30 day Challenge - Day 10

Day 10: Typhoon Roke!!
Today was a day spent battening down the hatches in preparation for a typhoon. It was a category 2 until it made landfall earlier this morning and by the time it reached us it was equivalent to a Tropical Storm... really? Hubby kept checking wind speeds and most internet sites posted somewhere around 50 knots as the speeds. OK... sure felt like more!! Most of the day passed without problems and it almost felt as though we'd prepared for nothing. No TV on all day long to remind us of the impending typhoon, just bands of heavy rain at times. The children were let go early from school, afternoon and evening plans were canceled. This, unfortunately, included us not being able to take Cheyenne to the eye doctor. Good thing we canceled, cause it was to be at 4pm and that was during the worst of the storm!

I always complain about having this street right behind our house, from which many cars and the fire trucks come out. It often feels like no privacy. However, this was the scene around 5pm today!!
Amazing!! This tree was the largest of all those trees you see... the smaller one looks like it fell, too, but the little building was holding it up. Eventually, a front loader came along and pushed it out of the road forward to only block the right side of the street. It was helpful, though, as hte fire trucks use this road and that kept it clear enough for them to get in and out. This tree is only the tip of the iceberg with many others down across the base.  I just saw a friend's blog and she showed a picture of another one of these trees, albeit much smaller, that went down in her street.  I just pray no one or no thing got hurt.  Fortunately, this tree didn't take down any of those wires you see across the street!!  No electrical outage... at least not for us. 

So, besides read and work on the upcoming bazaar... what does one do during a typhoon??  MAKE A GREAT PALEO MEAL!!!   I bought more Angus loin steaks the other day (yep, kinda expensive... but if you're going to have beef, might as well do it right!!) and some bleu cheese.  So, the menu was bleu cheese topped grilled steaks, bacon brussel sprouts, and mashed Japanese sweet potato.  Fortuantely for us, the typhoon stopped right as I was cooking!  So, my hubby, being the handy man he is, went outside and set the grill back upright (he'd placed it down on it's side in the grass and removed the gas tank to keep both parts safe) and rehooked the tank.  His job was the steaks and they were AWESOME!! 

Mine was to do the brussel sprouts... from a recipe from Everyday Paleo, and then boiled sweet potatoes, skinless, then mashed with organic butter and heavy cream.  As you'll see from the photos, they're not orange like ours.  Taste similar, just not as flavorful... very mild.  

And... the finished result was FANTASTIC!!  What a wonderful dinner.. here's my teen's plate (though he ate pizza between lunch and dinner time, so he wasn't hungry!  Darn, more for us!!))

I promise, though the sweet potatoes look strangely colored, they were just as tasty, just mild, compared with American yams!!