The Final Pig Out:

It seems as if everything lately can be described by what I am preparing, putting in my mouth-- and maybe that's appropriate for this time of year.
It's been a busy past few weeks of working too much, at the hospital and a few days at camp, and I can't even begin to put a recap on it since it was all happening too fast and I wasn't probably paying very good attention anyway;-)

Christmas was quite nice, one of the best parts being the dark chocolate volcano cakes I made and served with espresso bean ice cream (seriously, it was nothing short of dreamy). Camp was also good, despite the suck-o weather (50 some degrees and pouring the day we got there, but it improved pretty quickly. The kids still got to ski and sled, and no one got hurt, yay! And the camp food was ever so camp-a-licious..)
I got called in to work on all the days I was told I wasn't going to, including New Year's Eve, when my wonderful co worker saved my ass by calling me 15 minutes before I was scheduled to start my shift vs the night before as the charge nurse was supposed to do (and believe it or not, I was only 3 minutes late, not too shabby. I looked like a scary hag with major bedhead, but all my patients were sedated and no one complained...). So instead of running up to the Milwaukee Public Market and picking up some sushi grade tuna that day as I had planned (to make this super yummy dish a la "Heaven City"), I ended up running around like an idiot trying to create a new menu from thin air and purchase food after a killer, no-dinner-and-no-potty breaks-nonstop workday.
Since the meat markets were already closed, Jake and I flew over to one of the few places other than WalMart that was still open: a strange little store in New Munster called "Best Bargains" that is an impormptu cross between a restaurant supply company and maybe a Mexican market (sans Mexicans, go figure).
Anyhoo, here's what we came up with by the seats of our pants:

Grilled strip steaks with a thyme and Cotes du Rhone reduction sauce (so tasty!)

Alaskan King Crab legs with drawn butter and lemon

Scallops fra diavolo with linguine-- amazing!

Oven roasted asparagus

Wild mushrooms(from the groovy mushroom store) with carmelized onions

and finally, a really yummy chocolate cream pie (and not so hard to make from scratch as the folks from Jello pudding would like you to believe).

Oh! And a Raspberry Tart brew from the New Glarus Brewing Company, so SO good!

And so now I'm done, back to the old grind of low carb/whole grain dieting, to drive the new layers of holiday blubber away that I worked so hard to pile on. The gym has sucked lately, too, since they've been closed a lot with the holidays and all the bad weather we've been having. That, and the spin classes have been PACKED, making getting a bike more competetive than I like at 8 in the morning.
All in all, probably one of the best holiday seasons EVER; low stress (+/- the huge family blowouts we had Christmas eve/day, wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!), hanging out with friends and family (and we need to do MUCH more of that this year, it's a whole heap o fun).

Hope yours was just as nice... and if not, we have plenty of leftovers (if you're sweet, I may even let you have a taste of the Raspberry Tart brew, *maybe*...).

Happy 2009!