We are hooked.
We have seen the movie twice now and borrowed the book from a friend. After both racing through it we went to the store and bought Twilight and New Moon because we just wanted to read them again and again. Upon checking out at Barnes & Noble, the cashier said to me, "I took the liberty of including a gift receipt for both books."
HAAAAAAAAAAAA!
Apparently young adults are not supposed to be devouring reading these books.
Also, we were trying to use cash this weekend so when we went to buy the books I used a big stack of one dollar bills and a few stacks of quarters to pay. And he still thought I needed a gift receipt?!
HAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
J
I doubt our baby will be this small but that's ok!
Have a great Friday!
So this was yesterday—Charlie and her cute little scarf. My MIL, Linda, showed me this great idea and Charlie loved it.
Ok I've been tagged at 2 different blogs now and one was for 6 random facts and the other was for 7 random facts so I'll do 7 just to keep it real. Here are the rules…
1. I was tagged by sarahbee and amber.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog - some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blog.
4. Let them know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
5. If you don't have 7 blog friends, or if someone else already took dibs, then tag some unsuspecting strangers.
I'm not going to tag anyone else but if you would like to do this on your blog leave me a comment saying you have done this and I will definitely check out your blog and your random facts!
Fact: I had a very strange feeling that Josh and I would be together for quite a while the very first time we went out.
Fact: He had a similarly strange feeling as well. I don't know why it took us so long to figure it out. HA! Just kidding, it didn't take that long.
Fact: I love to watch football and baseball.
Fact: I would love to open a little bakery/café/shop some day and sell sweet treats and yarn.
Fact: I gagged 3 times this morning while trying to brush my teeth, my front teeth, not anything in the back or my tongue or what have you but the front of my mouth. And still I gagged.
Fact: Favorite hobbies would be knitting, reading, playing games, baking or cooking, and shopping.
Fact: I have been working on a very special new blog which I will soon be giving you a link to!
Have a blessed day!
This is how big the baby is right now, a kidney bean. Or a raspberry. About .6 inches long. It has little arms and legs and a head where eyelids have formed.I'm sorry there won't be any pictures of this but next time I make it I will try to remember to take some pictures.
This sauce is really very simple to make and is delicious to eat.
You start by making pesto or you can buy it if you are into wasting money like that (just kidding, kind of). Go to your local farmer's market and they will probably be selling basil for some absurdly low price like 2 bunches for $1. If you buy this much basil you will have like 3 batches of pesto. Pull the leaves off the basil and put them in your salad spinner. Fill up the bowl and cover the leaves with cold water. Shake off the water and pour it out of the bowl. If you don't have a salad spinner, put the leaves in a strainer and fill your sink with water, then drain the water. Rinse the leaves again and then spin them a few times to get all of the water off.
Now to make pesto, I use a very simple recipe….are you ready for this?
Get out your blender and load it full of basil leaves, pine nuts, and olive oil. Grind. Chop. Mix. Whatever you need to do. Make sure all the pine nuts and basil are chopped up to little tiny pieces. Oh, you want to know how much to use? Hmmm..
I use about 3-4 cups of basil leaves, 1 cup of olive oil, ½ cup of pine nuts and then I added a pinch of garlic and Kosher salt for some flavor. Add more olive oil as you see fit.
So you made your pesto, it is great to put on pizza or pasta or you can freeze it and save it for later.
Now let's say you want some pasta with pesto but you want it to have some depth to it and not just be plain pesto. Here is when you should make the pesto cream sauce!
To make the cream sauce:
You make a simple Bechamel sauce and then add pesto. Easy as 1-2-3.
To make a Bechamel sauce you do the following:
2 Tbsp Butter
2 Tbsp Flour
1 ¼ Cups Milk
Melt the butter in a saucepan, stir in the flour and stir until the flour is dissolved to a paste. You want it to start bubbling but not change colors. This happens pretty quick. Next you add your milk and continue to stir. Let the milk boil. Lower the heat, add your pesto and cook. Stir the sauce for about 2-3 minutes. If you want it to be more like an alfredo sauce with the pesto, add some parmesan cheese. If you want it be cheesier, add some mozzarella cheese. Keep stirring until the cheese is melted. I usually add about ¼ to ½ cups pesto. It will turn a nice shade of green. Don't worry, it will taste so good you can overlook the color. Hope you try this, it is very tasty!
Hello, we are back. I had the flu last week and was pretty much lazy so that meant no blogging. I could hardly get enough energy to read all of the blogs that I like to read. So we are back and ready to post again. A forecast of what you can expect to see this week…pictures from Josh's birthday party (only 10 days late), a recipe for Creamy Pesto Sauce, a fun knitting project, something from Josh.
Ok that should do it. Just wanted to let you know we are still alive and kicking, just a little bit slow these days.
Well, we survived the Puppy Party! On Sunday we had 11 dogs at our house, 9 of which were Labs. Charlie and Toby turned 1 so we thought it would be fun to have everybody over. Valeen (Toby's owner mom) and I made a ton of treats for dogs and humans. We had a great time watching all the dogs play. I don't think there is too much else to say. Probably the hit of the party was little miss Belle who is Daron and Rachael's new Golden Retriever puppy!
You can see pictures here…
So the V is backwards. Now I'm trying to decide if I want to switch it around. I probably will but it will take some time to get that high on my list again. J
I've been doing a lot of baking lately and would you believe I didn't take any pictures to show you. We now have homemade biscuits, pita bread, and hamburger buns in the freezer. I can't believe how cheap it is to make this stuff. A note to any of you who would like to do your baking with whole wheat flour instead of white flour…it is very simple to make this switch you just need to buy yourself a little box of Vital Wheat Gluten. You may have tried using all whole wheat flour (wwf) in a previous recipe and it just didn't taste right nor did it have the correct texture. You may be using half white flour and half whole wheat flour to correct this. This is a fine set up but not my preferred way to work. Well my friends, the answer lies in this cute little box.
When you are baking your goods whether it is cookies, bread, biscuits, etc. and have used all wwf without adding gluten or using a high gluten flour, your goods will probably be bitter and very heavy. Almost like the texture and heaviness is too thick to eat. You will want to add in some gluten to give your product more chewiness and what gluten also does is holds together moisture so your baking will be more moist and fresh. The gluten won't add tons of extra carbs but it does add some. While most traditional recipes are created using All-Purpose Flour you can easily substitute wwf as you see fit when you understand how much gluten to add in. They do sell wwf with higher gluten content as well as ww pastry flour but if you are cheap like me you can do it this way.
From what I have been reading and trying to understand, gluten is the protein that works with yeast and helps it to stretch and rise. When you are making any kind of yeast bread adding some gluten to your wwf will make all the difference. In the hamburger bun recipe it uses 3 cups of flour and ¼ cup of gluten. The directions on the box say about 2-3 tsp of gluten to 1 cup of flour so the ¼ cup could probably be reduced a little bit. As you work with wwf and gluten you will see where you need to adjust. When I bake cookies using all wwf I will add just a little bit of gluten (maybe 1 tsp) because I don't want the cookies to be super airy but I also don't want them to be rock hard and a pain to eat. This seems to work well.
I have not yet tried wwf for things like gravy or cream sauces and I don't know if I will…I just always have some all-purpose flour on hand for those types of things. Maybe I will start with the half and half approach and just see what happens.
Do any of you use wwf? Do you use it only for baked goods or all sorts of stuff?
lmost orange which is fine by me. The end goal is to now surround the letters with pictures representing love—most likely wedding pictures and maybe some with friends but it's our bedroom so it seems kind of weird to hang pictures of friends on the wall across from the bed...if you catch my drift.
I haven't had much to blog about lately and finally got some inspiration.
before we got her. Toby is the very light yellow lab.
Well this weekend is the 1-year anniversary of our wedding. The year has surely flown by for us. God has blessed us immensely throughout this year. We are thankful for the things he has gifted us with and the ways he has guided our lives together. This last weekend we had the great privilege of going to stay the night at The Castle at Glen Eyrie. It was amazing! We also got to hike to the Punch Bowls. I had a few falls on the rocks and got pretty banged up but it was a lot of fun. It was one of the more challenging hikes we have done together and Josh did an amazing job as my leader. That is an area where we have seen some growth. Not so much a problem with Josh leading but with me following. :) In the past when we would do tough hikes like this it would be quite difficult to work together and trust each other but this time we did a great job communicating and helping each other out. Well, mainly Josh helped me but it was a lot of fun! And no arguments or raised voices (except for my screaming as I fell) made for a very, very enjoyable time together enjoying God's creation. **I am adding clarification here to let you all know that I tend to get a little cranky when we hike and a certain man enjoys pushing me to go harder when I would just prefer to sit down so that is where the "raised voices" come in..mainly from my whining!)**
Another great event coming up is my birthday. I don't need to say anything else about this, you know what to do. ;)
To see the pictures of our trip, click the picture below...
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Some of you more dedicated readers may remember when I started posting my fitness accomplishments a few months ago. By fitness accomplishments I mean that I got up and went to the gym in the morning before going to work. Well Lacey and I have still been keeping this schedule as time allows and it has been going well. Lately though we have been getting very bored with the same old exercises and running on the treadmill. Not surprising! And we haven't been watching our food intake very closely so all the working out for me tends to get cancelled out by my late evening Sonic run for ice cream or a slush.
We were faced with the wonderful fitness frustration: PLATEAU. Neither of us had enough excitement about working out to push up the intensity of our workouts. We tried but it was too hard. J So we thought about challenging ourselves by training for a race. We also noticed this girl who is always at the gym the same time as us and she was using this book called Making the Cut. We talked about checking out that book to see what it would be like and I just went ahead and bought it. We both skimmed through it and decided it would be a good thing to try. The author is a trainer from the show, The Biggest Loser and she seems to have her stuff together.
The book consists of meal plans and menus along with fitness plans to reveal the strongest, sexiest you in just 30 days. We are just going to track our calorie intake and follow the workout plan exactly. We just completed Day 2 of the workout and I think it's going to kick our butts. Each daily workout has 5 circuits to complete and each circuit has 4-6 exercises. You do a variety of different exercises and I think this will give us the switch we need to keep our excitement going. I'll keep you posted every once in a while on how it's going.
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Here is what we have been working on...rearranging furniture, painting furniture, and trading beds. The dressers were a natural wood looking laminate finish. So we marched on over to HD and bought us some spray paint. And bam, Josh made them espresso brown and fossil. Also painted the handles that were originally shiny silver. We love them now! The bed has been moved to be catty corner. Need some suggestions for what to do in that corner behind the bed. Well maybe not do so much as what to decorate with. =).JPG)
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