Improve wrapping paper

On Saturday we went to a friend's birthday party. We got him a cheese knife set. Being a newly wed couple we don't have any wrapping paper and all his mom has is Christmas wrapping paper, so we got creative. While going through some boxes Daniel found some comic books that had some water damage or the covers were missing, so we re-purposed it rather than throwing them away. So we took two middle pages of the Superman Comic book and fashioned a wrapping paper. The pages were pretty brittle so I had to be very gentle when folding it. I think it came out very cool and we were happy with it and if you get a present wrapped in comic book pages just admire our creativity :)

Buffalo Chicken Egg Rolls

So I found this recipe on Pinterest. I love Pinterest, it gives me so many ideas and great recipes. So this one caught my eye because it was a new twist on buffalo wrap. 

 So we took an egg roll and but broccoli slaw in it ( I think if we made these again I would put more slaw in)

 Next we put some shredded chicken which we covered in a hot sauce/ranch mixture to cut the heat ( we are going to try an actual wing sauce next time)

 Next was blue cheese crumbled on top

 Then we rolled them up

 A bit of water to seal up the roll

 Cooked them on a wire cooling rack a sprayed with cooking oil (make sure to coat both sides)

All cooked. I think they were good, I would have preferred more heat and less blue cheese. Hopefully we will make them again and be able to play with the recipe a little.

Plant

So one of our gifts was a flower pot ( thank you Midgely's!) and we had some pods from a spider lily from his parents backyard. We planted 5 pods and we planted them at the beginning of the month.

 So our first shoot came up about 2 weeks after we planted

We now have three shoots coming up. The middle sprout has been growing very quickly. We are very excited to see it continue to grow.

Buddhist Temple

So for one of our Thursdays we went to this Buddhist Temple to see what it was and how it looked. This temple is on one of Daniel's pool routes and he has wanted to look at it and so we did :)

I think it is very cool all the different religions that are practiced here and the cool buildings they make. It was a very nice landscape and very peaceful.

Youth Conferece Continued

                We, meaning little Kevin, loaded up the truck and we were on our way to Cleburne

We had to stay twenty minutes away from the actual place Youth Conference was because there were no rooms available, but we were happy to be able to sleep on real beds and not on the hard ground.

That night we went and set up the stove and made sure we were near a water hook up and electric outlet. 

We headed back to the hotel, had some Dairy Queen and a friendly race in the hotel pool. We were in bed right after 10 so we could get up at 5 the next morning. YIKES! Breakfast was served at 7:30 and we had eggs to cook, sausage to heat up and gravy. 

I was put on orange juice duty, little Kevin just did anything he was told to do (sometimes it was helping me chip away the ice from the orange juice cans, and other times it was stirring Daniel's gravy while he cut fruit)

 Our knife worked like a gem, this was our free knife for registering from Calphalon not our set of knives.

   Daniel looking so happy at 6:45 cutting his oranges

Kevin brought us all aprons so we didn't get junk on our clothes. Daniel and I got ones with chili peppers

We served.. biscuits and gravy(with sausage in it), sausage patties which you saw me make, scrambled eggs, bananas and oranges. And orange juice (some said it was the best they every had).

One girl before we had started serving, I guess she had just gotten up and was thirsty, I had put all the juice coolers on the bench of the picnic table and when she came over "I said all of these are juice." "Where is the water?" "Over on the water table, over there." "Do I need to bring my own cup too? Or is there one over there?" I then turned to little Kevin, "do you think we should bring a water jug over here? Girl turned and yelled YES!
She was a piece of work, the rest of the morning we had to continually tell people which was water and which was juice.
I think we were a success, people came up for seconds and just to say thank you to us for waking up and cooking for them. I was also astonished at how many people didn't understand to hold your cup right up next to the spout so all the juice didn't end up every where, and when you did tell them, they would just kind of look at you and be like "What? Oh. Sorry." but whatever.

 I think we had about 150 people come through the line. Daniel was surprised how much girls could pack away and about the amount of boys that did NOT eat biscuits and gravy. To each his own I say.
              We had some leaders from our ward help serve the breakfast.

                 This is me helping clean up :)

Youth Conference

So Kevin (Daniel's Dad) was asked to make breakfast one morning of Youth Conference he accepted and then immediately enlisted us and little Kevin to help. We are making biscuits, sausage patties, sausage gravy, eggs and juice. Today since I had the day off was told to finish off the sausage patties. They were fully cooked I just had to get them browned and as much grease out of them as I could. Kevin had started them last night and I thought he was joking when he said I was going to be finishing them tomorrow, sadly I was mistaken.

 There were 15 bags like this that I had to finish up and then roll in aluminum foil in a log.

 The pan was so big I had to put it across 2 burners

 Eventually I started putting more in the pans to try and get them done a little more quickly

I had about 10 plate fulls that had more patties than these
It took me 2 hours to finish them all up and roll them in the foil. 

Words of Wisdom

So every Thursday Daniel and I have a date night, this usually entails us going to a Ross, T.J. Maxx, Burlington Coat Factory, that is further than our normal ones or a new one that we have just found, and finding a restaurant near by for dinner. Last week we had Chinese and hit up Ross T.J. Maxx AND Burlington, it was a very productive date lol. But our fortunes were SPOT ON

Daniel's

He first thought Utah :)

We are saving for a house payment :)

Animals of Texas

This will hopefully be an on going post just whenever I have a picture of a new animal.

HUGE duck!

Decor

While we were on one of our "walks" we found these two matching frames, one is an 8x10 the other has 8 places for a 4x6 image. They are both matted and something we wanted for wedding pictures.

 This was one of the pictures we were trying to  decide if we wanted big, but we like it with this set. We are currently in the process of getting a new print, however, because they just cut the sides instead of shrinking the image to fit the size.

I really like how these turned out. Just so I know you all know what the pictures are so... the upper left is the bridesmaids and me, the middle top of course is me, the upper right is my bouquet with our rings in it, the middle left is us cutting the cake, middle right is us by the temple doors, the bottom left is our snake shoes, middle bottom is Daniel obviously and the bottom right is Daniel and the groomsmen 

Big Ticket Items

Since we registered we have been looking forward to the day we got our pots and pans and our knife set. The knives are made from Japanese steel and look very pretty. We got these with a 20% off at BB&B and our gift cards.

We love them and are very excited to try them out!


Our pots and pans are the Contemporary Non-stick from Calphalon. We registered for a different set at each store. This particular set we found on Amazon. It is the biggest set (12 piece) and we got it for under $300! Our pieces came with a big stock pot,1 stew pot, 2 sauce pans like these, 2 frying pans, 4 lids, a steamer bowl and strainer insert.

Also excited to use these!