5 things Friday

1. Next weekend we're off on a Christmas adventure to Budapest and then to Vienna. "But Tatiana, didn't you just get back from Belfast?!" Yeah like two weeks ago. Yup, I did. We haven't actually traveled much this year or for any long stretches of time because most of my year was in limbo while we waiting to hear about my Oma's situation. So we're taking the chance now to travel a little but more. So we'll be in Budapest for the week leading up to Christmas which I'm super excited about. Did you know there is a Pinball museum there? And for actual Christmas we will be in Vienna. We've been to Salzburg but never Vienna. 

2. I genuinely have no idea what I'm getting Johnathan for Christmas. Can't think of anything. We're going our own little Christmas on Saturday so we're not schleping gifts all over Europe so I've got some serious thinking to do. Gift cards are a hard no. I know what other people got him so that's those ideas out the window. I recently got him a really nice bottle of something so I could just do that again. I don't know. I think this is the universe paying back after spending years telling people who complained that he was hard to shop for that he in fact was super easy to shop for and clearly they were over thinking it. 

3. One of my goals in 2019 is to cook through some of my cookbooks. I have lots of cookbooks. People buy me cookbooks. I buy me cookbooks. I love cookbooks. I may or may not have even picked up a cookbook I ordered today on my lunch break. I use to have a lot more but our move overseas saw a lot of cookbooks find new homes or get put into storage. I also keep a lot of cookbooks these days on my iPad. Super handy. Now I'm not looking to do one of those Julie and Julia projects. I'm looking to just work my way through a few of the books I have rather than hunting through them for one of two things. I have have a few really good instructional books like The Complete Bocuse and The Food Lab so I will probably start with those. 

4. Speaking of books and goals and 2019. Boy do I have a lot of unread books. So so so many. Part of my problem is I spend a lot of my day job reading so the idea of coming home and doing more reading is pretty blech. But I was inspired by some random show I saw on Netflix called Consumed. I won't go into the details but basically it's a decluttering show. One of the hosts things is to get the participant to bring all of one of item that they have an issue with having too much of and putting it all in a pile in one place. I did this with books. Yeah...I need to read some of the books I have...a lot of the books I have. I'm a chronic half book reader. I read some of it and then get distracted by another books. Oops.

5. I've been quietly working on a little side project Johnathan and I came up with a few years ago. When expats get together we have this tendency to talk about food. Whether it's food from our home countries. Food we miss. Food we are trying to figure out how to make using stuff we can only find in our current county. Food hacks and substitutions. Out of all the conversations Expat meals was born. We're still developing content for it, right now it's just an about page, though we have a pretty active instagram, and by developing content I mean saying to Johnathan, "how about we..." It's in its infancy but I'm pretty excited about it.