Goodies and Treatmaking...

Well, it has been quite a while since I last posted something...I am so sorry!

As far as updates, I'm finishing up my 4th week of my first semester back into school.  So far so good, I think.  Some of the classes are pretty lame, but that's to be expected, others are pretty interesting!  I'm still working at the same grocery store bakery, packaging wonderful deliciousness a little bit each week, and in order to get more hours, I've started bouncing departments, so I'll spend some time in the Health Market department and some in the Bakery.  I think the health market part suits me a little better because I spent 3 and a half years working at the health food store in Utah, so I have lots of experience with those products (the health market is mostly organic stuff and weird stuff like that).  It is really okay that I don't get too many hours, I have a lot of homework to do and hubby and I have been busy building some stuff.  Also, yesterday I had a regular orthodontist appointment, he checked the braces out and all looks good...AAAAAAAAND...we scheduled the date to get MY BRACES OFF!!!!  The special day will be May 14!!!  YAAAY!!! Happy anniversary and birthdays to us!! :) I've got my list of things I'm going to eat when they are off all ready! Yay!
Hubby is doing really good, he's been working hard!  I think right now he is working on Feller Bunchers...I don't know much about what he's doing with that, but there we are. :)

So, here are some pictures and recipes of things that I've been making....YUM!! Brace yourself, there is a lot of deliciousness coming your way.... hehe! (yes, I should be doing homework instead of posting these.... and if anyone wants the recipes for these post a comment in the comments and I'll put it up).
Okay...first, I made some soft pretzels!  They were pretty good!!  We added some wheat flour to make them a little bit healthier!  I think they might even be low carb, but I can't remember exactly. 

OH MY GOSH.  These are Swedish Pancakes.  Similar to German pancakes but they are a bit different.  I love these sooooo much.  I think I made them 3 times last week!!!  The recipe is so simple too!  (Yes, I've almost memorized it...)  I half the recipe, which then makes 2 servings and I can eat the whole pan with no leftovers...haha!  YUM!  I added cinnamon to it too so you get that beautiful little crust and added flavor on top...ah man..I should have had that for breakfast today instead of toast and a banana....

With....homemade maple syrup!  I've never made homemade maple syrup before now, but I don't think I'll go back to regular.  And I finally got to use the adorable little pitcher I got from Ikea before we moved (sad that its a little chipped...).

It is soo good though, and I love how thin it is, I feel like it goes a lot further than regular Mrs. Butterworth does.  And I feel like it has more flavor too...This recipe calls for 1 cup of granulated sugar, 1 cup of brown sugar, 1 cup of water and 1 Tablespoon of maple flavoring.  So easy and Yum!  It makes about 2 cups of syrup.  A friend of mine's mom uses the same recipe but adds another cup of water to the recipe, not a bad idea.  Plus it would make the syrup go further! :) I might do that next time!
I also made some bread-sticks.  I deviated from my usual bread-stick recipe to try these "olive garden" bread-sticks.  They were pretty good, we really liked the texture of these but I felt like my other recipe has more flavor.  So a week or so later I tried them again and added basil, Parmesan cheese and some other stuff to them and they were pretty good!  They may not look too appealing, but they were good!

OH...and cinnamon rolls.  YUM-O!  I got this recipe for quick and easy cinnamon rolls from a friend and have made them a couple of times so far.  The recipe for icing that came with it though, I wasn't too sure about.  Before now, I haven't really met an icing recipe that I liked that didn't taste like powdered sugar.  I found this recipe for icing with another cinnamon roll recipe that I really liked!  So I used friend's cinnamon roll dough recipe and my new favorite icing recipe.

The icing calls for cream cheese, hot water, butter, powdered sugar and vanilla (I think..), it is really good!  BUT...if you can hold yourself back and possibly wait...they taste better the next day! So...really, if your like us, what you can do is eat a bunch that day and then eat the rest the following day. Yep, I think you should do that. 

And finally....chocolate frosted peanut butter bars.  Yes! I believe the recipe I followed is supposed to resemble the peanut butter bars many of us got when we were in school back in the good old days.  Oh...they're so delicious.  I think my peanut butter cookie could have been a bit thinner, so maybe next time I make them I will split the dough up between two pans.  

I put them in the freezer after a few days when I realized we wouldn't be able to eat them all before they went bad, so we've got some in the freezer!  Yum.
What deliciousness have you been making lately? :)
xoxo
c

Chicken Snow Angels

Well, we have had maybe 2 or 3 warm days (35 ish degrees outside) the last couple of weeks and I decided to let the chickens out of their coop for a little bit to get some fresh air while I was getting them some food and water one day.  I think they were so excited to be able to run free again that they didn't realize what the white stuff was.  So they flew out into the field and this is as far as they got.  They got out there and stayed put.  But I guess they wanted to make their own snow angels, too, so I let them sit there for a little bit.  Eventually, I had to go and pick them up and put them back into the coop.  Silly chickens!!

 hehe...

 silly..

 Here are the snow angels they left behind, along with a present or two.

They are so fun!  I wish it wasn't so darn cold outside, then they wouldn't have to be stayed cooped up all the time, it makes me feel bad! But I really don't want them to freeze!!!  Maybe I'm too protective of my babies.... (probably)

I have been trying some new recipes lately...these are some Sunflower Parmesan crackers!  My first attempt at making crackers, ever!

The recipe called for 1 cup of sunflower seeds, 1/2 cup of parmesan cheese and 1/4 cup of water. Grind the seeds and parmesan together til its like flower then add in the water until it makes a sort of dough.  Its pretty greasy (natural oils from the sunflowers I suppose).  Then flatten it between two sheets of parchment on a baking sheet, score them into squares or whatever but leave them where they are.  Bake for half an hour and then take out of the oven and break apart to cool.  They were okay.  If they would have been thinner they would have had more crunch to them, but they were alright.  They look a little bit like Golden Grahams, don't they?  Yum!  I wish they were Golden Grahams!! :)  I have a recipe for almond butter crackers that uses almond meal, I might have to try that one, they look really good!  Thank you, Pinterest!

I also tried this other recipe from Pinterest that I found, its for crepes.

Initially, I was pretty nervous to make crepes, but after the first couple I had the hang of it pretty well!  I still don't know what I'm going to use them for, but we have some now!  I tried some the other night with some blueberry cream cheese and strawberry jam.  I think it would have been better if it was plain cream cheese rather than blueberry, the flavors just seemed kinda weird.

Annd...last but not least, this is what was happening outside our house.  This is where the exhaust comes out from our furnace.

That's a pretty sweet icicle... (icicle? That looks like its spelled weird!)

Anyway, I better get ready to go, I'm meeting a guy to get an office chair off of craigslist.  I need a good office chair, don't I?  School starts on Tuesday!!!  I'm so excited!!!!  (kinda nervous too...) Anywho...

xoxo   c

Happy Hatch Day: 7-ish months!

First, the chickens just turned 7 months old!  I have some not very pretty pictures for you to see! Mostly because its been pretty cold for a little while now and -20° the last few days.  Holy Cow!!! I am not suited for this kind of cold!  But we are surviving, not to worry.  Today, however, it warmed up to 3° today! It kind of felt nice, which is funny because that's still really cold.  I was just happy that the air wasn't trying to eat my face.  And the fun part is, we had a pretty good ice storm a couple of weeks ago then it snowed quite a bit, so there was all sorts of snow hanging out on top of the ice, so when the snow melts (or blows back in the driveway because of the wind) you can see the awful layer of ice underneath it.  We also had a nice warm day one day when it got into the late 30s and everything started melting so there were puddles in the driveway.  Then, of course, it got really cold again so the puddles froze.  Now our driveway has a really nice giant layer of ice. I hope all that makes sense.  The good news though, this weekend its supposed to get up to 35° to 39°!  It'll be a heat wave, so nice!  And the following week so far should be in the late 20s.  Not too shabby.  

Well, 9 out of 9 eggs that I picked up yesterday from the chickens were frozen and cracked in half. Because I didn't want to eat them, I boiled them along with a bunch of yolks from last weekend. They got quite the pile of stuff today!  The two muffin things were an experiment that didn't work out.  But they eat them, so I'll feed it to them rather than throw it away.  :)

Here is the thermometer showing that it is 0° outside.  Holy Cow!  Just terrible, but it rose to 0, it was about -20 this morning...

When I went to see the chickens and give them the delicious pile of eggs I looked out into the field and saw some turkeys!  There were 6, you can't see them very clearly, but its pretty cool that they are in our backyard.

 ANNDD....Here are the chickens!  The first fresh air and daylight that they have seen in weeks.  Poor babies.

Here is after I gave them the eggs!  They were in love!

Here is Basil's and his comb...after the frostbite and the fights, here is what we have.  There aren't the traditional ripples since they disappeared, but it still looks pretty good.

Here is Parker and his comb.  Man, he's a good lookin' chicken...look at the blue in his feathers on his chest.  Gosh.  His comb is also smoothing out, but still has some remnants and seems dirty too.

Also, one of my red sex link hens is getting a black comb...Hopefully it heals or something...

My poor baby chickens...They will be super excited when it starts warming up!  I'm super excited to let them out again and not worry about their little faces freezing off!  

xoxo

c

Post Christmas Mayhem

Well, we've had some craziness go around the house lately...
First of all, yes, the Christmas decorations are still up. (laziness)
Second, I love oatmeal chocolate chip cookies soooo much!
And Third, this is what happens when you leave destructible things like the graham cracker houses lying around...

And yes, moments later, the silos were kicked over!  I put my foot through the barn, that was very, VERY fun!!!
And here is mine...

Hubby put his fist through the house and it went everywhere...it was AWESOME!!  A huge mess, but it was really cool to see it just go everywhere in pieces!  hehehe (evil laugh)...And it went from there...I broke down the garage and barn and we did the fence too!  Soooo fun!  It was kind of fun to break something as you walked past them, just in case we were bored.  And I just barely threw them away.  It might be fun to build some just to break them down, hehe...What a great end to the year!
Happy New Year Everybody!!!! :)
xoxo
c

Lego Christmas Houses (10216 & 10222)

Well, its still near Christmas so I am going to say that it is still okay for me to post about Christmas. Nothing real special, but I bought some Lego Christmas houses last year and didn't get around to building them until the week or two before Christmas, and haven't gotten around to posting about them until now.  Man, I am not very good at this! :) That being said, I still have two houses to build not including this, but they will wait until we have our next Lego weekend or holiday.  

Okay, this first one is the Bakery, Lego set #10216.  Here is what the front of the instructions looks like.  

Here is how it is displayed in my home...yes, it is very dusty, I'm not very proud of that, but it is what it is.

Here is the storefront...there is a light in the shop so you can display all the stuff in the window. Yep, that's part of my hand! :)

 Here is inside the store...behind the oven there are a few loaves of French bread.

Here is a horse with a wagon and a tree...in case you didn't already see it..haha!

Here is a cute little skating rink.  Notice the boy standing by the bench with a camera in his hands, also notice the red legs "flailing" about because s/he was caught in a snow drift on the right side. Hilarious!

Here is the second set that I built, it would be the Post Office, set #10222.

 Here is the front...those little red post office boxes are so cute!

And there is a light in this one too!

This is my most favorite lamp post of all the sets I have built.  So cute!

Here is the inside of the post office, I'm really loving the tile floor.  It will stink to take up when I take the set apart but it looks really cool!

Here is the mail truck (I think)...

A bench by a snow drift with someone shovelling and a young boy walking his dog and stopping to give it a treat.

Here is the gazebo!  There is a guy playing what looks like a brass instrument and a guitar.  I love both instruments, they turned out sooo cool!!

Here it is displayed...and a couple of my Christmas decorations.  I also had lights draped around the room in honor of Christmas, it was really fun!

Well, that is it for the Christmas Legos this year, I really love them though!  They were really fun to build!  I still have some Harry Potter Lego sets that I haven't put together yet, but we haven't really taken much of a chance to play with much Legos yet.

School is starting here in about 3 weeks.  I am so excited to get back into school stuff, also really nervous!  I think it will be such a good thing though, so it will be worth it.  I recently ordered all of my books off of Amazon and am waiting for one more book.  I just want school to start already!  I know I'll feel differently after school has started but I'm ready to start a real job/career!
xoxo
c

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Merry Christmas!!!!  What a great day!  Hubby and I have been together for over 10 years now and on December 29th is our anniversary of the day we got engaged!  I can't believe we've been together for so long.  That first Christmas we shared, 10 years ago, we made graham cracker houses and decorated them!  They were so awesome!  Then, the next year or two we did them again and we haven't done them since. But this year was different.  We did them this year!  YAY! It was so awesome!

But first...A Christmas miracle!  For the first time in many, many years I received a surprise in a box of cereal!  This is my new (super duper awesome) Star Wars Pen!!  Yeah!!!  (Please disregard the gross carpet!)

And, in honor of an annual tradition I have shared with a good friend at work, I made a snow angel this year!  This was after the first good snowfall!  Before last weekend we had only had an inch or two, nothing that would make a real good snow angel.  Hubby took the picture and his finger made an appearance in all the pictures! :) hehe..

And on to the Christmas houses!  YAY!  I have 2 Christmas Lego houses that I built, but I haven't put them on here yet (obviously).  Next time hopefully...
This is Hubby's graham cracker house/farm.  We do not take this lightly...we do toys and everything too...its pretty awesome! Fyi, the stacked spearmints to the left of the tractor with the grain bin are his silos!

His turned out sooooo cool!!!
And on to mine...he finished before me, so while he was done and took a nap, I finished mine up. I know the snowman is out of place because there isn't any snow, but we had them so I decided to use them.  The marshmallow trees didn't want to stay standing up.

They turned out pretty awesome this year!!!  I have no complaints other than it took most of the afternoon! :) It was really fun though!!!
Merry Christmas Everyone!!!
xoxo
c

Cookies, Pancakes and Pierogies

Well, it has been about 10 days apparently since I blogged last, which disappoints me but also surprises me because it feels like it has been a lot longer!  We had some freezing rain last night and are still having some at random times today.  Everything is so completely frozen and icy its rather scary!  I've been seeing the large snow plows driving by several times already just putting out loads and loads of salt on the roads.  I'm very glad I don't have go to anywhere today and can just stay home under a blanket and in front of a heater.

I was writing an email to a close friend about a half hour ago and saw something funny.

Apparently I'm having a conversation with a human.  As opposed to everyone else?  hehe.  By the way, it was human resources from a bank, funny though!

Earlier this week, on Monday, I wanted some German pancakes with buttermilk syrup, so I made some.

I made them a little bit different than I usually do and my pancakes weren't as alien as they usually are, which was awesome!  Anyone that makes German pancakes probably knows what I mean by "alien."  If you don't know what I mean, look at the edges on the left side, it usually comes up and over the pancakes a ton more than that, so this was amazing!  And the buttermilk syrup turned out pretty good too!  Here is the link for the recipe: GERMAN PANCAKES.  Yum!  It calls for a lot of eggs, which suits us pretty well as we are starting to swim in eggs now that more chickens are laying!

I also made my mother in law's recipe for sugar cookies!  I MEANT to half the recipe, but I accidentally got excited with the eggs and put in the amount for the full recipe.  So....I ended up with a TON of sugar cookies!  I'm not complaining...they are delicious!  Thanks mother in law!!!  :)

 I only had one casualty...(poor little guy hit the floor...)

Because there were sooo many, we decided to frost them as we went instead of frosting them all at once!  So, I don't have any pictures of that.

I also thought I would try my hand at making pierogies.  We usually buy Mrs. T's pierogies from Wal-Mart, but we thought it would be fun to try to make our own.  I used This Recipe mixed with some info from another pierogi recipe.  The other recipe said to add some sour cream and I thought that might be a good addition.  I also halved the recipe, but that still made me end up with about a billion pierogies...You'll see.

First, I made the mashed cheesy potatoes.  I used about 2 and a half pounds of red skinned potatoes and about 10 ounces of mild cheddar cheese, grated.  I don't know if you have heard of this, but apparently if you put a wooden spoon over a boiling pot it will not boil over.  In this case it is totally completely true.  I would have had quite the mess on my hands.  Observe...

 Needless to say, I boiled the potatoes until cooked, then drained them in a collandar.

Then you add the cheese and smash it all together...YUM!  I added some salt and pepper because potatoes like salt and it helped the flavor quite a bit.  And sour cream, like I said.  Why have I never made cheesy mashed potatoes before that day?

Then, I put the mashed potatoes to cool and later in the fridge to wait for when I was ready.  On to the dough.  I wasn't sure the actual process so I probably did it wrong, but I think it all worked out in the end.  Here's the dough after I put in the eggs...

Then I put in some water and some other stuff and kneaded it for 10 minutes.  The first 5 minutes went pretty quickly but after that I kept watching the clock.  I was pleasantly surprised it came out so smooth.  (I love my table!)

After I cut off the first piece of dough to roll into the rounds I noticed the dough was getting skin on it, so I put a moist paper towel over it while it was sitting waiting for me to deal with it.  That worked pretty well until the paper towel dried out.  Instead, I grabbed a microfiber rag and used that instead, it worked really well!

Here is my set up.  I grabbed my desk and brought it into the kitchen to work on.  My table doesn't have the right kind of edge to clamp the pasta roller to, so that is why I am using the desk instead. Here is my first run through, it worked pretty well! But it took me a little while to get into a groove.

Here's what it looked like when I was rolling them out...these are my first few.  

And....here is how many I ended up with after I was done.

It took me like 5 hours from start to finish.  Holy cow! I can understand why people only make them a couple of times a year and why they have friends or family help them.  But they were pretty good!  Not sure if it was worth it, but still really good! Here they are after they were boiled for 4 minutes...(Then we froze most of the rest of them.)

For dinner, we tried them a few different ways.  Hubby tried to deep fry one...

The dough was too thin, so I think next time I make them I would do double the thickness of the noodle, then it should be perfect.  Then we baked some, which turned out really good/perfect.

It was definitely an adventure!  And now I have a freezer full of pierogies to show for it.  Yum! Will I make them again?  I'm not sure...

Next up...Lego Christmas houses!  Yay!  I better hurry and build them though, only 5 days til Christmas! Or is it 4?...I dunno.  

xoxo

c