just a chill day

This morning we got up and just hung around the house a little. We went for a run at the pond and watched a little college football on TV. This afternoon we went out to Barnes & Noble to browse through books about traveling in the local area - particularly for the fall foliage and apples. We're thinking about going to Pennsylvania or Virginia for a day or weekend trip sometime soon to check out the mountains, hike a little, and get some apples and pumpkins or something. The leaves are starting to turn a little up here - mostly on the cherry & maple trees. We both love fall so much - the weather & trees are beautiful. A short little trip in a few weeks will help bring in the season for us. :-)

Tomorrow night we're finally using Carlyle's birthday present that I gave him. I got us tickets for a sight-seeing cruise in DC - and we're going tomorrow night for the "twilight" cruise. I'm sure we'll both have plenty of pictures that I'll post tomorrow.

Best Mac&Cheese Ever!! followed by a really long week

Last weekend I made my favorite meal for dinner - ham, macaroni and cheese, and green beans. Luckily, Carlyle loves it too! :-) The macaroni and cheese was completely different from what I normally make, but it was amazing! It was super easy - here's how I did it:

In a crockpot, add:
2 cups (dry measured) macaroni, boiled & drained
2 8-ounces cheddar cheese shredded
2 cups reduced to 1.5 cups milk
fresh ground black pepper

I cooked it all on low for about an hour and stirred it occasionally to help the cheese melt. It's ready when most of the liquid at the bottom is absorbed and the cheese is melted throughout.

It was a really busy week compounded by that fact that my car was in the shop. It had been out of commission for a few weeks now but I finally got it fixed. The starter had to be replaced, but now I finally have it back after taking the bus & walking to get it this morning.  I'm happy that we're living in an area that we could definitely get by with just one car, but there are some inconveniences of course.  I'm very happy to have my car back now so I don't have to have Carlyle pick me up from the park and ride at the end of the day!

Blueberry Cobbler

Tonight Carlyle & I went to a potluck at a local park with a bunch of young married couples from the church we've been visiting. I made blueberry cobbler and it was a crowd favorite! :-) I literally only have one small serving left - and I made a 9x13 pan of it and there were maybe like 20 couples there +children. I didn't take a picture of it - sorry - but it ends up looking kind of golden / crusty/cracked on top from the sugar mixture sprinkled on top of the batter.

Not my pic, not my cobbler, no peaches, but this is the best example I can find of what the crust looks like. 

It sounds complicated, but it's really pretty easy to make. Here's the small (8x8) recipe (I doubled it for the 9x13 inch pan). It's from this cute little blueberry farm that my family used to go to to pick blueberries. They have more recipes on their website - the blueberry muffin recipe is really good, too.  Now my parents have a gazillion blueberry trees so we get blueberries for free! Thanks Mom & Dad! :)


2 C. blueberries
Juice of  ¼ lemon (1 ½ tsp.)
¾ C. sugar
3 T. butter or margarine, softened
½ C.  milk
1 C. all purpose flour
¼ tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking powder
½  to 1 C. sugar (according to your taste and the sweetness of fruit)
Dash of salt
1 T. cornstarch
¾ C. boiling water 

Line well-greased 8 x 8 x 2 inch pan with blueberries and sprinkle lemon juice over them.  (I didn't have lemon juice, so I didn't do this step. I did sprinkle about 1/3 cup sugar over the 4 cups of blueberries.)

Cream ¾ C. sugar with butter and add milk.  

Add to this mixture the flour sifted* together with baking powder and salt.  Spread this batter over blueberries.

Mix together the ½ to 1 C. sugar with cornstarch and salt.  Sprinkle this over batter and pour the boiling water over the top, but do not stir.  

Bake at 375°  for 1 hour.

(Recipe may be doubled and baked in a 13 x 9 inch pan for 1 hour.)  Serve warm with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream. 

*When recipes say to "sift" the flour mixtures, generally I dump all of it together and whisk it for about ten seconds or so until I think it's all mixed together and airy. Sifting is not an effective way to mix and evenly distribute baking power / or other leavening agents.

Taco Soup in the slow cooker

Tonight we had taco soup - thank you Lauren Privette for introducing me to it! It's super easy to make, is very adaptable, and tastes 10x better when cooked in a slow cooker for awhile. I cooked mine for 4 hours on low I think.

Main ingredients:

1 can corn

1 can black beans

1 can pinto beans or northern beans

1 package taco seasoning

1 can rotel / diced tomatoes 

Extra ingredients you can add if you want:

browned, drained ground beef or turkey

1 packet ranch seasoning

1 can green beans

(you could add a chopped onion or something if you really wanted, but I stick with what's easy)

*You dump all of the liquids and everything in the pot for the soup, so if you want it might be a good idea to get the low sodium cans. 

You can top it with sour cream, mexican cheese, tortilla chips... whatever. It's so easy to make and delicious! 

It's low cal and has lots of fiber thanks to the beans. Hearty soup - makes like 6 servings.

Baby Shower Petit Fours

Here's the photo of the petit fours all assembled that a clinical supervisor faculty member took. Thanks Maria!

Shrimp & Grits

Carlyle & I LOVE shrimp and grits Low Country style (is there any other way?). We did, after all, have it at our wedding reception! It was so easy and simple.

oh grits, how I've missed you...

Here's how I did it:
1. I chopped an onion and a sweet red pepper into slivers and sweated them with a little oil in a med-hot pan, covered, with a few shakes of creole seasoning.

2. I boiled the water for the grits and added a little salt and baking soda (to make them fluffier) and had those cooking.

3. I thawed and peeled the shrimp, shook some creole seasoning on them, and cooked them in the pan with the onions and red peppers.

Carlyle scarfed his down twice as fast as me, but I claim the leftovers for lunch tomorrow!

Baby Shower Petit Fours

I finally finished them! I made them for the hearing & speech faculty at the University of Maryland. One of the audiology faculty, Dr. Tracy Fitzgerald, is expecting a sweet little boy in two weeks!  I don't have a photo of them all assembled before people got to them, but one of the faculty does and will get the photo to me soon. I'll post it when I get it.

I made them in almond cake, Madagascar bourbon vanilla butter cake, and chocolate fudge cake. I iced some of them as baby blocks spelling "Welcome Baby Sam" and topped others with booties and rattles.

Here they are:

and this was what my kitchen looked like after I was all finished! what a mess to clean

Dinner & petit four beginnings...

First of all, today is September 11th, so that means 3 things:

it's the anniversary of 9/11 - our thoughts and prayers are with the victims families
it's Carlyle's mom's birthday - happy birthday!
and it's Jean Chesno's birthday - happy birthday to you, too!

Today we watched the Gamecocks play and kick Georgia's butt on TV. It was awesome and likely the most harmony we will experience this football season!
This afternoon while Carlyle watched all of the football games he could find, I made three different cakes - almond, chocolate, and madagascar bourbon vanilla butter cake. They've all cooled and chilled and I've cut them into the squares and I started the icing process. I definitely have much more than I need... I needed like 40 squares, and I easily have 80 lol. So, maybe people will take two!
 Here's what I have done so far...

This was after the first coat... it took like four! I think it needed to be drier and thicker icing to really stick to the sides and be more opaque.

For dinner we had penne pasta & spinach & shrimp with a deliciously healthy tomato & basil marinara sauce. The sauce had EVOO and omega-3 and DHA and carrot puree in it apparently, so --> really healthy. I cooked shrimp with some italian dressing and white wine and added it to the sauce. I've found that it's super easy to cook spinach in the water with the pasta for the last few minutes - then just drain it all in the colander and voila - it's all there and ready for the sauce. It was a great, easy Saturday night dinner.

crock pot fail #1, grad school, crock pot success!

Maybe since I've started blogging about meals I've gotten nervous or cocky or something... I don't know! I guess I've officially joined the new-wife burned dinner club though now. Anyway, I just tried something Tuesday and burned it. I just had it going for too long. I didn't really have any idea about how long it would take to cook what I had put in there. I'm sure that if it was going for a shorter amount of time that it would have been tasty. I had a cut of london broil and rice and a new teriyaki sauce that I bought in there with water. The little bit that I tried in the center (un-burnt) was potentially tasty - similar to a teriyaki stir fry that we have had before. I'll tweak this in the future and try it again and hope for better results!

School is so tiring for me right now - on Tuesdays and Thursdays I'm gone from 7-something until 7-something. Thankfully I have Mondays and Fridays free, and Wednesdays I just have class from 3:30-6, so I have a much shorter day.  This weekend we'll be relaxing and cleaning up and organizing around the apartment so life won't feel so stressful during the week!

This weekend I also have a new project to work on - my first paid cake making job! I'm making petit fours for my professor's mini baby shower following the faculty meeting on Monday. So, that's what I'll be doing this weekend.  I'm hoping they'll turn out something like this:

I'm planning to make them as square cubical as possible so that they will resemble blocks. I'll spell out "welcome baby sam," but that only gets me 14 blocks! I'm making like 40, so the rest I'm not too concerned with the rest looking too much like blocks. I'm thinking of doing booties, safety pins, and yellow duckies. I'll post pics of the process as I make them. If you know anything about me, you can imagine how much I've been planning this out meticulously in my mind for the past week. I've laid awake at night not able to sleep because I've been thinking of all of the things I could do on this cake project! Sigh, pathetic. :-)

So dinner tonight was amazing. It was a great weekend meal and reminds me of the beef pot roast my mom would frequently make for Sunday lunch.  It actually tasted very similar to Lizard Thicket's beef stew roast stuff that they have - and it's so easy to make!  I had a London broil that was still very large, probably about 2lbs.  I know it's not the typical cut to use, but it's what I had and I figured it would get fairly tender in the crock pot and I know how to slice it diagonally against the grain so it's in manageable pieces. I peeled about five white potatoes and chopped them into large pieces and quartered a vidalia onion. If I had carrots, I would have put them in there, too. You could put a can of green peas if you wanted, but Carlyle & I wouldn't touch it.  I mixed together a packet of Lipton onion soup mix, about 1/4 cup of water, and a can of cream of mushroom soup. If you aren't familiar with onion soup mix, here's what it looks like.

Be prepared to make it your best friend in the pantry. It's so versatile! (i.e. see the recipes below)

This is sort of what I went by - especially for slow cooker details

These are very tasty, although it's just a great idea and you could easily adapt it with your own favorite seasonings.

You can make this with fat-free sour cream and change the dip mix to a ranch packet instead - you're in total control of the calories and contents of your chip/veggie dip now! So empowering! :)

So anyway, I digress. Here's dinner:

And our happy plates :-)

Carlyle's happy plate after seconds (seconds = REALLY good in Carlyle food language)

Kathryn's happy plate

Last of "freedom" ... start of school

Monday was my last day of "freedom" before my classes started on Tuesday. I spent the day painting decor for our home to hang on our bare walls.

I started out with the canvases for the bedroom. I couldn't really decide what exactly to do with these, and I ended up painting over what I had done about three different times, finally blurring everything together. Here's how it started:

And here's how it looks now - it has metallic paints on top of the brown base that you really can't even see anymore!

Then for the living room over the couch I painted this one (it'll make more sense once I get the fabric I want to use for pillows and chair seats in the dining nook):

and here it is over the couch:

I was worried it would be too big... I think it's too small!
Then, on the other side of the living room area, I originally had a different concept and color scheme going to match with the pillows that we bought to use on the couch.

I never finished them as you can see, so I white washed over them and did something like the other painting.

You can see Carlyle and our messy apartment in the background, lol!

My first week of classes went well.  I need some good healthy crock pot recipes for Tuesdays and Thursdays when I get home really late, so if you know of any, let me know!