Things have been a little crazy lately, so I hope you'll excuse the lack of blog posts. I've been slammed at work with a suddenly large amount of separation boards and courts-martial, to include a contested court-martial that starts this Wednesday (though I'm only the assistant trial counsel on that one, thank goodness). This is combined with Lily's dad getting a new job which involves even longer hours and even more travel than before. So.... I haven't had a whole lot of time to blog.
But - Lily's dad picked Lily up last night and will have her for most of today. This means I get a whole day to myself. Do you hear that, folks?? A whole. Entire. Day. Of course I've got some trial work to do, but first I'm sitting around in my pajamas, drinking coffee, and blog-writing. Later I'll go for a nice run (outside!! Not on the treadmill during nap time!!) in this beautiful weather we're having.
So, while I am working on and will post soon about all the stuff going on lately (like Halloween and my mom visiting) - right now I'll share a few pictures from this long weekend.
On Friday evening, while Lily and I took a walk, we looked up at the stars and Lily said "how can we get up there? We need a spaceship." So I suggested we build one. With some couch cushions, pillows, chairs, and a blanket - voila, we were ready for blast off!
The cool thing about home-made spaceships is that they can be almost anything. It turned into an ice cream shop, whose specialty flavor was Bubblegum. Then it was a tent, to hide from the scary Mommy monster.
Friday night we also watched "The Land Before Time" - it's the first time I'd seen it since I was a kid, and I remember loving that movie. Lily liked it, although the part with Littlefoot's mom dying was sad and hard to explain. Lily's favorite movie of the moment is "Lightning McQueen" (meaning Cars), so at least it was nice to get a break from that one.
Thanks to Lily spending yesterday evening with her dad, I finally got to cook Dave his birthday dinner. Almost a whole month late!! But, due to Dave studying for the GMAT and me not having a night without Lily, it's been hard to squeeze it in. Dinner turned out pretty darn good, so I want to share some recipes.
We started with some creamy mushroom soup, with blue cheese toasts - really great - if you like mushrooms you ought to try out this recipe!
The blue cheese toasts are just thin slices of baguette with blue cheese on top, popped in the oven for a few minutes.
We were so eager to start eating it that I forgot to take a picture before a few bites were taken.... I'm no food photographer but I swear it looked more delicious in person!
Since my normal cooking style is more seafood, fish, and veggie-centric, I decided to go meat-and-potatoes for a change. What is not to like about caramelized onions and beef braised in red wine until it's falling apart?? Yum.
And the best part - carrot cake!!! I love carrot cake, Dave loves carrot cake - so I was really excited to make one. This recipe is out of this world:
- it involves pouring a buttermilk glaze over the cake layers when they come out of the oven, so the cake is incredibly moist and delicious. The only change I made was adding some golden raisins, which I think are essential to a good carrot cake. I topped it off with a cream-cheese icing (more cream-cheesy than sweet) and some broiled coconut.
Doesn't get much better than that!!
Happy Veteran's Day weekend..... more posts to come!!
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