Happy 2013!

Happy New Year!   I thought about doing a post about our new year's eve....but frankly, it was pretty boring.  Then I thought about doing a 2012 recap post, but I was too tired.  Then I thought about doing a post about all the awesome and amazing things we are going to do and accomplish in 2013...but to be honest, I have no idea what 2013 will hold for us.  I know it will be new and exciting...but that's about it!

So, I have instead decided to share a simple recipe with you.  For our new year's eve Curt and I decided that we were in the mood to have a bunch of small plates instead of one big meal (also known as "apps and zerts" if you are a Tom Haverford fan).  That way we could snack and just hang out and get to eat a lot of different things.  It was great!

Here was one of our favorites.

They are called Pear Pancetta Crisps with Goat Cheese and Honey and the flavor combination is amazing.  Also, they are super easy to make.  Win!  Here's the recipe:

Ingredients:
- 12 thin slices of pancetta (about 1/3 lb.)
- 2 Bartlett pears
- 1/2 (4 oz.) package goat cheese, crumbled
- Freshly cracked pepper
- Honey

Directions:
1.  Arrange pancetta slices in a single layer on an aluminum foil-lined baking sheet.  Bake at 350° for 8 to 10 minutes or until golden. Transfer to a paper towel-lined wire rack using a spatula. Let stand 10 minutes or until crisp.

2. Core pears with an apple corer. Cut pears crosswise into 12 thin rings*. Arrange on a serving platter. Top evenly with pancetta and goat cheese; sprinkle with pepper. Drizzle with honey just before serving.

*If you don't plan to serve right away, put the pear slices into a lemon water bath to keep from turning brown.

 That's it!  The easiest and most delicious appetizer ever!

Also, I'm sure this would pair really well with some white wine or champagne....but since I'm pregnant we drank it with this:

Seriously...most delicious sparkling grape juice around (and of course it's from Trader Joe's).

Happy New Year!

Snow Day Soup

It's snowing, y'all!

It's been a pretty mild winter up here so far.  We've gotten a couple of little baby snows.  This one is not much different.  I think we'll get about 3-4 inches when all is said and done.  As a Virginian, I have to remind myself that that is nothing to people up here.

In honor of this sweet little Saturday snow day, I'm making some soup in the crock pot and I thought I'd share.  I'm happy to say that this is my very own recipe.  Although it is adapted from both my mom's white chicken chili and chicken tortilla soup, found here.

Dice up an onion and some garlic.

Make sure you use the best Ro-Tel ever.  Diced tomatoes with lime juice & cilantro.

Throw everything into your crock pot (onions, garlic, beans, corn, ro-tel, chicken stock, water).

Add some spices...a tablespoon of each.

 

Season your chicken and place it on top of the mixture in your crock pot, submerging it into the liquid.

Cook on low for about 9-10 hours (or high for 6-7 hours).  Add chopped cilantro.

Shred your chicken and stir to combine everything.

Serve with some cheddar bay biscuits.  I made these for the first time tonight and they were amazing!

Serve in a bowl with cheese, cilantro, green onions, tortilla chips, and biscuits.  Yum!

Crock Pot Snow Day Soup (or White Chicken Chili)
 Ingredients:
1 package boneless skinless chicken breasts
1 can Ro-Tel
2 cans great northern beans*
1 can black beans (drained and rinsed)
1 can corn (drained)
2 cloves garlic (minced)
1 onion (chopped)
2 cups chicken stock
1 cup water (you can add more later if your soup needs more liquid)
1 tbsp cumin
1 tbsp chili powder
1 tbsp garlic powder
1/2 cup cilantro (chopped)

Toppings (optional):
Sour cream
Mexican cheese
Tortilla chips
Green onion (chopped)

Directions:

1. Dice up onion and garlic and throw them into your crock pot.
 2. Add great northern beans (add the whole can, juice and all), black beans, corn, Ro-Tel (add whole can), chicken stock, water, and spices to your crock pot.  Mix together with a spoon.
3. Salt and pepper both sides of your chicken and place on top of the mixture in the crock pot.  Press the chicken down gently to submerge it into the mixture.
4.  Cover and cook on high for 6-7 hours or low for 8-9 hours.
5.  Before serving, shred chicken with two forks (it should literally fall apart).  Stir in cilantro.
6.  To serve, place soup in a bowl and serve with desired toppings.  Enjoy!

This soup is also awesome with cheese biscuits.  I usually make them from a recipe that I have from working in Mrs. Hardesty's Tea Room, but decided to try something different tonight.  The cheddar bay biscuits (thanks Pinterest!) were amazing.  They are surprisingly easy to make from scratch.

*A note on great northern beans:  These are easily found in any grocery store in the South....but I've had the hardest time finding them in grocery stores up here.  Some similar beans are navy beans and cannellini beans (white kidney beans).  If you're a New Englander reading this, I have found great northern beans one time in the Spanish section at Market Basket (Goya brand).  I was so excited I think I bought 10 cans.

at home date night

Things have been pretty busy around here.  It's really nice to have a long weekend with no major plans.  It has also been unseasonably warm (yay!) and we actually got to go to the beach yesterday!

 yes, those are horses on the beach (only in New England!)

Since we've been so busy, Curt and I haven't spent a whole lot of one-on-one time together.  Sooooo we decided that tonight we would have an "at home" date night!  We do these often because, let's be honest...we're on a pretty tight budget.  I know that's probably hard to believe with me being a teacher and Curt being in school.  No worries though, he's sure to make plenty of money once he gets a job as a pastor.....bahahaha!

But seriously, we have kind of enjoyed living our simple life and coming up with new ways to have fun with very little money.  Hence, the "at home" date night.  Here are our rules:

1. Plan out the dinner ahead of time.  The dinner must have an appetizer, main course, and dessert.  It also must be very tasty....but with minimal "hands-on" time.

2. Set the table all fancy-like (cloth napkins, real silverware, and candles....shhhh don't tell b/c we're really not supposed to have candles in our apt).

3. Play some fancy music.  Usually we open up the old record player and put on some jazz or classical...yeahhh, settin' the mood!

4. Enjoy our meal together and pretend that we are at a really fancy restaurant.

5.  Don't do the dishes until tomorrow (gasp!  for those of you that know me this is a hard one, but it's part of the deal).

I think that's all the rules.  Obviously, they are not hard and fast, but we do try to stick to them.  The best part:  when you're super full and you just want to flop on your couch....you actually get to!  No paying the bill, no tipping, no driving home.  It's awesome.

 For tonight's at home date, I made chicken piccata/marsala.  I'm not really sure what the difference is between the two....I should probably look that up.  Anyway, I used a combination of this recipe and this recipe.  And let me tell you....it was delicious!!  Now, I'm not one to toot my own horn, but TOOT TOOT!!!  I have always struggled with cooking meat, especially chicken.  It's always either overcooked or undercooked.  Always.  But not tonight.  Somehow I managed to perfectly cook it so that it literally melted in your mouth.  And the sauce...ohhhh the sauce.  It was like the perfect marriage of butter and lemon and capers and brown bits from the bottom of the pan and white wine and heavy cream.  Heaven, I tell you.


Soooo what are your favorite date nights?

Garden update

You may remember wayyyyyyy back when I started my garden.  If not, you can check it out here.

Welp, I decided it's time for an update.  The garden has actually turned out to be SO much more work than I ever thought.  I had all these great pictures in my mind of a beautiful garden that produced hundreds of juicy tomatoes, herbs, green beans, and peppers all by itself.  I thought I had done the hard part when I tilled the soil and planted everything.

Boy was I wrong.  As it turns out, you actually have to water the garden every day.  You also have to pull out the weeds, otherwise your garden turns into an overgrown mess where you can't tell the weeds from the herbs (not that that happened...).  Also you have to fight off an army of mosquitoes every time you go out to water or weed....which hinders the process of both dramatically.

The good news is that by the grace of God we produced ONE good tomato.  We ate it.  It was glorious.  We also got about 10 green beans.  We were so excited that we just ate them raw.  They were okay.

Our massive harvest

Salt and pepper makes everything better

We ate our prize tomato with some twice-baked potatoes from a local farm stand.  We felt so cool and earthy walking over to the farm stand to get the other half of our dinner.  Then we went to pay and the guy said, "That'll be $2.50."  For two potatoes?  Seriously?  Sorry local farm stand guy...we won't be visiting you again.  You're potatoes are too rich for our blood.

1 year! (part 1)

Our 1 year anniversary was a couple of weeks ago (July 31st, to be exact!).  We really wanted to go away for a night since we live so close to so many great places in New England.  July 31st fell on a Sunday, so we decided to put of our trip for a few weeks, so we could go on a Friday....hence part 1.

Even though we knew we would celebrate later, we still had to do a few fun things on the actual day...and the night before.  We made ourselves a special annivers-eve dinner and smoothies with our new juicer (this was an anniversary present and I am seriously OBSESSED with it...you should totally get one).

Our summer fave... (quick tip: if you LOVE this as much as I do and usually make it with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, try a balsamic glaze instead.  It is sweeter and easier to make it look pretty.)

Curt's anniversary dance

I woke up and made us breakfast on Sunday morning before church.  Again with the smoothies because they are so. darn. GOOD!  And yes, that is a pancake in the shape of a K!

 After church, Curt surprised me by taking me to Wagamama, an Asian fusion restaurant I used to go to when I studied abroad in Ireland.  There are only 3 in the US and they are all located in Boston.  Lucky us!

 

 After lunch, we went up to the Skywalk in the Prudential Building.  It was really neat to see the whole city and listen to the audio guide.  There is so much to learn about this city...we feel like we'll never stop being tourists :)

On our way up to the top we saw this picture.  We imagine this is what we'll look like when we celebrate our 25th anniversary.

Views from the top...

It's been a great year.  We've had a lot of changes, transitions, firsts and lasts, hellos and goodbyes.  I think that the Lord has definitely brought us closer to each other and closer to Him during the course of this year.  Curt tells me everyday that he loves me more today than he did yesterday (aaww).  We pray that our love will continue to grow, that our marriage will be strong, and that we will never for get our first Love.

For the love of cilantro...

I haven't been cooking very much lately.  Things have been busy around here.  We're moving into the last few weeks of school for Curt, I've taken on some more responsibility at work,  I'm training for a half-marathon....you get the picture.  I've also been rather uninspired by the recipes I've been seeing lately.  Nothing has really looked good enough to make...until I saw this:  steak tacos with cucumber-avocado salsa

This recipe combines a lot of things that I really really love:  cilantro (it's hard to say in words how much I truly love this herb), avocado, lime, steak...

I wanted to share this because...well...it's worth sharing.  It's easy, it's quick, it has (relatively) few ingredients, and it's sooo amazingly delicious.  In my book, that makes it a recipe well worth sharing.  Here you go!

All of these tasty ingredients go into the salsa.

oooohhhhh cilantro....how I love you!!

All of these yummy things are rubbed on the steak before cooking.  I hear some of you naysayers out there saying, "Cinnamon?  Really??"  Trust me, it was good.

The final product!  We also added a little sour cream and hot sauce.  Sooo good...and easy!

Now go make this for yourself and let me know how it goes!

*Sidenote:  I'm considering giving cooking/baking posts a more regular spot on the blog....but I'm not sure I'm ready for that kind of commitment....yet.  Thoughts??

Saturday morning baking

I love Saturdays.  I love not having to get up for work.  I love having time to drink my coffee, read my Bible, and enjoy a quiet apartment.

I also love baking something new on a Saturday.   There is something therapeutic to me about combining flour, sugar, milk, and eggs....something therapeutic about kneading dough, listening to music, drinking coffee, and creating something delicious and warm from scratch.

Today I decided to make this yummy cinnamon sugar pull-apart bread, posted by Joy the Baker the other day.  As one who has an obsessive love of all things cinnamon and sugar, I knew I had to make this. 

 I also made a half-batch of the same icing I made for my cinnamon rolls.  We drizzled a little over the top.  Sooooooo yummy! 

 It puffed up a lot in the oven!

Like the cinnamon rolls, it takes time....but the end result is definitely worth it.

The best quick meal you've ever eaten...

So, as I've said before, I really do love to cook.  However, I don't have hours and hours of free time in which to do all this cooking.  I prefer to cook bigger, more complicated meals on the weekend and keep our weekday meals pretty simple. 

Curt and I have one absolute favorite quick meal that deserves to be mentioned:  Mandarin Orange Chicken from Trader Joe's!!   Okay, it deserves a whole blog post.  It's that good.  Seriously.

(Please accept my apologies if you live in B Building or work with me, because I've probably already talked your ear off about this meal.)

Since I've made this meal a million times now...and because I'm extremely type A...I've gotten the process down to a science (please note:  this is not a meal you would typically need directions for....it does come in a bag from the frozen foods section, after all :).  I thought it would be fun to take you on a little picture tour of how we make this scrumptious meal (with pictures....lots and lots of pictures)!  Get excited.

Okay....step 1:  Measure out enough rice for 4 people (Curt loves rice).  Put the rice and the water into the rice cooker (in my opinion, the rice cooker is the key to all things awesome that are related to rice).  Add a splash of rice vinegar and let the rice soak for about 30 minutes before cooking (the rice vinegar and the soaking time are crucial for  making "sticky rice"....our fave).

Step 2:  While the rice is soaking, wash all the dishes in your sink that are leftover from the morning and your husband's "second dinner" last night.

Step 3:  Preheat the oven to 400 degrees (I have found that washing the dishes and waiting for the oven to preheat equal the exact amount of time that the rice needs to soak....amazing).  Open the bag, put the chicken onto a cookie sheet and set aside.

Step 4:  Empty the two bags of sauce into a small saucepan and set it on the lowest heat setting.

Step 5:  This is where several things are happening at once.  Put the chicken into the preheated oven and set the timer for 20 minutes.  Also, plug in the rice cooker and flip that switch to "cook."

one....

two....

three!

Step 6:  While the chicken and rice are cooking, slice up a few green onions and set them aside.

Step 7:  Take a break and read the new J.Crew catalogue.

Step 8:  The rice and chicken should be done at pretty much the exact same time (I planned it this way :).  Toss the chicken with the sauce in a large bowl.  Toss in some of your green onions.

 I LOVE this setting!  It can sit like this while you get everything else ready.

Just look at that yummy, shiny goodness!!

 Step 9:  Make yourself a yummy bed of sticky rice, put the chicken on top, and garnish with a few more green onions.

 

Step 10:  Feel like you've died and gone to heaven because what you're eating is so delicious you can't possibly be in a fallen world anymore.

That is Curt giving the "#1" sign, just in case you were curious...

It's super, super easy and only takes about 20 minutes to make - start to finish.

Enjoy!