Blair's Blog

‘Tis the season to make poffertjes!

This past weekend was our annual Langendoen family Christmas gathering. Every year, for the past 11 years, we have set aside the first weekend in December (as close to 5 Dec as possible) to celebrate Sinterklaas with all 15 cousins. This year we added Brenda’s cousin Anna and her family who have moved to Alberta this year. In all we had 31 for much of the weekend. This year we all met a the senior’s center in Rocky Mountain House – it’s wheelchair accessible for Brenda’s Dad and very close to their home, so that worked out very well with lots of room for everyone.

The gathering has changed a lot over the years – five of the kids are adults over the age of 18 now. But many things remain the same as the first time we met up for Sinterklaas in 2007 at the Banff Gate Resort in Dead Man’s Flat. We still have wooden shoes full of Dutch treats, a visit from Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet, board games and lots of food.

Poffertjes are a staple for brunch on the Sunday – every year Brenda and I bring poffertjes and bacon and it never fails to be a hit. This year, we made almost 700 of the little pancakes – we have to double the recipe and then make 3 of the doubled batches. We made them at home the day before we headed to Rocky and re-heated them while we cooked the bacon.

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Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

This is what appeared for dinner today.  It’s is hard to imagine how the Irish survived prior to the invention of green food colouring!  Everything looked like it should have a slight minty flavour, but thankfully it did not. I do have to say that green rice is oddly mind-bending.  For dessert, I think that Brenda has found a recipe for home-made “Shamrock Shakes”, that has got to be an improvement over the green-tinged dinner.

And, of course, in other news – today is my license plate game anniversary.  As you surely recall, I began the noble quest on St Paddy’s Day back in 2003.  Sadly, I have to report that the pace of progress remains woefully slow.  This year ended at plate 865, only 46 new plates seen in the last 12 months.  I definitely have settled to a new lower level of plates spotted per month ever since my commute has switched to public transit. The 4-digit plates haven’t helped, particularly as they make up the majority of plates now. At this rate, you can look forward to about 3 more annual updates!

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Friday is our usual pizza dinner and movie with the kids evening.  Back in Chestermere, we quite often would buy pizza, either at the local Domino’s (which was actually quite good) or we would buy the 4-pack of Costco pizzas.  Now, though, the local pizza places are kind of expensive and the drive to Domino’s is more hassle than it’s worth.

So, lately Brenda has been making pizza dough in the bread machine and then we create our own pizzas with as much pepperoni as we want.  Tonight Alyssa has been helping to punch down the dough, form it and add the toppings.  This is Bobby, the sauce guy.  I am sure he will be delicious.

Especially with all that pepperoni.

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We headed up to Rocky Mountain House on the Family Day weekend to hang out with family there. It was also Valentine’s Day, so we had the older kids pick up pizza and keep an eye on the younger cousins at Barry and Breana’s while the adults had a nice dinner together at Ronny and Carla’s. We made it a bit of a pot luck and had a really nice evening with the 6 of us.

Brenda brought hibiscus flowers (in syrup) that we floated in the sparking wine, it was very exotic!

This was the view on the drive up – a glorious late winter day.

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