Happy New Year!

We were fortunate to enjoy New Years Eve with fabulous friends, an Ethiopian feast, and good times all around. We used our new cookbook to prepare a meal of veggie sambusa, mesir wat, tibs wat, and a berbere spiced potato/carrot/cauliflower mix and enjoyed Ethiopian honey wine with the meal.

Our good friends searched high and low in Manhattan for Ethiopian honey wine and finally found it at an Ethiopian restaurant within a few blocks of their apartment. As they conversed with the owner of the restaurant and explained to him why it was so important to bring an Ethiopian honey wine to their New Years festivities the owner became very excited about their friend's adopting from Ehtiopia and offered family to stay with in Addis while traveling as well as his daughter in Manhattan as an Ethiopian baby sitter! We are truly fortunate to live in an area where one can "stumble" into such grand Ethiopian resources! We're going to join our friends for dinner sometime soon at the restaurant and hopefully strike up a new friendship with the owners.

Cheers to our dear friends who gave us the African cookbook, our fabulous friends who sought out Ethiopian honey wine and found it as well as an entire family to get to know, and of course, cheers to the new year!

An Ethiopian feast

Our first kiss of 2008!
(Yes, that is Dick Clark on the TV in the background!)

Amazing hot chocolate sticks dipped in warm milk for dessert....mmm good!

What would new years eve be without sledding? Nothing could keep our boys from testing out 6 fresh inches of powder on our 6 foot sledding hill...I think someone's looking forward to being a daddy and having an excuse to go sledding again!

Here he is climbing the hill
(Yes, that is a cardboard box he's using as a sled)

Now prepping for the big slide


Down, down, and away!!!


Ok, I eventually joined in on the fun...