Beach Reading

I have to admit that I go totally antisocial on a vacation like the beach trip. I have a hard time turning off my brain and just sitting (for hours on end on the beach), so my deal is, if we aren't going to DO things, I'm going to READ things. LOTS of things. I read FAST. So here's my beach trip reading list, divided into two sections:

Brain Cell Promoting:
Into Thin Air, a personal account of the Mount Everest disaster, by John Krakauer
The cassoulet saved our marriage: true tales of food, family and how we learned to eat
Love, Water, Memory, by Jenny Shortridge
Calling Me Home, Julie Kibler
Escape from Camp 14, one man's remarkable odyssey from North Korea to freedom in the West, by Blaine Harden

Brain Cell Deleting: 
Silver Girl, The Beach Club, and Nantucket Nights, by Elin Hilderbrand (She's a perfect beach trip author)
The Perfect Hope, by Nora Roberts (Shut up, it's a BEACH TRIP)

And we've got a few books on cd for the 32 hour total trip:
The Hunger Games, book one
Ender's Game (a favorite from 7th grade and the movie is coming out this summer!)
Dad is Fat, by Jim Gaffigan. Stand-up on family life as a book, read by the author? Yes please.

Plus I've got a couple missional communities books from church that I haven't cracked yet, so I might dive into those. Between Brian and I, we're probably bringing fifteen books. I mean, we need a whole suitecase just for our reading materials.

This being a time of the Seven fasts right now, I'd also like to point out that this canon of materials is comprised entirely from the library. I love you library! You're my favorite!

Spring Round-up

A Memorial Day weekend project: Brian built us a planter! 

 This took a few more hours than he thought it would.

And after all that, we had to shovel out all this compost from the back of our car! 

The next weekend we flew to North Carolina for Joe and Maria's wedding. Here's where they got married: 

Insanely gorgeous, right? Duh. 

My handsome husband, standing up in his super-sexy tux. 

Finally, it's Media Week for Seven, again. We've turned off the tv. (Well, sort of. We watched Mad Men on Sunday night.) But otherwise we've been playing games, reading books, dropping in to see friends, hanging out with my parents and taking long after dinner walks to the library and bakery. This is the sun setting over Shorewood last night. We have to remember to turn off the tv more often. It's such a relief to just be together, instead of being together on the couch. 

Favorite recent recipes:

101cookbook's lemon risotto. I make it with brown rice, which takes forever, but it's worth it. 

Smitten Kitchen's yogurt panna cotta. A decadent breakfast. Make individual servings on Sunday and you've got breakfast all week! I used regular vanilla yogurt and skipped adding sugar. Instead of honey and walnuts, I made a rhubarb-strawberry compote.

I used to make this in my single-girl apartments in Chicago: Orangette's peanut-citrus noodles. A favorite standby. 

This chocolate-banana smoothie was a first breakfast one day last week. (I'm on two breakfasts right now. Morning = hungry time. Dinner = ehhh.) 

We head to Myrtle Beach starting on Friday afternoon, for a week of family time, ocean, beach, books, and NAPPING. I can't wait.

Seven, again, Week 1

I'm doing Seven again with a bible study group. This is week one, food. Brian and I, together, decided to eat seven foods this week:

Chicken
Sweet Potatoes
Eggs
Broccoli
Zucchini
Apples
Brown Rice

And then I amended that to include leftovers, or something in the fridge that might go bad, like oj or milk. Here's how the first morning, went:

"I really wish I could eat this omelette on toast like I've been doing. I forgot that I don't like eggs by themselves."
"I wish I could just have my regular toast and not mess with eggs."
"I hate Seven. It's dumb."

Then I got an email from Brian, at lunchtime: "Had leftover BBQ chicken and fried chicken for lunch. I'm okay with Seven."

Me at lunchtime: "Blech, that lunch is so boring, I'm just going to eat apples and crackers* at my desk." And on and on for four days.
*yes, I randomly added crackers.

Me at dinner: "I don't want to eat chicken again for a month."
Brian: "But this dinner is actually really good!" (Roast chicken, sweet potatoes, roasted broccoli."
Me: "Blech."

So this week was really rough and I hated the restrictions. I couldn't cook with anything but olive oil, salt and pepper and I got really sick of black pepper as a "Seasoning." I missed onions, garlic, herbs, bread, DAIRY.  I'm so glad it's over. However, I'm also really aware just how entitled I am when it comes to food. I feel like I've been trying to be better about being humble, but this broke that in half. There is no humility when it comes to my cooking. There is pride and vanity and I'm not sure where that leaves me, but damn if we aren't eating spicy pork meatballs tomorrow night.

Marriage, Month 8

Date night is an outing to Home Depot, where we spend entirely too much money on our summer gardening projects.

We celebrate things like the first warm weekend and it involves breaking out the grill and making strong margaritas.

We don't sleep the first really warm night in the apartment, because someone doesn't believe in a/c in the month of April.

We crash on the couch for our favorite shows, which include: Castle, Modern Family, Nashville, The Americans, Big Bang Theory and Scandal. Sometime I make him sit through Heart of Dixie.

I really get into using our slow cooker, come up with a delicious BBQ Chicken thighs recipe and make it twice in two weeks.

Brian still does the dishes, no matter how many dishes I use making dinner. (Hint, it's a lot.)

I'm still making the single-egg lady omelettes on a single piece of toast for breakfast. Brian still makes fun of me for making "fancy" breakfast.

We take a road trip to visit springtime in St. Louis - it's glorious and makes us look forward to our long road trip to Myrtle Beach this summer. Also, we need books on tape.

Only a couple years late to the game, we watch The Hunger Games. We decide to listen to those books on tape for the beach trip.

We marvel that we aren't sick of each other yet. Like, at all.