Friday, August 26, 2011

moving time...

now we finally are ready to move into our little condo tomorrow. Well little is a slight understatement, after getting the keys today and walking throw it. I noticed that it's rather big and spacious. Except for our homeoffice, which is so tiny :(

anyway no internet for 3-4 days now...

Monday, August 15, 2011

Getting away - Bucketlist

Over the last couple of month Robin and I created at bucket list, what todo this summer and to ensure this all is going to happen, before her schoolwork starts again. So far we are making fair progress and also did a lot of things which were actually not on the list.

forgot the tripod at home...
This weekend for example we wanted togo camping with friends for 3 days at the Yuba river. Since I always loved this spot for it's beauty and since it's so hidden, that not many people know of it.

Sadly our friends promptly ditched us with the lame excuse 'sorry I need to work, the q-tof needs babysitting' so it was just robin and me.

So after finding a nice camping spot next to a waterfall and some rapids, we pitched our tent and relaxed a bit, before settling in for the night.

waterfalls tend to be a touch loud...
At about ~10.30 pm. It always amazes me how early you go to bed, when you are camping. Maybe it's something about the fresh air, which just makes you tired?

the view is just amazing here
After a restless night of sleep, it turns out that waterfalls are so ridiculous loud that you can barley sleep and smart as we are, we didn't bring any ear plugs either... We woke up in the morning and packed up the tent. There is not that much space on this spot and we didn't want to clutter it with all our stuff. And I kinda like to have it all together, specially since it's only takes 5 minutes to setup or pack-up anyway.

2 hours later it turned out that Yuba is not that private anymore and dozens of people were swarming the area and searching for gold and gemstones. And proudly showing off the tiny pieces of jade they found. 5h later Robin and I were so annoyed by this, that we decided to pack-up and hike back to the car.

Now I mentioned hike. The thing is to get to this spot, you have to hike a rather steep and narrow path for 25 minutes or so. Which should rather repel the average camper with his beer cooler, chairs and inflatable's. So we were both really stunned to see all the people there, specially 2 years ago when I was there it was totally empty and peaceful.

Guess it's time to find a new spot now...

it just keeps going...


The next plan is togo camping at point reyes, maybe 6 mile hike in's give you more peace...

Monday, August 08, 2011

homemade pasta...

since we are going to move in two week, we decided to deplete our stocks of stuff and produce some homemade pasta.

So what do we need for the pasta?


  • 3 1/2 cups of flour ~400g
  • 4 eggs
  • some salt
  • 3 tablespoon of water, give or take
now the first step is to build 'mount eggy'

mount eggy
after kneading this for 12 minutes by hand we surrendered and the let the kittchenaid do the rest of the mixing. Now the fun part was to let the dough rest for about 30 minutes and than roll it out, till you can see throw it.
It turns out to be quite a workout and after 5 minutes I started to complain that I want a pasta machine, that this is so not worth the effort and so on.
15 minutes later I finished the first bath off the rolling out and started to cut up the pasta...
1/2 the dough is cut into stripes
The idea was to have tagiatella, since this seems to be the easiest possible cut todo.

Now while I was doing all the pasta mixing and rolling and cutting, robin volunteered to make the sauce, based on a recipe from my sauce book
  • 2 cloves of gralic
  • lemon olive oil
  • vodka to marinate
  • chicken breast, cut in stripes
  • spinach
  • basil
  • white mushrooms
and our result looked something like this.


all in all not to bad for 2 hours of work and delicious.

Now the big question, how did it taste?

Robin: I like it much better than store bought pasta
Me: it's really tasty, but a touch chewy. It's just different than store bought pasta