Entertaining

Posted on by Jordan

I learned soon after the post went up about being done decorating and painting furniture that we are not actually done with that.

None the less, Heather and I have had the opportunity to invite friends over on several occasions in the past few weeks. It has been really gratifying to feel that our hard work getting this place cleaned up was worth it. I should also note that Heather practically levitates around the house as she gives the tour of our final decor placement.

For a while there we were averaging just over two nights a week with three or more guests over. That pace has dropped off this past week, but we were having a lot of fun with it!

A few things we are discovering:

Cooking for more people is harder! I generally manage to scale the recipe up enough, only to be 20 minutes slow getting it done. Not the worst problem ever, but it feels like it throws the entire night off.

Letting guest bring over a salad or dessert helps out more than I ever would have guessed. It isn’t that we couldn’t make those, but in the time between getting home from work and when things start there often isn’t time.

And then the final bullet: Ticket to Ride is a great game!

Heather has deemed it her “favorite game ever” and thoroughly enjoys it every round, despite often loosing to a new player. And there have been quite a few new players… we played the game every night, and every time taught a new group of people how to play the game. Without fail, everyone picked it up quickly and was having a lot of fun by the end.

I am still looking for other games that we could perhaps move to once people have bought into the idea of boardgames being fun, but so far that search hasn’t turned up much. Perhaps as it gets colder and staying inside sounds more attractive we can devote some more time to the question 🙂

-Jordan

Strawbery Crepes

Posted on by Jordan

I don’t get many chances to make deserts. The following is a report from a weekend project I undertook while Heather was out of town.

Typically if I make deserts, Heather is out of town… same goes for bacon come to think of it.

In tying to find the recipe I used so I could write up this post I found the article that had gotten me interested in crepes in the first place here: Chicken-Broccoli Crepes. I probably could feed that to Heather, but somehow between the time I got it into my head that I wanted to try making crepes and the time I actually tried it, the healthy filling part had faded leaving me searching for something to fill them with.

I ended up settling on vanilla pudding and strawberries.

Before we get to the filling though, the actual crepes:

The actual recipe isn’t too important, all crepe recipes seem to be about the same, just flour oil and egg mixed aggressively and left to sit for a while in the fridge before cooking.

Speaking of cooking, I was worried about this part, because it has taken me a long time to get to the point where I make a passable pancake and these seemed like they would be less forgiving. As it turns out though, they are easier. Or at least, I found them to be virtually impossible to mess up.

After I made the crepes, it was just a matter of spooning in some pudding and loading the sliced strawberries. In hindsight I wish I would have made the ‘pie filling’ version of the recipe on the instant pudding box because what I made turned out to be too runny to really produce an attractive crepe.

I have been trying to work more on presentation, as that seems to be an area where you can take the same recipe but have it seem way better, just by having the finished result look amazing. I don’t know if I really go there with these… but I gave it a shot:

In a possibly related note, I have found that despite the fact that it sounds acceptable, Strawberry-vanilla crepes do not make a great Saturday lunch… or maybe I am just getting old. I suppose next time I should make up main course filling too, then fill half with something more substantial than pudding 🙂

-Jordan

Scones

Posted on by Jordan

As you probably heard about somewhere along the way, there was a wedding a few weeks ago involving British royalty.

It wasn’t a significant event in my world,but the office Heather works in had a different take. They claim it was because of the recent addition of a Canadian to their ranks, what with the whole “Canada still recognizes the Queen” bit. I can’t say I completely buy that. I talk to Canadians every day, and while they may have been a tiny bit more aware of the event than I was, they did not demonstrate the boundless enthusiasm for it that my wife did.

Whatever their reason, Heather’s office decided to have a sort of party on the day of (because it happened on a Friday morning for those of us in CST). Outside the world of TV shows about offices, “office party” just means “bring food” and not much else. Normally I should say… Apparently they designated a couple to dress up as the bride and groom…. Suffice to say they went above and beyond with their plans for the royal wedding.

And this is where I come in. I have actually made scones a few times before, but I don’t think they ever made the blog. They fall into that grey area between sweets and bread, and I have periodically tried them as a way to share a desert with Heather. I have even gone so far as to try a savory scone recipe although it wound up being kind of a tough sell.

Heather apparently remembered the first batch of scones I made well enough to think they would be a great addition to an English themed party at work.

Basically I doubled this recipe, except without the raw sugar crystals on top. Using dried cranberries doesn’t add much sugar so the end result is Heather approved.

Doubling the recipe did involve a distressingly large portion of butter, but I can’t complain about the results. The reports that came back from Heather’s office were equally positive, so I don’t think anybody really missed the sugar sprinkles on top. Although, speaking of the butter, because the method I used to cut each scone involved patting out a circle and splitting it into eights, it made calculating the butter per scone distressingly easy. There ended up being three-fourths of a tablespoon of butter in each scone. It’s better when you are just vaguely aware that there is “a lot” of butter in something I suppose.

One last comment about scones, and then I will stop before this gets any more scatter brained… Scones aren’t very hard. If you can make biscuits from scratch using a recipe, you can make scones. Just you know… use a scone recipe.

-Jordan

The Slog

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It’s that time of year again… Christmas is over and the weather just keeps getting colder. It makes it hard to want to do anything except crawl under a blanket on the couch and eat warm carbs.

This isn’t the first winter I have seen though. Heather and I are, distressingly, starting to establish a pattern to deal with this time of year. The initial plan had been to put our wedding anniversary provide some diversion in the midst of the post-Christmas blues. While that helps, we find ourselves feeling way too lethargic by about January 5th.

So for the third year running, we have embarked on a fitness challenge! I shouldn’t take too much credit, Heather is the driving force behind our decision every year… Something I am incredibly grateful for, considering I still lack the drive to start one of these despite the demonstrable benefits they have provided in my life.

That being said, going to the gym when there is an inch of slush in the parking lot and the air temperature is one degree is no fun at all. Also, it seems we aren’t the only people to have decided now is the perfect time to hit the gym, so it’s five times as crowded now as it was a month ago.

All the same, we are working out once again! I never expect the incredible soreness that comes with these things… I guess that means we are making progress 🙂

On the topic of being more healthy, I saw a recipe for pumpkin sloppy joes (aka Sloppy Jacks)

I won’t re-post it here, as you can head over to Cheap Healthy Good for the recipe

I knew I had to try it though, because as a rule Heather loves anything that involves pumpkin!

We didn’t have ground turkey on hand, so I just used beef. The results were… remarkably sloppy-joe-like. I suppose you would be able to see the difference if you had my filling next to a ‘normal’ batch, but I was surprised how unremarkable it was. It was also shocking to find that we couldn’t really taste the pumpkin in the sandwiches.

In keeping with the aforementioned rule, Heather loved them. I think we may have another quick meal on her list of favorites.

(no picture included, because they looked just like sloppy-joes)

-Jordan

Getting Ready For Christmas

Posted on by Jordan

Featured in this picture:

  • A few of the cookies we made
  • Our little tree
  • Heather’s newly shortened hair

Well… what to say about the past week.

Starting back on the first noteworthy thing, Wednesday we made Tuna Casserole for the kids at church. The first kid in line took one look at the pan, scrunched up his face like he was about to cry his eyes out, and nearly shouted “Tuna? But I don’t want to eat tuna!” Let me tell you, it didn’t make the chef feel real great about the meal. On the whole though, the kids managed to put away nearly all the food we prepared.

Friday we had our first Christmas event, my work team arranged to meet for dinner after work. It was fun to introduce Heather to so many of the people I work with, and to meet their spouses and significant others. I hate to stereotype, but many of the software developers are firmly on the introvert side of the fence. The majority of their wives and girlfriends are extroverted. It makes for an interesting time when you get that group together. I think Heather had about 15 conversations and I said about that many sentences, but everybody had fun!

Saturday, we had planned to run a few errands, and then have friends over for dinner and decorating Christmas cookies. The weather had other plans. Those plans not only included the first snow of the year, but an 18 hour blizzard warning from the national weather service.

When it was all said and done, I think we only got four to five inches of snow, but the wind made them into a major problem! That wend by the way, produced windchill down to a breath-taking negative 22! Our friends decided not to risk the cold, and we ended up staying home and not even making the cookies. The errands did get run though, including Heather getting eight inches trimmed from her hair!

Sunday, we tried several times at church to recruit people to help with the cookies, but the December “way too much going on” bug has already arrived, and nobody had the afternoon free! Heather and I ended up doing the cookies by ourselves, but we had quite a bit of fun doing it!

I looked at the calendar for the next two weeks and… well I won’t be bored. Hope everyone else is staying warm and not too crazy busy yet! 🙂

-Jordan

Happy Thanksgiving!

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I are in the process of heading out to see family for the holiday, but I wanted to take a minute and put together a post.

We haven’t done all that much in the past week… oh yeah so I saw a recipe for Pumpkin Biscuits and found it really interesting. It was seasonally appropriate, and Heather tends to like anything with pumpkin in it.

The only problem is the quantities seemed overly large, and I didn’t want to experiment with such a huge batch.

My solution was to take the normal recipe I use for biscuits and add pumpkin to that. In the process, I thought it would be a good time to finally try making biscuits in the food processor. That may end up being the best discovery I made in this endeavor! Cutting in the shortening is always kind of a slow process, but with the food processor it’s done in about 30 seconds. I ended up being so fascinated by the success I was having I forgot to add the pumpkin until I already had the dough finished.

I don’t know when the ideal time to add the pumpkin would have been, but I guess adding it as the last ingredient worked ok. Well, I say ok, but this is when things started to go off the rails for the biscuits. I added 3/4ths of a cup of pumpkin to a recipe that only had two cups of flour. That was more pumpkin than I probably should have added. The results were a sticky mess. I could tell there was no way I was going to get them rolled out, the dough wasn’t thick enough to roll, even if it hadn’t been so sticky.

Initially I thought I could try adding some more flour, but then I worried that the biscuit-ness of the resulting paste might not be there anymore. Looking at what I had in the bowl a little more, I decided it was thick enough I could probably just scoop it onto the baking stone and see what happened.

The didn’t end up being the most attractive baked good ever, but Heather gave them high marks for taste! 🙂

-Jordan

Another Side Of Cooking

Posted on by Jordan

For the most part, when I post something I made on the blog, it is because it is ether a mildly out of the ordinary recipe, or perhaps I was just really happy with the appearance of whatever it was.

Over the past month or two, Heather and I have had the chance to help out with a homework center. Our connection is through our church, although the Des Moines Vineyard isn’t the sole sponsor of the program. Specifically, our connection has been to arrange food for the kids each Wednesday night.

Often we have been able to recruit volunteers to prepare a meal to bring, and all we have to do is coordinate who, when, and where. Other times we have needed to prepare the food ourselves. This brings us to the topic of this post, because cooking for 30+ people is a little different than cooking for just Heather and I.

The first thing I made was chili. I don’t have any pictures of that, but well most chili looks about the same. The noteworthy thing is just that the ‘big’ pot we have isn’t quite as large as I had thought when your trying for massive quantities. I didn’t have room for all the beans and veggies in the pot, but at least we had enough food for everyone to eat.

The second time we cooked, we tried meatloaf and scalloped potatoes. I should be clear, I do mean ‘we’. Often Heather and I find that we get in each others way when we are both trying to work in our little kitchen, so generally I just ask Heather to go find something else to do when I am wanting to try something new. In this case however I wanted every bit of help I could get, and Heather really came through! She peeled ten pounds of potatoes, and then sliced them all! The assembled product, ready to be cooked:

They look pretty good don’t they? What we probably should have known, is that they were going to turn a nasty grey color in the fridge overnight. To make matters worse, we didn’t even know what had happened until we were at the church the next night with just enough time to throw them into the oven and have them done in time for dinner. To make matters worse, we didn’t notice the yellowed note near the ancient ovens warning us that they ran cold until 30 minutes into the 50 minute cook time! In the end, they looked sad, tasted fine, and were only 20 minutes behind schedule. It was a little demoralizing, Heather felt almost guilty serving “those gross potatoes” to the youth. I thought they were good, but I wont pretend they didn’t look a little off.

Our third try was a little more straight forward, spaghetti. I would have to leave work a little early to have enough lead time to make it work, but at least I figured there wouldn’t be any surprises.  Then we got a call from one of the people who work with the youth, saying that they were expecting a lot of extra kids, so plan on around 50!

The church kitchen is well-stocked with huge pots and pans, so at least we weren’t going to run into the problem we had with the chili.

It might be hard to tell from that picture, but that pot making pasta has to hold at least seven gallons of water…  It was kind of surreal cooking on that scale. Oddly enough I can’t think of much to say about that process, except that I was kind of thrilled the entire time to be cooking on that scale. I didn’t ever get a headcount on the attendance, but the group managed to go through 6 pounds of pasta, 4 loves of bread, and roughly 4 gallons of sauce. I don’t think anybody went hungry, but we didn’t have any meaningful leftovers ether.

In conclusion, I have enjoyed some of the challenges feeding the homework center kids have presented, but if you have ever fed a big group like that before and have some great menu ideas we could probably use them!

-Jordan

Weekend Grilling

Posted on by Jordan

Heather has been out of town for a few days thanks to a work trip.

A few notes from the odds and ends I stayed busy with:

It is possible to cook bacon on a grill:

If you try it, be aware that your going to have to give the grilling process 100% of your attention, as there is going to be a lot of fire. Maybe have a bottle of water handy or something.

This is exciting because Heathers primary objection to bacon (well ignoring the packing-plant episode) is the fact that it makes our entire apartment smell like grease for days. I may have found a work-around. 🙂

I went to the local gun range for a little target practice. If your like me, and maybe don’t shoot as well as you would like with a pistol, you might feel self conscious with all the other shooters around you. I realized though, if you just keep shooting the same set of targets, eventually you look pretty competent. Also I think I was improving rather quickly as time went on… still nothing to brag about, but improvement.

I thought I had a third point for this list but it seems to have escaped me… Hope your having a good weekend! 🙂

-Jordan

Quck Book Review, And Other Weekend Notes

Posted on by Jordan

I finished “Pandora’s Star” and it’s sequel finally!

I thought a lot about how I would sum them up. I think my feelings are that it was good, but after plowing through a little over 2000 pages I wanted great! I feel a little unhappy with the author for making me plow through that much book for something that didn’t end up being amazing. I suppose maybe there are people who enjoy having a more substantial read, with well fleshed out supporting characters and tons of trivial sub-plots, but I just didn’t feel like the pay off was there.

If you are ever in the mood for an absolutely massive space-opera style read, I can loan them to you 🙂

Other news this week…

We actually made corn! I don’t know how the entire month of July slipped past without us stopping at a local stand to pickup some fresh corn, but I somehow it happened.

I am forming plans to get some tomatoes from the same stands and make BLTs, but Heather’s aversion to the smell of cooking bacon has been somewhat compounded by a tour of a hog packing plant. Not the most uplifting side of our food production chain I am afraid. The tomatoes should be in season for at least a month, so hopefully there is time for some of the traumatic memories to be repressed or something 🙂

-Jordan

Spring Cleaning

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It is still spring right?

Because we just got around to the first major cleaning this apartment has ever had.

We weren’t exactly living squalor, but somehow being on the run most of the time had gradually let us get farther and farther behind in general upkeep. Much of the past weekend was spent cleaning, with the additional touch here and there after work, things are starting to look darn good around here!

We have a second bedroom. As much as we tried to avoid it, that room became the “everything room” catching odds and ends from the first day we moved in. It has a bed in it, and I think in prior post I may have implied that it was just minutes from being ready to host a guest. Well, it may have taken a little more than just minutes, and it might not be 100% ready yet….

One of the things we discovered while attacking the remaining tasks in said room: Not only were things un-dealt with since the move in there, the prickly disagreement that contributed to them being dropped in there instead of being dealt with properly somehow was still attached! That isn’t to say we had a horrible weekend full of not getting along, it just means we discovered that many of the tasks were far more complicated than we could have ever imagined. Heather and I can both be rather… insistent when we know how something should be done. Sad to think we can discover that much when just cleaning a room, I am sure we will get to put everything we learn now to use a few times throughout the coming years.

In a less personal note, I cleaned out the freezer and found some frozen shrimp. The first half of the bag I had used to make this salad: Asparagus and Shrimp Salad. I forgot to take any pictures, but mine ended up looking about the same. Sadly neither Heather nor I were particularly taken with it, so I wanted to try something else with the remaining shrimp. We also had a number or cups of Greek Yogurt pushing their expiration date, so I pulled together a remarkably convincing Shrimp Alfredo that was at least close to healthy enough to be eating on our last week of this workout challenge! 🙂

Check back soon for my chance to work through the backlog of recipes that weren’t healthy enough for the challenge 😉

Also, I have no idea how this is turning into a 40/60 split between things we do and things I cook… but I guess it gives me something to talk about.

-Jordan