Day 13 - A Fictional Book

I know I'm gonna come off like SUCH a gamer nerd...but...

Despite the fact that Halo is a bitchin' video game, it also has a very interesting storyline in all of their books (they have several different titles out). 

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

The official novels of the award-winning Xbox game! This set contains The Fall of Reach, First Strike, and The Flood -- the complete chronicles of the bloody Human-Covenant War on Halo.

The Fall of Reach
As the bloody Human-Covenant War rages on Halo, the fate of humankind may rest with one warrior, the lone SPARTAN survivor of another legendary battle . . . the desperate, take-no-prisoners struggle that led humanity to Halo--the fall of the planet Reach. Now, brought to life for the first time, here is the full story of that glorious, doomed conflict.

First Strike
The Human-Covenant war rages on as the alien juggernaut sweeps inexorably toward its final goal: destruction of all human life!

The Flood
The Human-Covenant War, a desperate struggle for humankind’s very survival, has reached its boiling point on the mysterious, ring world called Halo. But the fierce Covenant warriors, the mightiest alien military force known, are not the only peril lying in wait.

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Day 12 - Something You Are OCD About

I actually had to ask Eric what I'm OCD about considering I can't really think of anything off the top of my head. When I asked him, he instantly said, "Your sunglasses. You're VERY OCD about them". 

Now that he mentions it...yeah. I'm very OCD about them. They are ALWAYS with me, even when it's raining / snowing. They're polarized Ray Bans that I had tinted extra dark since I'm very light sensitive. So, not only are they kinda pricey, but they definitely cut down on my migraines which is pretty priceless to me. I usually have 'em in my purse, truck, or on the counter top so I can snag it on the way out. A few months ago, I mis-placed them and I was VERY upset...no sunglasses means very limited driving for me and lots of headaches :(

Other than that, I'll randomly flick lights on and off to make sure they're off even though they're CLEARLY not on.

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Day 11 - A Photo of You Recently

I haven't really been taking any pictures of myself lately. I'm rather self conscious since I've put on some weight...and seeing how I have a round face as is, the extra weight makes me have a moon face. Not a fan. 

This pic was taken...hmmm.... late October? Yes, of this year. 

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Turkey Love

Sorry I'm not writing too much in this particular post, but I wanted to show you how my turkey turned out for Thanksgiving :) I soaked it overnight in salt water, then gave it bacon creole injections while it was roasting for about 6.5 hours (the stuffing was a mushroom concoction) . It was SO tender! Good stuff! 

 

Lots of stuffing!

You can see the flavor injections when you sliced up the turkey :) 

Happiness is a well cooked turkey!

I hope everyone had an amazing Thanksgiving with their friends and family!

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Fantastical Turkey Chili

Since Eric made me roast a small child (19lb turkey ), I have tons of leftovers and I can't really keep having one Thanksgiving meal after another (turkey, stuffing, potatoes, cranberry, green beans..over and over and over again). So, I figured I'd make some spicy turkey chili :) Eric, John and Johns friends who are currently over absolutely DESTROYED this! I ended up writing it down in my cookbook for future use :)

Ingredients

    * 3 tablespoons vegetable oil, divided
    * 1 1/2 pounds turkey breast or ground turkey
    * 1 (1 ounce) package chili seasoning mix (mild or hot)
    * 1 teaspoon ground coriander
    * 1 teaspoon dried oregano
    * 2 teaspoons chili pepper flakes
    * 2 tablespoons tomato paste
    * 1 (14.5 ounce) can beef broth
    * 2-3 jalapenos, sliced (it's your choice whether or not you want to take out the seeds)
    * 1 (7 ounce) can salsa
    * 1 (14.5 ounce) can crushed tomatoes, or coarsely chopped tomatoes packed in puree
    * 1 (7 ounce) can chopped green Chile peppers
    * 1 medium onion, finely chopped
    * 1 green bell pepper, diced
    * 3 medium zucchini, halved lengthwise and sliced
    * 1 container of chicken stock (optional). If you don't want to use chicken stock, you can use water.
    * 1 bunch green onions, chopped
    * 1 cup sour cream
    * 1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese

Directions

1. Heat 1 tablespoon of oil in a large stock pot over medium-high heat. Crumble turkey into the pot, stirring with a wooden spoon to break apart as much as possible. Season with seasoning mix, coriander, oregano, chili flakes, and tomato paste, and mix until meat is evenly coated with seasonings. Continue cooking, reducing heat if necessary, until turkey is well browned.
 
2. Pour in beef broth, and simmer to reduce liquid slightly, about 5 minutes. Add salsa, tomatoes, jalapenos, and green chilies, and continue cooking at a moderate simmer for ten minutes. Adjust the thickness at any time you feel necessary by adding chicken stock.
 
3. While chili is still cooking, heat one tablespoon of oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Cook onion and green bell pepper, stirring occasionally for 5 minutes, or until onion is translucent and bell pepper is lightly browned. Add onion and bell pepper to the chili, and continue cooking at a very low simmer.
 
4. In the same skillet, heat the remaining tablespoon of oil over medium-high heat. Add the zucchini, and cook stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes, or until lightly browned. Add the zucchini to the chili, reduce heat, and continue cooking 15 minutes more. Again, adjust the consistency with chicken stock as needed.
 
5. Ladle chili into serving bowls. Top with sour cream, green onion, and cheddar cheese, and serve.


* * * *  This might come out different with ground turkey verses using a roasted turkey breast!! * * * *

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Day 10 - A Photo Taken Over 10 Years Ago of You

Go ahead. Say "Awwwwwww". 

I think I'm 3 or 4 .. I dunno! But, you can see I have blond hair :) 

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Day 9 - A Photo You Took

I love this picture. Love love love it. It's from my driveway over looking the horse pasture, taken around November last year. My Dad actually likes it so much that he had printed on a large canvas and it's in his dining room. Plus, I've had several people contact me about it and they've had prints made. Makes me feel pretty good! Not bad for taking a picture while in PJ's!

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Day 8 - A Photo That Makes You Angry / Sad

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T-Day!!

'Tis that lovely time of year where everyone gorges themselves silly on turkey (or ham) with all the trimmings! Spend time with our friends and family, have fun holiday memories (or nightmares). Either way, it's a four day weekend! Ha! 

This year, we'll be spending Thanksgiving day with some friends of ours since it's going to be their last one in Belgium. Everyone that's coming was asked to bring food since it sounds like there's quite a few people attending, which is totally OK since that's not really fair to expect the host to cook that much (roughly thirty!). So, I volunteered to bring "Bacon Mashed Potatoes". When I mentioned to Eric that's what I was going to make, his eyes dilated and he started salivating. Heavily. 

Thing is, the most I've cooked for is ten people..so I have a challenge making enough mashed potatoes for thirty people, including if someone wants to be a piggy and get more. I'm hoping I'll have SOME left over considering we're gonna do our own Thanksgiving on Friday. Eric INSISTS that we have a turkey. Fine and dandy.. I was thinking along the lines of a young turkey or something (8ish pounds). Eric picks out a 19lber. Trickeration, I say!

Today's energy is going to be invested in making the bacon potatoes since yesterday I the majority of the day to clean potatoes and mushrooms. When I pick up potatoes from the Commissary, they're normally already scrubbed down and washed..so all I have to do is a quick wash once I get them home. Well. I guess since potatoes are in such high demand right now, they ran out of their usual potato sacks and got some from the local economy. Doesn't sound all that bad till you realize all the potatoes are straight out of the ground. Not scrubbed. Still have clumps of dirt spackled to them. Fun stuff.

The mammoth size stockpot I gotta use to make all of the potatoes. Scary thing is, I have TWO of these! You're looking at a 42 quart stock pot. We originally bought these from Wal-Mart back in California, but you can find them on GSI Outdoors ....Side note: We didn't pay nearly what they're asking for (we got these about 2 years ago).

The stock pot with about 15lbs of potatoes:

All of the lovely mushrooms (roughly 3lbs):

I tend to peel the skins off of 'em, despite washing them and what not. It's easier than to scrub scrub scrub and feel like you didn't get all the poopy soil off of it. Sorry, but mushrooms are grown in super poop saturated soil. Just sayin'!

One with and one without the skin:

Chopped up:

Eric dealt with the onions, LOL. I would've taken pictures of them but they were burning my eyes far to much to try to focus the camera on it. They were potent lil things!

Since the main ingredient in the recipe is bacon, I ended up buying four packs of extra thick cut bacon. I didn't wanna stand in front of the stove top all morning frying them, so we resorted to using my stoneware bar pan (works VERY well and helps to season it even further!) and stuck them in the oven ( 375* for 22 minutes). I'm sure you're probably thinking that the pan looks gross, but it's supposed to be brown like that (aside from the grease). The darker the pan, the more seasoned it is. I've seen some to where they're almost black!

Once the bacon was done, I chopped the strips up into smaller pieces:

When the first two batches of bacon was done, we poured the excess grease into our stir fry pan since we were wanting to use some to fry up the onion and mushrooms:

Toss in the onions and let 'em cook till they're soft, then add in the mushrooms; saute till soft. Once they're soft, train out the excess liquid:

Once the potatoes are done boiling, drained and a little cooled down, you can start adding in the mushrooms, onions, bacon and ranch dressing. Now, I added in ranch dressing, salt and black pepper as I went along to "hone" in the flavor I was going for. All in all, this came out amazing :) I hope everyone at the party likes it!

PS: I didn't list the recipe because I'm sneaky like that!

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Day 7 - A Photo That Makes Your Heart Melt

I can't really think of a photo that melts my heart, but I know of a video that does! 

I know it probably seems silly for a commercial to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but this reminds me SO much of my dogs. They all have a BoBo (all different kinds, all different colors)and usually end up sleeping with one. Pretty much, imagine four dogs passed out randomly throughout the house..all with torn up BoBo's. Yup. That's my house!

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Μπακλαβάς!

I <3 Baklava! I rarely ever have it because it's so saturated with honey (and fatness), but I figured I'd give it a shot and try to make some since it's not something I see hanging around the grocery store. And..I don't wanna go to a Greek restraunt just for dessert. 

I read "Closet Cooking" almost every other day because the creator, Kevin, comes up with some really good stuff! I excluded the lemon and orange peels from the recipe since, well, he said he didn't really taste them in the sauce..so I didn't wanna bother trying to track down a lemon and orange. The only thing that was time consuming was laying the phyllo dough since it's tissue paper thin. Truth my told, my kitchen smells pretty amazing right now! 

 Baklava straight out of the oven:

 

Baklava with the honey sauce poured onto it :)

Mine looks dark since I added cinnamon into the sauce. I didn't have a cinnamon stick!

Here's the recipe.. I highly recommend you stalk his site!

Ingredients:
4 cups walnuts (chopped)
1/2 cup sugar
1 tablespoon cinnamon
1 cup butter (melted)
1 pound phyllo pastry (thawed)
3/4 cup water
1/2 cup sugar
1 stick cinnamon
2 inch slice lemon peel
2 inch slice orange peel
3/4 cup honey

Directions:
1. Mix the walnuts, sugar and cinnamon in a bowl.
2. Brush the bottom of a 9X13 inch pan with butter.
3. Brush butter onto the top of a sheet of the phyllo dough and place the sheet into the pan. Repeat until there are 8 sheets in the pan.
4. Sprinkle 1/3 of the walnut mixture onto the phyllo in the pan.
5. Brush butter onto the top of a sheet of the phyllo dough and place the sheet into the pan. Repeat until there are 2 sheets on top of the nut mixture.
6. Sprinkle 1/3 of the walnut mixture onto the phyllo in the pan.
7. Brush butter onto the top of a sheet of the phyllo dough and place the sheet into the pan. Repeat until there are 2 sheets on top of the nut mixture.
8. Sprinkle 1/3 of the walnut mixture onto the phyllo in the pan.
9. Brush butter onto the top of a sheet of the phyllo dough and place the sheet into the pan. Repeat until there are 8 sheets on top of the nut mixture.
10. Slice the baklava with a sharp knife.
11. Bake in a preheated 350F oven until golden brown on top, about 25-35 minutes.
12. Bring the water, sugar, cinnamon, lemon and orange to a boil, reduce the heat and simmer for 10 minutes.
13. Add the honey and simmer for 2 minutes.
14. Remove the cinnamon, and peals from the syrup.
15. Pour the syrup over the baklava when it comes out of the oven.
16. Let the baklava cool for a few hours.

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Christmas Markets - Part Duex

Last year, I made my rounds to several different Christmas markets between Belgium, Germany and The Netherlands. My absolute favorite from then was Aachen, Germany cause I managed to score some pretty cute stuff (here's the post from last year: Hood-Tastic ).  Here's another post talking about the ornaments I picked up: She who dies with the most ornaments...WINS! .

So, I had high expectations this year considering last year was so awesome. Then again, maybe since last year was my first time experiencing European Christmas markets, everything was just THAT amazing to me. I dunno! 

I headed to Aachen today since I had made plans with a friend if mine to go. Sadly, she had to opt out because her son seems to have caught a nasty bug that's been floating around (causes kids to look like the exorcist and puke). I ended up going solo since I was really excited to go and I was alright with heading up there by myself (I'm a big girl, I can handle it). Parking was a nightmare. Forty five minutes of frustration, people tail gating me, getting cut off and almost hit a few times... my blood pressure went through the roof and managed to give myself a nice headache by the time I finally found a place to park. I guess today was trash day, so a lot of the businesses where you can park (parking area's around the streets) were filled up with large trash cans or tons of trash bags, or people were parking very stupid / inconsiderately to where it was impossible to park another car.

After much aggravation, I found a spot. Luckily, I brought my jacket with a hood because it started raining shortly after began walking around! 

After walking around for about 10 minutes, I realized there weren't as many vendors there as there were last year. Doesn't seem like it at first, but once you notice there's "more room" than before, you tend to see where the "holes" are. Kinda disappointing :-/ If anything, it's just pretty to walk around and see all the different decorations that the vendors had up. Luckily, the lady who I bought my ornaments from last year was there:

I managed to pick up one that thought looked like Big Ben....but when I showed it to Eric, he said "Oh nice! It's the bell tower in Peer!". That quickly deflated my personal victory cause when I looked at it, he was right. It looks like the freaking tower! Now I gotta go back, or enlist someone for their services, and get a double-decker red bus so it's "FOR SURE" a symbol of London! It's all Eric's fault.

After I got the ornament, I picked up some potato fritters (they're absolutely UH-mazing)....definitely something I look forward to during Christmas markets! They offered me apple sauce with it, but I didn't want any considering I still wanted to walk around without dribbling sauce every where:

From there, I walked around a little more and killed some time since I was waiting for the local sushi place to open up. No, I wasn't eating for myself since I just had the potato fritter. Well, technically I was. I was picking up sushi for dinner since Eric and I wanted some.

On the way there, I figured I'd take a few random pics cause things looked pretty:

All in all, it was "OK", but not mind blowing like last year. The only thing that's really gonna make me go back is the ornaments and the potato fritters. I think Eric and I are going to venture over to Koln's market, or even Bernkastels since I know theirs is officially going on. Might as well kill two birds with one stone (Christmas market and get our pottery!)

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Day 6 - Twenty of My Favorite Things

So, I don't know if it has to be THINGS, or if it can be people and other living things. Oh well, let's get rolling:

#1: My family. Really, need I say more?

 

#2 : My pets. They ARE my kids! 

#3: My best friend. I met her back in 2001 through an old boyfriend. Even though we don't get to see one another very often (last I saw her was July 2007), we still catch up as often as we can, despite the time difference between Belgium and Australia. I consider her a sister! 

#4: Favorite Jewelry Piece: My wedding set.

 
#5:  Sushi. I absolutely love sushi. I can promise that I'd probably eat it every day if I didn't have to travel at least and hour to obtain it. When we lived in California, I worked a block away from an amazing sushi restraunt. I'll put it like this: They knew me by voice when I called in my orders. Yeah.

#6: My truck. By far, the best investment I've ever made...ya know, aside from getting married.

#7: European Christmas Markets. They're awesome. Well, most of 'em. You can find really nifty things, enjoy cultural food,  and really get to enjoy the atmosphere of "Christmas". They are VERY different then how we experience Christmas in the States (not overly commercialized).

#8:  Clam Chowder. To be more specific, the clam chowder from The Fisherman's Grotto in Monterey, California. It's the best, and I'm not just saying that. It's  literally ...THE BEST. The last time I was home, I pretty much dropped my bags off at my Dads house and headed straight over to the Wharf for some chowder, lol. Omg...I just started drooling..

#9:  My Xbox 360. I realize it's silly to like a video game console, but this thing has a lot of uses. Since Microsoft just released the "Kinect" system, it really enhances when you want to talk to someone via video chat. Not only that, but I can use it as a DVD player, sound system, a personal gym, and yes, a thing to play video games on.

#10: Germany. Yes, the country. Once you visit Germany, you'll completely understand why it's a "favorite" of mine.

 

#11:  What Dreams May Come. By far, my favorite movie!

#12: Artichokes. My favorite vegetable! I guess living in Salinas had it's advantages since we weren't all that far from Castroville, the "Artichoke Center of the World". You could pretty much get an artichoke made a dozen different ways (kind of reminds me of Forrest Gump when that guy was listing off all the different things you can do with shrimp). Truth be told, you can get amazing deep fried artichoke hearts there. 

#13: Bavarian necklace. Eric bought this for me while we were vacationing in Berchtesgaden. One, he got it for me as a Mothers Day gift. Second, he doesn't normally buy me jewelry, so this particular piece is very dear to me cause he knew it was along my style.... :)

.

#14:  Uggs. Yes, they're "Ugg-ly", but they sure as hell keep me warm! ESPECIALLY during the cold months in Belgium!!

#15: Favorite color: Fuschia

#16: CSI: Las Vegas. I own all ten seasons. What does that tell you?

#17: Peppermint White Mocha. Best drink every...especially during the holidays!

#18: Dachshunds. They the quirkiest breed I've ever dealt with..and I love 'em! Huge personalities for such a little dog! I have three (as you can see from the beginning of this post), my Dad has two and my Grandmother has one. All of 'em have very distinct personalities that set them apart (aside from their fur color).

#19: Fall. My favorite season! All the leaves change into this gorgeous red / orange hue, the weather gets colder...perfect time of year for hot chocolate dates on the couch and snuggling up with a blanket!

#20:  Favorite wedding picture. Eric and I both have this picture in our wallets, and we have it on our wedding album. Every time I look at it, it brings back all the feelings of how happy we were that day, the fun we had with our friends and all the crazy things we did while in Vegas. Love it!

Honestly, this was kinda hard!!! I had to really think for a while about what my "favorite things" were! Even then, I had to kinda throw things together cause I didn't want it all to focus around food, hahaaa

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