Cooking Extraveganza!

Yesterday I got my Betty Crocker on.

There is a girl in my ward that just had a baby and I was asked if I would bring her dinner last night. I said yes. I love to bring people dinner.

We also have a neighbor that just had surgery yesterday, so I offered to bring them dinner tonight. Again, I love to bring people dinner.

Lastly, I have a friend that is in the hospital because she just barely had her little baby. I haven't offered to bring them dinner (yet...) but I did want to stop by with a little dessert. I had a friend do this while I was in the hospital and her cookies were absolutely fabulous! I think they were the reason that I only lost 4 ounces after birthing an 8 lb 6 oz baby....

Anyways.....I also love to bring people treats so this is right up my alley.

Sadly, I don't do all these dinners and treats because it is service. I don't even do it because I like to help people or because I know how nice it is to have someone bring you food when you aren't able to cook yourself.

These reasons are much too noble.

It is because of very vain and selfish reasons. I'm really hoping that someday, somewhere, someone will tell me I'm a good cook.

That's it....that's the only reason I cook. Because I'm fishing for attention and compliments:) I'm hoping that in this case, the end justifies the means. It's the thought that counts, right?

That is what I tell myself.


So on to my cooking adventures!

So I'm thinking that with 2 dinners and a dessert to make, I should just do them all at the same time. I made a chicken pot pie casserole for the dinners (because the one for today could be frozen till it was time to cook) and then I got ambitious and decided to make these S'more cupcakes for the desserts. Oh....and these cookies. And because Ryan and I had already had this chicken casserole early in the week, I decided to make these chicken enchiladas.

I've got the dinners all put together and I'm working on these cupcakes like my life depends on it. They were a little intense. The recipe also makes enough for 24 cupcakes but I only have 1 pan that holds 12, so I'd do half the batch up to a certain point, then pull them all out of the pan and do the rest of the batch. It really made things go much slower than I anticipated....

Then, at 5:00 I put my casserole in the oven and wait for it to cook the necessary 30 minutes.

30 minutes later, my casserole is not done! The bisquick top is not even set up a little bit and at this point it should be golden brown and crusty. I'm panicking. Dinner is suppose to be at their house at 5:30 and my casserole isn't working. I fire up the oven temperate and put it back in for 5 minutes.

Nothing.

5 MORE minutes....

Slightly more than nothing, but just barely.

10 MORE minutes.....

Barely showing signs that it is being cooked within an inch of its miserable life.

At this point, I had nothing left. I had to go. So I take it out of the oven, drive it over the lady and with these words, "Ya'll should probably just call Pizza Hut....." I hand her the casserole.

I don't think she'll be telling me what a good cook I am.....

So today I'm a little nervous making this second casserole. Hopefully it turns out better than yesterday!

Anyway....
The good part of my day was when I did this:

Boo-ya! NAILED IT!!!
What you are seeing is an all-day muffin job consisting of a graham cracker bottom crust, cake, chocolate glaze and a whipped meringue top that has been broiled in the oven till it resembles a golden marshmallow.

Watch out Betty C.....there's a new sheriff in town.

The the cookies and enchiladas were pretty spectacular too:)

So I have a question for all of you. Would anyone like to have a recipe swap party with me every so often? Maybe once a month or once every 2 months? My idea is that we could all get together for lunch and bring one dish that we had made with enough recipe cards for everyone to take one. That way we could eat, hang out, try the recipes and have the recipe to take home with us. WHAT DO YOU GUYS THINK?

Tales to Tell

I haven't posted pictures of anything in a long time. Stratton keeps me pretty busy so I don't have a lot of time to blog and so I've got a lot to show you guys:)

Most importantly....Stratton! He is now 7 months old and turning into a holy terror. He's been army crawling around since about 6 months so nothing is safe.

Hey Mom! Whatcha doing???

Is that a camera?! I wanna see! Can I taste it?

Mine? Mine? Mine? Let me just lick it...

He also has been working on doing a real crawl with his belly off the floor. He takes a step or two and then gets too excited/impatient, drops to his belly, and scoots across the floor.

Last night he pulled himself up to a standing position so I'm thinking he might just skip regular crawling and go right to walking.

We have already introduced a sippy cup because he was so interested in our water. He absolutely loves water in a sippy. We only had to show him once how to use it:)

Ryan let him try his orange soda.

He also crawls over things and, in this case, on top of things. He wanted something sitting on top of those storage boxes in the left of the picture, so he just crawled onto this hiking backpack to get it:)

A few last things about Stratton without the pictures:

• He went swimming for the first time on Saturday! He seemed to really love it. Except when Ryan tried dunking him. Then he seemed a bit put out by everything. We tried taking a camera but the batteries were dead....
• He is happy ALL THE TIME. It is pretty cool that he just seems really pleased with life.
• He has had all of his shots up unto this point so we don't have to do any more until he is 12 months! Woot!
• He has 2 teeth that have broken through and are coming up on the bottom. Ryan swears he can see the top ones coming in, but I'm hoping that's his imagination. If he gets a lot of teeth in I think our breastfeeding days will be over.
• He is obsessed with my hair. Mostly he just wants to pull it. There have been days that we've done battle because I won't let him pull all my hair out.
• He loves his Aunt Katie and his cousins Michael, Brandon, Roman and Karlee. Katie babysits him a lot so he is really comfortable with her. His cousins are also very entertaining so he loves that. He has other cousins, but the younger ones don't hold as much interest for him and he doesn't know the ones that live far away that well.
• He is, as usual, pretty big for his age. At his 6 month appointment the nurse told us he was 19 lbs and 25 inches. His weight sounded correct to me, but the height would have put him in the 25% percentile for his range and that didn't seem right. He didn't seem short and fat to me, so I went home and measured myself. The nurse had missed 3.5 inches! He is almost 29 inches long, so he is going to show a shocking growth spurt at his 9 month appointment:)
• He is terrible at sleeping. I know that this is because I've given him bad habits and I don't stick to a sleeping schedule. He use to be good, but then he got sick. He wanted to be nursed at night and I felt sorry for him, so I would. BAD IDEA! We have been trying to break him of this habit for the last couple nights and it is pretty rough. I think we are getting there though. Anyway...that is just at night. He isn't a very good sleeper during the day either. I try to watch for his "sleepy signs" and put him to bed before he is exhausted, but I don't think its working. He screams for a long time before he will take a nap and then if I am lucky I will get 45 min-1hour out of him. Usually less though. It's bad. I'm currently reading this book 'Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child' and it seems really good, but I wish someone had like a condensed version of it. The book looks like it's about 1200 pages and I'm just not sure I'm ever going to get through it.

I think that is everything happening with Stratton. Now on the the rest of the family!

Ryan and I went skiing for our 2 year anniversary. I'm a much better skier than snowboarder. It was my first time and I only fell down a couple times. However, one was pretty huge and hilarious. I'd decided to let Ryan take a difficult trail and I'd just make my way down the easy trail as usual. Well at one point there are 2 arrows on this easy trail. One says, "Easy" and the other says "Easier" pointing you down 2 different parts of the trail. I'd been going down the "Easier" way the entire day, but decided I was ready for the "Easy" trail (ha ha! I'm so bad-a!)

Things were going great until I got to the hill. For some reason, they had this double-black diamond hill in the middle of my easy trail! I'm snowplowing and going back and forth (I'm talented so I can do them both at the same time...ha ha!) and suddenly, I fall. Even though I was employing all my 'slowing down' skills, I still ate it pretty hard. Hard enough I lost one of my skis. Trudging back up the hill to the initial crash site, I locate my ski. I'm thinking to myself, "Just put it down on an angle to the hill, clip in, and get your butt out of the middle of the trail!"

Sounds easy, right?

Wrong.

It was like IMPOSSIBLE to get clipped in while standing in the snow on a hill! After trying for what seemed like 3/4 of my life, I gave up, picked up the ski and what was left of my dignity and half walked/skied to the side of the trail where I continued to try and put on my ski.

Not a pretty sight people.

But I sure did enjoy myself:)

Ryan and I got started on our house! This is just the footers for the foundation. At this point we actually have the entire foundation done, the electric box hooked up, dirt has been brough in to back-fill and the lumber arrived yesterday! Ryan and his guys will begin framing tomorrow and then things are just going to fly! I'm so excited!

Sorry about this sideways picture. I was too lazy to switch it and then re-upload it. This is the boys at jeep safari. Its a bit blurry, but those are both little faux-hawks in their hair with red hair dye down the middle. They looked pretty awesome:)

This is Ryan's jeep on an obstacle. This year I went out for the first 2 days with Stratton and then stayed home for the last day. Stratton really loved the rocking motion of the jeep on the obstacles. He definitely took better naps while we were out rock crawiling than he does at home!

And that is pretty much it! Thanks for reading my long catch-up post!