Good Stuff!

Growing, growing, and more growing...!

Many things in my life have really turned around lately. 

Many -if not most- for the better! And for that, I am truly thankful. 

However life has a funny way of balancing itself out.

       I have gained 30 "mama pounds", or at least that is what I am going to call them. (It makes me feel better!) Jared has been so sweet about it. For some reason, he thinks I look beautiful in a whole new way and seems pretty genuine about it! So I'd count that as a plus because mentally, emotionally and physically, I think I am doing pretty well for having this lil boy in my stomach for 34 weeks now. I have not even had a breakdown! Unless you count crying over silly little things like cute pictures on the internet a breakdown, because then I've had many, many breakdowns!

      In the past I brought up that we did not like our midwife. Well ya know what I did? I finally got the courage to change our care provider! With the support of our new Bradley Class friends (Bless our classmates and our teacher for being so wonderful!) Jared and I said enough was enough. We let it go on too long and now I wish I changed sooner! Our new midwife is only 15 minutes farther then our last and she is so comfortable to be around! I even feel a little sad because I will only get to see her for appointments during the next month or so until we have our baby and then *poof* she will be out of our lives! I think I am going to bake her some awesome pastries when this is all over.

Speaking of which, I never posted pictures of the carrot cake I made for my father in law!

Yes, it was amazing...

and yes, I am getting off topic but if you made a carrot cake this good, you too would be proud!

I'll be posting more good stuff soon, but it's but deeper and for now you can just enjoy some belly pics and a close up of cake. Hope you like it!

Life Lately and The Worlds Easiest Peanut Butter Cookies

I decided to stray from my usual eggplant recipe and make an eggplant pie of sorts. Awesome as always!

I like peanut butter and I like cookies but I don't really care for peanut butter cookies. 

They are far crunchier than cookies should be in my opinion. But my sister shared a super easy recipe with me and they turn out so chewy.  Mmmm! If you want to know how to make them...

Preheat oven to 350 °

1 Egg
1 Cup O' Sugar   ...you could borrow it from your neighbor if you don't have some!
1 Cup of Peanut Butter.

Mix until .....mixed?

Bake on cookie sheet for approximately 8 minutes. Add about 2 more minutes if you made 'em big like me.
Done!

Date # 5 Make a very fancy breakfast in bed. DONE!

The picture on the left is me getting all dolled up to go somewhere and the photo on the right is me being grubby and working on the garden. It is weeded and expended, ready for spring! 

We also completed Date #9 Make lemon meringue pie together. 

... But it was eaten so fast there were no pictures! Sorry!

Totally random but, I don't know why I never thought of layering tights before. I thought it looked pretty rad! 

Date # 17 Take a drive. Here, there, anywhere is now complete!

You can't tell in the photo above but there were so many swans flying above us!

The short way home.                                                 The long way home. 

We love Washington.

We also finished Date #16 

  Have a game night. Every kind of game! Cards. Console. Board games. 

FYI I have become rather vicious at Poker if I do say so myself. Watch out!

Spontaneous Pizza Bake Off

Problem: It's 9:00 pm and here we are with 4 different options for
late night left overs but I can't honestly say I want any of them.
Solution: I want pizza and I wont accept any less.
Problem: We don't even have half of the ingredients for crust or for
toppings and all the stores are closed.
Solution:      Wing it. 


We did not have yeast for one, but that was not going to stop me. I went to Allrecipes.com, (which I love by the way) because there is a section where you can type all the ingredients you would like to add and all the  ingredients  you would NOT like to add -OR- You could type "No yeast pizza crust" and a ton of real people's recipes pop up. It is a bonus that these are real people's recipes because there are a ton of people who comment on how they changed it to suit their taste, what could have been used as alternatives and because it is given a simple five star rating scale.

So we begin.

 

This is Jared already busy at work. We were torn between two kinds of pizza dough so this is what sparked the "competition"  I chose one with eggs, since I thought it would be interesting. Also, this picture was edited in Photobucket and I really do enjoy that site but I am getting pretty run down from the same editing features, if anyone has a good editing program let me know! I'd like to try something different :)

Where is Maps? It has been too quiet....

Figures! Why does she prefer bags and boxes over fancy toys?

So at this point I am already nervous. I know I can not bake, so what am I doing?! Jared's already looks like dough and mine looks like pancake batter. I read and re-read the intructions 100x

I am just going to call him lucky!

 Okay. So I admit, my egg-y pizza dough was failing miserably. I added way more flour to try and cancel out the thin, soup like texture... not helping one bit. And of course my husband was looking like he was making pizza straight from Italy and I was stuck making breakfast batter. Ugh! I just could not accept defeat, no way! Not that early on! Time for another plan...

 So here was my plan, I was basing this entirely off my first job at Little Caesars. They have really good cheesy bread and I thought I would go that route. I buttered up the pan and... just sort of *plopped* my unattractive dough into the baking pan and spread it out.  (seriously this was the best picture I could take. It looked awful)

 And here is Jared's. He made his own sauce and used the breakfast pizza idea using turk'y bacon, 2 raw eggs, mushrooms, red bell pepper and onion. I was proud of him but I still wanted a decent pizza on my end.

 Here was mine all done. I baked the crust for 10 minutes then added my Mexican inspired toppings. Refried bean sauce, cheese, jalapenos, chopped onions, tomatoes and chips on the side. It was edible but not AWESOME. However...

 Jared's was awesome and won hands down. The egg cooked perfectly and the crust and all toppings went together harmoniously. He did a really amazing job. :) I'll get you next time Jared!!!!!!!!