Double Trouble

Double the trouble, they are coming to town

Overnight Apple Butter

This is a delicious recipe for apple butter. Its great on toast or bagels and the person who gave it to me puts it on crepes with brie. The recipe also suggests using it with chicken or pork. A variety of apples give it a complex flavor and suggested types include Granny Smith, Northern Spy, Rome, Winesap or Jonathan.

10 medium apples, peeled and cored and cut into chunks
1 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup honey
1/4 cup apple cider
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

1. Combine all ingredients into a 5 quart slow cooker and cover. Cook on low for 10 to 12 hours, until apples are very tender. Stir occasionally.
2. Place a large fine-mesh sieve over a mixing bowl and spoon a third of the apple mixture into sieve, pressing mixure through the sieve with the back of a spoon. Discard any course pulp and repeat process with the remaining apple mixture.
3. Return apple mixture from bowl to slow cooker and cook uncovered on high for an hour and a halfor until mixture is thick. Stir occasionally.

** Apple butter keeps refridgerated for a week or frozen to four months **

Christmas rocks with apple butter!!

Out and About

I felt bad posting only pictures of the inside of our apartment, so Brandon took some shots of our neighborhood over the weekend. The first picture is the outside of our building and the others are of the streets around us and on the way to Trader Joe's.

Advent

I can't think of anything to write. These are pictures of our Christmas tree (it isn't as dark in person) and our curtains (very exciting i know).

Thanksgiving

Over Thanksgiving my sister Genna came to visit us and had the honor of being our first house guest. As Genna doesnt eat meat and I didnt feel up to the challenge of cooking an entire turkey, we had baked lemon pepper salmon for Thanksgiving dinner.

These are some pictures from a day trip we took to Multnomah Falls outside of Portland. They are the second tallest year round falls in the US at 620 feet. The drops in the pictures are not spray from the falls, it was raining. The upside about the wet weather was there were very few other people there.

Details

So to fill you in on the day to day part of our lives. Brandon is working as an office assistant at a local family owned insurance company, Llyod Purdy. I am discovering law might not be the career path I want to take while I am a file clerk and receptionist at the Portland branch of K&L Gates. Since we both take public transportation to work and pretty much everywhere else we want to go too we sold my Subaru two weeks ago. Brandon has joined a car sharing program so that if we need a car to say, make a run out to Ikea, we have a car at our disposal. I have never been a huge fan of driving, especially not in the city, so I let B chauffeur me around.

These are just some pictures of our artwork and ceiling

Arrival of stuff!

Brandon still hasn't revealed all of the misadventures of dealing with the mover to me. It was a tough day but it's great to have our clothes and kitchen stuff here. Amazingly, none of our glass things were broken.

Our for real place

After we looked at about ten different places we decided to move into the Marshall Wells building. The building was built in built in 1910 as a hardware warehouse and converted into lofts in 2001. Not to sound like a real estate agent but our loft has cork floors, exsposed wood beams and ceiling, cherry cabinets and slate counter tops. We look into the buildings courtyard that has a water feature. This is the buildings web site, http://www.marshall-wells.com/

When we moved in we only had our very basics that we had brought out with us. For two weeks while we waited for our furniture to arrive from Michigan we slept on our airmattress and sat on our camp chairs. We were lucky to find that one of our neighbors was selling their sofa, which has become our favorite place to lounge. Above is our living and dining room and Brandon on our sofa.

Home for a month

For the month of September we rented a furnished studio near downtown so that we could get settled. We didn't want to rent a place site unseen from MI and we wanted to make sure we had jobs before signing a lease too. Even though it was small I was a little sad to leave it. It was built the beginning of last century and to get in the elevator you had to pull open a door manually and then slide the inner back manually too.

Pacific camping

After we visited Brandon's brother Cody, we had a few days before we could move into the studio we rented for September so we went camping on the OR coast. I highly recommend the OR State Parks for camping. They were very nice and clean and the rangers were friendly and best of all they had free showers with unlimited hot water.

The coast reminded me of a lot of places I have been around the world. The little tourist towns reminded me of places in Leelanua county. The shore reminded me of the northern Atlantic coast and the rocky parts of the coast were a little like Greece or Ireland.

Road tripping

This is how I saw Brandon for most of our trip. This shoot is when we were driving in ND.

We had driven from Traverse to Duluth, MN the first day and started very early the second day with plans to camp in western ND. However, we got to the national park sooner than we anticipated and the weather wasn't very comfortable for camping, so we decided to drive six hours to Bozeman, MT, where we were meeting Brandon's youngest brother Cody. The sun set picture below was taken somewhere in eastern MT. It took us a little longer to get to Bozeman than we thought it would and by the time got there absolutely every hotel within a 30 mile radius was booked up. We ended up sleeping in the car at a truck stop.

We had a fun visit with Cody in the days before he flew to the Caribean to visit his grandparents. Cody took us two tracking up to the mountain spring lake in this picutre. The next day we went on a raft ride that was billed to be white water rafting but was a very mild float down part of the Yellowstone River.

This may come as a suprise to people who know me well but I can actually survive camping. It is not my prefered method of lodging but it will do in a pinch. Brandon took this picture to prove to nonbelievers.

And finally, the Pacific!

For those of you with Facebook, I have posted more pictures of our trip there too.

Greetings from Portland!

On our trip out, Brandon and I discussed how we could keep our friends and families up to date on our lives out here without having to tell the same stories over and over. As kind of corny as it is, we decided a blog would be the easiest way to keep in touch with as many people as wanted to keep in touch with us. Check in with us for news and photos and feel free to comment or email us. And if you ever happen to be in the Portland area give us a call!