Winter sports

You probably know already that we are getting quite keen on skiing. This is a photo at Alta, the resort where we've been learning.

However, for a change yesterday we went out to watch some other people ski. There were trials for the Winter Olympics taking place at the Olympic Park in Park City all weekend. We skipped the Nordic events, which just look like a hard slog, and went to watch the ski jumping. This will be the first time that women compete in the ski jumping, because OMG it is almost 2014 what bizarre sexism has been happening, so there was plenty to watch. This was a free event and was obviously very popular, cars were parked all along the road and there were shuttles taking people up to the park. Of course you could walk and a lot of people did (amazing, I thought Americans NEVER walked anywhere if they could  help it), but that did involve a lot more scrambling in the snow than we had bargained for. The last part of the walk involved clinging onto a rope and hauling yourself up the hill. 

The view from the top was pretty good though.

Here are the jumps, the one on the left is the one that was being used.

The only bad thing about being up in the mountains is as you drive back down and see the horrible cloud of smog which is the inversion sitting over the valley. This is what you breathe when you go outside. There are bans on various industrial furnaces and outdoor fires at the moment, and people who are vulnerable to respiratory illness are encouraged to stay indoors. Nice! Hopefully there will be a storm along soon to shift it.

Christmas!

For non-Facebook friends, happy Christmas :) here is a photo from our garden. There will be no problem keeping the champagne cool as we sit in the hot tub.

(Falling over on the massive patches of ice might be a problem though. I guess there's a reason everyone obsessively shovels their walkways.)

New food continued

At The Annex (gastropub in Sugarhouse) on Sunday I tried pigs ears (best left as a chew treat for dogs) and poutine (chips and gravy with extra cheese - OM NOM NOM). To get in a festive mood I have also bought some egg nog, which is pretty nice straight from the fridge, but I think it will come into it's own as a milk substitute in coffee. Off course I am adding extra booze :)

This morning we went to the winter farmers market to buy our Christmas dinner (pheasant) where I recognised (and got a hug from!) the first gay couple to get married in Utah after the ban was ruled unconstitutional yesterday. Their first day of married life and they were at work! Then we went to the beer shop to buy a home brewing kit - finally I will be putting my chemistry degree to use!

This is not what I expected Utah to be like. I am pleasantly surprised :)

Keeping warm

There is a hot air vent down there.

Temple Square Christmas lights

We went to see the lights in Temple Square this week (and try out some night time photography). The trees are wrapped in thousands of fairy lights, our neighbour said the work starts in October. I can well believe it. It's very impressive.

In local news...

...Man Bites Dog! http://m.sltrib.com/sltrib/mobile3/57245345-219/officer-amp-dog-police.html.csp

Cold

The icicles on the porch are really quite impressive now. Soon we will be trapped in an ice prison!

Neighbours, everybody needs...

There are some really nice people here. Today a group of our neighbours shovelled the pavement along each side of the street, and did our drive at the same time while we were out having lunch! Which, incidentally, a mysterious stranger paid for. That has never happened to either of us before.

Icicles

Some of the icicles on our front porch reflecting the sunset. I am really pleased with this photo :)

Winter!

It's here all right.

House photos

Been meaning to post these for a while. This is how the house looks now all our stuff is in it. Not shown: our bedroom or the cat room/library because those are a bit difficult to photograph well.

The front room, now filled with books and cats of many lands.

We are using the traditional tabletop filing system.

Spare room.

The basement with the MASSIVE TELLY. Doubles as a dance studio.

Alcohol corner :) 

And finally, the hot tub! I added the rug and candleholders, there is also a string of solar-powered fairy lights for night time hot-tubbing.

The salt flats

Last week we went on a 100+ mile impulse drive west out to the salt flats. The ground by the side of the road gradually gets more salty as you drive along, and eventually you start seeing tracks from people who have been racing on them. At the point where we stopped there was a thick layer of salt, rippled like the sea bed, and we were able to watch the sun set over the mountains. The ground on the photos sometimes looks like snow, or, ice, or water. It's not. It's all salt.

Abricotines

These are not badly made macarons (really!). These are abricotines, although since I have made the raspberry jam version I suppose they should be framboisines? Anyway, they are essentially macarons but with cake flour added to the mixture. I am still not sure what makes cake flour different to plain flour, but since that is what the Laduree (cannot find accents on this keyboard, sorry) recipe calls for I made a special trip to Walmart for it. The recipe makes a huge batch of mixture which allowed me to do some experimenting. I found that when using baking paper the bottom of each half would colour too quickly and sometimes burn, even when I used a double layer. Turning the oven temperature down when the tray went in made no difference, so I kept it at 170 degrees. The best results came from using my macaron mat on the mini-macaron side, no burnt bottoms and a nice even, round shape. These are the ones in the photo, the first batch looked nothing like them! Strictly speaking they should be covered in flaked almonds but I left those out so I could see what was going on in the oven.

Thanks to the Veterans Day sales a shiny red standing mixer is on it's way, so get ready for even more baking posts :)

Baking continued

I tried making a cake again using self-raising flour and slightly less baking powder, and it sunk less, as I predicted. SCIENCE. Really I should now make a cake with no extra raising ingredients but I'm a bit bored of victoria sponge now and it's time to think about Christmas baking.

My local grocery store does have a few jars of mincemeat, as well as something that appears to be freeze-dried mincemeat *shudder* but as a point of pride I have been making my own for the past few years and I'd like to continue. Not as easy as it is at home though, mince pies are not an American thing and so the ingredients are not that easy to find. Raisins and candied peel - no problem. I had to go to a second grocery store for currants. I could only find sultanas by going to the Middle Eastern store, but that was a worthwhile trip because I also found halloumi for half what it cost me in the deli the other week. Cooking apples would probably have been OK but I like Nigella's recipe with quinces, which I knew I could find at a particular deli, although maybe the Middle Eastern store had those too. I had to make a trip to the British grocery store to buy black treacle and vegetable suet. Sure, I could buy everything online (and Waitrose branded at that) but I resent paying the shipping costs. The British store also had a guy on the till who appeared to be affecting a British accent, which was slightly hilarious. Of course I didn't laugh - I'm far too polite for that :)

So now I should be all set to make mincemeat and Christmas cake (we acquired cheap brandy at the liquor store yesterday) and maybe a Christmas pudding as well. I don't think Americans in general like any of those so we will have to eat them all ourselves :) perhaps Patrick can force some of them on his colleagues and watch them try and be nice about them.

Attaching a photo of the baking shelf in my cupboard. I mean business!

That didn't last long

Snow!

Looks like it could be hot-tub-monkey time sooner than I thought...

Cake disaster!

I have been looking forward to doing some baking in the new kitchen, especially after following the Bake Off from afar. I made some langue de chat on Friday (the easest recipe I could find in the Laduree book) and learned that "conv bake" and "bake" are very different over settings. Today I decided to test the oven with a victoria sponge, as recommended by Mary Berry, and it has gone very badly as you can see! The cakes have sunk in the middle, which means there was too much raising agent in the mixture. I am pinning the blame on the self raising flour. Americans don't really use SR flour so I guess I was lucky to find it at all, but it seems like the stuff they do have has a higher proportion of raising agent than UK flour. Or maybe it's just this brand. The only way to be sure is to try and make another cake!

Weather

Yesterday was hot enough for T-shirts and bright enough for sunglasses. This morning it is snowing! We live in a funny place.

I am looking forward to proper snow so I can sit in the hot tub and pretend to be a Japanese monkey

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txDR1y1drl0&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Our house

Well, it's been fairly busy for the last couple of weeks, hence no updates. We had a long weekend in San Francisco (the joy of being 15 minutes away from an airport), then last Monday all our stuff arrived and I've been unpacking it ever since. This means the house is not exactly tidy but I did have the foresight to take a few photos, and here they are.

Front room upstairs

Breakfast bar

Kitchen (with Ozzy)

Garden (with Patrick) - it isn't quite so green now of course

Basement

Lamb's Canyon

So one thing we've started doing is going hiking. Just short hikes, lasting a couple of hours, and not over particularly difficult terrain because I'm not totally acclimatised yet and it's very easy to get out of breath. It's a really nice way to see the scenery. I've put a few photos up on Facebook but for non-FB people I thought I should put some here as well. These are from last Sunday on a hike up Lamb's Canyon. It was a lovely sunny day but as we got higher and higher there was more snow on the trail - I am very glad to have proper boots! It feels quite bizarre to be walking on snow in the sunshine - in October :) - but it does mean you can get some nice photos. I'm not sure how Blogger will format these but hopefully you can see them.

Driving

Today I went to the Drivers License office with the following documents:

An application form
My UK licence
My passport
My visa
My I-94
A rental agreement (proof of address 1)
A bank statement (proof of address 2)
My social security number

This was still not enough for me to be allowed to take a driving test. Immigration need time to verify my identity.

So I drove home.

Om nom nom

One of the things I like best about travelling is all the new food I get to eat. America is no exception. These are the new things I have had in the past week:

Kohlrabi (OK, so I could have had this in the UK but didn't)

Cheese curds (and now I want to try them prepared in the traditional manner - deep fried)

Chocolate granola (it's like Coco Pops for grown ups)

I have also become a massive fan of all things buffalo-flavoured. Not the animal, the spicy vinegar sauce. Of course this is traditionally served with chicken wings, but you can also have it with breaded chicken, on pizza (have not persuaded Patrick to let me have this yet) and possibly best of all,  buffalo bleu Kettle Chips which combine both the spicy sauce and the blue cheese dip that usually accompanies it. Genius.

It is 1st October and I just put sunscreen on to walk to the local shop. I suspect that would not be the case in Cambridge.

However in Cambridge noone is worrying about the government just having shut down. I guess I'll be waiting a bit longer for an EAD and a driving licence.

Gardening

On Saturday we went to the Downtown Farmer's Market to do a little shopping, and bought some herbs to start a herb garden. The man at the stall did very well considering that I don't know how to pronounce "basil", "oregano" or, for that matter, "herbs" and I persisted in asking for "coriander" rather than cilantro.

I'll never bring myself to ask for an "eggplant" though. It's an AUBERGINE.

Garden

There are worse ways to spend your Sunday morning.

I need a car.

Before I can buy a car, I need insurance.

Woah, insurance is expensive! I need a sympathetic insurer who will take into account the no claims discount I have built up in the UK. Therefore, I need proof of my no claims discount. Of course my insurance company can only be contacted by phone so I'm hoping that I still exist on their database so I can use their web form and that Royal Mail will be able to forward the certificate because there is no way to change my postal address online.

I also need a US drivers licence to bring the cost down further. The DMV is only open weekdays during office hours, and is a 40 minute walk from my house. Therefore, I need a car.

*headdesk*

Someone is eager to go outside...

Cleaning

The array of cleaning products our landlord left us and strongly hinted that we would need to use. And to think I used to just use Ecover all purpose cleaner for everything. I clearly didn't know what I was doing!

All is well

Our landlord came out on Friday night to fix the plumbing (blocked food waste disposer), we still don't have TV but that is scheduled and in the mean time we have a faster internet connection and a Netflix subscription.

Slow progress is being made on the drive but there is no sign of any concrete yet.

Today I have been to the social security office to get myself a social security card. I managed to bring the wrong piece of paper and thought that would be it, but the lady at the desk was able to look me up on the system and so that was fine. In fact I was in and out of there in half an hour, I thought it would be much longer. I went to the mall afterwards and the shops weren't even open yet!

My early start downtown gave me a good excuse for dropping in on a lovely cafe http://les-madeleines.com/ for breakfast. I've not been to many cafes yet because this one is so nice. I had French toast made with panettone (Euro breakfast?) served with syrup and grapefruit slices - delicious. Oh, and I bought a couple of Amans for later. They are the best pastries I have ever had. They are so good I haven't even tried the macarons yet.

The cats are settling in fine, in fact they are so settled in they are starting to squabble again. Ozzy is behaving badly by jumping on every surface he can find so he is definitely back to normal. Izzy is still rather timid but is getting braver. Yesterday she went down in the basement of her own accord which was a big step. We're hoping they will be ready to explore outdoors in a week or so.

So far this week

I have spent 5 hours waiting for the cable guys who then spent a further hour and a half failing to instll the cable system for which all the equipment was already in place and had been working a month ago.

There has been no sign of whoever is supposed to be finishing our drive. Currently all we have is a patch of dirt and rubble.

The washing machine has sprung a leak.

Welcome to America!

Izzy

Not bad for a cat who started the day cowering under a table.

Cats arrive

The cats arriving has finally given me something to write about here! Spodding around on the internet and doing housework are really not that interesting and that's pretty much all I've been doing so far.

The cats flew in last night from London via Houston. Their plane arrived early and they were delivered to us at baggage reclaim (we should have gone to cargo but the SLC airport website didn't have a "where to go to pick up your pet" section). Ozzy was looking very sorry for himself but Izzy was quite perky - perhaps her ordeal was over? No, it wasn't, there was another car journey to endure with an unfamiliar house at the end of it.

Following cat website advice we'd intended to keep them in one room for a bit but as soon as the door was opened they slipped out to explore. They must have been well fed on the plane because they weren't at all interested in biscuits. The first place they went was naturally the basement room full of car parts which offered exellent hiding places. I'd hoped they might stay in the basement, which is mostly empty (apart from the dismembered car) but they decided that upstairs was far more interesting, probably because that is where Patrick and I live at the moment. Izzy retired to a safe spot underneath a table in the corner to contemplate the horror of her situation whereas Ozzy was quite happy to explore further, as long as someone was with him.

I am really going to miss having a door that separates upstairs from downstairs. Ozzy spent all night yowling outside our bedroom.

Today Ozzy seems happy. He still follows me round the house wanting attention and reassurance (a nuisance when I want to do some practice) but he has also managed to settle down for some naps. He has his own seat at the breakfast bar now. Izzy ventured out for a few cautious expeditions this morning and has got more confident as the day went on. She's currently on the super-comfortable La-Z-Boy rather than under a table, which is definite progress. Neither cat is prepared to use the litter tray at the moment so it looks like I am in for two weeks of following them round the house to stop any accidents (one per cat so far, one of which was in the nice new cat bed, naturally). At least they don't know where the cat flap is yet so they can't break out!