Its Been A Little Over A Week…

Posted on by Jordan

And…

  • Heather and I are home
  • The apartment is 99%  cleaned up
  • We have unpacked and stowed every gift and item that recently entered the apartment.

The process of cleaning up and putting away everything did cause some stress between Heather and I. As much time as we were spending together before the wedding, we somehow never really came to terms with our approach to planning chores. We both just took care of things like cleaning and laundry when we weren’t together.

In the end, it was a great week, and everything that we wanted done got taken care of. The process though… 🙂 I don’t want it to sound like we had huge fights over anything, we just had to figure out priorities and planning styles some. I can’t imagine what it would have been like having to move one of us into the apartment over the weekend, much less moving both of us into a house.

Thank you writing will be a challenge we have to tackle soon, and we are just starting to address how meals get taken care of. Laundry and managing the budget are still in there too… Lets just say we still have things to figure out, but the first week has been really great! Not always easy, but not hard ether, just felt like something that took a little thought and effort.

Speaking of food, one of the many great items we were given was a crock pot. I have all kinds of plans for that puppy, and happened to have stumbled upon some fairly straightforward “quick” recipes for them today. Posting them here so I can find them again:  (All shamelessly stolen from The Simple Dollar)

  1. Combine all of this into a crock pot.
  2. Add salt and pepper to taste.
  3. Turn it on low and walk away for eight hours.
  4. Add a quarter of a cup of water for every additional two hours you intend to cook it.

Creamy Chicken Casserole

1 can condensed cream of chicken soup (chicken & herbs if you can find it)
1 small can mushroom pieces (a 4 ounce can, drain off the water first)
1/2 chopped red onion
1 1/2 pounds skinless, boneless chicken breasts (cut into strips if you’d like)
1/4 cup white wine (optional)

Crock Pot Chili
1 large can tomato sauce
1 pound lean ground beef
2 cans beans (kidney beans are fine, but you can use whatever you like)
2 tablespoons chili powder
1/4 cup diced onion (or onion salt)

Simple Pot Roast
1 2 to 2.5 lb. roast
2 cups chopped carrots
2 cups chopped potatoes
1 cup chopped celery
3 cups beef broth or beef stock

Ham and Potato Casserole
4 red potatoes, sliced
2 red onions, finely chopped
1 1/2 pounds cubed ham
1 can condensed cream of celery soup, diluted according to can directions
2 tablespoons flour

(This one is very good with cheese on top just before you serve it.)

Shredded Beef Sandwiches
2 pounds beef brisket
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 1/2 cups beef broth or beef stock
2 cloves minced garlic
1 chopped red onion

(Serve this on buns – magnificent!)

Breakfast Apple Cobbler
4 medium-sized apples, peeled and sliced (try Honey Crisps)
1/4 cup honey
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 tablespoons melted butter
2 cups granola cereal

I hope to try one or two of these, there are a ton of recipes for slow cookers / crock pots out there, but fast and simple are really good attributes!

-Jordan

Lasagna Update

Posted on by Jordan

I mentioned a day or so back making lasagna, only I ran out of time to actually bake it. Wednesday night, I went to Blair to visit Heather and her Grandmother. Heather had taken the uncooked pan out to Blair the night before, so they baked it for that night.

the recipe is called: “World’s Best Lasagna.” I don’t know if it lived up to that claim, but it was very good. I have also had it twice as re-heated leftovers now, and its still very good. It takes way to long to make, and I don’t know what changes like using a canned sauce would do to the quality of the dish…. It was a  fun thing to try, but the prep time is a little over the top.

Just thought I should follow up on that 🙂

-Jordan

Pumpkin Pie

Posted on by Jordan

This post is a few days late in coming, as Heather and I attempted the pies over the weekend.

As we have been marching ever closer to Thanksgiving, and holidays in general, Heather and I had talked about wanting to try making a pumpkin pie. They seem like they should be fairly low in sugar, and pretty easy to make.

we shopped around a little for recipes, and got the advice “just use the one on the back of the can of pumpkin pie filling” so that’s what we did 🙂

The only problem was it called for a cup of sugar, shattering our hopes of a low-sugar pie. Our solution was to make two pies, one by the recipe, and one using splenda.

as you can see from the picture (click on the picture for a much larger version), the texture and color of the filling was drastically different using the two sweeteners. I know they sell a version of slpenda for baking that has some brown sugar mixed in, and I think this might be a domain where it would help out, darkening the color etc.

we tried the pies the same day we baked them, after letting them cool in the fridge for a few hours. They didn’t taste the same, but neither one tasted clearly better. I saved a slice of the splenda pie to try after 24 more hours, probably should have saved some of each to really compare. My theory is that splenda starts to taste stronger over time. With nothing to compare to, the slice of pie I saved for another day still tasted pretty good, and certainly didn’t leave any of that diet-soda esque aftertaste that splenda sometimes causes. (If you were wondering, the rest of the pies went to work with Heather).

-Jordan

The Day After Veterans Day

Posted on by Jordan

I had yesterday off, and that somehow translated into not getting anything posted.

What did I do with an entire day off?

Put new tires on my escape, and attempted to make lasagna from scratch! Both tasks took much longer than I expected. The end result was that the time from 1:00pm until 7:00 pm that I had 100% free was not sufficient to complete both 😦

I think the lasagna will probably be good, but I ran out of time to actually bake it, after making the sauce and assembling it in the pan. We are going to bake it tonight, so hopefully setting in the fridge over night wont hurt it too much. Alas, no pictures… I was going to shoot a few, but I was distracted worrying about time and never remembered to grab my camera (that was laying on my desk… mere feet away)

I should also mention that getting a Tuesday off really throws off your perception of what day it is… I still cant tell if its Monday or Wednesday.

-Jordan

Registered!

Posted on by Jordan

Well we aren’t done setting up registries yet, but Heather and I did get started on that project last night.

Our plan was to start at Bed Bath and Beyond, register there, and then head to Target and be done registering in one night.

The lady who set us up at Bed Bath and Beyond had other ideas. I will admit some of the things she told us were really quite helpful, such as the list of things you might want, or her advice about how many things to have on our list vs. number of invited guests. I am pretty sure we did not need 10 minutes of explanation of how awesome the china was. After we finally got the scanner and got turned loose it quickly became clear that even without the fine-china pitch, we were never going to make it to Target. The sheer number of choices we had to make was painful. Even if it was only a few seconds for each item we walked past, it still required thinking “do we have one already, if so is the one we have a candidate for replacing” or “would we conceivably use that if somebody gave it to us” It just got harder if there were options within a class of item (how do you pick between 3 kinds of muffin tins?).

Two hours later, I think we have Bed Bath and Beyond completely covered.

Its kind of hard to know what to put on the list, Heather and I aren’t moving into a house, and storage is somewhat limited in the apartment we will be staying in. Cooking is at least something we have enjoyed doing together, and will definitely work well in an apartment.  In the end I think we have a pretty good list of things that would be useful to have, and if I can stop feeling bad asking for half of it everything will be grand 🙂

-Jordan

Pie!

Posted on by Jordan

Yesterday was cake, today is pie, you might think this blog was desert oriented! 🙂

Heather was given some “for baking” apples from somebodies back yard a few weeks ago, and we had said over and over again that we should try making something with them. We never had time over the last two weeks until last night.

I had looked around for a recipe that would come close to being healthy, or at least not loaded with sugar. The best I could come up with was a recipe for “Sugarless Apple Pie,” a recipe that used apple juice concentrate instead of sugar for sweetness. I was a little skeptical, but figured it was worth a try… the worst we could do was ruin some free apples and a little pie crust.

Heather undertook to peel the apples using a “cut them up and then remove the skin” method that I didn’t really think was going to work, but without a peeler I couldn’t say much. It turns out her method actually works really well… faster than my peeling them with a knife and then cutting them up (moral of the story, we need a peeler). Once the apples were cut up, we just followed the recipe for the filling.

The crust came as 2 pie crusts, both in tins. If the directions hadn’t explicitly said you could dump one crust out and use it as a top for your pie I don’t know if I would have figured that out. I guess you can’t be an expert when its your first pie. We did that, but the crust stuck really bad to the foil we thawed it on so it was kind of a mangled mess when we tried to move it onto our pie. We were also worried that, because the picture in the recipe didn’t have a top, we shouldn’t have a top. I wish I would have taken a picture of the pie before we baked it, there were just strips of crust haphazardly tracing across the filling without any symmetry or plan. It was awesome, in a really sad sort of way. 🙂

we baked it setting in the middle of a pizza pan, didn’t use foil to protect the crust, and it came out perfect. I suppose if you tried it right next to another apple pie it might not taste as sweet, but on its own it tasted great and I certainly didn’t feel like I was missing anything.

notes for next time:

  1. Use more nuts
  2. A full top crust would be fine
  3. Get a peeler

-Jordan