I haven't been blogging about food lately.

You can blame Starbucks for that. Since I've been working I just haven't been cooking as much, and when I do get the chance to make a home cooked meal for Brent, we're not always eager to try a new recipe. I have been doing some experimenting, though, so here are some recipes that we've tried in the last several months.

Grilled Chicken with Lemon Basil Pasta

This is a Pioneer Woman recipe. Looks delicious, huh? It could have been extremely delicious, had my husband not bought me a juicer only a couple of days before I made this. The recipe calls for three whole lemons, juiced, and because of the novelty of my new toy I went a little juicer-happy and sent three whole lemons, rind, peel and all, through the juicing machine. The result was, I think, not what our dear friend Pioneer Woman had in mind when she asked for "3 whole lemons, juiced." I may as well have added a quarter cup of dishwashing detergent to my pasta sauce...it wasn't pleasant.

The chicken was good though!

So good in fact, that when Brent and I had managed as much of the sour pasta down our throats as we could, I dug around through the rest and salvaged the chicken to use in a later meal.

We will definitely be trying this dish again, with "3 whole lemons, juiced" with our hands...throwing away the rind, peel and seeds.

Pasta with Pancetta and Leeks

This was an extremely easy meal to prepare. It was satisfying but not too rich, and had that unique flavor of leeks sauteed in butter. I really like leeks. Unfortunately my Brent does not. So although I would recommend this recipe to those who like leeks, I will not be making this again.

Hmmm...except maybe I should try it with green onion. Oh my. Yes. That would be tasty.

Baked Creamy Chicken Taquitos with Cilantro-Lime Dressing

This is a recipe that my sis introduced to me when I was up helping her out earlier this Fall. She and Matt had already tried it and knew it was good, so she requested that I make it while I was up there. I did, fell in love, and made it for Brent soon after I returned home. He fell in love at first morsel as I did.

I love this recipe because not only is it incredibly easy (ESPECIALLY if you use a rotisserie chicken), but it also accommodates various food intolerance diets. It is, of course, gluten free, as the tortillas are made out of corn. The taquitos are also delicious when you omit the pepperjack and the cream cheese...I know, I made them for my brother who avoids dairy like the plague and he ate 12 in one sitting, plus or minus a couple.

The cilantro lime dressing is tricky if you're dairy free...I almost got away with dairy-less products until I double checked the ingredients list of the Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing packet and saw that it has buttermilk derivatives or something like that. My brother ended up eating the taquitos dry, dipping them in *gulp* Italian dressing when he wanted to (that sounds disgusting), guacamole or pico de gallo. And he loved 'em that way.

Avacado Tomato Salad

This is a recipe my grandparents stumbled upon in their town's newspaper. They tried it and instantly became addicted, making it two or three times a week. Eventually they decided to share their treasure with friends and family and emailed the recipe to us. I was wary of it at first because one of the main ingredients is cottage cheese...I'm pretty hit or miss with cottage cheese and I know plenty of people who gag at the thought of it.

But my intrigue won over my fright and we tried it. I LOVE it, I could eat it every day for the rest of my life and grow deeper every moment in my affections for it. Ok, so that's an overstatement. A huge one. But the point is, this is WAY better than you think it's going to be and is actually quite delicious! I'm serving it up again tonight!

Brent is one of those people who is not merely "hit or miss" with cottage cheese, he just plain doesn't like it. So, his judgement on whether or not he likes the salad is an undecided one...but it's not NO.

Try it..you never know. This may be your new afternoon snack.

The recipe: 4 large ripe avocados, cut into 1-inch cubes ,4 large tomatoes, cut into 1-inch pieces, 1-cup cottage cheese, 2-3 teaspoons of garlic salt. Combine all the ingredients, serve after refrigerating one hour.

Since you asked...

...here are the duds.

These are duds because the frosting isn't smooth enough, there's a smudge on the bat, and the spider web is discolored in some places. But this is basically what the cookies looked like.

Who Knew?

Minnie Mouse works at Starbucks!!!

At least she did last night.

That's right. I closed at Starbucks last night and all three of us closers wore costumes. Minnie Mouse, a basketball player and Mother Nature were all present.

By the way, Halloween was THE SLOWEST night at Starbucks I have ever seen. We went from 8:30 to 9 without a single customer in the store. I never want to work a Halloween again.

I really enjoyed playing my part. Can you tell?

Oh, and up until I left to go to work, Brent and I spent yesterday afternoon carving pumpkins. Brent's is the cannibalistic pumpkin, mine is the redneck one.

I heard a funny joke once: "You know you're redneck when your jack-o-lantern has more teeth than your wife does."

Happy (Belated) Halloween.

Mourning

This week I put in 19 hours of (fun) difficult labor to make 75 Halloween sugar cookies for a friend's party last night. I made 25 bats, 25 spider webs and 25 jack-o-lantern pumpkins. They were OH SO CUTE. I even did a photo shoot of them before I wrapped them up in their treat bags so I could add them to my cookie portfolio.

Then today, oh the sadness...I found that the pictures had been deleted from our camera. Oh Brent, I know it was an accident, but it pains me so.

My only consolation is that I have this picture of the sugar cookies I made for my niece's duck-themed one-year birthday party.

I do have quite a few leftover "duds." Bats, webs and pumpkins where the frosting job didn't turn out quite as I had hoped...I suppose I could take pictures of those. Anyone interested in seeing them?

By the way, I LOVE making sugar cookies. If I could, I would work in a bakery and decorate sugar cookies for a living. My problem is that as it stands now, mass producing cookies is a problem area for me. How in the WORLD to bakeries do it? I spent 13 hours alone frosting the darn things. I've GOT to come up with a better method for frosting.

This time I didn't charge for the labor, I just asked for reimbursement for the supplies. Comes down to $0.40 per cookie. That was $30 for this order. But imagine, if I had charged for my labor as well, at the rate I currently get paid at Starbucks, I would have gotten $190. $190 for 75 cookies? Who's gonna go for that? I MUST get faster before I start charging.

Thanks for listening. It means so much to me. :)

Surprise! I Chopped Off My Hair!

So last week my beloved Brent and I were separated while I served my sick sister and her kids in Seattle while HER husband was out of town. I left Brent looking like this...

...more or less. When I arrived home yesterday, I looked like this:

(I'm sure I could have found a better place in the airport to take a video of myself talking about my husband's coming reaction to my haircut, but after spending a week caring for two kiddos, my brain was in a fog. A bathroom stall seriously seemed like the best place at the time.)

Here is the video of my love's reaction. I spotted him from afar, so bear with the long video.

Yes, he loved it. He couldn't stop talking about it yesterday...how cute I looked...how different I looked...how much he was crazy about the new do.

And yes, he did arrive to pick me up at the airport with a dozen roses. Be jealous.

:)

Brain Lapse

Question:

Where was my head the other night when I was putting away the leftover Chicken Broccoli Casserole?

Boy, was that rank the next morning.

Our Birthdays

Check this out. I won 2nd place in Lukas's trash-the-dress contest! Brent and I actually get to do it! Woohoo! I feel so honored!

Needless to point out, there is a desperate need for me to update my blog. It feels like I haven't blogged all summer, which is sad, because it's been an extremely eventful summer with lots of blogworthy occasions and occurances. I'm going to attempt to catch up, one past summer event at a time, and hopefully regain your interest in this sad excuse for a blog.

I'll start with the celebration of Brent and my birthdays. Our big days are only 10 days apart from each other in July/August so Brent's family offered to host a big birthday bbq with my family in celebration of both of us. So kind of them. :)

The bbq was on a Sunday, so our plan was to go to church and then have everyone meet at the Tylers' home at 2:00. Or so I thought was the plan.

For some reason I didn't wake up to my alarm that Sunday morning, so I ended up waking to Brent urging me to get up and get ready for church. When I looked at the clock and saw that no matter what we were going to be late, I told him we should just go to the second service and keep sleeping. He protested and begged me to get out of bed and throw some clothes on for church. It was an ironic situation because usually I am the one struggling to disturb Brent Bear out of his hibernation on Sunday mornings. :) It was a true role reversal.

Anyway, he eventually convinced me that something was happening that was important enough for me to get out of bed, throw some clothes on and go get to the car. So I did! Except I stopped short on the way to the car because, upon opening my front door, my sister (who lives in Seattle) was sitting in the hallway outside the door. I shrieked because I was spooked (I'm easily spooked), then I started laughing.

Heather and Matt and their girls were supposed to arrive in LA for vacation like five days later, but it was a surprise for me that Heather and her newborn were flying down early to be a part of the birthday bbq. :) Such a loving sister.

Heather kidnapped Brent and I from going to church and swept us off to a birthday breakfast at Chocolatine.

Here we are gawking at the pastry case...

I'm not usually allowed to have coffee because it might cause the awful painful episodes in my gut that I get sometimes, but for my birthday breakfast Brent offered the go-ahead to get a cup of the liquid bliss. I chose a cappucino.

I ordered a quiche for breakfast...it was the closest thing to breakfast food they had. And it was so good.

Brent got a panini.

And Heather? Heather opted for the chocolate cake. For breakfast.

Ok, so she can't eat gluten, and there were no breakfasty-items that didn't have gluten in them...except for this flourless chocolate cake. :) Oh, so hard to have to live without gluten.

Brent and I ordered some truffles after we ate our meal. I got the passionfruit truffle...

And Brent went for the all-time favorite: the chili pepper chocolate truffle.

Later that day, we met the rest of the family at the Tyler home. I snuggled my Livie-niecie-poo, and she just thought it was tragic thing to have to put up with. Or maybe she was just hungry.

These pictures make me smile every time. Our little Liv is gonna be SUCH a drama queen!

My other niece was bright and cheery though. She looked so darn cute in her purple outfit!

A little later Olivia got fed and was a little more content to be with me.

So Rita and Larry had planned about ten games for us to all participate in. Not so much games...but individual races against the clock. They had gotten their inspiration for the games from a show called "A Minute to Win It." Brent and I had to win every one of them in order to earn our birthday gifts.

First, Brent had one minute to separate a bowl full of M&M's into five different mini bowls according to their color. He failed to organize them all within the time frame, so it was determined that there were too many M&M's in the bowl to begin with. Some of them were removed, and Brent tried again. He made it with just seconds to spare.

I tried, and I don't think I made it the first time. The judges were gracious though, and I got to open one of my gifts along with Brent.

Anyone else who wanted to try any of the games could; I think my brothers Harrison and Hunter both tried this one.

One of the other games involved faces and oreos. Each person had to start with their oreo on their forehead, and in one minute finagle it down to inside their mouth. Most of us opted to just fling the oreo from our foreheads with a quick flick of the neck and then catch it in our teeth on its way down. After a few tries everyone eventually got it. The attempts sure made for funny pictures too!

My sweetheart husband had me open his gift to me in front of everyone. He made sure to get my reaction on tape.

The trip to see the last space shuttle launch is especially awesome for me because when I met Brent, I had only like two months before made the decision to discontinue my pursuit of a career as an astronaut. I was/am a NASA nerd and have ALWAYS, always always always wanted to see a space shuttle launch in person.

So, my reaction to his awesome gift could have been so much more animated...however, I get a twinge of guilt every time I watch this video. The reason is because I remember that the only thing I could think of at the time was "HOW can we afford this?" I wish I had just trusted my husband who has proved time and again to be a faithful and wise steward of our finances. If I could rewind the tape and open that up that sweet, sweet card for the first time again, I would have jumped up out of my chair, jumped on Brent, smooched him big time, and laughed and laughed and laughed, with maybe a few joyful tears. :)

Here is a video of another game we played. We had to pair up and use these toys to throw a ball to each other, and make three successful throws/catches in one minute. It turned out to be pitifully easy once everyone got the hang of it.

For the game in THIS video, in one minute we had to take these stack of cups and with one hand build a pyramid with them, and then stack them back down again. DIFFICULT! I don't think anyone completed this task.

This next one was surprisingly more challenging than it would seem to be. We were given a stack of cups, one of them red-rimmed and the rest of them white-rimmed. In one minute we had to rotate the stack, one cup at a time, so that the red-rimmed cup would go from the bottom of the stack to the top and back down to the bottom again.

Oh my. I think I hated this next game. It would be more fun with a better squirt gun, but the lack of the squirt gun's efficiency might have been the point. We paired up against an opponent and had to be the first one to wipe out each of the candle flames with just the piddly little splatter from the gun. Oh goodness.

This next one should be a science experiment. I feel inspired to research WHY this works. There were like five drinking glasses filled with water lined up on the edge of a table, with paper plates on top of all of them. On each of the paper plates there was a toilet paper role, and sitting in each of the roles was a fresh egg. In one minute we had to flick a broomstick against the paper plate and grab the broomstick in time for the plate and the toilet paper role to go flying, and the egg to fall gracefully into the cup full of water. This video isn't the best example of this phenomenon because it was the last contestant, and by that time the paper plates and roles were soaked, skewing the results. However, everyone else who tried it scored a hole-in-one with each egg! Amazing!

And the last game I have to show you is where we had to dip our noses in vaseline, then dip our gooped-up noses in cotton balls, run across the yard with them still on our noses, and transfer them to another bowl. I think we had to get 6 cotton balls in one minute. Pretty easy, but it was still fun. :)

In conclusion, I believe this post demonstrates the fact that I have the best sister in the world, the sweetest and most thoughtful husband in the world, and the most creative and best in-laws in the world!