Dinners for the Week

Last week we tried *4* new recipes! I must have added a lot to Pinterest lately, because there were so many I wanted to try. Normally I would have doubled one of these to make 2 dinners, but since we were already making 2 dinners with crescent rolls we thought that would be a bit much!



► French Dip Crescents with black eyed peas (pictured above) - These were incredible! Definitely the stand out star of the bunch. I split the recipe to make 8 rolls & we made a dinner out of them, but they would also make great appetizers. The only problem I had was the sauce, which all boiled away when I wasn't watching, but I poured in 1 cup of water at the end and we had plenty for dipping (and a lot left over). Easy & very tasty!

► Soy & Br. Sugar Marinated Salmon with roasted green beans - This marinade added a nice flavor, but I was really hoping for more of a thicker, sticky sauce. It was a bit too subtle for me. I’ll keep looking! (The green beans we’ve made many times - tasty as always.)

► Crescent Chicken with mashed potatoes & green peas (pictured below) - This was good, but did not ‘wow’ me. I liked their idea of using the leftover sauce over mashed potatoes, but when we ate it I wished I had saved the sauce for the chicken instead. The fillings were also hard to fit into the crescents, so I don’t think I’ll make this one again.



► Hamburgers & tater tots (2 dinners)


And for lunch I tried ~
► Chicken Mei Fun - A great starter recipes, but I’ll be making some tweaks next time! I used a 6+ oz. bag of the noodles instead of the 8 oz. it called for & still thought there were be too many noodles when I first tried some. Once I divided it up for lunches it did seem a little more balanced though (I was able to divide up the noodles & the topping separately). I liked the idea of soaking the noodles in hot water to cook them while stir-frying the other ingredients, but even after adding another batch of hot water my noodles were undercooked. I’ll either use boiling water to start with next time or just cook them like normal.

5 months

As of yesterday I am five months pregnant! I meant to take a pic at 4.5 months too, the halfway point, but the longer I waited the closer we got to five anyway. Oh well!



And just for fun, here is the pic from 5 months last time. I even pulled out the same shirt for my new pic, though it's hard to tell since the silver stripes have all worn off! (How does that happen?)

Layla Silver Holo Polish

One of the nail polishes I got for Christmas was Layla Hologram Effect in "Mercury Twilight", a sparkly silver with a strong holo. I looked through pics of many silver holos to choose my favorite & have wanted this one for a while.

Unfortunately under most lighting you get a faint rainbow flash. You can barely see it on the middle nail here ~



Under bright lights & in the sunshine you get a much stronger rainbow. It was cloudy all week so I couldn't test out the sun, but it did look lovely under the bright light in our shower.



Holos are hard to capture, so you'll have to trust me that it was a lot more like the middle nail above. (Or do a Google search to see how pretty it can be)



Wear time ~

Holos are known to chip easily - I was a little worried when I saw one girl complaining hers began chippping after 3 hours! But you just need to know a trick to make them last as long as any polish - the top coat sandwich...

Top coats add durability, but they dull the rainbow effect of holos. Instead of skipping it all together, put down a coat or two of the holo, then your top coat, and finish off with more holo. (This works well to add durability under a matte topcoat as well)

I painted my left hand first this way and had to use four coats total of the holo polish. I started thinking, if I'm dulling the bottom layers anyway, why not just start with a normal silver polish first? On my right hand I used two coast of a shimmery silver, the top coat, and then finished with two coats of holo. You could not tell the difference at all, so this is a great way to save money using half of much of the pricey holo! And the wear time was even a little better - the all-holo hand got a few light chips on day 2 & 3 and then I did not have another chip until day 6! (this time on the mixed hand)

Dinners for the Week

Last week we made ~

► Frozen fish fillets with wild rice & roasted Brussels sprouts

► Chicken Taco Soup (2 dinners) - Hadn't made this one in a while - Orson loved it!

And I tried one new recipe ~

► Mushroom Lasagna with Béchemel sauce (2 dinners) - I based the meal on this recipe, but with quite a few changes. Mainly we halved the recipe & used fewer varieties of mushrooms - I used 8 oz. Bella, 8 oz. White, 4 oz. Shitake, and added 2.5 cups of cooked, shredded turkey.

This ended up being one of those recipes that takes longer to prepare than I expected (even with a generous estimate of time), and then we weren't that impressed with the results. It seemed so promising! I was drooling over the bowl of grilled onions, mushrooms, and turkey ~



And I usually love creamy white sauces! This one even has minced mushrooms & herbs mixed in.



I was expecting something rich & cheesy, more like Martha's Chicken Tetrazzini sauce, or maybe the Mornay sauce I made long ago, but this one ended up being a little bland & unimpressive.

As was the presentation! Not that I expect casseroles to be pretty on the plate, but this one had an interesting layering technique that was supposed to result in pretty slices. You lay down the noodles side-by-side, not overlapping, and then stack the additional layers on top of those. When it is time to serve you just cut across the noodles & can lift out a neat little serving with the ruffly noodle edges running down each side! Supposedly.



Apparently our noodles lost all their ruffle! You can barely see a curl. Oh well - I'm more interested in the taste, but this one was forgettable enough (yet labor intensive) that I don't think I'll be making again.

2012 Summary

Wow, 2012. That was a year I am not sad to see end!

Throughout the year one disaster after another happened to the majority of our electronics ~
♦ Our video camera died
♦ Our expensive printer died (from using the name brand ink!)
♦ The power switch on my computer malfunctioned (luckily we fixed it)
♦ Justin fried my cell phone in the pool
♦ My expensive camera was stolen
♦ Our laptop stopped holding a charge & the power cord broke (it’s barely holding on)
♦ Justin dropped his cell phone in the creek
♦ All of the electronics in our car, including the headlights, were fried from Orson shoving pennies in the CD player (Justin finally got everything fixed!)
♦ The air conditioning & heat at our new house has gone out more times than I can count (luckily we are renting & not paying for the fixes)

And I’m probably forgetting a few more! It’s a miracle our TV made it out alive.

Around the same time all of this started we found out I was pregnant but had a miscarriage a couple of weeks later. During this I had the worst tooth pain ever and both me & the dentist were convinced I had an abscessed tooth that needed to be pulled (which could not be done for weeks, until I was in the 2nd trimester, and no one could give me anything for the pain). Luckily I realized it was actually a terrible sinus infection putting pressure on my jaw & was able to clear it up with some steam, a neti pot, and some antibiotics. (No decongestants when you’re pregnant!)

Throughout all of this I kept my sanity looking forward to the next school year. We were on a very tight budget but Justin was planning on spending the summer looking for a new teaching job at a public school, which would come with a much higher pay. We were ready for a change, ready to get out of our old town, looking forward to not worrying about money so much, and I knew that was our only hope of replacing some of the bigger items listed above! Unfortunately months went by with no offers & no news.


Finally our luck shifted! At the end of the summer Justin finished up the last class for his Masters & the next day was called in for an interview in our top-choice school system! He got the job & we suddenly had about 2-3 weeks to find a place & move. We upgraded from an apartment to an awesome rental house with tons of room & were even able to settle in for a couple of weeks before Justin started work.

A few months later we found out I was pregnant again! The timing was perfect - the baby was due at the end of the school year and I’d have Justin at home with the newborn for nearly 3 months! After a little bit of bleeding and a negative doctor’s appointment we were convinced we’d lost this one as well, but it was an unnecessary scare - we are halfway through the pregnancy now & doing fine! We just found out we are having a little girl. I did spend the month of November in a zombie-like funk from another bad sinus infection (must be a pregnancy thing!) but we ended the year on a high note when, after months of working & waiting, Justin was finally approved for a very high paying fellowship!

We are looking forward to 2013 - enjoying the new job, new house, new town, and new baby! It looks like we’ll finally be able to get a 2nd car and I’ll be able to stay at home with our two little ones *without working*!! (Working at home with a toddler has been insane - I can’t imagine it would be possible with two!) Assuming we don’t have another colicky baby it should be a pretty good year indeed!

Peppermint Nails

A little belated, but here are the nails I wore for Christmas!



I've known for a while I wanted to do peppermint stripes for the holidays, but I'm picky. I didn't want the stripes to all be the same size, they had to be large & small like a candy cane. And the free-handed designs I saw were too messy (and too hard to do on my right hand!), I wanted the lines to be super crisp.

To create these nails I first painted my nails with China Glaze "Ruby Pumps", a lovely sparkly red. Then I laid down two lines of (super thin) nail striping tape & regular tape around that, painted the white with Milani "White on the Spot", and removed the tape. (This created the three white lines, thick-thin-thick) Getting the spacing just right was a little tricky, but I got the hang of it after a few tries.

Unfortunately I didn't have any tape the width of the thicker red lines, so I just had to wait for that section of white to dry & then filled in the outer edges the same way later on. I kept messing things up by getting impatient & taping over the white areas too soon - you really just want to leave it alone for a few hours!

2012 in Pictures

At the end of the year I like to round up a favorite picture from each month. Unfortunately this time I kind of gave up on taking pictures the 2nd half of the year with the loss of our nice camera, so we are left with only nails to look at. Whoops!

You'll be happy to hear that we should finally be replacing the camera in February if not sooner, so you won't have to listen to me whine about it any more! ;) Next year should be full of pretty food pics, a few baby shots, and maybe even the occasional craft.