Morel recipes, silks, and dancing!

With our 38 morels, Tess and I were able to make two whole dinner recipes!

On night #1, we tackled some morel cream sauce on fettucine.

The taste was great, but the sauce was almost soup. Whether it was a recipe issue or a not-enough-time-to-simmer issue, it just wasn't exactly what we hoped. So we stuck it in the fridge overnight, and since Tess had the following day off, she doctored it up by pouring off a little sauce and thickening the rest with flour, and brought it to Michael and me for lunch in the middle of the day! What a freaking champ!

The next day, we busted out the frozen puff pastry (I would love to try making puff pastry someday, and I have several recipes, but it's gonna be a project, and I really don't have the counter space here for extensive rolling), blanched some asparagus and sauteed it up in butter with the remaining morels and a bit of garlic, squished it into the pastries, topped it off with a bit of parmesan, stuck it back in the oven for a couple minutes, and voila!

Tess has a couple pics, but hasn't sent them to me yet. I'll post them when she does!

I can't even tell you how incredible it was. The earthy morels with the creamy, tender asparagus and buttery, flaky pastry melted into heaven in my mouth.

Let's just say it was a good time.

On Wednesday, we all trouped over to the rec center to take Renee's silks class! Renee is our Monday Belle and has lived in Skagway for nine years, although she still travels to do shows elsewhere sometimes. Before Skagway, she worked several seasons for Tokyo Disney, which is where she learned silks (also called ribbons or aerial tissue). For rec center members, her classes are only $15 for drop-ins or $100 for a ten-class card. We thought we'd give one class a try before deciding to buy a ten-class card, although we were pretty sure already that we would totally love it.

We were super right! Renee starts the class with partnered stretching and Thai massage, followed by strength training for arms, shoulders, and core, finally followed by actual ribbon work. We learned the basic hand lock, an “egg” hang (lock your hands in the ribbons and then pull your knees to your chest!), how to tip over upside down in the egg position and then extend our feet straight up (and then do crunch-type exercises that way by lowering and raising our feet along the ribbons!), how to climb the ribbon, and how to do a basic foot lock! It was so cool I can't even handle it. Ten-class card, here we go!

And then Thursday was dance night at the Gold Rush Brewery! Our new friend Gregory, who is the manager there, is teaching a weekly blues dancing class. Meridith has a bum foot right now, and Steph was feeling like a night in, but Tess and I went out – and had a great time. The class was easy but not too terribly slow, since people were picking stuff up well, and then the actual dancing was awesome. By the last hour or so, Tess, Gregory, Gregory's friend Brian, and I were the only ones left, so we got to partner up with each other pretty continuously and have some pretty rockin' dances. Yay, dance night!

Since then I've pretty much just been working! I've knocked down seven days out of thirteen in a row, and I'm still going strong! We went out to the BrewCo tonight just to hang around, have dinner/drinks/fooseball, enjoy each other's company. What was cool was that it was a bunch of our Skagway friends, not all of whom even knew each other. Greg and Brian were there, plus the '98 show crowd, including Allison/Jon/Tegan, plus some friends of Jon and Tegan, plus Mike from the Brewery, plus some friends Tess made on her day off today, including a guy Steph and I had met at Bonanza a week ago. Cool to see all at once how many people we know and like here!

And now off to bed for me! It's Sunday night, and I'll post this in the morning, I hope – or tomorrow late night, if there are too many cruise ships in already in the morning (highly likely).