kevinnowak.com

Thanksgiving.

Hope you all had a wonderful and relaxing Thanksgiving.  We decided to host dinner this year and had a huge group, 17 people in all.  It was a huge undertaking, but thanks to a lot of help from Deb we were able to pull it off.

We went very traditional for the meal, all the usual side dishes, but the highlight of the day was the turkey.  Or should I say turkeys!  Since we  had so many people, and we were deep frying, we needed to make two birds.  After borrowing a few fryers and buying $90 worth of peanut oil we were good to go.  The night before we injected the birds with a tasty herb butter marinade and then massaged it into the meat.  Made all the difference in the world and it tasted amazing!

This was our first time deep frying a bird and it was so easy.  Just a little careful planning and you can't mess it up.  The best part is that it only takes 30 minutes to cook a 10lb bird AND it doesn't take up any valuable oven space so you've got plenty of room for all those sides.

     

     

  

     

     

     

Kel did an awesome job with the table and of course everyone was ready to dig in once we made the announcement that dinner was ready!

     
     

 

Kel and I capped off the holiday weekend with a trip over to Lincoln Financial Field on Sunday evening to see the Patriots destroy the Eagles [and essentially end their season in week #11] 

     
What a game!

Go Hawks!

Go Hawks...beat the Prep today! 

  

Happy Thanksgiving!

May your turkey be moist and hopefull you don't burn the house down with  your deep-fryer!

  

  

What a Great Quote!

After recieving this years Pan Mass Challenge donation of $35million dollars, Dr. Ed Benz, President of Dana Farber Cancer Institute, adjusted his now famous description of the PMC. He said, “When they write the book on how cancer was conquered, at this rate the PMC won’t just be chapter one, it will be the whole damn book.”

Now that's a pretty damn powerful statement right there folks!

Why so much?

I came across this story on Yahoo last week about a photograph that sold for $4.3 million bucks.  Must be a pretty impressive photo to garner that kind of money, right?  That's exactly what I thought...until I saw it.   

  

Seriously?  $4.3 million dollars for that? I just don't get it.  You or I could go take that photo.  It would save you a heck of a lot of money doing it yourself!

iPod.

So now that I'm riding the rails again to work I figured I'd buy a new pair of headphones for my iPod.  I ordered up a sweet pair or Bose ear buds, the IE2's to be specific and the sound is just amazing!  So for the past 5 years that I've had this iPod I've pretty much used it docked to our stereo and it's pretty much always been plugged in.  Well, the battery will no longer hold a charge for more than like 5 minutes.  Last night I decided to head over to the local Apple store to have it looked at and see if they could replace the battery.  I handed the iPod over to this whippersnapper they had working there and he entered the serial number in to have a look.  He reported back to me that my iPod was "rather antiquated", with a look in his face that it should be housed in the Smithsonian alongside the bread slicer and typewriter.  Needless to say, there was nothing they could do for my battery.  He did say that I may be able to find some places online that would fix the battery for like a hundered bucks, but that may or may not work.  Then he told me about a recycle program they offer where I can put a few dollars from the old iPod towards a brand spakin' new one. 

Sold! 

I got myself a Nano, since 16gbs holds all of the 3,200 songs we have.   

  

I'm amazed at how small it is.  Not much bigger than a quarter and you can store all that music on there.  Pretty amazing!  Imagine going back to the 70s or 80s and showing those people something like this?  They'd never, ever believe you that you could store music on a little device like this. 

So I'm back to listing on my tunes to and from work...and they sound great!

New Job!

As some of you have already heard, I've finally landed back in the world of architecture!  Sports architecture to be exact.  Yes indeed...a full time gig here in Philly.  It's with a firm whom I've been talking to for quiet some time now.  Many interviews, lunches, and even a breakfast right at the end with the firms president that I think sealed the deal.  After that we ironed out the details and I started on Halloween of all days. 

I've been there a few weeks now and it's been great.  I'm involved in a few interesting professional and collegiate sports projects that are keeping me extremely busy.  There have already been a few late nights but it's what I enjoy doing most so I don't mind at all.  It's a really great group of folks too and I'm excited to be a part of the team.

So...with a new job in my back pocket we put on our glad-rags and set out for a celebratory dinner. 

  

We chose a place called 10Arts.  It's a bistro/lounge by famous NYC chef Eric Ripert that's inside of the Ritz hotel on Broad.  [It's a bit ironic to have eaten here as I had just finished Anthony Bourdains' book "Kitchen Confidential" and he mentions Ripert many times throughout. Very good book too and an intriguing look inside the darker side of the restaurant business!]

Once again we were eating dinner in a converted bank building and the interiors were stunning!

     

  

We arrived a few minutes early for our table so we found a seat at the bar for a few drinks. 

     

Once seated we had some tough decisions to make!  I started off with the fried and breaded oysters while Kel went with the creamy cauliflower soup, both delicious.

     

For the main course I had the striped bass with mussels and yukon golds and Kelly chose the tagliatelle pomadoro.  I had to switch out the bass for cod since they had run out.  Oh well.

     

Both dishes were tasty, but I kinda wish I could have had the bass.

For desert we ordered up a few items to share, the frozen snickers dish and the pumpkin tart...and of course a cappuccino for me.

     

Overall the meal was good...but not very good.  We were kind of expecting a bit more for the price.  

Turkey Time.

Tis the season to start thinking about the Thanksgiving bird.  This year we're hosting the meal at our casa and I'll be attempting my first deep-fried bird. [actually 2 birds!  both around 10lbs]  I'm looking for any recommendations on seasonings/dry rubs/injections as well as tips on the actual cooking process so that I don't start a backyard fire! 

Leave whatever you've got in the comments!

Credit Card Offers: The Tally.

If you rewind back to the begining of October you'll remeber I did a post about keeping track of all the credit card offers we get in 1 months time.  Well...it's time to reveal that number, and frankly, it's a bit less than I thought it was going to be.  Perhaps it was a slow month?  In any event, we got about 20 offers this past month...pretty much equally divided between myself and Kelly.  Sometimes we get two of the exact same offer, talk about a waste of money.

  

My whole point in keeping track of all these mailings was that maybe if credit card companies spent less money on marketing and mailing then they wouldn't have to impose so many fees all the time, right?

Now how's this for amazing timing, in the middle of the month we got an annual fee charged to one of our cards for 85 bucks.  This is a card that Kelly had before we even met and I've since added to the account.  Never an annual fee and a pretty good rewards program too, so we used the card often.  The rewards program actually saved us a decent chunk of change on our airline tickets over to Europe in 2009.  Anyway...now they were going to charge us an $85 fee for the card.  No thanks!  Needless to say, we canceled that card immediatly.  They tried every song and dance to get us to stay, but there was no way I was paying a fee to use a credit card...no chance. 

So we had to sign up for another card...always good to have at least two incase one doesn't work or something! 

Christmas Shopping.

Kel and I were out shopping the other night and she wanted to dip into TJ Maxx for a quick look.  While she was off in the womens section I decided to take a stroll through the mens department when I spotted this old McNabb jersey hanging on the rack.  They had a ton of them, all marked down from $120 to only $5.99. What a deal!  Of course I purchased one for every single member of Kellys family to hand out at Christmas time.  [hey...they guy did get them to a SuperBowl, right?] 

  

And just like that...half my Christmas shopping is done!