{"id":7013,"date":"2018-12-03T17:17:57","date_gmt":"2018-12-03T17:17:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.burnedatthesteak.com\/blog\/?p=7013"},"modified":"2018-12-27T14:09:53","modified_gmt":"2018-12-27T14:09:53","slug":"bettys-tree-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.burnedatthesteak.com\/blog\/2018\/12\/03\/bettys-tree-party\/","title":{"rendered":"Betty’s Tree Party"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last weekend we headed back to Betty’s…AKA The Shire.\u00a0 Her house sits in the middle of her own private forest and next to her sixty acre vineyard and her nearly two acre private garden.\u00a0 I don’t like to call it a garden.\u00a0 It’s more like a living museum.\u00a0 Or appropriately….The Shire.\u00a0 To do a pictorial of all the art in The Shire would take a lot of pages.\u00a0 You could fill an entire magazine just with the garden art.\u00a0 I’ll do my best to get what I can crammed in here, probably in a separate post.<\/p>\n

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Betty used to have a St.Patrick’s Day party every year, but after her husband Dick passed we switched to the Christmas Tree decorating party instead.\u00a0 Mary and her husband Chris bring in the tree, Betty grabs some special wines out of the cellar, and I make a plate of nibbles.\u00a0 Except this year, I made dinner.\u00a0 Because dinner is good.\u00a0 Then we all sip, nibble, and decorate the tree.\u00a0 This year, I even brought our friends, Elizabeth and her husband, Brian, with us.\u00a0 It was their first adult weekend together without the kids in twenty six years!\u00a0 Whaaat?!\u00a0 Their kids were so happy they threw a party of their own!<\/p>\n

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What was for dinner?\u00a0 I think the Christmas Tree dinner should be a little shi shi and a little down home.\u00a0 So we had lobster tails and shrimp, but no silverware or plates.\u00a0 I’m made a feast low country boil style with no boiling.\u00a0 At all.\u00a0 Because that’s how I roll.\u00a0 And no corn.\u00a0 Because I’m over corn.\u00a0 I couldn’t ditch the potatoes because Betty’s favorite thing is potatoes, but I roasted them instead.\u00a0 Because duck fat and truffle oil and potatoes are the magical trinity.\u00a0 Instead of corn, I roasted some artichoke bottoms, because they’re perfect for dipping in all the clarified garlic butter and garlic leek cream sauce that Hubs keeps requesting.\u00a0 We finished dinner with a fantastic Japanese cheesecake that Elizabeth made after all my raving about the one Jennifer made.<\/p>\n

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After sleeping in on Sunday, Elizabeth and I hit Blue Raeven Farms market stand for some pastries and eggnog.\u00a0 Of course I got pies to bring home!\u00a0 Duh.\u00a0 \u00a0Then it was off to The Shire for the grand tour and a look at some interesting pruning methods in the vineyard.\u00a0 Of course I took pictures!\u00a0 Silly.\u00a0 No first time adult weekend would be complete without doing just a little wine tasting, so we hit two wineries in my favorite AVA, the Eola~Amity Hills, that are in Betty’s neighborhood of stellar Pinot Noir~ville.<\/p>\n

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By the time we left the second winery, it was close to dinner time and we had a two hour drive in front of us.\u00a0 We all went to dinner and I think we were all reluctant to leave for the night.\u00a0 But the burgers, pastas, and seafood snacks did us in.\u00a0 I kept thinking about how pretty the tree turned out and how in love I am with my life right now.\u00a0 I really lucked out with Hubs.<\/p>\n

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Oh!\u00a0 I saw a giant porcupine at Betty’s!\u00a0 It was enormous! I tried to take a pic but it lifted it’s booty at me (or maybe I imagined that part) and Hubs made me close the car door.\u00a0 Nothing would ruin a picture perfect weekend like a face full of porcupine quills, so I listened to him.\u00a0 But WOW it was cool.\u00a0 I consulted The Googles later only to find out that they don’t actually shoot quills from their bodies.\u00a0 Good to know!<\/p>\n

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Last weekend we headed back to Betty’s…AKA The Shire.\u00a0 Her house sits in the middle of her own private forest and next to her sixty acre vineyard and her nearly two acre private garden.\u00a0 I don’t like to call it a garden.\u00a0 It’s more like…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7106,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wprm-recipe-roundup-name":[],"wprm-recipe-roundup-description":[],"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.burnedatthesteak.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/IMG_20181201_161744_2.jpg","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pagICo-1P7","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.burnedatthesteak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7013"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.burnedatthesteak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.burnedatthesteak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.burnedatthesteak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.burnedatthesteak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7013"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.burnedatthesteak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7013\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7215,"href":"https:\/\/www.burnedatthesteak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7013\/revisions\/7215"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.burnedatthesteak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.burnedatthesteak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.burnedatthesteak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.burnedatthesteak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}