Wild Mango

On Tuesday night, Joe and I got all gussied up and went on an honest to goodness date. Wild Mango is a newer restaurant at Great Northern Mall in North Olmsted, a west Cleveland suburb.
I had the Salmon Duo... perfectly cooked salmon cinched together with a scallion and nestled in whipped garlic potatoes with a teriyaki glaze, a mango and cucumber relish and pesto topped salmon on a block of sushi rice with a gingery sauce drizzled at the bottom.
We split a vietnamese spring mix salad with prawns, peanuts, soft rice noodles drenched in sauce at the bottom and fried rice noodles mounded on top. There were also delicate sweet potato spring rolls in the mix. YUM!

Joe ordered the duck, which came with sweet potatoes and an eggplant salad. In true Tilsch style, he let me sample all of his food before wolfing it down :-)
After our hot date, we went to best buy and got a flip cam then Target to pick up another pack of diapers. Don't we know how to be romantic!

Meeting the Parrinos and Giammos

Grandma G and Auntie Barbie try to entertain the little guy.

Fall foliage portraits

Cleveland eats

Grandma Giammo made this crustless quiche with spinach, mushroom and red pepper... I enjoyed eating a wedge of it on our trip from Cleveland to Chicago.
The Parrino clan met at Sara's Place (pronounced like the word car-a instead of care-a)in Gates Mill, on the east side of Cleveland. I had a california style turkey burger that stared me in the face for almost an hour while I fed Stephen and forked broccoli dipped in Joe's mussels provencal sauce into my mouth. And I didn't even drip on the kid. But once Stephen was done with dinner, I got to eat mine: an all-white meat turkey burger that was as savory and juicy as sausage topped with guacamole, roasted red peppers and alfalfa sprouts. I was in heaven.
For dessert, I split this cute pumpkin pie with aunt Sally. The crust to filling ratio was a little off. I would have rathered to have more pumpkin, less dough. Or if the crust was saltier or more sugary it would have been better. :-) Overall, Sara's Place had a great menu and an airy country ambiance.

Parrino men make omelets

This morning the guys made breakfast... omelets with herbs fresh from the garden. This one features flat leaf parsley.

Above, the conversation goes something like this: "How many eggs do we use?" Right, some of the fillings chopped up and ready to go.
Joe's favorite dessert, strawberry rubarb pie. We got to bring this home with us. :-) I had some for dinner. It was delicious, also featuring rubarb from John's garden.

Maggiano's

Creme brulee, sorry I can't spell. The crunchy sugar was awesome. I tried not to eat too much because I'm lactose intolerant and I'd already eaten some chicken pesto linguini and two big chunks of cheese in the spinach salad and the mozzarella in the eggplant parmesan.
Here's the pesto. Taken with flash because Maggiano's is always dimly lit.
So I forgot to mention... Joe and I went to Cleveland this weekend for a very brief by family-packed trip. We ate lunch at Maggiano's at Beachwood Place with the Parrino clan.
Here's the rest of them :-)
We also had dinner at Grandma G's with the Giammo clan, but I got too absorbed in eating to take photos. Sorry.

Visit from the Waldals

Yeah, I'm horribly late, as in two weeks late, in publishing these pics from when Bryce and Emily came to visit us in Hoptown. They came on a Friday around lunchtime and then after eating Chinese dumplings, we headed to Coffee And... for dessert and drinks. Then we twisted their arms (idiom doesn't really work when you make it plural, does it) to stay the night so they could get up bright and early and have plenty of time to stop at the Cincinnatti IKEA before returning home to Cleveland.
Here's Bryce making a really rich chocolate dessert... just like the good ole days at Magnolia House.


And Emily, waiting patiently and working on their taxes.
she's not too sure what she thinks about me taking a picture of her with the pad thai :-)After eating dinner we trooped over to the New Era to bring Joe some dinner and dessert. We ate the super rich chocolate cakes in the KNE kitchen.

Thanksgiving Highlights

I haven't been blogging very much lately... and it's not that I don't want to. I think about blogging a lot. I dream about it. Day dream that is. But these days I've really been running around like a chicken with my head cut off. Or my wings cut off. And maybe one of my feet cut off too.

Well tonight I'm finally forced to sit down and do something fun-productive because Joe has the car and I'm stuck without any way to get back to work and do A) interviews for a holiday pops story B) write said story C) write tour of homes story D) fix my new column "Girl Eats World" about the cushaw squash E)Gather information for a new photo feature I'm starting Thursday F)edit and layout the wedding announcements G) Call people to set up interviews for the Madrigal Feaste story. There's probably an H) sitting somewhere on my desk, but for now that's all I can remember.

I really don't like December, and it's not even December yet.

OK enough whining. Let's look at some wonderful Thanksgiving highlights:
These are the cushaw squash pancakes I made the night before we left for Cleveland. We ate them in the car on the way there.

Joe and I got to see many of his relatives on our trip and enjoyed many, many home cooked meals. This is a small selection of the desserts we had to gorge on Thanksgiving Day. The cookie is a soft Italian Biscotti... They were lightly iced and had orange zest in the dough. Made by another Italian in Grandma Giammo's apartment building. Must get that recipe! Joe devoured half the tin for first breakfast on Black Friday. Behind the biscotti is tofu pumpkin pie... my mom's recipe made by Joe's mom, just for me (and Jack, who is also lactose intolerant.)
And here's an adorable chickadee, looking more colorful than I remembered them, at the Cleveland Metroparks Rocky River nature center-- a place I could probably spend hours sitting in the bent-branch rockers, ogling critters until the sun goes down. Some genius placed several feeders just outside a wall of reflective glass windows. I think it's one of my favorite spots on earth. The day after TG, the Parrino clan braved the cold to take a very short walk in the snow crusted woods and to sit in those rockers. We saw chickadees, nuthatches, tufted titmice, red bellied woodpeckers, hairy woodpeckers and downy woodpeckers, mourning doves, junckos and the pudgiest squirrel I've every seen. He didn't bound, he waddled.

Flock of Uechis

I'm sorry, sorry, sorry that I took so long to post so many things. It's not that I didn't want to.

A week ago (Monday July 2) Joe and I were very happy to have visitors from Pittsburgh: Guy, Marianne and their clan of four children-- each who have very distinct, interesting personalities that reflect different facets of their Jesus-loving parents.

Guy and Marianne were a very important part of Joe's and my college years and they were also a big part of Joe and I becoming a couple.

I enjoyed their antics as well as their obedience to their parents and their affection for each other. These pictures show a little glimpse of it...

Mint tea

I'm just so happy I can finally get these photos up... but I don't have a lot to say. This is mint. It's an invasive species at the Parrino's in Cleveland. But in my neck of the country, it's a sickly, gangly, stemmy plant drooping out of a small flower pot on my patio. But the good news is that it's making a come back and I plan to make some fresh vanilla mint tea by the end of the summer.

Cleveland

My visit with Joe and Mom Parrino to the Cleveland Botanical Garden near my Alma Mater, Case Western Reserve University, was full of excitement. I used to frequent this little green oasis when I was an undergrad and when it was free and walking distance from my dorm. My senior year they began construction on a butterfly rainforest. Happily it was open on July 3rd.

Roy Peter Clark over at Poynter (all you journalists know who I'm talking about) just gave an example of a great journalist who recorded the names of 55 of 56 butterfly names while reporting for a story. (or something silly like that) I on the other hand, only remember one name, the Blue Morpho, and I'm not even sure how to spell it. Joe's mom and I spent all our time swinging our lenses around trying to capture this elusive creature that much prefers gliding and flitting to resting and sunning.

Blogger has not been cooperating with me of late. For a week I couldn't post any photos. Today it decided to work for a little while... there are a few other shots that didn't make the cut though! Maybe it will be in a more obliging mood tomorrow!