Vanilla Souffle

For my birthday, Ryan gave me Mastering the Art of French Cooking. We're excited to try out some of the varied recipes, but there are some we'll skip. Specifically the recipes for cow and lamb brains. Saturday night we made our first recipe from it - a vanilla souffle. For whatever reason, I've never whipped egg whites before, so Ryan thought it'd be good to not only read up on it in the cookbook but also watch a video of Julia Child making a souffle. Turns out a souffle is pretty simple.

We started by buttering our mold and dusting it with sugar.

Next up was making the sauce.

Ryan whipped the egg whites.

Here Ryan's folding the egg whites into the sauce.

Then we baked it, not sure whether it'd actually turn out or not. The recipe said there should be 1 1/4 inches between the top of the mixture and the top of the mold. We didn't have that, so we made a collar for the souffle.

It turned out very nicely, if I do say so myself!

Space Needle

We very well might have lived in Seattle the rest of our lives without ever entering the Space Needle. It's quite expensive (eighteen dollars a piece or thereabouts) and to us the cost isn't worth a view of the city. But we have a friend who is working at the Space Needle right now and he's able to take a few others up with him for free. So a couple of weekends ago we hopped on the bus and met our friends there.

Here we are, with Lake Union behind us. Gareth really wasn't interested in taking a family photo - I was having to fight a bit to keep him in my arms. What he wanted to be doing was looking through the telescopes at the boats on the lake, the buildings, whatever he could see. He got to do plenty more of that after we took the picture, so in the end he didn't mind that we put him through one picture. On the elevator ride up he made most of the adults chuckle as he said, "Wow!" over and over and over as we went up.

I'm glad we went (especially since it was free) because it made quite the impression on Gareth. When we were driving past the next weekend he was excited to see "the building we went to yesterday!" from the car.