Brunch at L'Ecole Culinaire

Brunch at L'ÉcoleCulinaire!

Olivia's brownie troop was fortunate enough to be able to celebrate Mother's Day with a special brunch prepared by Chef Jason Sparks at L'EcoleCulinaire. The brownies served the food that Chef prepared. Assisting that day was a true assistant and soon to be graduate of the school, Mike, along with a very helpful newbie, John, and of course a guy who spent most of his time behind a camera, me. However, I did make the whipped cream by hand.

The brunch started with a fresh fruit and yogurt parfait that was prepared almost exclusively by John. That was followed by an amazing quiche that was made completely from scratch, (Tip: For a great crust, use ice cold water.) along with a fantastic balsamic salad. To end the feast was some type of chocolate waffle topped with my whipped cream and fresh strawberry sauce.

The girls were eager to serve their mothers and I believe the moms had a wonderful time.

To see the rest of the photos from the day, visit my Flickr page and look at the Brunch at L'Ecole Culinaire Set.

Chef Jeff???

No, I do not think of myself as a chef, but for Mother's Day we were celebrating with my wife, Jennifer, and her mother. As is typical I was outside grilling and decided to put on the chef's coat that Jason Sparks so kindly gave to me. He is a chef instructor at L'Ecole Culinaire and it is one of his old coats. I wore the coat just to be a little silly, but also because it is nice to not worry about getting something on your clothes when cooking. So I just may wear it more often.
For the story on why Jason (a.k.a. Chef) gave me the coat, give me some time to post about Olivia's girl scout troop's Mother's Day Brunch at L'Ecole Culinaire.

I apologize for the quality of the photo, but it is the best I could do with my Blackberry. It is good enough for you to see that we were having pork tenderloin, corn on the cob and asparagus. It all turned out pretty good if I do say so myself. Not up to the standards of the chef's coat I was wearing, but good enough for the Pomrankas.

Broken finger

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It has been a couple of weeks since the accident where Mia slammed her finger in a door and she is healing nicely.  So I figured it was about time to add a post about the incident.  I don't think I will go through all the gory details, just enough to give you the big picture.It all happened the night before we were leaving for a vacation to a water park.  Mia was in the house running to keep up with her big sister who just went out the back door.  Some how Mia caught her finger in the door.  Ouch! After cleaning it off, we made the pretty obvious decision that a doctor needed to see it.  Mia and I hop in the avalanche and head off to MO Baptist Pediatric ER.  While Mia was screaming in pain, once in the car she started to calm down.  She did say she wanted her Ga, a.k.a. grandmother and when I called and gave Mia the phone, that just made her cry more. At the hospital Mia was amazing!  She was very calm and let the doctors do their thing.  It did take quite a while to get everything ready (x-rays, local anesthesia, a couple of opinions, etc.) but Mia was a trooper through the whole four hours. The end result was a broken finger tip and the finger nail had come out of the nail bed.  However, the repair work went well and after a couple months of a cool, black finger, Mia should be back to normal.

Of course the doctors told us to keep the finger dry.  However, that did not keep us from going on and enjoying our trip to Great Wolf Lodge.  Vinyl gloves and some elastic wrap worked wonders!

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When we returned for follow up visits, Mia was again pretty good.  The first visit she was a little nervous about the nurse taking off her bandage, but not as bad as Jennifer.  But Mia learned to keep her finger safe and kept up her active lifestyle. We had our second follow up visit and all is going well.  You can see the very tip of her middle finger is broken in the image of the x-ray (Now a days they show you a print of the x-ray, and you get to take them home. If you click on the image, you can see the very tip of the finger is broken.

Now Mia is doing great.  She only has a small bandage on her finger keeping the finger nail clean and a little protected.  When the doctor took the splint off, at first Mia refused to bend her finger.  So we had an OT come down and talk to Mia about the importance of bending her finger and gave me some OT games to play with Mia.  Of course by that evening Mia was bending her finger just fine and even wanted to show the doctor how well she was doing.

Animoto

After listening to Net@Night where they talked about the new site, Animoto, I just had to give it a try. It was very simple, all I did after signing up and clicking the create video button I pointed it to my Flickr account, chose this group, picked some music (after listening to a sample), With a click of the create button, I went outside to grill a pork tenderloin and in a few minutes I had the video. I might be sold and purchase a pro account for my next photo to video project.

Great Wolf Vacation: Day 3

If you have read either of the first two posts in the Great Wolf Vacation you probably get that we bounce between the water park and something else out here in Kansas City. Today was no different. We started the day with going to Crown Center for a little shopping and fun. Fortunately I have been there before because the directions from the hotel were simply wrong. But it only added a couple minutes at most to our morning journey.

We walked around and Mia got some more make-up, a.k.a. lip gloss, and we headed to the Hallmark Kaleidoscope. That is where the photo above of the girls on the bench was taken. However, it is something you have to signup and go in at a specific time and we did not want to wait until 3pm. So we watched some school choirs, went to the Crayola restaurant for lunch, got some candy, watched some more school choirs and decided to head back to our pretend home.

Once at the lodge, it was time to go swimming. Mia still did not want to go down any of the slides, but after a little while had more fun playing in the big structure. I believe she has been very worried about getting her hand wet even though it has stayed very dry wrapped up in a rubber glove, taped and then package wrapped.

Olivia had a blast like always and this time I took the point and shoot into the water park to grab some memories. I have not done much with any of the photos yet because processing them on a four year old laptop with only 512MB of memory is painful. I have included this one of her standing under one of the many water features.

After spending a number of hours in the water park we headed back to our pretend home to change and then back to out finish that crazy MagiQuest game. Olivia completed all of the tasks earlier and started an adventure tonight. Well the adventure was going along just fine until the end when we had to battle the dragon. The instructions were lacking so we had to ask an employee for help. Even with his telling us what to do we ended up spending about an hour trying to figure it out and finally just gave up. It was time for dinner.

Fortunately our pretend home had enough leftovers for all of us to have a decent dinner. This is one of the big benefits to having a room with a refrigerator included. It was nothing fancy, but did save us the cost of going out yet again. All we had to do was find some ketchup packets for Mia to be able to enjoy her leftover hotdog.

The end of the evening was spent relaxing and just enjoying a little down time. The girls played Webkinz while Jenn and I read.

Whew vacations are tiring!

NOTE: Post edited on 4/25 to add photos.