Reorienting

Recently, I had an “Is this really my life?” moment.  Not the bad kind, like that time I was being rained on INSIDE of a van (That one’s for you, JKV), but the really good/moderately disorienting kind.  2011 started with working my first ever holiday shift at a hospital, and hating every single moment of it.  From there, things have definitely looked up. 

I chose a career path in ambulatory care, finished my first year of residency, bought a car, picked up and moved to Colorado, met a wonderful man, fell in love with said wonderful man, lived alone for the first time, am half way through another year of residency, and have started looking for a big kid job and thinking about what I want the rest of my life to look like. 

I putzed around in various tiny church plants in Denver and thought I found a place to settle into, until JR and I decided that it was probably a good time for us to start going to church together.  It was a total game changer for me, and now I go to a huge 500-people-per-service-kind-of-place where I get to see JR do what he loves every single week.  And I adore it, and am really looking forward to investing there.

I have attended more professional sporting events in the past 6 months than in the rest of my 25 years of life combined.  My sports related wardrobe has increased 400% (from 1 shirt to 4!)  My math skills haven’t improved at all – that is 400%, right?  I know who Andrew Luck, Jay Cutler, and Tim Tebow are – and I even find myself CARING about what is going on sometimes.

I’ve done a pretty good job exploring Denver and Colorado – I’ve been to Aspen, Breckenridge, Boulder, and the Garden of the Gods.  I’ve checked out the Denver Art Museum, seen Les Mis, found a number of fabulous restaurants, cute coffee shops, and 1 fantastic book store.  We already have opera tickets for February.  I even think the number of times I yell “damn hippies!” in my head while driving has decreased. 

But at the same time, I haven’t rolled out of bed and gone to a fabulous weekend brunch with a good friend in a long time.  There hasn’t been that quiet, semi-comatose, comfortable silence until the coffee kicks in and we can finally hash out all of life’s troubles together. 

I haven’t strapped on my salsa shoes, gone to yoga, cooked dinner with a giant group of people, taught a Sunday school lesson, or baked a single cupcake. 

So that is what brought me to my moment of “Who am I, anymore?”   Beautiful things have been discovered, learned, and given, but beautiful things have been put to the side as well. 

And so I begin a process of reorienting myself to me among the uncertainties that 2012 is sure to bring. 

I don’t want to speak to soon – but I think it’s going to be a good year. 

Curried Coconut Chicken Soup in Your Crockpot

This soup is incredible.  Seriously.  A sweet, savory, warm, filling, packed-with-good-ingredients, winter delight.  I could easily see vegetable broth, sturdier vegetables (cauliflower, potato or cabbage perhaps?) +/- some extra firm tofu making this a meat free but still delicious meal for my vegetarian friends!

Ingredients:
1.5 lbs boneless, skinless chicken breast cut into cubes
1 carrot, chopped
2 medium onions, chopped
1/2 red bell pepper, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 tbsp minced gingerroot
1 tbsp curry powder
4 cups chicken broth
1 tsp kosher salt
3 large stalks lemongrass
1 can (~14 oz) coconut milk
2 tbsp creamy peanut butter
2 tsp soy sauce
2 tsp hot pepper sauce, such as Sriracha (I omit this completely, because I'm a weany.)
1 tsp light brown sugar
1/4 c. coarsely chopped cilantro leaves

Directions:
1. Add oil in a large deep skillet and saute the chicken until lightly browned.  Add to slow cooker.
2. Add the onions, carrot, and bell pepper and saute until almost tender, about 3 minutes.
3. Stir in garlic, ginger, and curry powder and cook for a few seconds until aromatic.
4. Add the broth, salt, and lemongrass and heat to boiling.
5. Pour into the slow cooker, cover, and cook for 3-5 hrs on high, or 4-8 hrs on low.
6. Mix the coconut milk, peanut butter, soy sauce, hot pepper sauce, and brown sugar to combine. 
7. Pour into the cooked soup and cook on high for 15 minutes.
8.  Remove the lemongrass, stir in the cilantro, and serve over rice!


*From Art of the slow cooker: 80 exciting new recipes by Andrew Schloss

Good times! (nostalgia edition)

Because they make me happy, and because I didn't get to share them properly at the time, here are some selected pictures of the celebrations that happened before I left Philadelphia:

Definitely miss Thursday dinners with the people named Sykora and Dyson

Charlotte looks so much older already!

And THIS baby now lives outside! Woohoo!

 And then there are these two...




"Helping" grill outside

My going away party featured a sausage assortment.  These people get me.

There were also other delicious things to eat too!

Small group love!

And then something funny happened.  I can't, of course, remember what it was.  But it was hilarious:

Love for the Sykora Dyson family!

We also had an imprompto indian feast on the porch one evening.  Oh Tiffin, I miss you and your saag paneer.  But mostly your saag paneer.

And I FINALLY got to a Philly's game (after 7 years!)

And then there was the icing on the cake (literally).  This is the cake from our PGY-1 pharmacy residency graduation.  Note the spelling error - hilarious!

How did I get so lucky?

Birthday Celebrations (abridged)

While I was blessed with many wonderful calls, gifts, celebrations, and general feelings of love on my birthday, this one needs to be shared with the wider community.  JR and I went to the most amazing restaurant for a celebratory birthday brunch.  It is called Beatrice and Woodsley and both the atmosphere and the food are worth talking about:

First of all, it looks like this (on the INSIDE!):

And then there is the food.  Which both looks and tastes amazing!

The Philadelphiia Vandaveers - I kept thinking about how much you would L-O-V-E this place! Visit? ;o)

The parental visit - much overdue!

Wow - it's been a long time.  As Meagan would say, October was "uber cray cray".  Way back in September, my parents dropped by Denver for a weekend visit and we crammed in a lot of good times!

But first, a picture of Poochini...because I can:

Anyway - back to the trip! On Saturday, we went up to Breckenridge, CO for a beautiful day in the mountains. 

The main drag in Breckenridge

We had lunch at an adorable and delicious Mexican restaurant.  We sat out on the patio by the mountain river and took in the scenery:



Photo op!

They also had a silly hat store, which mom got into while dad was searching for a ridiculous gift for his annual office white elephant exchange:

Oh yes, and did I mention the aspens looked like this?  They did. 

Sunday, we headed down to Colorado Springs (and drove quickly past Focus on the Family headquarters, mind you), to Garden of the Gods.  Which is a fantastically cool display of plate tectonics and errosion - which I know because my mother insisted we watch the 15 minute educational video at the visitors center.  Oh, mothers.  Anyway - the park is absolutely gorgeous!  Here are some select views:

My parents fit in well in Colorado

I did a bit of climbing around the rocks, even though you aren't suppsoed to do that, and I wasn't wearing appropriate footwear. Typical.

See - don't they look good in this state?

Much fun was had by all!

Delicious Denver Eats

The woman I am currently on rotation with for work, who has dubbed herself "mini-boss" (read: not my residency director, but in charge of my education at the moment) is awesome.  She enjoys unique, delicious, and cheap eats around Denver, so she has introduced me to some great places.  I'm just about to start my last week of rotation with her, and one of the things I'm going to miss the most is all of the delicious food options close to the office!

On Thursday, we traveled down to Civic Center Eats Outdoor Cafe, which is a summer lunch tradition in downtown Denver.  What is this glorious tradition?  It's a gathering of Denver's gourmet food trucks into one park for my eating enjoyment.  The decision was tough, but we ended up splitting two sandwiches from Denver Biscuit Company's Biscuit Bus.  They make delicious sandwiches, sometimes involving fried chicken, on the most amazing biscuits ever.  They sometimes look like this:

We split the Elmer - or pulled pork with homemade BBQ sauce, slaw, and homemade pickles, and their special chicken cordon bleu biscuit sandwich - ham from Niman Ranch (the local sustainable livestock farm), buttermilk fried chicken, cheddar cheese, and you know, honey butter. Such artery clogging deliciousness!

Because we were still hungry (right), we finished off lunch with a homemade cookie ice cream sandwich from Cream City Treats.

Not too bad for a Thursday!

A weekend in Aspen

My life is difficult, boring, and not any fun. 

Or, Emily and David came out for a weekend visit and we headed to the mountains! I think this makes me a real Colorado girl!

So I'm just going to go ahead and jinx myself: my residency is awesome. I asked to leave just a little bit early on Friday to try and beat the weekend traffic into the mountains (East coasters, it's like the traffic to the shore for the weekend).  They pretty much threw me out of the office at 11am - what great people to work for.

If you travel a particular way into Aspen, you get to go through Independence Pass, which reaches a height of 12,095 feet.  Holy crap, I could barely breath when I got out of the car.  My heart felt like it was pounding out of my chest!   

I did a science report on the tundra in elementary school, which is why I look so excited about this sign.

Emily and David also enjoyed Independence Pass

The other thing that is cool about independence pass is that the continental divide cuts through it. 
This is me "hiking" the continental divide.  I wanted to touch the snow, but it was far away.

Because David had spent many summers at the Aspen music festival and had himself some connections, we were able to get free tickets to the orchestra concert on Friday night, which was an all Shostakovich event. Tickets came with a complimentary glass of wine before the show, as only tickets in Aspen would.  After the concert, we headed out to dinner on the patio of Jimmy's, where I had the most delicious buffalo burger.

On Saturday, we traveled up to Maroon Bells for some hiking, which looks like this:

We were going to do the usual hike up to Crater Lake, but there was a lot of excitement going on that day: 

If you feel like reading the Denver Post's coverage of this story, it is hardcore, as things around here tend to be.  Plan B (NOT the pharmaceutical kind) was to turn back and hike in the other direction, which was lovely, until we ended up in the middle of thickets filled with delicious looking berries and all started thinking about how tasty that probably looked to a bear. 

But before we turned back, we got to do some hiking through an avalanche boulder field. 

It was an awesome feeling looking up into this thing.  We learned that frequent avalanche sites have 3 distinctive features, all of which you can see pretty easily here.  The snowbowl, at the top, is where all the fun begins.  Then the track/chute is the narrow middle part where the snow gains all of its momentum, until it ends in the runout zone, which is where we were standing.  Awesome sight!

The weekend ended with plenty of tennis, eating, and shopping in town before a long drive home.  What a great first mountain experience!

Moments Worth Remembering

A few weeks ago, I finally found the kitchen table I had been dreaming of:

1.) Espresso colored
2.) Room for lots of people
3.) Built in hidden leaf
4.) Counter height!

Of course, I found it on craigslist, which is feeling like the only place I shop these days.  I went to pick it up early Saturday morning from a lovely woman named Natasha.  As we started to load the table + 6 chairs into my car, we realized it just wasn't going to fit.  I told her that it was no problem, and that I would just be back in a little bit for the second trip.  Instead of agreeing, she insisted on loading the extra pieces in her car and driving them to my apartment with me.  Then, when we got there, she offered to help me haul the table upstairs into my apartment (I hadn't quite figured out how I was going to make that happen).  When all was said and done, I insisted on giving her the extra $25 over her asking price that I had in my pocket, which she assured me was totally unnecessary and then promised to buy someone else coffee with that money.  Her parting words were an offer to e-mail her if I had any questions about Denver or needed anything.  God (and Natasha) are good. 

Snooze

This is a late entry, but definitely one worth mentioning.  In the few action packed days Beth was able to spend with me in Denver, we accomplished a lifelong goal - to actually GO to one of the many fantastic restaurant recommendations featured in Sunset Magazine.  (Side note: another thing this magazine is good for is the recipes - I have yet to have one of them turn out badly)

Anyway, the restaurant was a brunch place called Snooze, an A.M. Eatery (see, breakfast!, it says so in the title) and they have phenomenal things that look like this:

Menu description:

Sandwich I Am Udi’s soft pretzel roll filled with scrambled eggs, cheddar cheese and a sausage patty, served with a side of smoked cheddar hollandaise & house hash browns. Yes we can!



A well chosen pancake flight: sweet potato pancake, blueberry lemon bar pancake, red velvet pancake

 Consider this your invitation to jealousy. Or - if you want to be more cup-half-full about it, a place for you to request during your visit. :o)

That wasn't in the travel brochure...

Today's addition of "That wasn't in the travel brochure..." is brought to you by monsoon season.  That's right, apparently 300+-days-of-sunshine-a-year Denver has a monsoon season, which was churning into action just after I arrived in town. 

It's official name is the North American Monsoon.  Apparently, it's caused by a low pressure area that develops over the southwest due to intense summer desert heat meeting an area of high pressure, called the monsoon ridge, that develops in the upper atmosphere over the four corners region (that's me!).  It typically begins in mid-July and usually wraps up by the end of August or early September.  For the first couple of weeks when I got here, there were these big, angry afternoon thunderstorms with a ton of lightning, and something that is apparently called virga - lots of visible rain coming out of dark clouds, yet never actually hitting the ground.  Like this:

Don't worry, some of that water did eventually hit the ground as flash flooding tends to be an issue with these systems.  You learn something new every day, right?

The Journey Westward!

I did the trip out to Denver essentially over 3 days with my amazing friend Beth.  Our first day included treking over the the mountains of PA and Ohio (sometimes at a runaway speed of 40 mph with the trailer) to spend a wonderful first night in Indianapolis, IN with a friend o' Beth's from college.  In general, I was totally blown away by the lovely and dynamic cities of the midwest that we experienced along the way - definitely an unexpected surprise!  For instance, we shared a lovely dinner with old and new friends at Black Market, which I would recommend you visit were you ever to find yourself in Indianapolis. 



Bye, PA!



Day 2 consisted of an only marginally flatter drive to Lawrence, KS where we enjoyed the hospitality of a friend's parents.  Along the way, we broke up our journey with a trip to a winery we spotted along I-70 in the booming metropolis of Hermann, MO called Stone Hill.  Did you know that Missouri was a wine producing hotspot pre-prohibition?  Me neither. We also made a stop in Kansas City for some delicious bbq at Jack Stack and got all of the recommendations that had been given to us - hickory pit beans, cheesy corn bake, cole slaw, and........BURNT ENDS!

Arch-tacular

Finally, on day 3 we made the long trek across Kansas, where I only had 1 mild weather related meltdown - those thunderstorms make some serious noise and light!  Thanks again for driving that part, Beth.  Luckily the weather cleared by the time we got to the western end of the state so we could make sure to catch the world's largest easle:

Can you spot the Pizza Hut?

Then, it was a safe (and on time) arrival in Denver.  Julie will be pleased to know that we read interesting road signs aloud to each other the whole way from PA to CO.  In addition, all state road sign credits go to Beth, as the ones I was responsible for taking pictures of turned out like this:

.....it needs some work.