Valentine's Day 2011

This year Valentine's Day was extra special.

#1. Our first V-day as a married couple

#2. It was also our 6-monthversary of being married

#3. Ryan planned it like 4 months in advance

Dinner was AWESOME. We went to Via Toscana, a great Italian place in Louisville that was having a special 5-course dinner for the holiday. The food was, simply put, amazing. It rivaled what we had on the cruise ship during our honeymoon!

On the way to the game, we picked up our nephews, Ethan and Jared - we had a couple extra tickets and thought that they would have fun!

The game was pretty fun...for the first 18 seconds, after which the Avs got somewhat clobbered. Ending score: 9-1. We all enjoyed being there, but wished that we had been rooting for the Flames instead!

We had a fun Valentine's Day and I'm so glad that I get to spend that holiday with such a stud every year!

Breathe Easier

A few Saturdays ago, the weather was fantastical, and Ryan and I decided that it did not merit sitting around the house. So out we went!

Our journeyings led us to Fort Collins Nursery. Of plants. We thought our home needed a little sprucing up, and figured a couple of house plants would take care of that for us.

We bought one cute little plant for Ryan's cubicle at work. That way he could feel like he had a little bit of nature with him even though he can't see the light of day from where he sits.

We also got a couple other beauties, including a money tree. It has an adorable braided "trunk", and it loves us!

See all those somewhat lighter green leaves on the top? Those are all new since we bought it! I feel so proud. However, it may have to move its living locale soon because it is going to cover up our wedding picture, and that is not OK.

Brain Food

I have recently made a goal to not use a recipe for the majority of my cooking. I still like to peruse my cookbooks for ideas, but try not to actually look at a recipe while I'm making dinner. I like to call these dishes my "Brain Food". It is something that I really enjoy doing, and know that if I want to be good at it, I need to practice and use the knowledge that I gained at culinary school. It's been four years since I graduated from it, and stuff is starting to fade, which I hate because I read recipes and realize that I have forgotten that I know how to do something (i.e. blanch and shock).

Another motivation for cooking this way is that 90% of the time Ryan enjoys dinner more when I don't use a recipe. I'm hoping that I can continue to keep that percentage!

The only "bad" part about not using a recipe is that it makes it a lot harder to share my concoctions with you because I never measure anything. On Tuesday I made something I called Tomato Basil Chicken. Ryan raved about it, and insisted that I write down the recipe. So I did! The measurements of the spices are guesstimates, but everything else is pretty accurate.

Let me know if you try it, I'm curious to hear if you enjoyed it as much as we did!

Tomato Basil Chicken

Ingredient list:

1 lb boneless skinless chicken breasts, cut into strips

2 garlic cloves, minced

Olive oil

5 whole white mushrooms, sliced

1 large tomato, blanched and shocked*, diced

1/3 C chicken broth

1-15 oz bottle of light Alfredo sauce, divided

1 tsp dried basil

1 T dried minced onion

Salt and pepper to taste

Sauté garlic and chicken strips in olive oil. Meanwhile, in a separate sauté pan, cook mushrooms over medium heat in small amount of olive oil, adding minced onion and chicken broth after 2 minutes. Allow to simmer. Add tomatoes and Alfredo sauce, bring to a slow simmer. Add basil to cooked chicken; stir to incorporate. Season both sauce and chicken with salt and pepper. Serve sauce over chicken.

Yield: 3-4 servings

*Blanched and shocked: cut out the leafy top of the tomato and slice an "x" into the bottom of the tomato. Plunge the tomato into boiling water for 30-60 seconds, or until the skin begins to break. Remove from the water and immediately put into an ice bath. This allows the skin to easily be removed and brightens the color of the tomato.

Holy COLD

Last night Ryan and I went to bed rather late for a "school night". He was designing my business card for me (thanks Babe!). After we turned out the lights, it could be seen through the windows that the sky wanted to snow. Yay for snow!! We woke up to pretty little flurries, and I sent Ryan off to work in Boulder with an angel on his shoulder. (His travels were safe today.)

Then I went to school.

If it weren't for this magnificent work of art, I would have froze!

This coat was the most perfect of Christmas presents for a Colorado college student.

It was for days like today and tomorrow that this coat was made. As I walked around campus today, the temperature was a whopping 10 degrees, with a much lower windchill. Tomorrow's high is 2 degrees and all of the public schools are closed. However, the president of CSU is evil and will likely have us all trekking around campus despite the frost bite wielding weather.

But don't worry, Ryan said that I can wear his clava.

Soup!

On Tuesday night I decided to make soup. I very rarely make soup from scratch (or from a can). Not quite sure why; I suppose that soup is just not "amazing" to me in most instances. I usually go for something a little more adventurous and different in my dishes. However, it has been requested of me to cook dinners a little more down-home-on-the-farm. I figured soup was a pretty safe decision.

So I whipped up some Southwest Chicken Corn Chowder that I found in one of my Healthy Cooking magazines. I added a few other spices, but left the salt out so that Ryan and I could both "season to taste". It was a hit! I went ahead and made the entire batch, since soup is such a great leftover once the flavors have melded, and it's so easy to freeze too!

Give this soup a try the next time the weather is chilly. It's delicious!

I left on a jet plane

During Ryan's hiatus in Neenah, Wisconsin, I hightailed it to Springfield, Illinois, to spend about a week with my sister Crystal and her family. It was a fantastic distraction from Ryan being gone! Only bad part about the trip was that Ryan was bored out his gourd and I was..well...not.

The trip started out with a fun surprise fly-in by my dad to celebrate his 28th anniversary with my mom! She was definitely not expecting it, and it was really fun to have him there for the weekend. In fact, Ryan was only a 6-hour drive away, so he came down to spend the weekend with us too! It was fun to have all three couples and my two nieces together for a couple of days.

Every day was filled with fun activities: going out to lunch and shopping with Crystal, going out to dinner a couple of times, going to see The Tourist, playing games, watching old family-classic movies, going bowling, and going to Chuck E. Cheese!

I brought some exercise videos with me, and Brielle loves to "participate". She hangs in for about 5 minutes and then comes and goes sporadically. I enjoy having her company and hope that she always loves working out!

When it was time to go home, it was sad to say good-bye, but I couldn't wait to see my stud-of-a-man waiting for me when I got off the plane!

Thanks for letting us invade you for a bit Crystal, it was a very fun vacation!

I'm alllll alone....

Ryan starts his new job tomorrow!

Before he was officially hired, he asked the HR contact that he had been talking to about travel; how often and for how long. She told him that hardly anybody ever travels, and when they do, it's usually no more than a week.

See that big red dot? The one by Chicago, very close to Lake Winnebago? That is where Ryan is, and I am not. He will be there for the next 2 weeks! So much for sparse travel - his first two weeks on the job are spent more than one thousand miles from ME.

On a happier note, upon finding out about this business trip, Ryan was brilliant enough to suggest that I spend the time without him with my older sister in Illinois! So my mom and I have a flight out there in a few days until the end of Ryan's trip. I am excited for that great distraction, and I hope that the next few days go by quickly!