We have been eating a lot of soup the last few months. Soup is delicious! I suppose I have always thought so, but I feel like I have rediscovered my appreciation for it lately. It's hot and it doesn't require a lot of dirty dishes usually either. I like standard kinds of soup but I have trying my hand a number of new and interesting kinds too. There have been so many delicious ones I finally decided I should share them with one and all!
(Before I launch into the soups, I should add that I am a big fan of AllRecipes.com. I love the variety of recipes and I REALLY love that there are reviews. I feel like that provides something of a guarantee that the thing will be delicious. And they usually are--I have very rarely been disappointed with the results (*cough*fried cheese curds*cough*). Anyway, that is the story. Now the soup!)
Easy Chicken Fajita Soup
This was so so good. The funny thing is that it really IS just like fajita filling--all the pieces are in big long chunks. If I had wee ones, I would definitely make smaller pieces but it would still be just as tasty. I also followed a recommendation to make this to go along with and that was a very good decision.
Thai Chicken and Coconut Soup with Noodles
I don't know how authentically Thai this actually is, but I do know that it's really good. Coconut, cilantro, noodles?? So many things that I love in my food! It can turn out super salty so keep that in mind.
Chunky Chicken Noodle Soup
Sometimes we like traditional soup. I have tried several different chicken noodle soup recipes, but this one is my favorite. I like to throw in a potato. I made my own noodles once or twice--we had no rolling pin then so I used a can of biscuits to roll the dough out. True story.
Potato Clam Chowder
Another traditional soup--clam chowder is one of my very favorite soups. I tried a few different recipes, but I like this one because there's no cream so it's not super heavy or fattening. We like to occasionally watch our figures around here until dessert.
BLT Soup
It sounds kind of funky, but this soup is REALLY good. I feel almost as much pride in it as if I had made the recipe myself. I like this soup because there are a lot of shortcuts you can take in terms of quickness and healthiness--like bacon bits or turkey bacon or premade croutons. I also like throwing in a little radiatore just to give it a little something extra. Try it! You'll love it.
Well I think that is enough soup for one day. I heartily recommend them all, and if you try them, let me know what you think! And of course I am always happy to hear about new soup recipes.
I love Valentine's Day! I think I am a sucker for festivity. I just like to be excited about the things that everyone else is excited about, whether it leads to fun things for me personally or not. What's not to like about V-Day after all? Pink! Red! Sparkles! Flowers! Sparkles! Chocolate things!
As a singleton, I was always kind of annoyed by the whole S.A.D. thing. I mean, isn't Valentine's like any other holiday, big or small, in that if you WANT to have fun with that day then you can? Not that you have to go hog wild with every single holiday, but there's no reason for anyone to feel bitter and sad on Valentine's Day. You can have fun with your friends or family or by yourself, it doesn't matter if you don't have a valentine. In my second year at college I started a Valentine's tradition for myself where I would watch a Disney movie, and I had a great time every year. Now as a non-singleton, we still are doing that (amazingly, Mr. Graham had no trouble adopting that tradition).
Naturally I have more fun on Valentine's Day now with my buddy, but that's true of pretty much any occasions and I still don't feel like there was anything lacking in my earlier V-Days.
Anyway, here is my gift to all of you. I can't even tell you how many times I have watched it but it is a lot.
(I just watched it like four more times.)
On a not-really-related note, we finished watching Daria recently, which I had never seen before. It took a little while for me to get into, but I loved it by the end. I think we are going to be Daria and Trent for Halloween. Gee Quinn.
Let's rewind to Christmas. This year I did a couple of crafty things for people, even though I've always been snooty about the "homemade Christmas" thing (because I'm materialistic of course). Since I have a tendency to document my craftiness on my blog I will tell you about my Christmas crafties.
The first thing was some cookies. Okay, maybe they're not necessarily a craft, but I'm counting them anyway. This year we made cookies for Drew's family and my contribution was a gumdrop cookie (Drewbles made his BCEs*). I became acquainted with these cookies several years ago through my sister-in-law, Sarah, but had never made them myself before now. They were, if I may toot my own horn, rather a hit. So, for you curious folk who didn't get any and for you interested folk who did, here is the recipe, which is courtesy of Sarah's lovely mother.
Cream together 1 c. shortening, 1 c. brown sugar, 1 c. white sugar. Beat in 2 eggs. Sift together 2 c. flour, 1/2 t. salt, 1 t. baking soda, 1 t. baking powder and add in. Stir in 1 c. shredded coconut, 2 c. cut gumdrops and 2 c. oatmeal.
Cook at 350 for 11-15 minutes and then eat until you can eat no more.
I would add that mine didn't need quite all the flour. Also, make sure you buy FRUIT gumdrops and not spice gumdrops. I followed Sarah's lead and just bought fruit slices and had Mr. Graham cut them up for me into manageable smallish pieces.
My second Christmas craft was to make some more magnets, this time featuring the grandkids.
I was going to make a set for both my parents, but the craft store thwarted me and didn't have any in stock for all the many weeks before Christmas. In the end I used ones I had leftover from my England magnets but I only had enough for one set. Maybe one day they will sell the really clear stones again and I can make a nice new set.
My last Christmas craftible took the most time by far, but first, a story. Lo, these many years ago when I was wee tot of 5 or 6, my teacher at church gave us each a gold Christmas spider (along with the cheesy story I forgot soon after). Over the years my Christmas spider became quite infamous among the decorations, and the tree was never complete without it. In 2009 my mama sent it to me here and then, later, plaintively asked me to make her one for next year. I tucked that idea away for this year, and I made a spider for my parents and each of my siblings (and myself of course). Again the craft store thwarted me and I had to make white spiders instead of gold. But in the end, they turned out so cute anyway and I just wanted to hug and squeeze them all. Behold my little fleet (and a cameo from Boston Rob)!
And here is the original.
He's a little wonky these days, but now that I know how to make them, I'm thinking about pulling him apart and remaking him. But then he wouldn't be quite the same, would he? Oh, little Christmas spider, what larks we have had.
And that was Christmas. The crafty part anyway...maybe this whole "homemade Christmas" is okay after all.
*Best Cookies Ever.
There's an artist on dA that does some funny things. One funny thing she did recently is this:
It was a big hit and led to some altered versions by others. This is my favorite, for obvious reasons:
Hah! Everything is better with dinosaurs. Unfortunately I can't tell you who did this one, but whoever you are, I tip my hat to you, sir/madam/mademoiselle.
On a completely unrelated note, little Vera has just been a basket case for well over six months now. I thought it was because she picked up not one but two viruses in a pretty short amount of time last spring. And, yeah, that probably didn't help but months later she was still taking a ridiculous amount of time to boot up/shut down/open Firefox/open anything. Finally last week I had a little suspicion that maybe my antivirus software was the culprit. So Friday night it was in with the new (avast) and out with the old (symantec) and Vera has perked right up to her old delightful self. I would say symantec served me well, but remember those two viruses? Anyway, it's nice to see Vera happy again and it's nice to not be waiting half an hour for her to do anything. Huzzah.
And now commences the blog post I have been meaning to write for weeks now.
So, 2010 has ended, and now 2011 is here and I can't even believe it. 2001 seems like last week, even though I know it obviously wasn't. Okay, maybe it seems like, five years ago, but not ten. My my my. Anyway, I don't usually get big on resolutions. I tend to make goals whenever they come to me and then follow through from there (or not). This year I made a whole list, and while most of them aren't really interesting/relevant for other people, I do have two categories of goals that I am particularly excited about.
First, I have some art goals. I spent so many of my teenage and college years drawing pencil portraits, but ever since I started drawing my own things my senior year at BYU, that's kind of fallen by the wayside. I've drawn a handful, but they've taken months and months at a time. So one of my goals this year is to do a lot more pencil drawings, even just small ones. I'd like to do one a week but since that is entirely unrealistic, I'm aiming for once a month at least.
Another one of my art goals (leftover from last year) was to start an art blog for me and Drewbles. We finally did it and you can see it here. The design is still in progress but we've been updating it pretty regularly. You can also see one of my other art goals in progress--finishing a drawing of Legolas I started about a year ago (eesh). He's the main reason I haven't done any of my pencil drawings yet.
So, aside from the art goals, I have some book goals also. I feel like I spent 2010 reading either a) books I'd read before or b) reading dumb books that I knew were dumb and read anyway. Not that I don't enjoy a ridiculous book from time to time, but the ratio was a little off last year. This year I plan to read more books that I've never read and to have most of them be good books. I haven't made a final list of books to read or anything, and I have no set number, but here are some books I have already lined up to read during the year:
- Jude the Obscure (the only big Hardy novel I haven't read)
- Mansfield Park (the only Austen novel I haven't read)
- 1984
- The Bourne Supremacy (I read the first, and have the 2nd and 3rd)
- Cold Comfort Farm
- I Capture the Castle
I'm also planning to reread Series of Unfortunate Events with Drewbles in the summer, but that's my only planned repeat. I'm really excited to read some new things! A little while ago I did a little books meme on Facebook and marked off which ones I'd read. I was quite happy with how many of them I'd read, but I hadn't read many of those recently...so I'm going to have a much better book diet this year.
In 2011 I have a lot of things that I just want to get done. Lately I've felt like I've been kind of stagnant with things. And of course I'm largely to blame with not using my time as well as I should, but dang it, my favorite hobbies are just time consuming. So I need to be better and prioritize things so that the things I REALLY want to do and get done actually HAPPEN.
I feel pretty good about the year so far. January has been kind of busy with post-holiday stuff and apartment hunting, but I've been sticking to my art goals, and I'm almost done with my last 2010 books so I can start afresh. Huzzah. I've also been noticing that my poor blog has been a little neglected lately. Unfortunately I think it might remain a little neglected, for a little while. If I've got these goals, I can't spend the time blogging about random stuff. I'm definitely not abandoning my blog--I mean, it's been around since 2004, it's not going anywhere--but I just want to focus on taking care of some other things for a little while.
BUT luckily Mr. Graham keeps a good blog with regular updates on our doings so if you like to keep tabs on me, please go hither! But in the meantime you can also find bits and pieces from me here and here. And of course, Facebook. I think I'll always be able to make time for a little status update.
I know, I know, we've been home for a while now (*sigh), but I've been planning on doing this post for months now. My skills of procrastination are mighty indeed of late. ANYway, we came back from England with a lot of stuff. Really cool stuff. And since most of it is, naturally, in our house and you can't all come to our house just to see our new magnets, I will show them to you this-a way.
Like I said, we got new magnets. They are pretty awesome. You can probably guess where we got two of them.
The sheep one we found up in Windermere, where apparently their sheep (and byproducts) are a big deal. It just seemed appropriate to get something cheesy for our wedding anniversary celebration.
We got this delightful Christmas tree ornament at Westminster Abbey. It was the ONLY ornament we found like this in all of our travels--most were felt-y and puffy and big. This one is so charming and wintery and yet also Londony.
We saw lots of shows, as you know, and we got the programs at every one. Aren't they pretty?
We also got books. Lots of books. Seriously, a lot of books. But I didn't take any pictures. So just IMAGINE a beautiful pile of books from pretty much every place we went, along with a boxed set of the adult edition Harry Potter paperbacks (you knew that was going to happen). I also got these books.
Okay, so I haven't made anything from them, but I WILL. Soon. I also got those measuring things so I wouldn't have to convert all the recipes--I will say that was a stroke of genius. Go me. Oh, and we got these other food-related items--salt and pepper shakers! Aren't they the best? I'm already dreading the day some ruffian child o' mine breaks them. 
(Yes, those are tiny Pirates of the Caribbean figurines you see in the pictures.)
I love to buy postcards of my favorite things from a museum. We went to a lot of museums so...I got a lot of postcards. These are another thing that I hope to be able to display at SOME point in life. For some reason, they don't look like very many in this pictures but trust me, it's a fat stack.
I also kept all the maps, guides and brochures we picked up along the way. These were the source of my totally awesome magnets, as you may recall.
Oh, and we got this cool thing too. The tiniest Stonehenge of them all!
In other stuff news, we brought quite a lot with us, and some of them didn't make it through the whole trip unscathed.
You might think that we would have left these items there and gained a little extra suitcase room, but no, we brought them all back. We didn't even stop using them. In fact, we didn't even repair them, aside from the glasses (which have since mysteriously disappeared). That's just how we roll. I guess?
Of course we got other things as well, like shirts from Oxford, hats from various shops, scarves and an umbrella. It's always a delight to go through the day and run into these little reminders of our trip. It's so nice that we could not just go, but also have the money to bring back these little mementos. Thanks, work!
(Originally I was going to try to cram this into a Facebook status.)
Tonight Mr. Graham and I went to see a one-night showing of the recent Les Miserables 25th Anniversary concert. It was three hours and $15 a pop, but it turned out to be well, well worth the cost and time.* During these three hours I compiled the following list of conclusions:
- It IS possible for "Bring Him Home"--one of my least favorite songs in the world--to sound like it is being sung by a man. Thank you, Alfie Boe, for singing like a man.
- While I can give Nick Jonas some credit for being involved with something that is not a Disney Channel byproduct, for an event on this scale, he just didn't have the (Marius) goods. That said, he didn't embarrass himself, but he did sound comparatively underwhelming.
- Lea Salonga as Fantine is just as good as Lea Salonga as Eponine. (She *may* have made someone that is not me cry...)
- Ramiiiiiiiiiin! It was nice to see him in a show that is good and stuff. His inclusion as Enchiladas ("Enjolras," says Mr. Graham) was 50% of my motivation for seeing it in the first place. I want to turn him into an iPod and put him in my pocket.
- Oh my, Michael Ball is not as young as he once was, though his hair looks exactly the same.
- I enjoy Les Mis probably 40-50% more as a concert. Granted, I have seen
most of the 10th anniversary concert many times, and on stage only once. However! I think the show itself is kind of fundamentally flawed in its characters and storytelling, but it works better when you can see people's faces well and identify all the characters better. For whatever reason, probably because some minor things are cut, the story seems much more focused in concert versions. - I find it frustrating that even though I only really, really like about 1/3 of the songs I still find the whole thing so very spirited and rousing. It puts me at odds with myself. When the original 1985 cast came out at the end I was ready to squeal like a little girl.
- Why don't they do concerts for any other big shows? How has ALW not been all over this for years?
Anyway, it was a good time, and it was really fun to see a lot of the cast members that we saw live this summer. We even spotted that most dreaded Marius--he who makes Nick Jonas look good, or at least better. *As a sidenote, we were finishing up our Harry Potter movie-a-night marathon and had to watched the first hour, go to the show and then finish it after. Last night we had to interrupt Order of the Phoenix with a rather lackluster local production of The Scarlet Pimpernel...bad French accents were ever-y-whare.
On Sunday, the very day of Halloween, we had our second dinner in a pumpkin and it turned out great. And this year we had a couple of friends over to help us eat it so now there is slightly less for us to eat as leftovers all week. A lot of people that we have mentioned this dinner to have been kind of perplexed and interested in it so I thought I would explain the process here.
My first dinner in a pumpkin was made by my then roommate, Comrade Cox in 2008. Last year I decided to try it myself since it seemed pretty straight forward. And when I say "seemed" I mean "is." So, here is the process.
You buy yourself a pumpkin. You don't want a gigantic pumpkin because it has to cook and also it has to fit in the oven. I have had good luck with a nice mid-sized pumpkin that is more tall than it is wide. You clean it out all nice, and put the seeds aside for baking later--or for just sitting on the counter, like I'm doing this year.
So then you need to fill it! I follow Comrade Cox's recipe, which is as follows:
-Sausage: one of those Jimmy Dean kinds of sausage that comes in the fat tube.
-6 cups of cooked rice
-1 can of cream of mushroom soup
-1 can of cream of chicken soup
-1/2 cup soy sauce
-1 small onion, all chopped up
-A few stalks of celery, all chopped up. You want about as much celery as you have onion, unless you really like celery. Or onion.
All you do is cook the sausage with the vegetables until it's done, mix in everything else and then put it in the pumpkin! If the pumpkin doesn't quite hold it all (you want some space), everything is cooked so you can just eat it on its own. There is NO waste, Siegfried!*
Put the lid back on the pumpkin, put the whole thing on a baking sheet and stick it in a 375 degree oven for 2 hours.
My pumpkins have not needed quite 2 hours, more like 1 and 45 minutes or so. Anyway, whenever it is done, you get a strong man to get it out of the oven for you.
Then you just dish it out, scraping out pumpkin with the other stuff, and you eat, eat, eat until you can eat no more! And when you can't eat anymore, you dig everything out and throw what's left of the pumpkin away. Food doesn't get more seasonal than this!
*That one's for you, Marcue...can you place the reference?
When did I become such a lazy blogger? I have no shortage of things to blog about, but I just never seem to get to doing it these days. Well, today I am doing it. Maybe it is a sign of things to come.
So, I like to go running. It is delicious. It's good for me. It's the perfect way to start the day. But I have this trouble with getting out of bed. In fact, more often than not I just stay in the bed. Yeah, I could run after work, but that involves two showers a day and dinner at 8:00. So morning is the time, but morning is for sleeping! But like I said, I like to go running and I know it's good for me, especially since I sit at a desk all the day long. But how ever am I to motivate myself?
The answer came to me last week: I must treat myself as a small child! When willpower won't work, one must turn to the time-honored system of a reward chart. But I wanted to make a cool chart, and I remembered Elise's magnet project. I am occasionally crafty so I decided to make cool magnets for my chart. I gathered the necessaries and pondered what pictures to use. For a while I thought I would make dumb magnets with different celebrity faces because the only magazines we have are Entertainment Weekly. Maybe if one of the issues had pictures of everyone from Battlestar in it that would work, but I would have had to settle for Miley Cyrus and the cast of Glee. No thanks.
But I had another moment of genius! We happen to have a stack of pamphlets, guides and brochures from London sitting on our floor, and they are bursting with tiny cool pictures. So I got out the duplicates and cut them up and 8 really cool magnets were born. Thanks, brain.
As I mentioned, my chart includes rewards also because nothing motivates me like getting stuff. I didn't want to make it fancy though or involve much money so my list of rewards are things like a pumpkin shake and getting to pick the movie on Friday night. So, week one of my chart plan has passed. Did it work?
Okay, so Mr. Graham still has to drag me out of bed (usually by the ankles), but now I am kind of willing and don't try to dissuade him with sleeping-in snuggles. Hurrah! Yes, I did make a Love Never Dies magnet--it was the perfect size!
On a totally unrelated note: yesterday we went to Walmart where they had this photo spot set up for How to Train Your Dragon. You could even get a free 5x7 print of your picture. Doesn't Mr. Graham make such a great Hiccup? Maybe next year we'll be Hiccup and Astrid for Halloween.
Okay, so this final installment is a little overdue. We came home to a flurry of activity and perhaps I was a little loathe to admit to the end of our glorious trip. There were a lot of emotions involved in this trip but now that all is said and done, mostly I am still just a bit sad that it's all over. But! Let us not dwell on what is passed in a sad way. Instead I will sum up our last week.
Our last weekend, as you may recall, involved a number of museums and had Mr. Graham coming down with a cold. We started out the next week with him getting over his cold (as he always does so speedily), and then with me picking it up a day later. It wasn't the best timing, but if you're going to have a cold, better to have one in London. Right? Something like that. So, the list:
- Monday was a bank holiday so there was no work for me. Mr. Graham worked the morning away and then we spent the afternoon at St. Paul's Cathedral. Naturally it was extremely large and impressive and beautiful. We also took the stairs up to the Whispering Gallery which was fun, but, despite our best efforts, we were unable to achieve the infamous effect. We then took the stairs up to the Stone Gallery, which provides a pretty great view of London.
- From the Stone Gallery we continued on up to the Golden Gallery. It had a pretty nice view and luckily, unlike the rest of St. Paul's, you can take all the pictures you want! And even luckier, it was a lovely sunny day.
From the top we went all the way down to the crypt to see the famous tombs of Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington, as well as those of JM Turner, William Blake, Joshua Reynolds, Edwin Landseer and so on and so forth. We even found a bust of George Washington tucked away in the corner. On the whole, like so many other pricey spots in London, it was totally worth the time and money, and we were glad we made it there at last.
- On the way home we did our best to check out the famous Notting Hill Carnival. We got there in time to see a parade, surrounded by massive amounts of people. We didn't get very far--the music was so loud and the crowds were so tights. So we gave up on the unknown potential delights and went home for more ice cream and Cloverfield on tv.
- The next day as Mr. Graham was feeling so much better, I started feeling so much worse, just in time for our trip to the Globe Theatre to see A Comedy of Errors written by a fellow named Shakespeare. Coworker Caity had a seat but we were in the standing yard for the common folk. Aside from my drippy, snotty nose and general weariness, it was a great time and the show was very creative and well done. Not to mention the accents were ever so authentic.
- Wednesday was the worst sick day so after a long day at work and then dragging myself back home, I stayed there. Mr. Graham was kind enough to not resent me for keeping us at home on our second to last night, and took care of me instead.
- Thursday was our last night! Caity and I made a half day of it, and left the Society for the last time. It was sad to leave our English friends behind, including the ninja bunnies in the courtyard. We packed for a while and then all set off for a last night of English larks. We checked out Abbey Road, which was surprisingly close to our previous lodgings, and then found some dinner a traditional English place. We did a lot of fond reminiscing over our delicious English foods (seriously, English food is good. Really good.).
- Friday morning started early. We finished packing up and took a taxi back to the airport. It was a pretty painless process--aside from the fact that the airline had deleted Mr. Graham's flight reservation. Oops. They got it sorted out in a few minutes and off we went. We looked longingly down at the land as we flew away and got a good look at Ireland as we went. I won't bore you with the details of our less comfortable planes, the mishaps at Chicago security or the poor entertainment choices. In the end we arrived safe, sound and very tired. It was sad to finally part company with Caity, who will forever be our London friend. We took a last picture of our jet-lagged and worn out selves and went our ways.
And that was London. I feel like London and I truly bonded. I sweat buckets on its Tube, I tripped on its sidewalks, I rubbed my bare feet upon its famous tombs. I sneezed and coughed on it, and I even vomited on it. I saw all of its delights that I could and I loved it so.
Now it is over and done with. But never fear, you haven't seen the last of the London posts.
This was so so good. The funny thing is that it really IS just like fajita filling--all the pieces are in big long chunks. If I had wee ones, I would definitely make smaller pieces but it would still be just as tasty. I also followed a recommendation to make this to go along with and that was a very good decision.
I don't know how authentically Thai this actually is, but I do know that it's really good. Coconut, cilantro, noodles?? So many things that I love in my food! It can turn out super salty so keep that in mind.
Sometimes we like traditional soup. I have tried several different chicken noodle soup recipes, but this one is my favorite. I like to throw in a potato. I made my own noodles once or twice--we had no rolling pin then so I used a can of biscuits to roll the dough out. True story.
Another traditional soup--clam chowder is one of my very favorite soups. I tried a few different recipes, but I like this one because there's no cream so it's not super heavy or fattening. We like to occasionally watch our figures around here 
It sounds kind of funky, but this soup is REALLY good. I feel almost as much pride in it as if I had made the recipe myself. I like this soup because there are a lot of shortcuts you can take in terms of quickness and healthiness--like bacon bits or turkey bacon or premade croutons. I also like throwing in a little radiatore just to give it a little something extra. Try it! You'll love it.
