Good China for Ula

Souvenir dishes from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, on display at the Museum of Science and Industry.




One of the things that DH and I share is an interest in is pretty dishes. We have a very small kitchen, though, with very little cabinet space. The people who designed university housing were not expecting people to really cook. They were expecting busy students who lived off of take-out pizza and ramen noodles. This means there is no place to store a set of fine china, let alone two sets, which is what we recently found ourselves in possession of. When DH's mother passed away, DH inherited a beautiful set of Noritake china. Only 2 teacups and saucers are in use. The rest of the set resides in cardboard boxes in the back of our storage locker.
My grandmother recently decided that my sister was getting her silver and I was to get her good dishes. Ula and my mother packed up all the china and took it to my mother's house. The dishes are pretty, but we really don't have a place for another full set, so I took a single teacup and saucer as a souvenir and gave the rest to Ula. She will probably leave the dishes with my mother until she gets a place of her own, but that might not be very far in the future. She plans to graduate from college in May.


DH's mother's set of good china, Noritake is the maker, Candice is the design name:



My grandmother's set of good china (now belonging to Ula). The maker is Mikasa and the design is called Monte Carlo (470):



My reason for choosing to keep a cup and saucer, was that my grandmother used to have a display shelf in her den, where she kept a collection of pretty teacups and saucers.

The Trip Home

Here is our trusty navigator, Gaspar Perdido, in his place of honor on the dashboard, all set to direct us back to Florida.



Ready for another long car ride:



Blaze is actually a very good traveling companion, who seldom asks, "are we there yet?"

Windfarms in Indiana:





New Year's Eve: watching the countdown to midnight on t.v. in a room at the Holiday Inn Express in Franklin, KY.





Since Nashville, Tennessee was the nearest big city, this is the New Year's celebration we were watching:

The Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago

On our last full day in the Chicago area, we took Blaze to the Museum of Science and Industry. It seems that everyone else had the same idea, because it was packed with people. DH is not a fan of crowds and really didn't enjoy himself, but Blaze took a completely different view. Upon see this huge line to buy tickets, Blaze excitedly pointed and shouted out, "look, a maze!"























The mailbox right outside the museum:

Christmas in Chicago

Two days after Christmas, we headed North, following behind my mother on some pretty confusing and sometimes slippery, unplowed country roads (she has a special way of getting from Palestine to Elgin, where she drives through fewer towns to save time on the trip). To make the trip more exciting, the sky and the ground were the same color of white, a phenomenon I'm not sure my Floridian husband had ever seen before.

The next day, DH and I took advantage of having my mother and Ula there to babysit and took our first time off from parenting in a very long time.

We drove into Chicago and had lunch at Rick Bayless' restaurant, Frontera . We had watched the t.v. show "Mexico, One Plate at a Time" with Rick Bayless on PBS.



We arrived towards the end of the lunch rush, which turned out to be to our advantage. When we came in, we had been told it would be a two hour wait for a table, but it actually turned out to be only 20 minutes.



The food was excellent! I had the duck breast in mole sauce that I had seen on a Food Network show called The Best Thing I Ever Ate With a Sauce (yes, I watch a lot of cooking shows).



DH had a shrimp dish that he said made him weep a little, it was so good. He said that for the past 15 years he had tried to find this dish in the United States, but it had never been as good as when he had it in Mexico, until now.

Then for dessert, there was a dish with two kinds of flan.





The food was all wonderful, but besides that, I was impressed with Frontera for another reason. These people are masters of portion control. We had hot chocolate, two appetizers, and generous main courses, and still had room for dessert, which is something that rarely happens. Not only that, but after dessert, we felt full and happy, but not so stuffed that we couldn't comfortably take a nice long walk.





Inside the giant Macy's Store (formerly Marshal Field's):








Back outside:

Excuse the fuzziness of this next picture, but we were able to stand outside the window and watch ABC, channel 7, doing the evening news.

Persimmon Pudding

This is an old-school, regional dessert favorite. My mother's mother has been gone for about 16 years, but the memory of the persimmon pudding that she always made for holiday meals lives on.

This year my mother used that same reliable old recipe, found in an dog-eared and yellowed, locally printed, paperback cookbook, to make persimmon pudding for our Christmas dessert. As always, it received rave reviews, and one of the younger cousins, who is too young to remember his great-grandmother, said it was the best persimmon pudding he had ever had.





To make this masterpiece, follow the directions from the ancient cookbook, including Grandma's handwritten baking instructions, cool, cut into squares about the size of a brownie, and serve with homemade whipped cream.

Black, Red, and White Christmas

For many years now, my mother has had a new color scheme for Christmas each year. Last year it was brown and gold. This year it was black, red, and white.







She decorates everything to go with her color choices, from sewing new slipcovers for the throw pillows on the living room couch and chairs, to the light switch covers.

While Ula was put to work scraping the frosting out of Oreo cookies, so Mother could use the cookies for a crust, I was given the challenge of turning the following objects into decorative candlesticks for the dining room table.



This was my final result:



Each candlestick was then placed on a red lace doily on the table.

The Christmas Eve Snow Fall

After years of telling Blaze (and DH) that going to see my family in Illinois for Christmas meant that we might see snow, it finally happened. It snowed most of the day on Christmas eve.

This was particularly exciting for Blaze, who had not seen snow since he was 2 years old.



We fit as many snow related activities into Christmas Eve and Christmas Day as we could, and Blaze enjoyed them all. Even clearing Grandmother's front sidewalk was fun.



I was the victim of Blaze's first snowball, which went down the back of my neck, but Ula was the target of all the rest. He didn't really like the fact, though, that if he threw a snowball at her, it meant she could retaliate.



The sled:











Our somewhat sinister looking snowman, with bulging eyes made out of kumquats: