As you may already know (or may have guessed looking at Kelli in some of our pictures), Kelli and I are expecting our first child later this year. She’s due in December, and this past weekend, we flew to Ithaca, NY – Kelli’s hometown and the hometown of our alma mater, Cornell University – where her sisters and parents threw us a wonderful baby shower.
You might notice lots of yellow rubber duckies, and both pink AND blue pacifiers. To answer the inevitable question, no, we don’t know what we’re having. We plan to wait until Baby Bronski is born to find out the sex. There are so few genuine surprises in life, and we figure this is one we don’t want to pass up on. I have to laugh sometimes. People are shocked at our decision. They can’t believe that, given the option to know, we would decline to find out. Then they’re quick to point out we’re bound to receive a lot of things that are yellow or green. Well, for one, we happen to like yellow and green as colors (along with “espresso,” they’re the colors of the nursery). But for another, if we knew it was a boy or a girl, I’m pretty confident we’d received a lot of blue or pink. You’re bound to get a lot of one color one way or another!
Of course, one surprise I’m not keen on is gluten in my food. Thankfully, Kelli’s sisters and mom went to great lengths to plan a buffet menu that had plenty of gluten-free options. There was the caprese salad, a traditional Italian combination of tomatoes, mozzarella and basil, drizzled with olive oil and seasoned with salt and pepper. Then there were the delicious fruit-kabobs, with fresh, ripe watermelon, pineapple, canteloupe, and honeydew mellon. For dessert, they made three cakes, one of which was a gluten-free cholocate cake kept separate from the others.
But my favorite by far was the pulled pork. My sister-in-law, Karla, lives near Dallas, and used her true-to-Texas recipe. My father-in-law, Bob, executed Karla’s recipe on his new Green Egg grill. While I’m not up on all the particulars, I do know several key facts about the process. A) It involved 6 ten-pound pork shoulders (that’s 60 pounds of meat! Can you say leftovers?). B) It involved some 15 hours of smoking and cooking the shoulders over low heat. And C) It involved copious quantities of Brooks’ B-B-Q Sauce, a gluten-free barbeque sauce from the restaurant with the same name in Oneonta, NY, an old favorite of Kelli’s family.
The food was scrumptious, seeing family and friends was great, and above all else, Kelli and I eagerly look forward to welcoming Baby Bronski into our gluten-free world later this year!– Pete