Swag Bags

I love the Oscars.  Every year I look forward to the announcement of movies up for Best Picture and then hurriedly try to see them all before the big event.  The past two years that's been a bit more difficult because they now have about 10 films up for best picture instead of just 5.

Another reason the Oscars are intriguing to me is that all the multi-millionaire celebrities that attend all receive "goody bags", or swag bags, worth thousands of dollars!  I secretly hope one day I'll be invited to the Oscars so that I can get a bag filled with trips to tropical islands and something from Kim Kardashian's watch line (just kidding, I would never wear that).

Well, last weekend The Saulters got to attend a fancy event and got a swag bag of our own!

The event: The PAOF Fair (Physician's Alabama Opportunities Fair) which tries to recruit future and current physicians to rural, under-served Alabama locations.
The location: The Grand Hotel in Point Clear right down the street.  Its one of the top hotels in the world!
The cost:  Free!!!!!!!

Stuart and I will occasionally splurge and to to The Grand for Sunday brunch.  We've always wanted to stay but it's ridiculously expensive.  So we both jumped at this opportunity for a night for free!

The event started on Friday with an amazing lunch buffet of gumbo, salad, steak, veggies, and the most perfectly seasoned chicken I have ever tasted.  Oh, and don't forget about the bread pudding and chocolate mousse cups!  While we stuffed our faces we listened to a lady talk about her life as a rural family doctor.  Next up was Stuart's favorite: a lecture on how to manage medical school debt.  The average med student graduates with $160,000 in debt and we are both a bit panicked on paying that off.

After the speakers were finished they opened up the exhibit hall where a good 25 hospital systems from Alabama were present to try and recruit you to their location.  It was fun to talk to them and get a good feel for what different places are like.  Of course Stuart felt a bit out of place walking around with me and our friends Shannon and Andy.  The hospital CEO's would go down the line asking what specialty we wanted to go into, and Stuart would just smile and say, "Engineering.  I'm here for support!"

Stuart's unofficial job during the fair was to grab freebies while I distracted the exhibitors.  Bless his heart, he even went as far as carrying a bag that looked like a man purse.  After a successful afternoon of talking until my jaws hurt, we wound up with this!

Three new grocery bags, Tervis Tumblers, coozies, Swiss Army knives, and more pens than you can shake a stick at!

You'll notice the Mardi Gras stuff on the right.  That came later on in the night when some of us drove down to Fairhope for a parade.

And, even better than all that, right when they started calling door prizes I told Stuart, "I don't think I've ever won a door prize."  Well a few seconds later they pulled my name out of a hat and I won:

Yeahhhhhhhhhh!

And then, what is a good medical school event without a game of Catch Phrase?!?!!?  This is probably my favorite game in the whole world.  And there's something about when my school friends get together that it gets pretty intense!  I think its a good way to get stress out.  Anyway, some people came to our room and we played a few rounds, probably keeping up the whole hallway with our hooting and hollering!

Let the games begin.  Liz is probably revelling in someone's loss.  We played boys against girls and it was pretty intense!

Andy started the evening propped back in his chair and wound up on the edge of his seat!

THINK THINK!

I think Stu looks more intense here than he did before the marathon?

Sunday morning we woke up bright and early for the breakfast buffet.  Unfortunately, we had to actually pay for this.  But we wound up making money on a very fancy and fun weekend!  Success!

Paula's Cheescake

If you've read the Culinary Life List, you'll know that Stuart and I are trying to turn over a new leaf by not eating processed foods.  As you may have guessed, that was more my idea than Stuart's.  As you also may have guessed, that is proving to be a pretty challenging task.  I dare you to open up your pantry/fridge right now and see what percentage of the stuff in there is processed.  It's scary!  And what I mean by processed is having stuff on the label that is not recognizable as food.  Example: Tocopherol in my seemingly-healthy Near East boxed whole grain couscous mix.  What the heck is that?  And don't even get me started on Velveeta.  It's not even cheese!

Anyways, we have begun the process of using up/donating the processed items in our pantry and replacing them with only whole-food items.  This will mean a lot more cooking on our parts, but hopefully a lot healthier bodies in return!

And of course there will be bumps in the road.  Our first bump?  Paula Deen's Chocolate Explosion Cheesecake.  

Whoa.

 It all started while Stu and I were watching the Food Network one Saturday.  The whole day was dedicated to recipes with chocolate in them.  On comes Paula Deen, the queen of fattening recipes.  Well her show that day demonstrated making the Chocolate Explosion Cheesecake.  Stuart and I were transfixed to the television.  The cake had 5 layers.  There was cookie dough, caramel, and ganache involved.  


Fast forward to Valentine's Day.  Stuart came home from work one evening with a Publix paper sack which went straight to the fridge.  He said it was my V-day present and I had to wait to see what it was.  I was immediately suspicious.

Large paper sack to the right

On Valentine's Day before our wonderful dinner at the Wash House, which could be a post in and of itself, I opened the bag.  Ta-daaaa!  It was the cheesecake ingredients for us to cook together!

A few days later we began our cheesecake adventure.  We donned our aprons (matching ones, mind you!) and prepared to bake.  We divided up layers.  I worked on the graham cracker crust while Stuart made the first chocolate layer.  Now, I have to give Stuart credit for the culinary progress he has made!  Before we were married he ate tuna helper and peanut butter (not together) on a regular basis.  I also remember the first dinner he ever made me was chicken nuggets and his grandma's frozen mac and cheese.  I loved it just the same!  But now we both like spending time in the kitchen together, and his cooking skills have grown to prove it!

Anyway, I was at one counter pressing down the crust, and Stuart asked me where the flour was.  I keep flour, sugar, and corn meal on the counter in big unlabeled glass canisters.  I use them a lot and theyre just really handy that way!  I told him it was the 1st jar and kept minding my crust.  A few minutes later, over a steaming double boiler, Stuart asked me to come see if the chocolate looked ready.  I glanced in and noticed it was a little, well, grainy.  I then looked to his right and noticed the jar of cornmeal was open.  Uh ohh...He grabbed the first jar at the other end of the row.

We proceeded on despite the mishap.  On to the next layers of caramel sauce, cookie dough (processed, dang it), and chocolate ganache.

Mistake #2: we cut the cookie dough a bit too thick and didn't have enough to cover the entire cheesecake.  Again, we proceeded on.  When the cake was finally assembled it almost overflowed the pan!  Since the cookie dough layer was only on the periphery there was a big dip in the cake, but we figured it would taste good anyway.  Into the oven it went!

Paula said to bake the cake at 300 degress for an hour.  I thought that seemed kind of low but went with it anyway.  After an hour it was still basically liquid, and it wound up cooking for about an hour and a half.  After 8 agonizing hours of it cooling in the fridge, it was time to taste!

Mistake #3: not greasing the pan enough.  That plus all the layers didn't quite 'adhere' together.  Made for a bit of a messy cut

So, as I'm sure you're dying to know, the cheesecake was delish!  You couldnt even notice the secret ingredient: cornmeal.  However, next time we may try sticking with just 1 or 2 layers instead of 5.  And maybe I should label my jars.

NOLA

This weekend we traveled to New Orleans so that Stuart could run in his second marathon.  If you remember from an earlier post, I was supposed to be running the half-marathon.  Alas, a few days prior I had to have some small medical procedures done (I'm ok - no worries!) and the stitches weren't exactly running-friendly.  Regardless, I accompanied Stu to the Crescent City to cheer him on!  And, since the only time I had been to NOLA was for Katrina cleanup, I considered this to be a mini vacation.

So on Saturday around noon we headed out.  When we arrived downtown our hotel room wasn't ready, so we used that opportunity for Stuart to sign in for the race and for us to see the sights!  After signing in, we took a stroll down the Riverwalk.  This is lined with mall-ish restaurants and shops, and on the other side you can see ships chugging down the Mississippi River.  If you're "lucky", like we were, a few rats might even scamper across your path as you pass by.  We finally made it down toward the French Quarter and got in the block-long line for Cafe Du Monde.  If you've never heard of it, the cafe has a pretty simple menu: Cafe au Lait and beignets (French Donuts).  If you've never had one, a beignet is basically a hand-sized funnel cake that is even more delicious.  

Our last half-eaten beignet with it's bath of powdered sugar

The atmosphere there is pretty cool, too.  It's an open air cafe where you seat yourself (if you're lucky enough to find a table).  The tables are tiny and round and so close together that you can literally bump elbows with people at the table next to you.  Conversations are loud but you can still hear the street musicians playing right outside.  Once you sit down a waiter somehow notices and comes to take your order (ours was two cafe au laits and 1 order of beignets).  A few seconds later the food arrives and you pay, cash only, right there on the spot.

Along with the conversations in the air, you also will notice little specks flying around in the sunlight.  I first thought it was dirt or debris from the street, but then after Stuart took his first big bite of French donut, I realized it was powdered sugar floating around!

Stu's first bite.  He had to load up on the carbs for the race, you know!

My first bite!  I didn't race, but loaded up on carbs anyway.

To lick the sugar off the plate or not?

After we ate our fill we headed back towards the hotel.  We didn't make it far before we saw a huge crowd forming around Jackson square.  There were people lined up in the streets and sidewalks watching 4 guys in matching Adidas sweatsuits do some sort of routine.  We stopped to see what all the hullabaloo was about, and wound up getting the show of our lives!

Although I can't confirm this online, apparently these 4 dudes used to live on the streets of New Orleans doing who knows what.  Then they discovered they could dance/do gymnastics and also were hilarious, and decided to do these routines on the sides of the street.  As far as I know, this is their only occupation, and based on the numbers of people that watch and give tips, they probably make more than we do.  I have to admit I was a bit jealous!

We watched for at least half an hour as they jumped and danced and spun around.  Even though that was entertaining enough, the best part was how they would mock people in the audience/bystanders.  For instance, a lone Hispanic man in a cowboy hat and denim got called the Marlboro man and asked where his familia was.  An elderly lady in a wheelchair was told if she took the chair to the ghetto where they lived they could fit it with 24 inch rims!  I think she was confused, but it was hilarious!

Head spins!

 After the show, we grabbed a bite for dinner and then headed back to the hotel for an early bedtime and what we hoped would be a restful night.  We got settled in and were just about to doze off around 9pm, when all of a sudden we heard, "BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!"  At first I thought our neighbors were watching a loud movie, but then we realized it was coming from outside our 2nd floor window.  I walked over to peek out the curtains and what did I see but ...

What did we do to deserve this?!

 A MARCHING BAND!  Just parked outside our window in a random alleyway, banging their drums.  Why?  I have no idea.  There definitely was not any parade nearby.

We finally settled off to sleep amidst the drumline.  However the slumber didn't last long.  As luck would have it, the white building in that picture was actually A BAR.  And not just any bar.  A New Orleans bar.  AKA a place where people drink a lot, stay up til all hours of the morning, and have loud Cajun accents. The event that actually woke us up was a Cajun "gentleman" named Curt who was loudly cursing at someone and dropping the F-bomb at every opportunity.  His girlfriend/wife was trying to get him to stop, but unfortunately for our sleep schedule he didnt.  I never went to the window to peek, but figured things would settle down after I heard the police siren 20 minutes later.

False.  An hour later another similar scuffle broke out.  This one also involved dragging wrought Iron chairs across the cobblestone alley.  Fortunately Stuart is a heavier sleeper than I am.  I slept about 3 hours and he got about 5.

Whether we were rested up or not, the morning of the race came early!  Stuart got up at 5:45 and got ready to run!  I walked him down to the start line to give him a good send off (and to take pictures of course!)

Look at the intensity!  He didn't know I took this  =)

Over 16,000 people ran the marathon and half-marathon

He's up there somewhere running at the start line!

He got off to a great start and I headed back to the hotel to chillax a while before picking him up at the finish line.  When time came I was a bit nervous since I had to find my way around NOLA having never really been there before.  With some driving advice from the valet at the hotel and a newly found NOLA-inspired rap radio station to give me confidence, I found the finish line pretty easy!  A parking spot on the other hand was a bit more of a challenge.  Without divulging too much embarassing information, I wound up parking at the wrong end of the mile-long city park, not finding the finish line until he had been finished about 25 minutes, and then making the marathoner walk 2 extra miles back to the car.  To top it all off, I was going to try and be a good cheerleader and sit at a spot on the course and give Stu some water and good cheer!  I camped out for a while and he never came by.  I was beginning to think he just walked for a while and was being slow until he called me to let me know he was already finished.  Turns out I was on the half-marathon track and not the whole.  Oops!  Anyway, I found him eventually and after he recovered a while we headed back home to Daphne!  An interesting weekend for sure!

A new kind of bucket list

Kacie's Culinary Life List
{Inspired by my favorite food blog, www.biscuitsandsuch.com

Things I want to cook/eat/plant/do before I go ...

~ Create the perfect mac and cheese
~ Grow all our own fresh herbs
~ Have a garden patch with tomatoes, greens, and other delightful things
~ Compost
~ Cook seasonally
~ Learn to properly taste and appreciate wine
~ Learn to pair wine with foods
~ Stop buying pre-packaged foods (aka foods with chemicals and preservatives)
~ Learn what makes a good olive oil a good olive oil
~ Use my crockpot without burning the food (why does this happen, someone please tell me!!)
~ Bake a cake that doesn't crack, and ice it in a beautiful fashion
~ Meet my food role model, Ina Garten
~ Own a Le Creuset dutch oven, know how to use it, and use it regularly
~ Find freedom from recipes
~ Cook through an entire cookbook
~ Learn to love mushrooms
~ Eat French food in France
~ Eat Italian food in Italy
~ Taste every ethnic food available in the USA
~ Eat on 6 of the 7 continents
~ Learn to make healthy desserts
~ Make our own salad dressings
~ Learn why there are so many types of vinegars (balsamic, apple cider, white, etc)
~ Eat at The French Laundry, "the best restaurant in the world"
~ Have such a well stocked pantry that all I need at the store is produce and meat
~ Plant a lemon tree
~ Learn to bake bread, and related to that, overcome my fear of using yeast
~ Cut an onion without crying
~ Start a dinner party club
~ Perfect my knife skills
~ Design my own kitchen in our future house


The things above in red are all things I hope to do this year!

We went to a fight, and a hockey game broke out!!!

Add this to our (very short) list of rare sports events attended: Mississippi Surge hockey.  If you would have told me ten years ago that on a free Friday night I would be sitting with a handsome man in a Gulfport MS arena watching minor league hockey players and shooting champagne party popper fireworks, I would have laughed at you.  But!  Lucky for me, I married into a family of die-hard Mississippi hockey fans.

Stuart's Uncle Rusty and Aunt Ginny are really awesome and gave us tickets to go with them to last night's Mississippi Surge hockey game.  They are huge fans and have attended almost every game for the past 10 years!  They love it, but I must admit I was a bit skeptical.  I know nothing about hockey and hate being cold, but I decided to be a good sport and go along for the ride.

Stuart and I drove over after work, and I started feeling better about the event as soon as we set foot inside the coliseum.  It was warm!  Before we got to our seat we thought we would have some delish and totally unhealthy stadium food (when in Rome, right?).  We split a Nacho Grande that had a delightful amount of liquid cheese and settled in for the game.

People watching is one of my favorite pastimes, but the crowd was unfortunately sparse.  However on first glance around the stadium I noticed a majority of the attendees were women, most well past the age of retirement.  They were all bedazzled in their "I heart hockey" rhinestone pins and MS Surge plastic rings.  Some even had a beer in their hand(s)!  Several of the most hard-core (and younger) fans were down on the floor level behind hopefully sturdy plastic walls.  They carried signs that said things such as "If you can't play nice, play hockey".  The people watching was good, but then it was time for the main event to begin!


Aunt Ginny supplied us with champagne party poppers and instructed us to fire them at any score, or just because.  I was hesitant since my mother was always rather paranoid about firecrackers, and inside nonetheless!  But I warmed up to the rebellious idea quickly.

At the beginning of the game, rumor quickly spread around the coliseum that the Surge had hired three "enforcers" who were good hockey players, but specifically chosen to take out (aka beat the mess out of) the other team's players they didnt like.  As the team skated onto the field we immediately spotted them as the guys that had numbers on the back of their jerseys but no names.  One would think the refs would be suspicious of that?


So the hockey game got underway.  I have to admit friends, it was pretty exciting!  There aren't many other sports besides college football that can keep my attention, so hockey must be something pretty special!  The only thing is that Stuart and I couldn't quite figure out the rules.  Obviously the goal is to get the puck (aka biscuit in hockey slang) in the goal (aka basket).  Other than that, I cannot begin to tell you what the strange markings on the ice are, or what constitutes a penalty.  It seems that slapping someone with your hockey stick and then slamming them into the wall is ok, but tripping them with your shoe is not.  Quite the mystery.


Unfortunately, The Surge lost this face off.  But Stuart and I came away with a greater appreciation of a new sport!  I'll leave you with my favorite moments:

An engineering marvel: The Zamboni truck

If you look closely, the wall is painted so that the opposite team looks like ballerinas.  Ha!

The best part was spending time with the hubs!  Please ignore our winter pastiness and my apparently massive sternocleidomastoid muscle

Oops!  It's been a while since I posted!  To fill you in, we got back to work on a good foot after our Christmas/New Years vacay ... Stuart to his semi-new job in the Blending and Shipping division at Chevron, and me at Children and Women's hospital BIRTHING BABIES!  Yes, you read that right.  My hands have been in many places they have never been before/should never go again.  It's a semi-stressful rotation, nowhere near as bad as surgery so far, and it's pretty fun.  It runs the gammot (is that how you spell that??) from seeing clinic patients to assisting robotic surgery to birthing babies.

Anyway, the big challenge that this new year brings is summarized in this lovely photo at the top of this post:  figuring out our future.  Or perhaps I should say, trying not to panic/worry/fret/be overzealous in dreaming as God directs our future for us!  The time has come for me to 'grow up' as a medical student and (1) pick my future specialty as well as (2) decide where I want to go for residency.  Fortunately I think I have my specialty pretty well figured out to be Internal Medicine.  Basically because I have ruled everything else out!  Haha.  Here's how that process went:

- Neurology rotation - Loved.  Brains are cool (nerd alert).  However; most of your patients don't get better and you just give them a lot of pills
- Pediatrics - I don't know how to act around children.  I still can't look in an ear with confidence.  It was not challenging enough (nerd alert #2)
- Surgery - Turns out I like cutting things and sewing them back together.  Turns out blood doesnt make me faint.  Turns out I enjoy having a life too much to do this.
- Ob/Gyn - I dig women's health/women's rights.  I don't dig putting large instruments into you-know-where.  It makes me a little queasy
- Family Practice - Haven't done it yet but it involves children, so that's out.
- Internal Medicine - Shadowed an internal med doc over Christmas and LOVED it.  I love old people.  I like the complexity of managing several diseases at once.  Variety is the spice of life.

See?  Decided.

Now the next step is figuring out where in the heck I'm going to finish learning to be a doctor.  There are so many factors that go into that decision!!!  Big program or small one?  Community based or university based hospital?  Big town or small one?  Terrible call schedule or moderately terrible call schedule?  Those are kind of obvious questions I anticipated.  But as I've looked a little more I've discovered more, like: Can I learn Spanish through a program here?  Can I do an International rotation?  Is there a housing stipend?  Agh!  So much to think about!

Since I have to keep you reading this blog and on the edge of your seat, I'm not going to reveal just yet where we are thinking about going!!!  But as of now I have a list of about 10 programs I may want to apply to.  That may grow or shrink.

Finally, and most of all, Stuart is the most amazing husband in the world.  He fully supports me in this, knowing that the next few years with residency will be super tough!  He also wants for us to make the best decision for me and my education and career (maybe because he wants me to make a lot of $$ later so he can be a stay at home dad??).  I am so blessed to have such a great husband!

2011!

My how time flies when you're having fun!  It seems like just a few weeks ago Stuart proposed (Oct 2009), and now we're already at January, 2011!

Stuart and I rang in the new year in a couple different ways.  First, on NYE we headed to Stix with some of Stuart's republican friends to enjoy an entertaining Hibachi dinner.  (As an aside, does anyone else feel awkward when you eat hibachi?  Honestly, the food is okay, but I get so distracted watching the guy and feel like I should pay more attention to him than my eating companions!)   Anyway, we were planning on going to downtown Fairhope to watch their version of the ball drop that night; unfortunately, they had to cancel the festivities due to the economy!  I never envisioned Fairhope as a city requiring budget cuts, but it's apparently true.  So we headed home on an unseasonably warm NYE and made a fire in the chiminea on our porch.  Being the night owl that I am, I fell asleep on the couch before the ball dropped on Dick Clark's (which is not hosted by Mr Clark, ironically) NYE extravaganza. 


NY day we woke up and broke in our never used wedding present waffle maker with homemade buttermilk waffles with a blueberry/blackberry reduction sauce!  I've always been intrigued and intimidated by reductions, what with them making them right and left on the Food Network and all, but they're pretty easy!  Basically the title of a sauce is a verb, not a noun.  You take a liquid and boil it until it reduces into a syrup.  The only trick is that hot/boiling syrups are in a liquid state, so I had a hard time telling when it was done.  It came out a little thick but it was still good!  After some football watching and novel reading, it was time to start our NY dinner!  Of course every good Southerner knows you have to have greens and black eyed peas on new years!  Last year I did greens and peas from a can, so this year I wanted to get a bit more inventive.  I did sauteed kale with garlic and red pepper flakes (super super easy and healthy!) and black eyed pea cakes.  Now, for the cakes, you have to picture a pea/pepper/onion/delicious spice mix molded together and fried like a crab cake.  It was inspired by my favorite cookbook, Screen Doors and Sweet Tea.  It sounded easy enough, but alas, my cakes did not adhere to each other and many wound up looking like fried pea stew.  Stuart spent some man time outside grilling some spicy sausage.  Topped off with honey cornbread and a glass of champagne, it was a complete and delish meal!

 The next day we realized we had stayed inside the house all day for the first time in a long time!  Stuart watched more football than I believed possible, and I knocked out well over 100 pages in the 600+ page epic, The Poisonwood Bible (buy it and read it now, its amazing).  The relaxing was so nice, but probably something we won't get to make much of a habit of  =)


Then on Sunday we splurged and went to The Grand Hotel for brunch.  The Grand is listed as one of the top 30 hotels in the WORLD, and is located just down the street from us!  Can't beat that!  Since we aren't fancy pants members (aka loaded), we just go for brunch once in a while when we save up some extra money.  And boy, hidey!  That is a delightful meal!  Belgian waffles, blintzes, pecan crusted fish, cheese trays, smoked salmon, the list goes on and on.  If I'm lucky, we go at a time when they make up fresh banana's foster.  To top it off, the service is fabulous, and they have a brass band made up of cute little old men!  The highlights of this trip were (1) dropping a huge bite of unknown sea creature smothered in tomato sauce onto my brand new sweater dress while the waitress dashed across the room saying "ohhhh honey do you want some club soda?!?!?!" and (2) running into a surgeon from South.  Not just any surgeon.  The surgeon that strikes fear into the heart of every medical student.  And she's a lady!  We were walking up to the buffet when I spotted her loading down her plate with cocktail shrimp.  I thought I saw little horns protruding from her hair, but it could have just been the light reflecting.  I stopped dead in my tracks, causing Stuart to run into the back of me.  He said, "What what?!" and I said, "Don't talk!!!!!!  She doesn't like it when you talk!!".  We narrowly avoided her so as not to have to exchange pleasantries.


All in all, it was a great and relaxing New Years!  I hope you all had a great one, too!