ryan & mariah

Ryan and Mariah got married not quite three weeks ago, and we all celebrated with them two weekends ago! It was really gorgeous fall weather in Stone Harbor for a lot of fun outdoor time: a pizza dinner on Friday on the deck at Stone Harbor Pizza, a lovely midday celebration on Saturday at a huge rented house on 103rd Street with catering from Back Bay Seafood, and a bagel breakfast at my parents' house on Sunday with bagels and coffee from Avalon Coffee Company. My cousins from both sides of the family were in the same place for the first time ever, I got to meet Mariah's parents and a lot of her extended family members, and basically everything about the weekend was delightful. One of our family friends pointed out that the weekend felt like one big happy relaxed reception, which I'm pretty sure was just what Ryan and Mariah were hoping for. And it was great.

Stephen and Gran and I did a little bit of cooking to supplement the catered food, specifically the following things (the eggplant salad in particular was very, very tasty):

+ roasted eggplant and herbed quinoa salad [only change was to roast the eggplant in the oven instead of grilling it, but grilling would be delicious]
+ black bean and roasted cherry tomatoes salad [approx. 1 cup of caramelized onions added]
+ salsa
+ quesadillas: take small corn tortillas, fill with a small amount each of grated pepper jack cheese, caramelized onions, and sauteed green peppers, and cook in a dry frying pan until cheese is melted.
+ gluten-free chocolate nut granola [made with 1/3 cup of coconut oil rather than the 1 cup the recipe calls for]
+ Smitten Kitchen maple walnut granola
+ Nutella-stuffed brown butter sea salt chocolate chip cookies [we have made these before, and I think they turned out even better this time, which is to say incredibly deadly]

And then we spent the better part of the following week eating leftovers of all of those things plus the catering. Trust me when I say that we suffered.

sardinia V: costa smeralda

The Costa Smeralda has some of the most stunning coastline I saw in Sardinia, but it's definitely a world of weird. An expensive world of weird. I'm a total convert to paying for loungers and umbrellas on the beach (after having tried it for the first time in Positano), but €50,- for a couple of spots on those nice cushy loungers you see in the first picture seemed a tiny bit extravagant. We rented the non-padded blue and yellow ones (way cheaper) and spent a few sunny hours refusing to buy pashminas/sunglasses/hats/assorted other knickknacks from the beach hawkers and then busted our way out of there for the open road.

sardinia IV: water

Three shots of the water on the Golfo di Orosei.

sardinia III: cala gonone & the golfo di orosei

     
Some shots from the two different days we did the Golfo di Orosei boat tour (separated by a day of hanging out at a beach to the north of Orosei & subsequently at the pool at Hotel Villa Gustui Maris, pictured above). We totally loved Villa Gustui Maris last year, so much that I reviewed it on Trip Advisor. Their breakfast is one of my favorite hotel breakfasts ever -- little individual silver coffee pots! fresh fruit! local Dorgali ricotta! eating on the patio overlooking the Golfo di Orosei! So great.

sardinia II: flowers

Gorgeous flowers at one of the beaches we visited on our way up the southeastern coast of Sardinia in early July.

sardinia I: the southeast

Stephen and I liked last year's parts-of-five-days trip to Sardinia so much that we decided to go back again this year. This time we spent almost two full weeks there. These pictures are from the first couple of days, when we spent the night in Quartu Sant' Elena just outside of Cagliari and then road tripped up the southeastern coast on the way to Cala Gonone.

Pro tip: The promenade along Poetto Beach is an excellent place to go running.

kölner wochenende

I visited Mandie in Cologne a couple of weeks ago, and in between running 13.1 miles (training for the Frankfurt Marathon less than two months out!), splitting fifteen little dishes of fabulous Persian food with Mandie and Kedar, watching Clueless, and getting Flammlachs sandwiches and a Nutella crêpe at a wine fest by the Rhein, we went to the lake. Specifically, Blackfoot Beach, which was excellent. We eased our way into the not-terribly-warm water and spent a while lounging on the big floating rubber barriers you can see in the lake before coming ashore for a light snack, which in my case translated to basically a whole meal involving potato salad, Greek salad, and, in response to some serious post-run protein cravings, the rare consumption of a German sausage. (I hit my lifetime bratwurst limit sometime in 2007, after a couple dozen visits to the Freiburg market for cheap bratwurst and mustard on a Brötchen, but do occasionally make exceptions.) The French fries in the picture tasted not a little bit like chicken and I didn't quite manage the entire sausage, but they (and the entire lake visit!) totally hit the spot.