Salad!!!!

I bought lettuce this week because it was on sale, and I have ate (eaten?) a salad every single day.
I am addicted!
I guess that is a great thing to be addicted to though.
I think it's mostly because I have found the most delicious salad dressing. and shockingly enough it is not caesar - formerly the ONLY dressing I ate.
Wishbone Creamy Italian = delicious.

and I made homemade pizza the other day.
the last time I made homemade dough it didn't rise enough this time it raised too much!
well Lee thought so anyway, I like a nice thick pizza dough

What's for dinner

I realized I've been writing a lot about desserts... so I thought I'd share some of what we've been eating for dinner recently.

- Spinach Chicken Alfredo Pizza, with homemade dough I might add - yum yum yum!  (this picture was taken before it was baked)

- Regular Pizza too
- Teriyaki Chicken Stir Fry -onions, carrots, bell peppers, rice, and gasp -lentils!? haha
- Pumpkin soup and cheese quesadillas for dipping :)
- Chicken and homemade dumplings - I was really happy about this one.  My mom makes dumplings and they are so good, so I was happy to have mine turn out just as good!! and the dumplings are just flour and eggs, who would have thought! lol
- Tacos, something we eat at least every 10 days or so...
- Hamburgers and Macaroni & Cheese - one of my favorite, easy meals.... loooove Macaroni!
- Spaghetti
- Omelets - Lee has finally approved my omelet making skills.  He truthfully is really really good at making eggs.... but he trusts me now.  I don't eat omelets so I never made them before.  but poor guy he just gets onions, peppers, and cheese in his.... bacon and sausage is too expensive & fattening. lol.  When Lee eats an omelet I just have a fried egg and toast.
- Chicken Sandwiches and fries
- Pot Roast - yay for a crockpot!!  I really like pot roast, and Lee does too, he just doesn't really love potatoes so he doesn't like them in pot roast..... weirdo.
- Chicken, mashed potatoes, and peas - easy and home-y.
- Alfredo - we eat pasta a lot.... we have Chicken Alfredo probably once a week. Homemade sauce now too... jar sauce is too expensive & with cream cheese I can make it sooo much better anyway.



Ok, that's enough..... I think I have pictures of some of these meals somewhere... or at least pictures of other things I've wanted to blog about. so I'll try to update more frequently.!
now.... what to have tonight ??

Cinnamon Rolls

On Sunday afternoon I was just sitting at home alone and got in the mood to bake something.
We don't buy many "snacks" here in Grenada.  Mostly because it is too expensive, so I am excited to try baking more.
I decided to bake cinnamon rolls because that is one of Lee and I's favorite things.  When we first got married and were living in West Virginia we would go to Kroger grocery shopping together (the good old days) and we would always end up buying a can of cinnamon rolls and making them when we got home and eating the entire pack in one sitting! haha, unhealthy, but so fun and delicious.

I found a recipe online that didn't require too much work or sitting around waiting for the dough to raise.

filling

• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 2 teaspoons cinnamon
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon butter, melted

dough

• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 1/4 cups buttermilk ( I substituted - 1 cup milk & 1tsp white vinegar)
• 6 tablespoonsbutter, melted

I mixed all the ingredients together for the dough and mixed the filling ingredients together until it looked like  sand.

I rolled out the dough into a rectangle, brushed on melted butter, and spread the filling on top

I then cut it into strips and rolled it up into 'rolls'.  This was really difficult for me ( my first time home making cinnamon rolls) maybe my dough was too 'wet' because they kept falling apart and coming open, so they didn't turn out that beautiful.... hence why some turned into more of a crescent roll.
and then by reading more recipes I found that it probably would have been easier to roll the entire piece of dough up into a 'log' and then cut it.  I'll know next time. and pur the rest of the melted butter on top! (LOTS of butter in this one, lol)

 Make sure you spray or butter the pan really, really well!! I found that a lot of the filling melted and ran out the bottom and caused them to stick.  Or perhaps I should have baked them less. ?
I baked them for 20 minutes on 425degrees.

I made a very small amount of icing to pour on top, because they already had so much sugar in them!!



Icing

•  2 tbs of cream cheese
• 1 tbs milk
• enough powdered sugar to make it thick

So I definitely learned a lot for what to do next time, and they turned out delicious regardless!

Home cooking!

I'm still cooking.... every single day in fact, I just haven't been updating as much.. and this summer I'm afraid there's going to be less updates for this housewife, considering my house is being taken away.  But as of now I've made a few things lately that I'm pretty proud of!

1.  Jerk Chicken and Fruit Salsa Sub!  This is my very favorite sandwich.  They serve it at the Owl here and Lee and I love it so I decided to try to make my own version and it came out very successful if I do say so myself :)
To make the salsa I cut up
tomato, red bell pepper, watermelon, and cantaloupe -put it in a jar with some vinegar and honey and shook it up really good and let it sit in the fridge for a few hours.
For the chicken I just used a packet of jerk seasoning I got at the grocery store and mixed it with some soy sauce, lime, and oil. 

2.  Pumpkin soup and cream cheese sandwiches - pumpkin soup is a new addition to my cooking rotation, appearing about once a month... replacing tomato soup, which I like and Lee doesn't so much.  Some days I just really feel like soup and a sandwich!  When I made the soup I had planned on just having grilled cheese, but then I felt like something different so I googled sandwiches made with cream cheese and found one that "Kids Love!" haha sound like Lee and I so I made it & we did love it!  It's cream cheese with cucumber, carrot, and apple cut up in it & you could add nuts but we didn't have any.
ps. note my little cactus display and my magazine basket I made :)

3.  Texas Road House night!
Ok so the only thing that resembled Texas Roadhouse this night was the steak and cinnamon butter...  but it was still good, and you gotta make do with what you have!  We had, steak, potatoes, corn, and cornbread.  I forgot to buy rolls at the store so we ended up having cornbread that I made on the stove top... it turned out delicious, just a little stuck to the pan... and the cinnamon butter was soooooo good. I think I want some right now...
I just melted some butter with a little honey and stirred in cinnamon & put it back in the fridge to get a little harder again.
For the steak I actually marinated it in Italian dressing and soy sauce... some recipe I found online & it was great! not quite as great as Roadhouse, but close. 

and for some reason the photo is rotated the wrong way... how do I fix this?? anyway, you get the gist.

So...now I'm off to find something interesting to make for dinner tomorrow night!

Pumpkin Soup

Last week a friend and I went downtown and ended up at the smoothie shop, I have yet to go to St. George's without a stop there... it's so hot outside and smoothies are so refreshing!! but they also serve different soups for lunch (not quite as refreshing in the heat..) it was only 10:30 but my friend Chris is almost 9 months pregnant so it was lunch time, we asked if we could have a taste of the pumpkin soup because I had heard it was good... and it was! 
A couple days later I was in the grocery store and they had several chunks of pumpkin in the produce section, and it was really cheap! so I asked the lady who was putting the produce out how to make pumpkin soup.. and she replied in very Grenadian fashion with something like "just cut it up, boil it and add spices"
ok... so that's what I did! and then improvised... I added onions for flavor and after it had cooked for a while and was looking pretty thin I decided to add a little cream cheese and milk to thicken it and make it a little richer, and it was delicious!  Lee liked it and he was very skeptical about the pumpkin soup...
I got enough pumpkin to make a pot of soup for $4EC! that's like $1.50!
I found a website with several different recipes and I want to try a couple of them whenever the store gets more pumpkin in!  http://www.mom-mom.com/pumpkin_soup_recipes.htm
Hopefully pumpkin soup will become an autumn staple in our family.... or at least around the holidays!
I took a picture... but it doesn't do it justice, it just looks like baby food :)

bad housewife ?

I feel like I've been a bad housewife lately...
I was sick for a good week straight & didn't do much...  & I just get so busy doing other things & come home and am so exhausted I don't want to cook or do dishes!
I even have a maid that does the cleaning! and we are banned from doing laundry monday-friday because of the drought so I don't even have to do that until Saturday!
but I still dread the thought of dishes!!!!!!!!!!
yesterday was unusually bad........
we went on a trip with the SOs about an hour away, and spent the entire day in the sun and heat & then on the way back our bus over heated and we had to stop and it was hot and riding a bus over mountains is no fun so I didn't feel great and I came home and realized that we had NO clean plates and our only skillet was dirty. no clean dishes=no dinner.
It's not that big of a deal for us to have no clean plates because we only own 6.
so I was whining to Lee about the dishes (I'm ok to admit that I whine sometimes) and he said "it's ok, you've had a rough day, go get chinese food from the bus stop"
yesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss
I have the best husband.
and even better... later that night HE did the dishes :)
he loves me too much.

I'm usually not that bad, I typically do the dishes twice a day because we have so few they all get dirty quickly, but yesterday, I was through with dishes. and got a delicious dinner out of it.

Today I cooked beef and noodles for dinner, a first since being in Grenada.  I found beef tips pretty cheap at the store so I thought I'd give them a go... I left them on low cooking while I went to the grocery today and when the housekeeper came she turned it off so they didn't cook quite as much as I would have liked, but still turned out good.  I had planned on making mashed potatoes too, but once again, the only pot I own had the beef and noodles cooking in it. ugh.
and later after dinner I made us peanut butter milkshakes with our new blender :)

In other news, I paid the deposit for our apartment today!! yay for a place with an oven and pots and pans!

Fat certianly does taste good!

Fried chicken breasts

We LOVE Yams!!
These turned out really good...
I cut them up, boiled them until they were soft, but not quite mash-able
drained the water and put them back on the stove 

added a little butter and brown sugar 

cooked them a couple minutes more so the sugar stuck

corn with butter and cream cheese!
my Mom had this in a restaurant once and started making it at home
and Lee LOVED it
I don't like corn that much... but cream cheese and butter make everything taste good!! 

In college I was telling a professor I had about something I had cooked (when I had my first apartment with some friends and we were coming up with meals all the time...) and I told her I made the very best mashed potatoes by using heavy whipping cream instead of just milk... and she looked a little taken back and said "well, fat certainly does taste good!"  hahahahaha so the girls I lived with and I started saying this all the time about everything we'd eat! aaaahhhh the precious days we spent living in a barn :)
We lived in a converted barn, turned awesome apartment!  It was part of a bed and breakfast.

We lived on the bottom right hand side. 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, giant kitchen, cozy little living room.... :)

we had a huge yard with a gazebo!!
we had the best labor day picnic here....

the 4 of us at our labor day picnic!

 I miss these girls so much!!
we all got married this past summer....
our apartment was WEDDING central our senior year of college!

my friend Tiffany has "Barn life Wednesdays" on her blog, it's so cute! and made me miss our barn :(

Bake sale minus the bake...

Today we had a bake sale for the Limes After School Program.  We need money to pay the rent for the building we use and supplies for the kid.
since I don't have an oven I made rice crispy treats... I had to do it in about 4 different batches because I only have one pan (which I bought yesterday specifically for this, because I realized I didn't have anything to put them in to let them 'set up' and actually be square...just a disposable foil pan for $5ec but it was small) so I would make a pan, then stick it in the freezer so it'd harden quicker, cut them and wrap them in plastic wrap and then start over....  I think I ended up with about 30 big squares... they sold for $3EC each, a little bit more than $1US.
We made over $760EC!!! which is about $285US!!
Our rent is $100EC a month so that covers it for the rest of the term and leaves money for supplies!
So many people donated baked goods... and delicious baked goods!
Apple cake, chocolate peppermint cake, pumpkin bread, banana bread with chocolate chips, brownies with pb swirl, chocolate macaroons, chocolate cookies, chocolate chip cookies, mini pies...

My mountain if rice crispies

I made something else, but then decided not to take it to the bake sale... saltine cracker candy... you can make it a lot of different ways.  My mom makes a toffee chocolate version. 
You break saltines into about 4-6 pieces or so each and lay them in a pan or on wax paper.

Melt butter and brown sugar on bring to a boil to get thick and then pour over the crackers and then pour melted chocolate on top and let harden. 

This is one of Lee's favorites!  My mom made it for him at Christmas and I had forgotten how good it was until I was thinking about no bake desserts!

I made mine with peanut butter and white chocolate chips because I had them left over from the pancake experiment! 

The same as before I broke saltine crackers (you can probably use other crackers... but saltines are nice and salty and don't over power the other flavors) and spread them in a pan.
then melted a little bit of butter and peanut butter in the microwave.  I added a little powdered sugar to the melted pb so it would cool a little thicker and hold nicely on the crackers.  That is how I make fudge, butter, pb, and powdered sugar, but I didn't use as much as I would for fudge... just a bit to kinda thicken it.

I poured that over the crackers... they weren't completely drenched in peanut butter but had a good coating, I didn't want too much to go through the cracks because you want the bottom of the dessert to be cracker so you can hold it in your hand.
Then I poured melted white chocolate chips on top of that.

Melting the white chocolate chips was way more difficult than I thought it would be..... I wasted quite a bit trying to get it to thin and get runny.... it just got hard and clumpy!
So after some google-ing, I turned my microwave's power setting to 60% and added a small big of vegetable oil.  I was melting about a half cup of chocolate and used about teaspoon of oil. and it worked much much better.  White chocolate is hard to melt because it actually isn't chocolate at all... and what I was using (Nestle) wasn't even made with cocoa butter like most white chocolate is... it was just some sugar and palm oil concotion... so the slightest amount of moisture will 'sieze' the chocolate and make it clump. you need to use a very dry bowl and spoon too.

or just use regular chocolate, white is difficult!  or I read that the bars of baking chocolate work much better than chips because chips are made to keep their shape even while baked at 400degrees.... and bar chocolate is meant to be melted... makes sense huh?

I put the dessert in the refrigerator to get hard for a while and then cut it into squares, even though it doesn't cute into perfect squares and crumbles a little, it is delicious!!

Blueberry, white chocolate pancakes!

I found the white chocolate chips at foodfair for a little less so I bought them, just for this!
I just used jiffy muffin mix and added the white chocolate chips
The kopykat recipe (like Denny's pancake puppies) called for them to be deep fried.... and that would probably be amazing, but I just made them like pancakes and it was delicious!

and we had scrambled eggs to make it more like a meal than just dessert :)

lots of randomness

yesterday I went Cactus Hunting.... haha. read about the adventure on my other blog.
but I now have a cute little family of cacti on my table... I might decorate the cans they're in.

Frozen pizzas... they only cost $5EC & if you microwave on a low power setting & then put in the skillet for a couple minutes the bottom gets crunchy and tastes like it was baked in an oven!

plantain chips again!! I took my sister Mandy & my friend Alfonso's advice & after they had cooked for a tiny bit I smashed them & then fried them some more & they were so good!!

Cajun Chicken Alfredo

Today I found Cajun seasoning at the grocery store so I was excited to use it.  Lee and I really like spicy pasta dishes.... especially  Cheesecake Factory's Chipotle Chicken Pasta and Red Lobster's Cajun Chicken Linguine... sooooooooooooo good!

If you have never had either one then you are missing out on two incredible meals. haha.
Cheesecake Factory is over the top good because they use honey glazed chicken, asparagus, red and yellow peppers, frozen peas, and onions.... and topped with little crunchy tortilla chip slivers. 

This is a picture of me eating it the day after our wedding, in Columbus, OH on our way to the airport. See how happy I am? and it's not all because I was a newlywed :)

anyway.... it's good.
I didn't quite match up to that tonight, but I came close.
I made a really good creamy, cheesy alfredo sauce using butter, milk, garlic, cream cheese, parmesan cheese, and I used the local "cheddar" cheese that I get at the grocery store... which is 0 like cheddar, but not like mozzarella, but it turned out really really good!  I don't really measure... I just added more cream cheese or milk as needed.
I sauteed onions and red, yellow, and green bell peppers and then added it to the sauce while I cooked chicken and the noodles.
It's difficult to make a meal with only 2 burners, 1 pot, 1 skillet, and NO oven! I had to wash my pan out twice during this process!
and to top it off I found the most incredible breadsticks today at Foodfair for only $3EC for like 8 breadsticks! I froze the rest to use another day...
and as I mentioned we have no oven... I creatively put the breadsticks over top the pot of noodles to let the steam melt the butter and warm them!

did I mention that they were GIANT breadsticks? We were stuffed!

Copy Kat Craving

 I want these!!!!
Denny's Blueberry and White Chocolate Pancake Puppies!
mmmmmmmm sounds incredible

http://www.copykat.com/2010/02/15/dennys-blueberry-and-white-chocolate-pancake-puppies/

I will post soon if I give in and buy the white chocolate chips to make these....

Homemade Potato Chips!

my friend Amber said that she made potato chips (they are hard to come by in Grenada...)
so I wanted to try, and they turned out amazing!!!

1. I cut the slices really really super thin.... you could almost see through some of them.
2. I put the slices into a bowl of ice water for about 30min (like I do french fries, it's supposed to make them crispier)
3. I layed them out on a towel to absorb the water off of them (all of these chips came from 1 potato!)

4. I cooked them in a hot frying pan of grease on medium heat (I used enough oil to cover the chips)
5. I flipped them over once they started to brown.. it only took about a minute or so

6. I put them on a paper towel to absorb the grease & salted them immediately!

7. Lee and I ate the entire plate like a couple pigs

ice cold.... salad

lately I have wanted to eat nothing else but salad!
I was really sad to find out that they don't sell caesar dressing here! it is Lee and I's favorite! so instead I got creamy italian and it's very good also.

I like my salad really really cold. like Ruby Tuesday's salad bar... it's always packed in the ice & so fresh and cold! I like to cut up my lettuce and/or spinach and put it in the freezer while I chop up the other stuff so it's gets super cold!
For the most part I am not very adventurous with my salad. I just started eating salad about 4 years ago when Lee forced me to take a bite of caesar salad, but I was instantly hooked! I LOVE caesar salad... how I went 19 years of my life without eating it I will never know... and I got my sister Molly, who is equally as picky, to eat it & her little girls eat it now too! especially from Texas Roadhouse. mmmmmmmmmm they have the BEST!
My salad usually consists of the following... lettuce and/or spinach, carrot shreds, cucumbers, cheese, boiled egg, and croutons.  Lee doesn't like egg, but I love it!

for dinner the other night I just wanted salad, but I made hamburgers too because Lee is a big man who needs more food than that :) and we had our star fruit!  I recently found star fruit that is a lot more orange than what we've had before and it's a lot sweeter... but we still sprinkle sugar on top of it, it's like dessert!

sure this dinner wasn't fancy, but it's a typical night for us

Sometimes I feel bad because I like to eat my hamburgers plain, with just ketchup so I forget to give Lee any toppings... usually he doesn't even get cheese! I just forget... but he never complains.  The yellow bottle is banana ketchup, it's made locally. It takes almost exactly like regular ketchup... I was a little disappointed, I wanted it to taste crazy, but instead it's just ketchup, only yellow. 

Plantain chips!

today I perfected plantain chips!
this was the 3rd time I have made plantain, and the 2nd attempt at 'chips'
for some ridiculous reason, the first time I made them I started cutting the plantain by slicing it down the middle.... length wise. as soon as I did it I was like, why did you do that! so we had long strips of plantain that day... with brown sugar. they were really sweet and so good!!
Lee suggested I make chips (apparently they sell them in the vending machine where he worked) so the next day I attempted to do so but turns out Lee prefers his chips really crispy, and I like mine crisp, but with a little softness in the middle. so he wasn't quite satisfied.
alas today I decided to try again, we were having shredded chicken sandwiches for lunch after church... and in honor of valentines day, I thought to myself, I should cut the chips into little hearts! i cut a little v into the whole plantain at once and then sliced the chips... but they did NOT look like hearts.
I cut them soooooooo thin and they turned out delicious! I took mine out of the pan a little sooner than Lee's so his would be cripier.
and he LOVED them! 
he kept talking about how good they were, examining them closely, commenting about how I could sell them because they were better than the ones from the vending machines........ and he never noticed that they were supposed to be cut into hearts. HA!
I was waiting for him to say, why do these look like pac mans?? or what happend to them? lol.. but nothing. He just gobbled them down and I never mentioned it.

My chicken sandwiches (which my mom is famous for making) turned out the best they ever have!!! I made  them last night and let them sit in the fridge overnight & they soaked up all the good flavor.
and. I'm pretty proud of this idea... they got a little dry last night & I didn't have any chick broth or stock, or bullion cubes.... so I opened a can of chicken noodle soup & used the broth off of it! perhaps that's something most people would have done.... but I thought it was pretty smart of me :)

it looks a little gross here..... but is soooooooo good! 

a Cooper family favorite :)

Tomorrow Lee has his first tests of medical school!!! He's been studying like a fiend.  So we didn't celebrate Valentine's Day today..... well not really. we had really good lunch and dinner though, if I do say so myself... dinner was penne and alfredo with chicken, onions, and bell peppers and garlic bread, our favorite meal by far.
but tomorrow we're going OUT! :) and to the beach! together!

microwavin

I've been experimenting with baking in the microwave... I've made brownies and pizza crust so far and they have turned out really well!
I'm debating about making cookies. chocolate chips are $16EC and then you need all the other ingredients too! and peanut butter is really expensive too.... and they don't sell premade cookie dough, or I would buy it and just eat it. and I haven't seen any pre-made mix either.  Brownie mix and pizza dough mix are only about $5EC, so we'll stick with that I guess.
I may make peanut butter fudge sometime soon, I've been craving it... but for now jello and pudding are our desserts.

Here is how I made the stuff in the microwave....

Pizza
- got the Martha White mix that you just add water and oil to.
- mixed it up and let it sit covered up for 5minutes
- made two balls of dough
- pressed one down on a plate to form a mini pizza
- poked holes all over it
- put it in the microwave on 20% power setting and let cook for about 4-5 minutes... I watched it until I saw it was rising
- took it out and it had baked pretty well, it just didn't get brown.
- so I stuck it in the frying pan to brown and crisp it up!
- and it worked!!
- I then added our toppings..... which saddly consisted of the following. spaghetti sauce (beacuse I was too cheap to buy pizza sauce for an experimental pizza) adobo powder seasoning (because I use it for everything!!! salt, pepper, garlic... and other stuff all in one!) parmesan cheese, and really thinly sliced cheddar-ish cheese (sliced b/c we don't have a grater, and cheddar-ish because it says cheddar but is really light orange and doesn't taste like cheddar, but it's good! and once again I didn't want to buy mozzarella cheese for an experiment)
and it was GOOD! we loved it. I want to make it again soon to cure my pizza cravings!

skillet pizza? haha

actually quite delicious!

and for the brownies... I just followed directions and poured half the batter into a plastic microwavable storage container, because that's all we have besides bowls and plates, and microwaved it on about a 20% power setting until the top didn't look wet anymore!

it makes a really fudgey brownie, not cake-like at all... but still good.
the first batch I made I cooked it on about a 50% power setting and they were good for the first 15 minutes while tHey were hot... and then turned to BRICKS! so cook them slooooooow.

and sorry no pictures. we ate them quickly :)

Star Fruit

I found star fruit really cheap, so we have been eating it like crazy.
I've found the very best ways are to eat it cold with a little sugar sprinkled on top to take away some of the sourness... and to grill it. it tastes so much sweeter when it's just cooked a tiny bit.
I found a website with about 4000000 recipies for using star fruit, so I'll be trying some of them out.
Here's what we had the other night. and it was GOOD.
Chicken, bell peppers, onions, and star fruit.
and we had potatoes

and it's pretty! i love pretty food

There IS a difference between sweet potatoes and yams!

On Friday I got the chance to go downtown St. George's and go to the local market! I was so excited to see everything they had and the people.
I bought what I thought to be sweet potatoes... but once I got them home and cut them open I realized they were white inside... so we googled it and found out that they are actually yams.  They grow yams in South America, the Caribbean, and Africa.  They are white-ish in color, a bit dryer than sweet potatoes, and a lot sweeter!  I microwaved them just like you would a baked potato and we didn't even add brown sugar, just butter, they were that sweet!! and hopefully just as nutritious.... but I wonder if they are because they are white ? they say that the brighter the color the better for you things are.... hmm.

Don't throw away the toilet paper rolls!!!!

 

Would you believe that I made this out of 2 old toilet paper rolls?? I did! I just googled ways to re-use tp rolls (b/c I'm pretty much reusing everything we have.... and we have lots of toilet paper). I saw a picture of flowers, made of out toilet paper or paper towel rolls, so I decided to try for myself.

You just cut it into little circles and glue them together how ever you want, after I put the glue on I put paper clips on to hold it together.  I squeezed some of them to make it look a little more like leaves and left some rounded to look like a flower.

I put it on my closet door.... and I just really really love it and the way the shadows come off of it. It's so whimsical.  Even Lee loves it... he keeps making comments about it. maybe just because he know I like it and am proud of it... but either way he likes it.
I'm going to try to think up a way to make one for his closet... that's not flowers. maybe just like swirls...

and here's a look into our dinner the other night.

Chick-Fil-A style chicken nuggets, homemade french fries and onion rings.

unhealthy, maybe... but tastes sooooo good.  I like to make things like restaurants b/c we will hardly ever go out to eat here...

To make the chicken you cut it up into nugget sized pieces or strips or whatever you want and soak it in heavy cream and egg for about a half hour. I just used the boxed milk that we get b/c it is a little sweeter and thicker than regular milk.... or you can use regular milk, I have before. but the very very (and probably most fattening) time was when I used the cream.
and I've found that if the chicken is still a little frozen then it cuts into chunks really nicely and doesn't feel as gross to touch.
so then you mix the batter, which is flour, powdered sugar, salt, and pepper.   I don't measure really, but I use more flour than the sugar... it just depends on how sweet you want it to taste. Lee loves it sweet.

and I double dip... from the wet mix, into the dry, back to the wet, back to the dry, and then into the pan. at home I would deep fry it, but we don't have that luxury here, just one small frying pan.

I even used my pot to cook the french fries... didn't go over so well, they stuck to the bottom a lot, so they were kinda chopped up, but still tasted really really good. Lee said they tasted exactly like Swiss Chalet, for those of you Canadians who know that restaurant.

a tip about homemade french fries that I learned on the food network once, is to let them soak in ice water after you cut them up, it makes them crispier! 

and at last minute I decided to make onion rings using the same recipe as the chicken (separate bowls of course) and the were the BEST onion rings ever...