What a Week!

We did indeed have a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner at my parent's. Besides turkey, stuffing and mashed potatoes, there were: peas, carrots, turnips, brussels sprouts, sweet potatoes, and sauteed mushrooms. For dessert, there was pumpkin pie, apple pie (made by my sweet husband), and some wonderful pumpkin cheesecake muffins. Delicious! After dinner, we watched the wedding video taken by my 12 year old niece. She did a fantastic job! I told her she could have a pretty good side job, if not a very successful career. :-)

The rest of the weekend was pretty quiet. We were supposed to go away for the weekend, but the extreme cold weather had closed the Falls Trail at Rickett's Glen State Park, so we decided to postpone the trip for better weather. We did go for a hike on Saturday, a long 6 mile circuit hike in the Rockaway River Wildlife Management Area. Not an easy hike! We were wiped out. We were still working our way through the Thanksgiving leftovers through the weekend, but by Monday we were ready for something different. We decided to try Murphy's Hideaway in Rockaway - not an easy place to find, but I have to say it was worth it. Monday happens to be Lobster Insanity - a 1 1/4 pound lobster, 6 clams, potato and salad for $15.95. I thought about it, but we had actually come looking for a good burger. They have 8 oz Angus Burgers, with your choice of "accessories". I went with bacon and swiss, the hubby chose cheddar and onions. Yum. They were excellent! And the restaurant was a great find, lots of intriguing specials and happy hour treats. Something called Oogy wawa is on the blackboard...

The rest of the week was lost in a blur of hard work and late hours. Both of us are in a very intense time at work these days, so we basically just come home, eat something, and collapse on the couch. One day (Thursday?), we made a pasta dinner that turned out really well. I found the recipe on Cooking Light, although I wouldn't necessarily consider it to be "light". I subsistuted chicken thighs for the chicken tenders, and used half and half instead of cream, but otherwise followed the recipe. You can find it here: http://find.myrecipes.com/recipes/recipefinder.dyn?action=displayRecipe&recipe_id=698596

Friday we decided to live a little, so after working until 6:30 (that's just wrong), we went to Thai Ping in Boonton. It is a beautiful little restaurant, nicely decorated, and they were even playing Christmas music. Everyone working there was very friendly and helpful. We started with the Thai Ping Egg Rolls, 4 small egg rolls served with a zippy dipping sauce. For an entree, I had Yum Nuur (Thin sliced tender charcoal beef marinated with fresh chili herbs, red onions, tomato, cucumber, mint leaves, and lime juice served on a bed of lettuce), which was delicious. I ordered it mildly spicy, but it wasn't really spicy at all. My husband got Mussaman (with pork), which is described as "Sauteed potato, onions, peanuts in a tangy piquant curry coconut milk curry". He ordered it medium spicy, and it was... HOT! Like, burn your tongue, breathe fire, sweat from your eyes hot. But tasty! I found that if you didn't get too much of that "piquant" sauce, it was much less painful. But we brought half of it home. Maybe with lots of rice or noodles, it will be a bit milder! I think the lesson here is to just order the food mild. We had a similar experience at Thai Nam Phet in Rockaway, so now we know. Thai food is pretty darn hot. We also rewarded ourselves with dessert. I had one of my favorites, Mango with Sticky Rice, and the hubby had fried bananas with ginger ice cream. I managed to get a taste of the ice cream before it was hoovered off the plate, and it was very tasty. All told, the bill was about $60 (no drinks, it's BYO), and a very pleasant evening after a totally crazy week.