Meat Hand

We had a special Halloween themed dinner tonight.

Inspired by these two bloggers, I decided that we would be making meat hand for dinner.



It was delicious.



We gave it one thumb up.



I don't really know what to say, other than that it is meatloaf shaped into a hand and baked until delicious. Erik took the time to carefully craft finger nails and a wrist bone out of potato. It's definitely the weirdest thing that has ever come out of our kitchen, but I'm hoping it will become a Halloween tradition.



To accompany the hand, we roasted these cute little potimarron squash.



And we'll be eating this applesauce cake for dessert as soon as I finish this post. The icing is delicious, and the cake smells great, so I assume it will be a hit.

Edited to add that the cake was in fact delicious, and that it was well worth unwrapping the 12 squares of Kiri cheese to make the cream cheese icing. You should make it now!

Sunday at the Cemetary

It's Halloween, and we live near Pere Lachaise, and we needed to walk off an exceptionally bad Chinese lunch.



You can't really tell from these photos, but the leaves are changing, and it was quite pretty. Not as impressive as the changing leaves in Canada I'm sure, but we'll take what we can get.



Last night we went out with Julia and her friend to Ave Maria, a Mexican bar near Oberkampf. They were having a Halloween party (or maybe a Day of the Dead party?), and there was a live mariachi band, and frozen margaritas. What more could we want?




Public service announcement: Daylight savings time ended here today, so for the rest of the week we are officially an hour less ahead of North America. It's not even 7 and it's already dark... :(

Louvred

It's school holiday time for me, and I've decided to play Parisian tourist for the week. I have to admit I've been a bit lazy about it, and went to Ikea on Tuesday with Julia, which I doubt any self respecting tourist would do. But we needed wine glasses, and I was looking forward to a visit without the crowds, so that took care of Tuesday.

Ever since Steve and Yoshimi visited this summer and spoke so highly of their visit to one of the world's most famous museums, I've been wanting to go back. I haven't been to the Louvre in years, having been very quickly intimidated by it's size.



This time, again hoping to avoid crowds by going in the middle of the week (probably not possible during considering that it's a major tourist attraction on a school holiday) Julia and I fortified ourselves with lunch first on the rue St. Honore before braving the masses inside the Louvre.



Geared up with audio guides, we followed the masterpieces tour which took us to the Venus de Milo, the Winged Victory, and of course the Mona Lisa. We also went through the Grande Gallerie to admire the paintings by da Vinci and Raphael, before spending a good moment admiring the Greek sculptures.



It was quite satisfying, and I felt very cultured, if also exhausted at the end of the visit. I would have also liked to do the French Collection tour, but at three hours, I thought I'd save that for the next visit.

Strike, Blogs and Recipes

Steve jokinging-ly implied that we were too busy striking to blog, and while that's not exactly true, don't you wish you were in France right now? Tuesday was the official start to the 'unlimited' strike, but by Wednesday the metro had more or less returned to normal. I don't have any connections to get to work, just one long train ride, which means that I don't usually have any problems (knock on wood). Erik was however takes the RER B to work, and it always strikes first and the longest. It kept up the fun all week. My favorite slogan for this whole strike has been 'greve jusqu'a la retraite' which means strike until retirement. Fun. It will be interesting to see how this mess pans out, but until then, I think we can anticipate some more crowdy metro trains.

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Speaking of Steve, he and Yosimi have recently moved to Canada, and Yoshimi has started her own blog over at yoshimiandsteve.blogspot.com. It's in Japanese and English, but Yoshimi takes great pictures, so you shouldn't have any trouble following along.

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In other exciting news, life around here has been pretty straightforward. I've been cooking a lot on weekends, so instead of boring you any more with the mundane details of our daily lives, I thought I'd leave you with some links to the tasty stuff we've been eating.

I made this Pumpkin Olive Oil cake this morning to use up the pumpkin left from pie making last weekend. Yummy!

Along the same lines, I made this delicious Zucchini Cake a couple of weeks ago, and keep looking for excuses to make it again.

We had this mushroom lasagna for dinner last Sunday and it was a very satisfying meal, and we're looking forward to pulling the leftovers out of the freezer soon.

Happy cooking!