm going over the questions for the grandpa!
Now the Grandpa is in the hot seat...and I guess I did pull a "Barbara Walters," since there were a few visible tears on some of the tough subjects. That's when I know I'm doing my job...capturing that emotion on film!
Jeremy was our official "behind the scenes photographer for the day." Though I did look over to him at one point and see him sleeping in the chair during one of the interviews...not sure if that is a good sign!
And the final interview together...fun to get both of them on tape at the same time and find out who really made the first move!
Alright, set up the laptop (with recipe) outside of the splatter zone in the kitchen....check!
Make the ground beef, mix in green chilies, and make the tomato-y spicy enchilada sauce....and simmer forever....check! (Oh, and sneak a couple tastes of the stuff...you know it is good when you would already eat it as is, and you haven't even gotten to the next step!)
Make a really big mess on the stove top... notice the tomato sauce splatter...it hit places I never thought it could hit! ....check! (I'm still finding red spots weeks later!!)
Get your assembly line together, cilantro, black olives, green onions, corn tortillas (they actually are really good in this recipe...otherwise I usually go with flour!). Then start stuffing and rolling...and stuffing and rolling...and see if you can hire any of the neighborhood kids for this part of the process...as long as they have clean hands! =)
And once that is done, your casserole might look like this....Notice the crazy amount of dishes in the background. I tried to convince Jeremy that they had his name all over them...ummm, unfortunately, I didn't get a "check" on this one!
Throw it in the oven, and ta-da..."Cheesy goodness" as Jeremy likes to say!
Put a little sour cream on top and you are set! I have to say that these were even better than what you order in a Mexican restaurant...super tasty! I knew they were a hit when Jeremy said, "I would go running every day if it meant I could eat these enchiladas for dinner every night!"
I am happy to say that I introduced them to "ranch sauce" for the first time...and they loved it! Then I tried to tell them that Jeremy puts it on pizza, hamburgers, and pretty much anything he can. This they did not believe!
The night wouldn't be complete without a stop at Rudy's!
Molly was our driver, after we watched her win her sand volleyball game at Aussies! All in all a really fun night! Now I just have to go research what a jackalope is...Chiara and Paolo kept asking me about them and I didn't have a good answer! =)
We tried the warm fresh herb goat cheese dip for an appetizer. Jeremy got beef burguignon, and I tried the rack of lamb with spiced orange and white chocolate chutney. I know....there was chocolate in everything!
Then for dessert Jeremy had helped make the famous Werner birthday cake...yes, another tradition. This recipe won the Pillsbury cook-off in 1988, and has been a mainstay in our house ever since!
I had a piece on Sunday, my birthday, and then headed out of town for work. Mind you, I did leave an entire birthday cake behind. But let me tell you how this cake situation went down. I can still vivdly remember the phone call...
No, I did not just get a job as a mechanic! This is me after my workout this morning. Since I was the only one in the class today, Stephen, my trainer, decided that we would do something "more dynamic." I could only wonder what that meant...and not in a good way.
My tire was about 250 lbs, hence the nice dirty end result of the photo below!
We flipped them 25 times, did 50 burpees (an exercise which would have been better if never invented), and then we ran 2.5 miles! Craziness! Still trying to get my hands back to a normal color...might need to find a degreaser this afternoon!
