French Toast Casserole

Friday morning I had a little breakfast party.
3 of my friends came over for breakfast and then we went downtown St. George's to explore and take pictures.
I made french toast casserole & it turned out great!  and everyone seemed to like it :) so here is how I did it.
I'm not really that great for following recipes I usually change things or don't measure or something...  but I'll try to do my best!

ingredients:
1 loaf of bread (texas toast would have been great, but that wasn't an option)
5 eggs
milk -I'd guess about a cup? or a little more
vanilla -just a splash
sugar - about 1/4 cup
cinnamon - 1 teaspoon

-cut the slices of bread into 4ths and layer in a pan. I think I did about 3 layers deep.
-mix eggs, milk, sugar, cinnamon, and vanilla in a bowl & then pour over bread making sure to coat each slice and layer.
-cover and refrigerate over night

the next morning:
-bake casserole at 400degrees for about 10 minutes
-while it's baking mix butter and brown sugar in a skillet until it makes a syrup
-then remove casserole from oven & pour over top, and bake for another 10 minutes (or until the bread isn't too soggy anymore)

I like to serve mine with powdered sugar and syrup. 
I also thought bananas mixed in the butter and brown sugar concoction would have been really good, like bananas foster! but there were no bananas to be found on the island that day....

BACK!!

I had almost forgot about this other little blog I started....
I am in full "housewife" mode today and it reminded me to update!!
I will have to work on getting a new layout too, considering I don't live there anymore....

Things are mostly the same.... just different apartment.
Although I now have an oven!!!
and my laundry routine now includes a clothesline.

I will update about all my adventures in cooking, cleaning, and house-wifing soon.
but for now I am getting ready to check on a true housewife disaster....
I washed my navy blue tie-dyed dress with some other things & apparently it bleeds blue dye onto everything else!!!! I have had the dress for like a year.... I can't believe this is the first time it has ruined other clothes.
one thing I was sad about were my off white shorts that I have had since like 10th grade..... I'm going to attempt to recover them from my laundry mistake and get the dye out! wish me luck!

Memorial Day

 I've been on Polyvore today... it's a really fun website. especially when you're bored.
so I made some outfits with similar items to things I already own for Memorial Day, one of my favorite holidays of the year :)

homestretch

I got up at 6:30am to make Lee breakfast before his Biochem final (the last one! yay)
Yes, he woke me up.... but at least I told him to.

I've been watching Mad Men & it's set in the 60s & all the women are such syrupy sweet housewives... none of them are happy & their husbands are dirt bags & they all smoke like freight trains.... BUT it did make me think about how women actually did do every single thing at home & how Lee being consumed with medical school about 14-15 hrs a day makes me a 1960s housewife.
Dinner is ready for him when he gets home (as well as breakfast & lunch occasionally) I do the dishes, he always has clean laundry, I make the bed everyday, I even take the trash out. haha.... ugh it sound so depressing.  I don't mind it that much, especially since I don't have a real job, but even on days when I babysit and/or do some volunteer stuff I come home & am like.... are you serious I have to cook now? and in the real world Lee would be doing sooooo much more.  When we lived in West Virginia he did the dishes every single day and at least once a week he cooked.
I'm afraid those days are over, at least for the foreseeable future.
But I am so overwhelmingly proud of my husband for completing his first term of medical school and doing so well and still having time to love me and making sure I never feel neglected.

You make me happy to be alive!

I picniked a few picture with the lyrics to what has become kind of Lee and I's song... Firefly by Jimmy Needham.
His new album is coming out soon & we're both really excited... we're planning on listening to it the entire way to my parent's house... a 10 hr drive. haha

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!

a real housewife

I've been getting more and more house-wife-y/mother-ish as time goes on....
I notice myself doing things I can't believe I'm doing. 

For example, right now I am up at 7 on a Sunday so I can do laundry... we have scheduled laundry times once a week (to conserve water b/c of the drought) and I initially signed up for Saturday night 10-1am, because lets face it, I couldn't remember a time when I went to bed before 1am... but lately I've been going to bed early and getting up super early! it's very unlike me!  Yesterday I got up at 7am to go running before the heat of the day (which at 7 it's still too hot I found) so last night I was tired by 11 and went to sleep, having only done one load of laundry.  I knew no one was signed up for laundry this morning so I figured I could get mine done before church and I am.

There are lots of other things I've been doing & thought oh man that was just like my mom! like:

• The way I do dishes and clean things... I've been using my fingers a lot more.  I can remember watching my mom scrap food off of a plate with her fingers and thinking how gross it looked & the other day I was doing dishes and there was stuff left on a plate and I just started gathering up all the goop with my hands rather than finding a spoon or something to use & after I did it I thought.... why did I do that & why didn't it gross me out more?? 
• Raw ground beef... I hate to touch ground beef.  I used to find any way of making a hamburger patty without actually touching the raw meet & now I just dig my hands in there and squish it up. yuck. 
• Cooking new & unusual things & then eating it too! 
• Getting excited over new pots and pans

I'm really getting sad about leaving Grenada for the summer, mainly because Lee and I will be staying with family for almost 3 months and won't have our own little place.  I like it just the two of us and having complete control over the kitchen and what we eat and when and what we do... Lee's family eats dinner together every night & I just think it will be weird for Lee to come home from work and the entire family sits down for dinner that his mom cooked.... but I also think it would be weird to stay in the basement while they eat & then cook a separate meal for the two of us.  I guess I'll cook dinner sometimes for the family.... and Lee will probably have to work late some days.
I just know I am so excited to move into our apartment for next term!! Our first REAL apartment with a full kitchen and everything!  but then once we're finished in Grenada..... we're moving in with my parents for a while until Lee's clinical rotations start & so that will be weird all over again.... not so much for me, but probably for Lee. uugggghhhh medical school.
at least we'll be together :)