Birthday Dinners at the County Line

We headed to dinner with Jim's family for Jamie and his dad's birthday dinner. We had an awesome table that overlooked the water (which is part of Lake Austin). We had a good time hanging out with everybody and enjoying our BBQ!

There was a guy walking around the restaurant making balloon animals for the kids. Dawson had a cat made, Caden had an air guitar made and Ryan had a motorcycle made. The guy was pretty good making the balloon items. Caden had asked for a un-blown up balloon so he could play with it. He tried through out the dinner to blow that sucker up, and didn't have any luck!

I ordered the special of St. Louis ribs. They were FANTASTIC. I don't think they are better than Rudys, but they are a very close 2nd. They had a lot of meat on each bone and it was very tender. The sides (potato salad and coleslaw) were just Eh. Not great, not bad.

Dawson and his cat

Ryan also got a un-blown up balloon.... and as you can see, he didn't have much luck getting it blown up. Check out those cheeks!

After dinner we all headed outside to feed the turtles.

There were SOOOOO many turtles. I don't think I have seen so many turtles in one area. They knew it was supper time and came out to get fed!


My MIL took a couple of photos of us. I wonder what I am thinking here....

I imagine this is how I look 98% of the time... always a camera in my hand ready to catch the shots

Pulled Pork- 2 different ways

Ingredients

1 large onion, chopped
6 garlic cloves, peeled
1 pickled jalapeño pepper, seeded and chopped

2 jalapeno in adobe sauce
2 teaspoons of Chipotle

dash of chile powder
1 Tbsp tomato paste
2 Tbsp Dijon mustard
3/4 cup distilled white vinegar
1 teaspoon paprika
1/3 cup ketchup
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
1/4 cup light brown sugar
Salt
3 lbs of pork butt shoulder roast, trimmed of excess fat

Method

1 Purée all of the sauce ingredients (everything except the pork) in a blender until smooth. If you have extra time, marinate the pork in the sauce overnight or for several hours before cooking. - I marinated mine for about 4 hours

2 Put sauce,and pork into a large pot and add 1 quart of water. Bring mixture to a boil and simmer, covered, turning frequently, for 2 hours or until the meat pulls apart easily with a fork.

I actually poured everything into the crock pot on low heat for 10 hours. I wasn't sure how the marinade would hold up, but it worked perfectly. I will say that even with all of the jalapenos, there was not a lot of heat in the meat.

3 Remove from heat and cool pork in the sauce. When cool, remove the pork from the sauce and shred into small pieces.

I used store bought BBQ sauce to top the meat with. It was a Central Market Brand BBQ sauce that had a lot of black pepper flavor. Very good! I used the meat in two different ways, sandwiches and served over polenta. The sandwich topped with red onions and pickles was GREAT, and served with polenta was just okay. It was more of a polenta thing than the BBQ pork thing. I think if we had grilled the polenta rather than have it straight out of the pan, then it would have given it more flavor and firmer.

Hawaii

Sorry I have taken so long to get this post up. I had a lot of photos to go through, and then the slow process of uploading the pictures. We had a fantastic time in Hawaii with Rachel. She is born to be the hostess with the mostess. She knew where to take us and how to to have a jammed packed time. We easily needed to be there another week to really see Oahu and everything the island offers. Rachel and Brian will be in Hawaii for another year, so we'll be saving our money for another visit.

We had a layover in LA before we made the long trip to Hawaii. I took this picture about 2 or 3 hours into the flight.

Yup, in the lavatory :o) And there wasn't a line, so I didn't mind taking time to take a picture. I needed to get up and stretch my legs during the 5 hr flight.

The airline had a map on the monitors to show us where we were during the flight. (well, when they weren't showing a movie). It was a little odd to see us over so much water.




We were on our first hike about 1.5 hrs after we got off of the plane.
This was a doozy of a hike, a lot of steep climbing

The views were worth the excruciating hike. The views were amazing

Jim and I

Rachel and I

This is called the pillbox hike. Along the hike there are a couple of pill box bunkers left over from World War 2. The military used them to make sure the enemy didn't sneak up on them

Hams on a mountain

This was an island on the Marine Base. The sunset was beautiful, and the beach was peaceful.

Rachel, me and Jim. We were on top of one of the mountains around the base. Beautiful 360 degree views

See the rainbow behind the palm trees? It was one of the largest rainbows that I have seen. Rachel said that she has seen much larger rainbows while she has been on the island.

Rachel surprised us with lei's when we arrived at the airport.

They were gorgeous and smelled wonderful.

During our drive to the North Shore. We were driving when I took this picture.

Seriously.... this is the view from the road. Pretty fine view.

Along the road, we stopped to pick up an ice cold young coconut.

You can drink the coconut water and eat the flesh. One tip, don't drink to much or you'll end up with the Hershey squirts :) The flesh was interesting. I thought it would be more sweet, but it had a strong nut flavor, like a pecan

We were lucky enough to see a sea turtle! We stopped at the Turtle Bay Resort for lunch and drinks and to check out the resort that was in Forgetting Sarah Marshal (funny ass movie). This little guy was searching for food and floating around the rocks.

Our fruity drinks

A beach on the North Shore... we had a storm come in while we were laying out. It was nice to have the light rain in between the sun

We got the most awesome shrimp plate from this truck. Macky's is one of the many little trailers/trucks that serves shrimp plates. Rachel said that she has tried many of them and this is her favorite.

Garlic Butter Shrimp. Get in ma belly!

Laying out at the beach

Rachel finishing up her coconut as a snack.

After the North shore, we headed over to the west side of the island to watch the sunset from an isolated beach.

The sunset was blocked a bit by the rain clouds. But I really like this picture because of the separation of colors. The sky above the clouds was a light navy, the clouds were a dark navy, the sunset glowed a rich yellow, and the water was a blue.

One of my favorite photos of the trip

Jim and I

Rachel and I

One of my favorite fee pictures! I love the movement of the ocean

Palm tree

There were a couple of cool tunnels that we took. The view on the other side was always awesome.

There were a lot of Gardenia trees around the base. Rachel had two in her front yard. The flowers were everywhere.

Rachel had a couple of coconuts that she found on the ground on the beach. Jim is such a great sport and did what I asked for the photo :)

To get to one of the beaches, you had to cross the air field. We had to wait a couple of times while airplanes landed or took off. I haven't been that close to airplanes when they were taking off and landing. Quite the experience. Rachel liked to speed across the air strip because there was a little bump on the road, and if you hit it going fast you could get a little air in the jeep :)

One night we packed up some wine and cheese and headed out to the beach. It was so much fun just to sit around and talk while listening to the waves crash.

After about 20 minutes we realized that we had visitors. A bunch of crabs were interested in us and would crawl up to check us out. They were quick little fuckers so we weren't able to catch one.



After a bit of wine, we took some fun photos. We used the little camera for these photos... perhaps the big camera would have been better. We had to time it just right for the camera and flash to go off. We had a good time taking these photos. Lots of laughing!

Me and Rachel

Jim and I

Jim and Rachel

We spent an afternoon at the Pearl Harbor memorial. We toured the submarine Bowfin and went on the USS Missouri. It took some time, but it was worth it. So much history in such a smal area.

I snuck out early to catch the sunrise. I pretty much had the beach to myself while I was taking pictures.

I didn't get to see the sun rise because it was behind the little mountain. I tried climbing out around a few rocks, but the terrain was to rocky to keep going. I was a little worried about the tide coming in also, so I didn't venture out to far

I carefully walked along the beach to get the footsteps in the sand picture :)

Good morning world!

This took talent! It was kind of hard to balance while my legs were in the air and get the camera, and take a picture.

Yoga on the beach was so much fun. I haven't done yoga before and this was a perfect opportunity to do it. Rachel was the instructor so I got special attention (usually it was to correct my novice moves and poses). Plus getting to do it on the beach was something that I'll never get to do in Austin

Ha! My feeble attempt at this move

Thanks to Jim for taking pictures. He went jogging while we were doing yoga but he finised up before we did.
Rachel and I, out in downtown Honolulu

The longest game of darts ever. This was a pretty cool Irish bar in downtown Honolulu

Jim, me, Rachel and her friend Brandon. We went to dinner then out for some drinks in Honolulu

At Yard Bird enjoying a couple of brews

One day we decided to go kayaking then snorkeling. The island we were kayaking to felt like it was about 100 miles away. You can see the island that we were heading towards in the picture (which is to the right in the picture below). Kayaking in the ocean was a total workout.

I was using a disposable waterproof camera, so the shots aren't perfect. The water so so clear, you could see quite aways (which was good in case a big shark was coming our way to eat us;) ). There were all types of fish swimming around, and most of them were about the same size.

Aloha

About 40 feet from shore, the floor of the ocean dropped. I have no idea how far down it went, but it looked far (I couldn't see the bottom) So odd just to see it drop like that. I'm sure that is where the sea monsters were ready to eat us.

After snorkeling

This little breakfast and lunch joint was slammed! I had heard wonderful reviews on the internet about this place, but I also heard about the insane wait. We ended up waiting about an hour to get inside. I'm pretty sure I have never waited that long for brunch, but the food was worth it.

We ordered Eggs Benedict, a short stack of macademia nut pancakes with macadameia cream and a side order of ribs. I thought the ribs sounded fantastic and I knew I didn't want to leave that place without trying them. The meat fell off of the bone (which I think was a short rib) and had a slightly sweet taste. I believe they had a Guava BBQ sauce on them. All of our food was really good. I'm glad that we waited.

Rachel, me and Jim. We had to hurry to take this picture because it was starting to rain.

Our cute couple picture

We are such hams! :o)

Bye Bye Honolulu! We'll be back as soon as we can!