Spicy Pumpkin Soup

Oh wow, do I have a recipe for you!   I stumbled across this yesterday after a random Google search for “pumpkin soup,”  (something I just had a hankering for, even though I’ve never made it before).  I had just about everything this recipe calls for other than cream, so I just added a little extra milk and it turned-out great.  (I also halved the recipe)  And it was sooo good, I LOVE it!  I had two big bowls and am eating the leftovers now.  It’s creamy and pumpkiny, but there’s also a strong taste of curry, and the cayenne pepper makes it spicy!  (I need a big glass of water when I’m eating!)  Not to mention, if you make your own chicken stock like I do (saved from when I boil chicken to use for casseroles and enchiladas), this is a pretty cheap meal!  I paired it with a salad, and it was perfect.

Now, I love spicy food, Clay not so much.  He got home late last night after I had already had my two bowls, and I couldn’t wait to hear what he thought, although I was guessing he wouldn’t like it too much.  (not much of a pumpkin fan, definitely not a curry fan, and not a spicy fan)  I said, “What do you think??!” when he was on his first bite, and he looked at me and slowly said, “Well… I’m just trying to finish this first spoonful…”  So, needless to say, it wasn’t his favorite.  But, oh well, more for me!!!!

INGREDIENTS

4 Tbsp unsalted butter
2 medium yellow onions, chopped
2 teaspoons minced garlic
1/8 to 1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper
2 teaspoons curry powder
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
Pinch ground cayenne pepper (optional)
3 (15 oz) cans 100 percent pumpkin or 6 cups of chopped roasted pumpkin*
5 cups of chicken broth (or vegetable broth for vegetarian option)
2 cups of milk
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup heavy cream

METHOD

1 Melt butter in a 4-quart saucepan over medium-high heat. Add onions and garlic and cook, stirring often, until softened, about 4 minutes. Add spices and stir for a minute more.

2 Add pumpkin and 5 cups of chicken broth; blend well. Bring to a boil and reduce heat, simmer for 10 to 15 minutes.

3 Transfer soup, in batches, to a blender or food processor. Cover tightly and blend until smooth. Return soup to saucepan.

4 With the soup on low heat, add brown sugar and mix. Slowly add milk while stirring to incorporate. Add cream. Adjust seasonings to taste. If a little too spicy, add more cream to cool it down. You might want to add a teaspoon of salt.

Serve in individual bowls. Sprinkle the top of each with toasted pumpkin seeds.

Serves 8.

*To make pumpkin purée, cut a sugar pumpkin in half, scoop out the seeds and stringy stuff, lie face down on a tin-foil lined baking pan. Bake at 350°F until soft, about 45 min to an hour. Cool, scoop out the flesh. Freeze whatever you don’t use for future use.

Cake #2

Betcha thought Clay and I forgot about the whole cake thing, huh?  That we just did that first one?  Oh no no, my dear  readers, I’m proud to say that we’ve done 3 cakes and are planning to do our fourth asap.  I’m way behind on posting this (as I am about posting everything else that’s happening these days), but here ya go:

Cake #2

Since we didn’t like the yellow cake recipe we used the first time, I decided to just go with Wilton’s standard yellow cake recipe.  I figured that if it was their go-to recipe, surely I couldn’t screw it up too badly.  And I’m very happy to report that it was MUCH better than the first one! It wasn’t very yellow…. in fact, it kinda looked like white cake, but it was very good.  We went with chocolate butter cream icing this time, Wilton’s recipe again, and it was GREAT!  I had to laugh at myself because my first reaction was to say that “it’s so good it almost tastes like it came out of a can!”  But seriously, bowl and spatula-lickin’ good.  (and I caught Clay with a bowl of extra icing about a week later, he was dipping cookies in it and eating it on the couch…and feeding some to Harris!!!!)

So, it tasted good.  As far as looks go….well.  Eh.  We had friends coming over for dinner that night, and this was supposed to be the dessert.  I was icing it as they arrived, and although I tried to give a go at some piping, I was in the middle of making dinner, we had guests, and most importantly, my bags kept exploding on me.  I had been using just Ziploc baggies (too lazy to buy the real ones) and they worked ok for the first cake, but they were just NOT working for me this time!  Finally, it was time to eat dinner and I just gave up.  Clay came over to give it a shot and piped a few ridiculous looking rows.  This cake was NOT pretty.  But it tasted good!

This is how messy I was.  Clay just shook his head and rolled his eyes.

My busted bags

I actually bought some real icing spatulas this time, so the actual icing process was easier than the first time I just used a knife, and it looked smoother.

Of course, Clay insisted on writing a number two and an exclamation point to mimic our first cake…by this point, we were just slapping stuff on there simply to have more chocolate icing to eat…all sense of style was out the window.

Ridiculous.

Oh, and here’s a picture of Princess Evelyne helping me make it!

I’ll try to post about #3 asap!!!

Life is Beautiful

Today is my 29th birthday.  And it’s kind of funny to find myself here, living in Seattle as a mother of two children.  And I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately as I compare where I am now to where I’ve been in the past few years on my birthday.  Last year we had only lived here two months and I was still very homesick and doubting whether I’d like it here.  I was pregnant and wondering what this new baby held in store for us.  The year before, Evelyne was a fussy ten month-old and I was still trying to figure-out what it meant to be a mom.

This year, however, my birthday comes at a time of great happiness and contentment.  I’ve thought so much lately about our family and my identity as a mother, and I feel like God has brought us to a place of much joy.  The past year has been rough…just the normal adjustments of a new baby, expanding to a family of four, sleep deprivation, and some postpartum depression thrown in there just for fun.  But now…. what joy.

We went out for lunch on Saturday to Red Robin (we do this every year for our birthdays because if you sign-up on their website, they email you a coupon for a free burger on your birthday!), and it was the first time the four of us have ever eaten out together.  It felt kinda like a coming-out for our family.  Harris is finally old enough to sit in our booster seat and eat by himself off a tray, Evelyne is old enough to sit in a big chair and act like she knows what’s going on.  I was curious how it would go, and I’m happy to report that it was a very pleasant experience.  No one fussed, no one complained (that I recall), and other than a small incident where I knocked my drink all over the table, it went perfectly.  Harris even ate lettuce from my burger!  (I’m still amazed that he’ll eat anything I put in front of him since Evelyne will eat hardly anything I give her.)  That lunch felt like a milestone for us… like we had made it.  We made it through the past nine months and have come out on the other side with a new appreciation and love for our kids.

I feel like God has been bringing thankfulness to my mind lately, and I have felt it in such an overwhelming way.  I love my kids.  I love my husband.  I love how the four of us are a family.  I’ve mostly been struck by how much I L.O.V.E. Harris.  I’ve always loved him, of course, but it’s one thing to love a tiny baby you just met who does nothing but suck the life from you (literally) and scream at you all day and night, and it’s another to love a chubby-cheeked, smiley, squealing with laughter when he sees you baby that you just want to mush all day.  I love this stage, I love that he finally loves me back, and I love the baby he’s turned into.  It was the same way with Evelyne… she was a fussy, colicky baby who never slept and I was depressed.  I loved her, but oh, I loved her so much more when she got older.  Partly because she was easier (as bad as that sounds), but mostly just because I actually got to know her the longer I’d been with her.

I was looking at newborn pictures of Harris the other day and seeing how incredibly cute he was kinda made me want to cry.

I wish I could go back and love that newborn baby the way I love him now.  Now, I’m obsessed with him.  I want to eat him whole.  I love to hold him and be near him.  And I know that, at least for me, that seems to be the normal course of things, growing slowly in love with the babies.  But as I look back, it still makes me sad that I couldn’t feel this same depth of emotion for him when he was the smallest and most helpless.  But it was the same with Evelyne, and I imagine it’ll be the same with the next baby.

I love the stage we’re in right now.  I love the ages of my kids (Evelyne will be 3 in December, Harris is 9 months tomorrow).  I love watching them grow and change and learn.  I’m excited as I look forward to what the next few years will bring.  I’m very happy here in Seattle, and I’m so thankful that God brought us here.  Clay is loving his job and is soaking-up every possible learning opportunity as he continues to take classes and learn advanced techniques in physical therapy.  We’re getting to know great neighbors and making new friendships and feeling much more rooted here.  We’re LOVING our church.  (www.seattlequest.org)  I feel like we’ve finally moved out of that “survival mode” stage and are back to a place where we can give more.  There will always be bad days and bad moments because, let’s be honest here, we are talking about raising tiny humans, and that can be incredibly difficult.  But wow, the joys are SO outweighing the not-so-great parts.  And I’m so thankful for my blessings this birthday.

Harris at 8.5 months

So yeah.  It’s been a really long time since I’ve updated on my boy Harris.  But let’s just pretend you’ve been following along for the past few months, and wah-la!  He’s now eight and a half months old!

Here are the details:  He’s everywhere!  He started scooting and rolling and moving like an inchworm at six months, and now he’s full-out crawling pretty fast.  Last week he started pulling-up, and I’ve seen him take a few steps, so I think we’re on the verge of cruising as well.  This is totally blowing my mind since Evelyne was stationary on her butt until she finally started to crawl at ten months.  He is really, really active and physical and all those typical things that one tends to say are such “boy” qualities, but since I hate gender stereotypes, I’m just going to say that they’re Harris qualities.  He’s incredibly persistent when he wants something we have, like food or any of Evelyne’s toys.  About a month ago I realized that we were already at that point where I couldn’t eat anything in front of him without sharing with him.  (And I had JUST gotten out of that stage with Evelyne!)  And speaking of food, he LOVES it.  With Evelyne I was very diligent to feed her solids a certain number of times per day, etc… but with him, poor guy, he’s lucky if he gets one or two meals a day.  (it’s so much more of a hassle with the second!)  But when he eats, he loves it and doesn’t refuse anything.

(Oh, and if you’re wondering where all his hair went, I gave him his FOURTH haircut a few weeks ago.  It kept getting really long and floppy on the top, and it just didn’t look cute.  A few weeks ago I buzzed it just to get it all one length and let it start growing again.)

He absolutely LOVES Evelyne and totally lights-up when he sees her.  Today I was rocking her before her nap (we always rock and sing songs) and he was awake, so I brought him in her room to play on the floor.  Well, he got fussy, so I picked him up and was rocking both kids, one on each knee.  They were both in the funniest mood and pretty much started wrestling in my lap!  He kept lunging at and tackling her, she would die laughing and say, “Oh, Hawwis!!!”  Back and forth they would tickle and laugh and roll around, all while I kept rocking and singing (because I knew if I didn’t finish our standard set of songs Ev wouldn’t want me to put her in the bed)  It was hilarious!!!!  Even after I put her in the bed she was still laughing!  It’s times like those when I LOOOVE having two kids!  I love watching them interact, they truly love each other already, and it’s so wonderful to watch.  I’m so excited to watch them grow-up together, and I just kept thinking that if they’re already having fun like this now, it’s going to be awesome to watch when he actually gets old enough to really play with her.

Harris is a cuddly, smoochy baby who gets tons of kisses and hugs because his cheeks are just so tender and juicy and I want to just snack on them all day.  He’s very giggly, quick to smile, and very ticklish.  Although he’s really active, he’s also chill, he’s more content to be held or to sit on my lap and watch the world go by.  He loves being outside or just hanging around on my hip while we watch Evelyne play at a park.  However, one fatal flaw is that the boy still isn’t the greatest fan of the car.  Since he’s been a newborn, he never falls asleep in the car (has happened only about 3-4 times in his life), so if he’s slightly hungry or slightly tired, he’ll just cry until we get out of the car.  Sometimes quite hysterically.  It’s awful to listen to….sometimes I feel really bad for him and it makes me sad, other times it just gets on my nerves and I’m all, “Dude, get a grip.”

As for the sleeping, this past week we’ve been working on getting the wake-ups down to once a night.  It’s pretty much been two, sometimes three, for the past few months.  He’s done really great the past few nights, last night he even slept 10.5 hours straight, and he’ll often sleep a total of 13-13.5 hours at night!  (not straight!)  So if we can just do the one feeding per night I’ll be happy to do that for another few months until he doesn’t need it anymore.  He’s got a pretty regular nap schedule, but it’s just a crapshoot as to how he’ll sleep.  Sometimes it’s an hour and a half, sometimes it’s 20 minutes… sometimes two long naps, yesterday was two 30 minute naps!  But in general, he’s doing pretty well.  He dropped his third nap really early, about a month ago, so managing two naps is MUCH easier than three or four, and we’re able to actually get out of the house and do things without having to rush home 30 minutes later for a nap.  (because he won’t sleep in the car or anywhere else)  That in itself has made life way easier.

In general, he’s just such a joy.  I love having two kids, and I often think about how excited I am about the coming years with these sweethearts.

Some things I’ve recently learned in the kitchen

Since I’ve been trying to expand my culinary horizons lately, I’ve learned several new things from being in the kitchen more often.  I warn you, these are ridiculous.  I would guess most of these things aren’t news to anyone, but I’ve been really excited about my discoveries and wanted to share them.

*In a pinch, if you don’t have a wine stopper and the cork won’t fit back into your wine bottle, you can definitely use a rolled-up washcloth to stuff in the top.  Credit to Clay for this one.  Our champagne stayed bubbly for days, although every time I opened the fridge I just shook my head and laughed and felt like the biggest dork ever.  (as you can tell, we’re really not wine connoisseurs.)

*Most important:  A dishwasher actually WASHES dishes!!!!!  OK, so I don’t know where I got this, but in my entire life I’ve always completely handwashed everything before putting it in the dishwasher.  With soap.  I would scrub every fork and food-caked plate, and obviously, it took quite awhile.  I even wondered, “What is really the point of the dishwasher anyway?  I guess maybe because it sterilizes the dishes after I wash them?”  I still used it 98% of the time, except for my pots and pans, but never being ones for washing dishes, Clay and I tend to let them pile-up and then do a huge clean all at once when we notice that everything’s getting really gross.  I definitely put it off more because it was SUCH a long chore.

Somewhere recently I heard that the dishwasher is actually supposed to clean the food off of your dishes.  I thought, “Well, our dishwasher is umpteen years old, so surely ours wouldn’t do a good job of that and I don’t want to waste an entire cycle only for them to come out dirty.”  Well, one night I was SO fed-up with the dishes and was too tired to do wash them, so on a whim I thought, “What the heck… let’s give this a whirl.  It’s not going to work, though.”  And I loaded the dishes in the dishwasher.  I didn’t even rinse them.  (there weren’t any chunks of food, just dried food and such)  It took me about 2 minutes to fill the entire dishwasher and clean my whole sink out.  I thought, “If this works, it’ll be too good to be true.”  I ran the dishwasher, filled it with more soap than usual, and ran it on the normal cycle instead of the light cycle that I usually used.  When it was done, I went to check, and MIRACLE OF ALL MIRACLES!!!!!  MY DISHES WERE CLEAN!!!!  The food was GONE!  It miraculously disappeared!  Even all the plates with dried food and my coffee cups with dried coffee on the bottom…. they were sparkling clean!  I went into the living room and told Clay, “I have the most wonderful thing to do tell you.  This is going to change the rest of our lives.  It is beyond amazing.”  He was doubtful, but then I showed him the clean dishes.  And then we said, “Hmm… no wonder the dishwasher is such a popular appliance.  This must be why so many people like them.  They actually WASH your dishes!!!!”  I kinda feel like someone from the 1950’s (or whenever they invented dishwashers) who just can’t believe that technology is going to help her around the house.  And now I’m almost excited every time I load the dishwasher with dirty dishes because I can’t wait to see how they come out totally clean with almost ZERO effort on my part!  It’s an amazing world we live in, people, this has revolutionized my life.

*The broil function on my oven is totally functional and allows me to make toast.  I don’t think I’ve ever made toast in my life unless it was in a toaster or toaster oven.  We have neither now, so I haven’t made or had toast in about a year.  A few weeks ago we were at a friend’s house and I noticed her making toast in her oven.  I thought, “Wow…. could I have been doing this all along?  Tonight on a whim I decided to throw some bread in there, and a few minutes later, what do ya know—we had toast!  What a wasted toast-less year we’ve had!

*I’ve learned how to sharpen my knives.  A few months ago when my mom was here, she was using a knife and commented on how dull it was.  I said, “Well yeah, they’re five years old and I don’t know how to sharpen them, so I bet they’re pretty dull.”  She showed me how, and it really wasn’t that hard AT ALL, and now I have sharp knives!  Obviously, it makes a pretty big difference in my cutting abilities!  Five wasted years of dull knives.

*The drawer at the bottom of my oven that holds all my pans will actually come out all the way.  This accidental discovery for the first time let me see the floor that was under my oven and all the things that had collected there.  I found a couple of lost toys for Evelyne and a marker cap that I specifically remember searching on my hands and knees for about 20 minutes for last year.  Instead of trying to snake my vacuum hose under my oven, it’s way easier to just take the dang drawer out!

*I bought a new teapot about a month ago at a garage sale because my old one was pretty gross.  I asked the lady if it whistled, and she said it did, which I was pretty excited about because my old one didn’t.  When I finally heated it up hot enough to whistle the other day, I was kind of surprised at the sound that came out.  It sounded just like a tornado siren!  Being from the Midsouth, I’m pretty used to tornados and tornado sirens… so imagine my surprise when I’m making tea one day and I hear from the other room something that sounds like a siren, and my first instinct was, “Danger!!! Tornado!!! Take cover!!! Run to the bathtub!!!”  Nope, just my teapot.  At least it’ll keep me in touch with the South while I’m out here.

Aces of Cakes

So a couple of weeks ago Clay and I had our first weekend getaway since Evelyne’s been born.  (almost 3 years!)  My parents flew up here from TN and stayed with the kids, and we went a few hours north to Victoria, British Columbia.  (I’ll put-up another post with pictures because it was truly beautiful)  So, one afternoon while we were sitting on “The Veranda”, an outdoor restaurant on the front porch of our beautiful hotel, watching people and the harbor and having drinks, we had a good conversation about our relationship.  A sort of “State of the Relationship Address” as we like to refer to them.  We agreed that we have been awesome partners in parenting, we almost always work together and agree on things in raising the kids, and we’re a great team.  But, as expected, something has been slowly lost over the years as most of our focus has been on parenting and less on being husband and wife.  So we tried to think of something we can purposefully do to spend time together that has nothing to do with parenting.  (other than sit next to each other on the couch watching the same tv show)  Clay suggested we start cooking together (like I’ve said before, we’ve been watching a lot of Food Network!), and that led to the decision that we’re going to…..drumroll…..learn how to bake and decorate cakes together!  Isn’t that great?!  Ha!  Of course Clay is an optimist and thinks that in a few years we’re going to be so good that we’ll be making the kind of creations that we see on tv, but right now our immediate goals are to bake approximately one cake a week together and to make cakes for Evelyne and Harris’ birthdays (in December and January) that are decent.

I’ve never made a cake that’s not out of a box, so simply making one from scratch is my goal and something I want to learn.  Clay mostly wants to focus on the decorating since he’s a really detail-oriented kind of guy who will probably be awesome at that sort of thing once he learns.  Now if you remember The Birthday Cake Debacle of 2008, you’ll probably understand how much of a non-expert I am in this area and am looking to redeem myself in the decorating area as well.

So last weekend we made our first cake.  I just picked a random yellow cake recipe and buttercream icing from Allrecipes.com and we got going. (I did substitute butter for the shortening in both recipes)  The cake came-out looking golden and smelling wonderful, and since it was so late at night, we covered it and left it in the pans all night long.  (I don’t know if this was a good idea or not)  The next night after Evelyne went to bed we started trying to get them out of the pans….ehhh, that didn’t go well.  First I noticed that the middles of the cakes had totally sunken down.  I had buttered and floured the pans, but they were stuck on the edges.  We butchered it as we tried to get it out, and once we got it out, it looked like this:

(you’re going to have to excuse our gross cabinets and countertops….we’re renting, and I don’t think this house has been updated in the past forty years)

We iced the middle and stacked them, and it just looked ridiculous.

Then I released Clay to the carving.  (He had been itching to get his hands on a knife and start shaving-off the sides to make it more even.)

It did look a lot better after he did that, although he had to remove the entire top layer and it was still really uneven.  We did a crumb coat of icing, and then the next night finished it with a top layer of icing.  I hadn’t been able to find an offset spatula yet, andI just had to ice it with a knife, so even though I tried to get it as smooth as I could, it still wasn’t that great.  (and notice the lean to the left!)

And then we started piping.  Oh yes, we piped.  It wasn’t very good, but we did it.

We didn’t really know what to do after this, and by this point it was 10:30 p.m. and we were both tired, so we just put a big number 1 in the middle to signify that it’s our first cake.  Apparently I put it off-center (I’m like the anti-perfectionist, so I don’t really notice or care about those things, but it seemed to bother Clay), so he made me put an exclamation point after it to center it.  (which I thought was silly, but whatever)

So there we go.  Our first cake.  It tasted pretty good…. the actual cake was pretty thick, tasted more like a pound cake than the light and fluffy cake mix cakes I’m used to, but it was good.  The icing was really, really sweet.  It was good, but very rich, and we’re going to definitely try another recipe next time.  Maybe we should’ve used shortening?  So, that was our first cake adventure, and we’re planning to make another one today.  I’m hoping to turn this into a blogging project to keep us accountable to doing it, so get excited that you’ll get to see all of our creations!  (don’t you just wish you could taste them?!)  We’re going to try to give away as much as possible since it would be DANGEROUS to constantly have cake in the house, we’ve already eaten way too much of this one.  If anyone has any favorite cake websites, please let me know.  I think today we’re going to use the Wilton recipes for yellow cake and buttercream icing, so we’ll see if those turn-out better.  Yay for cakes!

My OB said what???

Oh, my heavens to betsy!  Look what funny little website I just came across—My OB Said What???

This is a blog with comments that doctors/nurses/midwives have said to patients….the awful, the ridiculous, and the horrible.  Things like, ” Your cervix is a little dehydrated.”  (Uh, huh???!!!  What the heck?)

OK, well I think it’s hilarious!

Ahhh, the world of disciplining children…

So, I just wanted to quickly point y’all to a great discussion happening over on Adventures in Mercy. (this is one of my favorite blogs, by the way)  A reader wrote-in asking for advice from Molly, the blog author, and other parent readers regarding how to discipline her toddler.  Coming from a conservative Christian background that emphasizes “first-time obedience” and spanking, she wasn’t sure how to discipline in a way that remained firm but also showed grace when what she was currently doing had her feeling angry.  The discussion that follows in the comments section is pretty great as it’s simply advice and conversation on other ways to discipline from other Christian parents, some who are currently doing it with little ones and others who have been there/done that.  I enjoyed reading through it, and much of what the readers described is very similar to the ways we discipline Evelyne.  (one day I’ll actually get up enough energy to sit down and write about that)

So anyway, if you have young kids or might one day, I recommend checking this out as a starting point for thinking in more detail about other ways that Christian parents discipline without spanking.  Molly, the blog author, has also written lots of posts about how she changed from a punitive parenting model to a more grace-based method—HIGHLY recommend perusing around her site!  Adventures in Mercy

The Parenting with Gentleness Series

Right now

What I’m laughing at: Harris learning how to stand on his head—he stands his legs up while the front half of him is still on the floor, and it’s really funny!

What’s making me sore: I just started Tony Horton’s 10-Minute Trainer, and heavens to betsy, it’s hard!  I haven’t truly worked-out since, um….well…  there was that brief stint when Evelyne was about a year old, but that was over quickly… It’s really been QUITE some time since I’ve consistently pushed myself on a regular basis to exercise and stay in shape (like as in when I was engaged to my husband of five years!).  And I just had a baby 7.5 months ago which has left quite a bit of lingering weight, so these work-outs are requiring a lot of effort on my part.  It’s just 10 minutes, but it’s an INTENSE 10 minutes and I’m sore.

What I’m watching: Just finished the 4th season of Top Chef (Oh my gosh, what WAS Lisa still doing there at the end?!) and just discovered The Rachel Zoe Project.  (reality show about a fashion stylist to the stars)  Still diggin’ the Food Network.  Right now–How I Met Your Mother, Clay’s and my favorite sitcom.  The funniest show ever.

What I’m listening to: Elmo’s World and Little Einsteins (Evelyne just finished singing Elmo’s World, complete with her arm up in the air as she ended her performance on a crescendo.)

Where I’ve been: Outside!  We helped our neighbors throw a garage sale this past weekend, so I’ve been outside a lot lately.  It was fun to spend more time with the neighbors, and we made a little cash, too.  (a very little, like $30!  The first day I just broke even because I bought so many clothes for Harris and some pants for me.  Evelyne had a BLAST playing with the neighbor kids all day long, and now she asks to go outside when she first wakes-up in the morning because I think she assumes that there’s always a party happening outside our door.  Two of the neighbor’s nieces were here this weekend, and they’re 10 and 12.  The 10 year-old really took to Evelyne, and Ev LOVED her.  She spent all day playing with Ev and carrying her around on her hip (she wasn’t a whole lot bigger than Ev herself!), and Evelyne kept calling the girls “my sisters.”  We also had a cook-out (well, I guess people here call them bar-b-que’s, but I still can’t get my head around that since to me bar-b-que is a very specific food you eat, not the act of eating hamburgers.) out in the middle of the cove (another local difference, they call them cul-de-sacs here and think we’re hilarious for saying “cove”) on Sunday night and that was really fun.

What I’ve been eating:  Last night was a curried lentil stew that turned-out awesome (first time I’ve ever cooked lentils) and tonight was my first couscous.  Nothing fancy, people, just a bit outside of my boring box.

What I’m annoyed about: I went to the grocery store tonight at 8:30 specifically to get chicken on the last night of the 99 cents/lb. sale.  A sale I’ve been waiting weeks for.  They were out and I planned to ask for a raincheck (always ask for a raincheck!!!), but I got so distracted by my cheap Kashi cereal deal that I totally forgot and didn’t remember until I got home.  Now the sale is over and I’m out of chicken….but I do have a TON of cereal!

What I’m excited about: This weekend Clay and I are going away to Victoria, B.C. to celebrate our 5 year anniversary (that was last month).  We’re staying here , and although I don’t really know anything about Victoria, everyone keeps saying how awesome it is, and I’m excited to get away.  (I kept thinking about that this afternoon when I was wishing that I didn’t hear “Mommy?  Mommy?” every 15 seconds!)  My parents are coming to stay with the kids while we’re gone, and I’m excited to see them and for them to get to spend time with my beautiful babies.

What made me smile today: Harris blowing raspberries and spraying pureed broccoli/zuccini everywhere!  His little bottom lip pooches out when he does it, and it’s just the cutest thing I’ve ever seen!  Oh, and Evelyne’s new favorite thing to do is exercise with me, and she says that her favorite is “the one with just the girl, not the one with the boy and the girl.”  (which means she likes the Pilates from On Demand and not the Tony Horton video)  She asked to watch the Pilates video, and I told her that I had to go cook dinner, but she wanted to watch it by herself, so I put it on and she got down on the floor and tried to do it!  She did get frustrated, poor thing, and said, “Mommy, I can’t do it!”  It was really sweet and hilarious to watch!

What I’m reading: Positive Discipline: The First Three Years and Unconditional Parenting.  They’re both great.  I’ll hopefully be writing more about what I’m learning from these books and the others that I’m hoping to start soon.  Unconditional Parenting is really rocking my world right now in a great way.  I would say that the author pretty much shares most of my discipline paradigm, but he lays the philosophical groundwork in a way that’s deepening my own convictions and pushing me to search my heart in how I was raised and how I hope to raise my kids.  I’m really loving it so far.

Aaaaaaand…..that’s all!

Food

I mentioned in a previous post that I’ve been watching lots of Food Network lately and spending more time in the kitchen, and I have to say, I’m really enjoying it.  I’ve always “cooked,” since getting married anyway, and at times my dinners were great and at times they were not quite so delectable.  Clay and I always laugh about how in the early days of our marriage we ate a lot of “one bowl dinners” where I pretty much just threw together whatever I had into one pan and mushed it around, shook some soy sauce or cheese on it and called it good.  (not soy sauce and cheese together…yuck.)  My cooking has definitely improved over the past five years, slowly and incrementally, but I don’t think I ever really enjoyed it very much until we moved here and I actually had a kitchen big enough for more than one and a half people.

Since our food budget is so low ($250), I pretty much just buy whatever is on sale and try to rearrange it into different kinds of dishes.  This means that it’s very easy for me to get in a food rut, and two weeks ago I had one of those frustrating afternoons where I just stood staring into my pantry for about half an hour trying to figure out what in the world to cook for dinner and it was DRIVING ME CRAZY!!!   So since then I’ve been trying to be more proactive about gathering new ideas and recipes (thus, Food Network).  I’ve been branching-out a bit more lately and I’m having a lot of fun.   And surprisingly, much of what I’m cooking is just a different arrangement of similar ingredients I’ve always bought, I just had no idea how to put it together that way.  For example, last week I cooked North African Meatballs.  First of all, I never make meatballs, I always just brown and crumble my ground meat.  So yay, meatballs, something new!  But most of all, who knew that when you mix cumin and cinnamon and cayenne pepper (I didn’t have all the ingredients, so I subbed a few and left-out a few) it makes this amazing Morroccan flavor?  I mean, I’ve had those spices in my cabinet for awhile but I would have never thought to mix them, but now it’s my new favorite thing.  Simple!

My other favorite thing I’ve made is this Potato-Bacon Torte. A torte for goodness sakes.  I made the homemade pie crust and it was EASY and SCRUMPTIOUS!  I pretty much had all the ingredients, I just never knew how to mix them together to make a torte!  But WOW, was it good!  As you can see, I’m getting these recipes from Melissa D’Arabian’s new show Ten Dollar Dinners on the Food Network–love it!  I’ve never been one to copy a recipe that I saw on tv, but I’m so glad I did!

I’m also starting to fall in love with baking.  Of course I don’t know how to do hardly anything, but I’m fascinated by the process of stirring together a few random ingredients that hide in my cupboard (like baking powder… I mean, what IS that stuff?) and out comes something totally awesome to eat.  It’s so incredibly simple and obvious, and I feel like I’m discovering something the rest of the world already knew.  Like a few months ago I bought a can of cocoa (for the first time ever) and noticed on the back that it had a recipe for brownies.  I was so shocked, I had no idea that you could make brownies any other way than a box of Betty Crocker mix.  I KNOW!  How ridiculous is that?!  (of course I will say that when I made them they definitely weren’t as good as Betty Crocker!)  And earlier this year when we ran out of Bisquick I was like, “Hmm… I think I heard once that you can make pancakes with stuff like flour and milk…. I wonder….” and what do ya know, I now have a pancake recipe with nothing but flour and milk and stuff.  And bread!  I made the most awesome homemade bread last week… like, I kneaded it!  With my hands!  And it turned-out PERFECT!   I also made homemade bagels last week, but those didn’t turn-out quite as well…they tasted great but never rose very much, so they were kinda small.  But who knew you could do that, just whip together some stuff in a bowl and make BAGELS?!  I’m so incredibly annoyed that a lifetime of convenience and outsourced food has robbed me of this knowledge!  I also came across this awesome recipe for Ginger cookies, and I made it twice in a week and ate a TON of them (…and actually now I kinda want to go make them again now I’m thinking about it!  They were SO good!)

I’m trying to challenge myself to discover ingredients and foods that I’ve never cooked before.  And it’s kinda sad how many of those there are.  I bought fresh garlic last week and have been cooking with it for the first time instead of using garlic powder like I usually do.  I mean, garlic.  It’s not rocket science, it’s a pretty basic ingredient, and I love using the real stuff.  (I also like mincing it with my big knife like Rachael Ray!)  Tonight I cooked polenta for the first time.  I made it using this recipe and I loved it!!!!  (although it was very similar to cheese grits which, being from the South, I’m very familiar with!)  It was so easy, but somehow venturing out of my usual box made it so much more fun for me.  It got my creative juices flowing!  I also bought some panko bread crumbs, anyone have a good recipe using those?

And last night I read this:  30 Worst Foods in America.  And how depressing that I’ve definitely eaten some of those!  (Chili’s fajitas, anyone else?!)  I’ve been thinking a lot about our eating habits and after reading that last night I just got so disgusted at the food industry and how gross and processed so much of it is.  I’m decently informed about nutrition, I know what we should be eating and what it does for keeping our bodies healthy and strong.  And we don’t have a horrible diet, it’s just not nearly as good as it should be.  I don’t generally buy that much junk food, but we do eat too many processed things on a regular basis that I’d like to cut down.  (cereal, granola bars, crackers…)  So I’m going to try to change that.  I really want to try to focus on eating as many whole foods as possible and cook more.  This morning instead of my usual bowl of cereal, I cooked scrambled eggs in corn tortillas, and my appetite was more stable throughout the morning than usual.  I like cooking breakfast on the weekends, so maybe I should just start being more intentional about doing that and then gradually try to do more during the week.  Now if I could only get Evelyne to eating something other than Kix and Cheerios….

Any good recipes you want to throw my way?  Or favorite new ingredients or foods?!  Enlighten me!