My friend Rob hunts deer and is very good at it. I can only think of one year in the 15 that I've known him that he hasn't bagged at least one (depending upon whether or not extra tags are available). This is the meat that feeds his family - they pretty much use every part of the animal and, if you eat meat at their house, you can be sure that it's deer. Some years hunting season rolls around and last year's venison hasn't been depleted from his freezer so he and his wife gift us with 20 or 30 lbs. This was one of those years. (One year, Rob's wife Jennifer went ocean fishing with some colleagues and, despite never having fished before, managed to catch several bluefish. Since they don't love fish, she gave me the cleaned, wrapped and frozen fillets. These are seriously good people to know. In the past I've tried to return these favors with home grown produce - Jen loves a good tomato sandwich - but now we live too far away for that.)


So tonight's dinner will be venison steaks that are currently marinating in a mixture of dry white table wine and chicken broth, with some onions and garlic minced in. They'll be pan fried (sort of like a Swiss steak, I guess) and served with something kind of risotto-esque (love that creaminess on cold rainy nights) and probably some roasted carrots and beets. How's that for a nice winter's meal?


I'm still working on the gingerbread house pics. We used to have a really great Kodak digital camera, but we didn't treat it carefully and the pictures started coming out blurry. But it was very easy to use - downloading was a snap into our HP Photosmart printer - and now I really miss it. Our current camera is a Fuji that, while it has some cool features like the ability to take short "movies", is a pain in the butt. Nothing's intuitive or simple and it cost quite a bit more than the late, lamented Kodak. I guess this is what we get for not handling our belongings with care - spending more money for a more irritating product. So I'm working on it.