April 3rd, 2015 - Good Friday

Jesus Christ: "I am the resurrection and the life.  He who believes in me will live, even though he dies;  and whoever lives and believes in me will never die."

So we're still on watching our Oscar winning movies.  This week we watched The Sting (1973).  A pretty good movie overall, a little slow in parts but it was pretty good!  

Okay let's get down to it!  It's Friday Night in Winslow and time for our 24th Mystery Bag Challenge!  It's Damon's turn to pick the mandatory ingredients and my turn to cook.  

Recap: The rules are simple; whoever is cooking has to make dinner using each of the mystery food items that the other has put into the mystery bag.  We can also use other items that we have in the fridge and pantry, but MUST use some of each item from the mystery bag, and MUST be ready to plate-up dinner before 1 hour has passed after seeing the ingredients for the first time.  We agreed to turn it up a notch and start thinking more outside the box for the mandatory ingredients we'd be picking for the other!

And here's what I ended up with for tonight!

A pound of ground turkey, white rice, a can of black beans, and a can of sliced carrots.  Yeah, if you're thinking that doesn't sound good, that's what I'm thinking too!!  

What to do, what to do???  I immediately think Mexican food because of the beans and rice but what the hell to do with those carrots??

Anyway, no time to waste.  I get the meat in the skillet and start browning it, I get my pot of water ready for the rice and then take a purusal of the fridge to hopefully get inspired by something and it works.  We have romaine lettuce!!  I'm going to go for a Mexican lettuce wrap!  I start by adding lots of seasoning to the turkey meat to make it taste like something you want to eat and cut up some veg.  Oh and sip on a margarita as I go.... for extra support in my challenge... LOL!

Next, I start thinking about a side dish.  I think the beans, rice, and carrots are all going to get thrown into the wrap, along with some shredded cheese AND queso and some finely diced onions.  But, I can't just serve lettuce wraps, so I'm inspired by something a co-worker of mine often makes and tastes EXCELLENT. A jalapeno and cheese taquito kind of thing... Cream cheese, shredded cheese, Greek yogurt and jalapenos and sweet peppers, rolled up in a flour tortilla rubbed in butter and baked until golden brown.

So I put my mixture together for the wraps, get my lettuce washed, pop my taquito's into the oven, and begin to assemble my wraps and think about plating.

I think I overfilled my wraps a bit but I'm done with time to spare! Dinner is served!!!

It was entirely too much food but everything was GREAT!!!!  The little taquito's were super spicy but how could cheese and jalapeno's not be good???  

A reminder of our scoring system...  

being done on time = 0-1 point

dish presentation = 0-2 points

dish creativity / originality = 0-3 points

dish flavor = 0-3 points

portion size = 0-1 point. 

We did our scoring and in the end, I got another perfect score!!!

Damon = 106.25, Christina = 109.5, and that puts me back in the lead, until next time anyway!

Now we're off to watch our next Oscar winning  movie, The Godfather II (1974) and even though it didn't win an Oscar, we're going to try to squeeze in The Godfather III because you can't just stop at the second one!

                                   

Happy Good Friday to all!! 

One Year Wedding Anniversary Weekend

Matthew 19:6: "What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder."

Thursday: It's (almost) been one year since we were married. We're starting our celebration a little early with a half priced room at the West Siloam Springs Cherokee Casino.  We didn't win big but we came out a little above even so that in itself is awesome!  We had dinner there at the buffet and even ran into an old friend (James - sooo good to see you!). 

Friday:  We come home to feed the fury faced children and decide to camp out in a tent on our back porch - and don't knock it until you try it!  No bugs and you don't end up laying down with a rock in your back all night, it's great!  It was cold as hell, I will admit.  So much so that I got a space heater and plugged it in out on the porch!  It was too funny! Damon didn't think it would do any good because it was so windy but it made a huge difference!  We cooked hot dogs on a little Coleman propane burner, which was also pretty hilarious to see, but what the hell, we were camping!  We talked, listened to the bumps and creaks in the woods (which is our back yard) and when we weren't listening to that, we were listening to bag pipes on CD!  We finished off the night with a bottle of champagne and snuggled up nice and warm in the tent.  It was a great night!

  
Saturday:  Next up, we grab some lunch and went out to Tontitown and checked out their historical museum. We drive by a lot on our way to and from Tulsa and always want to pop in but they are usually closed or we're in a hurry.  So, we made it by there today.  Very nice lady that runs the place and a lot of old historical pictures of the people and the town from the 1800's that were pretty cool to see!

After, we check into our practically free hotel.  Yeah, it was like a $150 suite and I won it in a silent auction for $25.00!!  So, we've had a busy couple of days and we decide to just hang out in the room for a bit, chat, watch some T.V. and what not until dinner time.

We're finally starting to get hungry, so we get around and head out to Rogers and have dinner at Bonefish Grill.  I got gift certificates through rewards on our credit card, so dinner was free!!  The food was great and we had a great time, though Damon had to cut my steak for me because my wrist was still all swollen and bruised up from falling off the porch on Monday.

  
Sunday:  We catch Insurgent at Malco theater, we didn't think it was as good as the first one but it was an okay flick to watch. Now, we head out of town to where it all happened, a year ago tomorrow, Eureka Springs!!!!  We get there, check into our randomly selected hotel via priceline.com and then hit downtown for some window shopping and people watching.

After walking around a bit, we stop off at the Rowdy Beaver for a little hair of the dog. We had a few beers, enjoyed actually being to smoke and drink beer inside a building for a change, and discussed our dinner options.  It's Sunday, March 29th and it just so happens to be the season finale of The Walking Dead.  If you recall, last year we rushed right back to the hotel to watch the finale on our wedding day, lol!  So it's kind of a tradition now!  We we're originally planning on eating out somewhere but it started getting late and we can't miss our Walking Dead.  So, we asked our bartender where we can get the best pizza in town to take back to the room and he tells us Chelsea's.  Chelsea's is a little local dive bar that we actually went to last year on our wedding weekend.  We ordered up some dinner and had a few beers on the patio while we waited.  We got back to the hotel with just a few minutes to spare. we get the paper plates out, pop open a box of wine, and don't disturb me for an hour... THE WALKING DEAD IS ON!!!  

Anyway, our tradition that we're making is trying something new every year when we come back to Eureka Springs for our anniversary.  A new restaurant, new bar, new hotel, etc.  We had a blast going to new places and it's still surprising. We've been coming to Eureka Springs for ten years now and we can always find something new and different!

Monday:  We took a drive up to the chapel where we were married exactly a year ago and took some pictures. A pic from exactly a year later, minus the tux and wedding dress!

We wrapped up there and headed out of town on our way home.  We stopped for some lunch at a new place called the Angler's Grill and had some beer and cheeseburgers. Then took that long twisted road all the way in to Rogers, where we stopped off at their historical museum to have a look around.

When we got home we broke out the top layer of our wedding cake, after eating home cooked fillet mignon!!!!  Surprisingly, the cake was still really moist, the frosting seemed a little grainy but it was still yummy cake a year later!  

                                     

Happy one year anniversary to us!!! 

March 21st, 2015

Miranda Kerr: "My goal involves a hammock, a vegetable patch, and a solar-powered house.  And I hope to eventually get there."

The weather has been so crazy and we've been waiting for the right time to plant our vegetables.  Today is the day and hopefully that won't bite us in the butt!  

Today we are planting six jalapeno plants (cause I like it spicy!!), one strawberry plant, one cherry tomato plant, one roma tomato plant, and one red bell pepper plant.  We've had luck in the past with our roma's and peppers but our cherry tomato plant last year didn't do didly and neither did the strawberry plant.  This year, our strawberry plant already had a couple of berries on it so hopefully that's a good sign!!

We are also going to attempt to transplant a few evergreens from the back forty of our property to up by where the driveway meets the road (my goal is to have a wall of evergreens along side the road).  I attempted this a couple years ago, my mom and sister helped me while Damon was building our dog houses.  I pretty much killed them all by not taking good enough care of them.  I was able to bring one back to life because as soon as I saw that they looked like they had all died, I started going out religiously to "miracle grow" them.  We planted four, I resurrected just one from the dead. 

Anyway, we plan on transplanting two more larger ones on either side of "the tree that did" (because it so did come back from the dead).  Fortunately, we already have quite a few evergreens out along the road so hopefully this project can be done in another year or two.  

Yeap, that's all folks.  This is Winslow and don't you forget it!

                                     

Next week is our one year wedding anniversary, yeah us!!! 

March 13th, 2015

Orson Welles: "My doctor told me I had to stop throwing intimate dinners for four unless there are three other people."

So we're still on watching our Best Picture Oscar winning movies.  This week we watched The Godfather (1972).  How has anyone not seen or not liked The Godfather???  I don't get it, the movies were awesome and we enjoyed watching the first of the trilogy and we are looking forward to finishing that out.  

Okay let's get down to it!  It's Friday Night in Winslow and time for our 23rd Mystery Bag Challenge!  It's my turn to pick the mandatory ingredients and Damon's turn to cook.  

Recap: The rules are simple; whoever is cooking has to make dinner using each of the mystery food items that the other has put into the mystery bag.  We can also use other items that we have in the fridge and pantry, but MUST use some of each item from the mystery bag, and MUST be ready to plate-up dinner before 1 hour has passed after seeing the ingredients for the first time.  We agreed to turn it up a notch and start thinking more outside the box for the mandatory ingredients we'd be picking for the other!

And here's what Damon ended up with for tonight!

A pound of ground turkey, zucchini, refrigerated crescent rolls, and a can of pears.  Yeah, I'm pretty damn pleased with myself.  I didn't necessarily think of something that he could make with this but I also had lots of faith that he could make it work!  As you can see, Damon wasn't so happy about his mystery bag!  

Damon says that I didn't totally screw him on this bag but it's a challenge for sure.  We always have a hard time thinking what to do with ground turkey, even when it's not a challenge.  Some thoughts for you, if you don't particularly care for ground turkey; use it in saucy or big flavor dishes (then you don't really know it's turkey), such as chili, spaghetti, or if your whipping up some rotel. Another thing you can do is mix it with ground beef for a large meatloaf.  You can also just add some seasoning and it makes a huge difference, I like to go with some sage, oregano, and crushed pepper flake.

Anyway, while I'm apologizing for the not so inspiring bag I gave Damon, he gets to work.  He puts the meat into a bowl and begins adding some spices along with Parmesan cheese and makes some meatballs.

Next, he begins to chop some vegetables, onions and zucchini.  Then he starts thinking about those damn canned pears and decides to cut some white cheddar.

He decides to do a vegetable medley with the zucchini. He chopped them up with some red onion and does some fancy tossing as he sauteed the vegetables. Then he starts to assemble his crescent rolls, rolling up pieces of the canned pairs with some white cheddar inside the rolls.  He gets them into the oven and then gets some pasta cooking.  Next, I can tell he's in his head thinking about how to plate.

As usual, he pulls it off and with just a few minutes to spare.  He serves me my spaghetti and meatballs topped with a sautéed onion and zucchini medley, served with pear & cheddar stuffed crescent rolls on the side.

We dig in and everything tasted great.  I especially liked the fruit/cheese crescents, but I'm a huge bread and cheese freak!  I think I didn't care as much for the zucchini being in the spaghetti but hey, this is about trying new things!  Damon loved the zucchini in the pasta but I think he's still iffy on the crescents.

A reminder of our scoring system...  

being done on time = 0-1 point

dish presentation = 0-2 points

dish creativity / originality = 0-3 points

dish flavor = 0-3 points

portion size = 0-1 point. 

We did our scoring and in the end, Damon gave himself a 9, he felt like he lacked creativity and I didn't think that was worth a whole point off so I gave him a 9.5 (I think our first half point off lol) and he ended up with 9.25 points.  

Damon = 106.25, Christina = 99.5, and that puts Damon back in the lead, and the first to break 100 points!

                                   

Happy Friday the 13th everyone!!