Wedding Day Taters

We attended the most beautiful wedding this weekend. It was held at the Garden Vineyards estate in Hillsboro, situated at the top of the west hills overlooking fields and farms. Everything about this wedding was just so fantastic. You had a great setting with picturesque views, a beautiful, tearful bride, a ceremony that was both heartfelt and humorous, and you could not have ordered better weather for an outdoor wedding.

The best part was that for the first time in years, my husband and I had no wedding party obligations and could just attend as regular guests and not have to show up hours in advance for pictures or worry about getting the bride's dress bustled correctly after the ceremony. Wait. That was the second best part. The best part was that the kidlet was having a great time at Grandma's house and we got to have a rare Parent's Night Out. Woo-hoo! Partay!

Because we were at a vineyard, the wine began flowing early and we made sure to sample it (if sampling is defined as drinking several full glasses) and the food was great. In particular, they served these stuffed red potatoes as part of the buffet that were just so good and appeared to be pretty simple to make. For purely investigational reasons, I just HAD to go get a second helping...

Anyway, tonight with our dinner, I attempted to re-create the recipe and here is what I did:

Preheat oven to 400. Wash about 1 pound of baby red potatoes, place in baking dish and cover the potatoes with with Italian salad dressing. Cover the dish with foil and bake for about an hour; shake the dish about halfway through. While the potatoes bake, mix about 1/4 cup feta cheese with about a tbsp of mayo and maybe a 1/2 tsp of minced garlic. Stir it up well. When the potatoes are done, put them into a bowl and stick them in the fridge for a few minutes until they are cool enough that you can stand to touch them for a few seconds. With a melon balling spoon, scoop out the top of each potato and put it back into the baking dish (I used a new one that I sprayed with Pam). Fill each potato with the feta cheese mixture and put it back in the oven uncovered for about 20 more minutes. Then, I switched the oven to "broil" and cooked them for about 3 minutes longer, until the cheese stuffing turned golden.

Here is how they looked:

We decided that the feta cheese stuffing tasted VERY similar to what we ate at the wedding. The only problem were the taters themselves. The ones at the wedding were VERY soft, almost barely keeping their little tater shape. I think when I try this again, I will bake them at 450 degrees, or increase the baking time. Also, next time I will scoop out more of the potato and make more stuffing to put into them (but that's just a personal preference thing--what good is a potato without a bunch of fattening stuff on top of it?)

Anyway, the bride and groom are off to Fiji and I am so jeal- happy for them. Meanwhile I will sit here and eat the rest of my Wedding Day Taters.

Haircut

I have a hard time paying people to do things that I am perfectly capable of doing myself. While I would love to have a housekeeper and a yard maintenance crew, I know that I have the time and ability to run my own vacuum cleaner and pull my own weeds (much to my dismay). I may be in the market for a personal chef, however, as my cooking tends to be kind of hit or miss, but one thing I CANNOT do for myself is cut my own hair.

I love getting my hair cut.

I never thought I'd develop a relationship with a hairstylist. My hair was never very complicated or remarkable in it's style, and I pretty much spent my college days dropping by the nearest Supercuts to gets the ends trimmed. When we moved out to Minnesota, however, one of my friends just raved about how much she loved her salon, and it was right around the corner from her apartment. So, in an attempt to avoid studying, I made an appointment at this salon with the plan to meet my friend for lunch afterward and to shop in the cute little neighborhood surrounding the place. And that is how I met Dawnelle.

For the next 2 years, the standard routine would be to get my hair cut and then meet my friend afterward for food and shopping. Sometimes she would get her hair cut at the same time, and the four of us (Dawnelle, me, my friend, and her hairdresser) would chat above the sounds of blowdryers and running water. It was great. Getting my hair cut was an EVENT (keep in mind that I was a student and so it didn't take much to turn anything that did not involve studying into an EVENT).

Third year, we started hospital rotations that required me to be at the hospital VERY early, and it soon became obvious that an extra half hour of sleep was going to win out over self-beautification. I became Pony Tail Girl. The problem was that I still had all of this hair to wash and get into some sort of manageable style every morning and I felt that it was still taking up too much time.

The final straw was my surgery rotation, during which I needed to BE at the hospital at 5am. I figured, nobody sees my hair anyway because you have to wear those soft shower cap-like things on your head most of the time, so off to Dawnelle I went. I wasn't even really nervous because I figured hey, hair grows. And I had her chop it all off. Picture Ryan Seacrest with half as much product and minus the highlights.

It was great! I loved it! It cut my "get ready in the morning" routine time in half, which meant more sleep! Woo-hoo!

Unfortunately, any woman who has had short hair knows this secret: It's addicting. I kept having Dawnelle cut it shorter and shorter until it got to the point that she was using a razor to cut the back. And every time, she'd ask "are you sure?" and I just say "cut away!"

My husband did not care for this look. In fact, I suspect that he hated it. After I'd started growing it out he did admit to me that he thought it made me look very boyish. I had to agree that I'd gone too far when I looked at the back of my head with a mirror one morning and could clearly see a tiny little bald spot on my head from a chicken pox scar. There IS such a thing as too short, and I'd found it.

I started growing it back out around the time we moved back here while mourning the loss of Dawnelle. I went to the hair salon around the corner from our house, and never really saw the same person more than twice.

Two years ago, I found Dosha. It's a salon/day spa in a funky little part of town that reminds me of the salon in Minneapolis. And that's where I found Christabelle. I figured the -elle part of her name was a good sign because I had had such good luck with Dawnelle. I also just found out that they don't allow anyone under the age of 12 in the salon "unless they are receiving services" which, as a mommy, it's kind of nice to have a place that you can count on as a kid-free zone and getaway.

They greet you with tea or ice water and your haircut starts with a scalp massage. (Now, I know it may sound weird, but you DO have muscles on your head and it's very relaxing. Trust me.) The whole place smells like Aveda candles and Aveda hair products and they have this cool gas fireplace that looks like it's coming from crystals. You get your hair cut and styled, and then they do a hand massage, too!

Then they have to call security to pry me out of the chair because I've just had such a relaxing, good time and I don't want to leave.

I love getting my hair cut.