1. We kept things very simple regarding our dinner with Adrienne, Josh, Ellie, and Jack before they left Kellogg this evening to spend the night at a hotel near the airport before flying out early Friday morning. I just poured canned tomatoes and tomato sauce in a Dutch oven, seasoned it with light amounts of salt, pepper, garlic powder, basil, oregano, and fennel seeds, and added a small chunk of butter, and made a straightforward pasta sauce.
We poured this sauce over spaghetti. Debbie made a very simple and tasty cucumber salad and we had leftover bean salad from the night before.
It was a simple and satisfying dinner to enjoy in the midst of Adrienne's family getting packed and ready to go.
2. I thoroughly enjoyed spending time with Adrienne's family. It's fun to see Jack moving with his new deep voice into his teenage years. Ellie is full of vitality, both in her joy when she's happy and in her protests when she's not (!).
The uncertainty for a period of time after Ellie's birth in 2019 coupled with the challenges of managing home life during the most restrictive days of the pandemic put a lot of strain on this family. Debbie helped them significantly by living with them for a year, taking care of Ellie and helping Jack do school from home and helping with all sorts of other things, while Adrienne and Josh worked during the day. I experienced the strain they were under when I visited them in New York.
Challenges remain, as always in family life, but I was very impressed with how much more relaxed Adrienne, Josh, Jack, and Ellie were this week than when I last saw them two years ago. Our time together was light, fun, full of good cheer (and good beer), and very enjoyable.
I look forward to when we can all get together again, whether here in Kellogg or with a trip back east.
3. The past five days or so have been very good beer days for me. I drink beer for taste and flavor and memories. I have had stretches of time in my life when I drank beer mostly in order to get inebriated, but I've not enjoyed inebriation for quite a while and I don't like it when I drink a bit too much and start to feel drunk.
I also enjoy drinking beer when I'm in the company of another (or several other) beer drinker(s) who enjoy drinking a wide variety of styles.
Josh fits this description. Although he steers away from, but will occasionally drink, sweeter beers (like Loft Honey or Heidelberg), Josh enjoys a variety of IPA styles (imperial, hazy, juicy, West Coast, etc.) and has a special fondness for Belgian beers. He's also very much into imperial stouts and barleywine.
During his visit, we didn't drink any imperial stouts or barleywine and we only shared one Belgian beer. Had he been here longer, we could have traveled west and purchased Belgian beers as well as the more intense stouts and barleywine.
As it was, Josh came back to the house after going to the store with fun and tasty IPAs. I can't list them all here, but I had a great time sampling small amounts of several of the beers he bought and experienced a bit of an IPA revival for myself. I had a store of porters in the fridge, both Baltic and chocolate-y, and we shared those.
I also enjoyed, on the other end of the spectrum from IPAs, cracking open a couple of cans of Heidelberg that have been in our basement since last July. Having been stored in a cool place, the beer wasn't skunky after its long sit (I feared it would be) and it was fun to sip on Dad's favorite beer and pretend like he was still around and we could drink a few together while yakkin' and laughin' about all kinds of things.
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