Kelley Bromley

Now that I don’t have a wedding to plan I can upload all the photos I’ve been meaning to upload! The following albums have been added:

Grouse Mountain	Terra Nova	Girl’s Night BBQ
James & Alyssa’s Wedding	I recently came across a bunch of very old pictures from when I borrowed everyone’s photos to scan during high school. Unfortunately at the time I had a parallel port scanner which went dead slow at 300dpi, so to speed things up I scanned everything at 100dpi. At the time it looked great on my 800×600 screen. Now most pics are 600×400 or less and wouldn’t even be able to be printed *sigh* but nice to have in any case. I’ll think about putting them up if there’s any interest.

Lionel has been wanting to make boerewors, a traditional South African sausage, for quite some time. Traditionally they are made of pork and beef, but since we don’t eat beef we decided to use lamb. On Monday we bought a beautiful boneless leg of lamb roast - 2kg worth. On Thursday we painstakingly trimmed the skin and fat away and cut it into pieces small enough to fit through the food grinder attachment of our KitchenAid. An hour and a half later we had a bowlful of ground lamb, excellent quality. Then we looked at it. Speckled throughout was pieces of grease from the food grinder. It was ruined. Now, this happened last time with carrots I was grating for a carrot cake (5lbs worth!), and so this time we were prepared and THOROUGHLY cleaned the device. But to no avail. Four pounds of lamb ended up in the garbage. This was quite upsetting. Did I mention we did all this after running 9.8 km the previous day, and me working from 6pm the previous day until 6:30pm that day, and then coming home to make sausage?! It hit us hard, heh.

So we went out and bought some ground lamb today and tried again. It was a success! Unfortunately the meat was ground very fine and was very lean (the recipe calls for bacon and we didn’t put it in). Next time the bacon goes in and we’ll request coarsely ground. In the meantime, the spicing was excellent!

Well, after some frustrating trials I have figured out how to allow users to add comments to photos in the gallery, so feel free :) Also, I meant to say last time that I haven’t gotten around to doing the captions yet, but I’ll work on it as soon as I have other pictures up, heh. There’s a backlog right now :)

Lionel and I received our wedding photos in the mail today. WOW! We got all the full resolution images on a DVD and they are CRAZY. Nate did an awesome job. He had such a great personality, was very accommodating, and took amazing photos. You can see his other work by going to his website, www.nategates.com.

Anyway, I have updated the gallery on my website — if you’d like to see the photos, follow this link. We haven’t decided which ones to make larger copies of, but the one on Signal Hill is pretty cool and a few at Bowring Park would make nice enlargements too!

I really love the photos he took at the reception. Besides the portraits we set up he took random photos during the night and those ones I find are the best. He didn’t get everybody in those kinds of shots, but here are some people he did get!

Lionel’s friend James recommended a garden store downtown called Art Knapps. It was great! It had everything you need to start an Urban Garden. We got a little carried away… Lionel wanted to get some basil, so we got a big pot of that and a massive planter to hang on the railing of our 7th floor apartment.

Well, after I got in there I wanted to garden too! I got a smaller planter and some Cilantro, Dwarf dill, and Parsley to go in it.

I also got some English Mint, but I’ll need to buy another pot for it. In addition, I got a baby tomato plant! Lionel wants to grow Campari’s from seeds, but even though we don’t know what kind of tomato these will be, the plant was only $2.49 and already had little tomatoes on it! So we got a nice terracotta pot and I gave it a home :)

I still have to plant my Mint, and I want to get one more small railing planter to put some flowers in, but for a start I think it’s looking pretty awesome! To see all the pictures, click here.

Yesterday the girls and I had a Bahelorette / Girl’s Night BBQ and it was so much fun! We had it after the wedding because leading up to the wedding Lionel and I were so busy taking care of the last minute details and buying a house that we couldn’t fit it in. I picked up Hiu Ming and Ash and we gassed up the car before driving to Katie’s in Torbay. Strangely enough the pumps need to be turned on here in Newfoundland, which was completely foreign to me. I couldn’t figure out why the gas wouldn’t come out of the pump until Ash asked if I turned it on. At first I thought she was joking… but then I saw the switch. I was so used to Vancouver just swipe and go I didn’t even know you had to do that!

We drove out to Torbay uneventfully and got to Katie’s house and her dad drove us to the end of Bauline Line, where Katie was house sitting for her sibling. Ashley unveiled the copious amounts of alcohol she wanted to get rid of before heading to Japan, and we started cooking.

We needed extra milk, an egg, and had forgotten the cheesecake, so we wanted to go back to Katie’s, but we were stranded! We had a little miscommunication problem when Katie said to have her dad drive us out because she didn’t know I was taking the car. In either case, her dad got Katie and I and we picked up said items while Hiu Ming and Ash got to work on the mashed potatoes and the BBQ, even though neither one of them had ever BBQed before!

When we got back all was safe and sound and nothing had caught on fire. The meal was great and the talk was awesome! Katie and I got back just as Ash and Hiu Ming were finishing up with the BBQ and we did a little impromptu dancing, check it out! Hiu Ming is operating the camera and Ash is on the left, Katie’s on the right, and I’m in the middle.

After the meal Ash made us a Chocolate Raspberry Creme Liquor for dessert and it was delicious. We had some cheesecake, made some cookie dough batter for later, and chatted for a bit then headed out to the fire pit to attempt to build a fire, which was another great memory, haha.

Once it got going we made some smores by wrapping graham crackers in tinfoil with marshmallow and Hershey’s chocolate in between and sticking them in the fire. They came out a little burnt on the bottom where they touched the smoldering embers, but it didn’t taste burnt and we ate them anyway, LOL. We learned that dried pine branches make awesome surges in heat and create very cool looking sparks!

After the fire we headed to bed. Ash and Katie each took a kid’s room and Hiu Ming and I took the Master bedroom. We ended up chatting for so long, and the next morning Katie and Ashley said they could hear us giggling all night. It was so funny — Hiu Ming and I would both say we would stop talking and sleep and we’d both know we’d talk again in a few minutes. It was a blast!

The next morning we had watermelon, tea, and buns for breakfast before heading back. That day we went to go see the movie Transformers with the rest of the group and Ash brought the chocolate chocolate chip cookies she made with the Girl’s Night cookie dough. Fun Times :)