Kathleen McGivney

Thanksgiving dinner with a twist

Spiced pear and apple crumble with vanilla ice cream, originally uploaded by kmcgivney.

As I mentioned in my last post, our original Thanksgiving plans to escape the country and its litany of Black Friday advertisements were thwarted by my sinuses, so we decided to stay home and make ourselves a little mini-feast. Since it was just the two of us, and one of us is a vegetarian, we didn't want to make a turkey, so instead I made chicken and Atom made something called Match, which is a meat alternative product that is meant to look, taste, and cook like meat. We also made vegan pumpkin bread, gougeres, roasted brussels sprouts, sweet potato & roasted garlic mash, and spiced pear and apple crumble.

I'll be posting a couple of the other recipes later this week. Photos of the whole dinner and the recipe for the spiced pear and apple crumble are after the jump.

Our Thanksgiving tradition

Belgian beer is strong, originally uploaded by kmcgivney.

When my lovely husband (pictured above) and I first started dating, I traveled a lot for work. He quickly obtained a passport and adapted to my insane travel schedule, often accompanying me on trips to conferences. Towards the end of that year, we realized that we had no vacation days left, but both of our employers conveniently gave us both Thanksgiving day and the following Friday off. So, we did what every travel-addicted nutjob would when they find themselves with a long holiday weekend off - we went to Europe and visited friends in Belgium.

This became a tradition for us, and each year since, we have gone to Europe for Thanksgiving, thus avoiding having to make the difficult choice as to which family members win the Kat and Atom lottery*. The first year, we went to Belgium and visited Liege and Bruges; the second year, Italy, where we visited Rome, Orvieto, and Florence; and last year, Belgium again, where we visited Antwerp, Bruges, and Brussels. This year, we had a trip planned to London, and were scheduled to fly out yesterday. Unfortunately, my immune system got wind of this and went out and picked itself up a hefty virus**, and I didn't feel well enough to travel, so we are staying home and cooking ourselves a tasty Thanksgiving feast, which I'll hopefully be coherent enough to photograph tomorrow (which will likely depend on the levels of cold medicine in my blood). In the meantime, I thought I'd share some photos from our past European Thanksgiving trips. Enjoy!

*Our egos aren't actually THAT big. It's more like Kat and Atom Russian roulette.
**Not pigflu. How do I know? The internets said so.

Photos after the jump.

Art imitating life

My husband as art, originally uploaded by kmcgivney.

Last week, my husband, my partners in Hanne Apparel, and a few of our muses went to GMHC's third annual Fashion Forward event. This was our second year attending and sponsoring, and we had a fantastic time! One of the highlights this year for us were the fashion students walking around the party sketching the attendees. We bought a couple of the sketches - one of my daughter, and another one of an anonymous fabulous fashionista, but missed out on this one during the event. Fortunately, my husband is fairly recognizable, and one of the event organizers saw this sketch of him after the event and sent it to us. I love it! I especially love how the artist captured his favorite new red shoes.

I'll be back to my semi-regular schedule of posting recipes, travel photos, and the occasional technology rant shortly. In the meantime, if you're in the NYC area, we're looking for some more authors at the NYC Metblog, so if you want to write about NYC, post a comment over there and let us know!