In theory, I have time for updating this thing more often...

As it turns out, my "free time" over the holidays and between semesters has been pretty full. I had a lovely trip to North Carolina and back-to-back Christmas celebrations at my parents' house and at my sister's. We sang carols, ate, took walks, ate, visited, and looked at pictures of kittens (ours) and a trip to Peru (my sister's and her husband's).Monday, we had our holiday celebration here with Stephan and Emma, who had her tonsils out yesterday and is recovering quite well. We had a totally non-traditional meal centered around Bami Goreng--Indonesian noodles with shrimp and veggies. Stephan found an Indonesian salad in a cookbook that we hadn't tried before, and it turned out delicious. The crucial ingredient is a sauce made from onions, peanut butter, grated lemon peel, chili powder, and coconut milk. This gets poured over a bed of lettuce topped with sliced hard-boiled eggs, cucumbers, bean sprouts, cooked green beans, cabbage, and maybe a couple other things I'm forgetting, then the whole thing chills in the fridge. Yum! I made a broth using a can of veggie broth and some lime juice and cilantro, based on the sopa di lima recipe I use, but more of a simple broth to go with the robust other elements of the meal. For dessert, I made a key lime pie.Today, Chris is back from Arizona, where he was working at a mountain-top observatory over the holidays. He has written about this experience here in his new livejournal.While in North Carolina, I went to a gathering organized on Facebook by a few people I went to high school with. This was lots of fun and I may post more about it later.Tomorrow, we fly to L.A. to visit Dan.