Nick's birthday weekend

What a week it was.  Monday was a normal hum drum Monday, but come Tuesday I was busy as a bee.  Nick took me to a nice French Bistro in Lafayette called Metro for our six month anniversary.  I know, it's already been six months!  Time sure does fly when you're having fun!  At Metro we ordered a dozen oysters and calamari as appetizers. He's created a monster by introducing me to oysters.  (I think I say that every time I have them now.) I love them and can't get enough...of the small ones, that is.  I still haven't developed taste buds for the larger, more briny mollusks.  For dinner Nick ordered black cod over a rice cake and I had a lamb sausage and a side of potatoes.  My goodness, it was good.  On his sister's recommendation I also got a Pink Lavender Metro cocktail that was really tasty.  All in all I thought the place was good.  The portions were just about right and the setting was very nice.  It had a modern club-ish feel in the front by the bar though it was a nice sit down restaurant with a fireplace and sun room in the back.  Maybe the owners were trying to dip into the best of both worlds for ambiance.  Who knows, the food was good and that's what we care about. The evening ended nicely with Glee and V, two of my favorite shows. 

By Wednesday things were in full gear.  I had to cancel my weekly dinner with Melanie just so that I could get everything done.  After going to the grocery store, I made a fresh salsa that was spicy and addicting just like my first recipe I concocted in Troy.  The grocery store didn't have habanero peppers so this time I used serranos and added some onion.  I think I might actually enjoy this recipe a little more than the first salsa recipe I made.

Spicy Salsa #2

2 28oz cans diced tomato
7 serrano peppers, seeded and minced
1 small red onion, diced
1 head garlic
salt to taste

In blender mix serranos, onion, and garlic until finely chopped.  Add diced tomato and salt.  Blend until desired consistency is achieved.  (I like mine chunky)

I also made a copycat Old Spaghetti Factory Creamy Pesto salad dressing that tastes pretty much just like the real stuff.  I knew that I wanted to have a salad for the bbq I was having for Nick's birthday, but I couldn't decide on what kind I wanted.  After going through loads of salad recipes on Allrecipes a little light bulb came on.  Nick's favorite dressing is the creamy pesto from Spaghetti Factory so why not make that?  We had actually looked up the recipe a while back just to see if there was one out there and sure enough, there were a bunch.  I picked the top hit on google and it turned out marvelously with the simple garden salad that I made.  I wasn't able to find Romano cheese at Food Maxx, but I substituted it with Parmesan that I had at home and it worked well.  I also grated my garlic instead of mincing it because I didn't want people biting into little chunks of garlic.  I also made a second batch just for us to have at home using Best Foods instead of the store brand and it came out a lot thicker and had a better texture.  Anyway, not many people ate the actual salad, but they used the dressing on their ribs and sausages.  I have a feeling that our friends don't enjoy salad as much when there's good old meat being grilled up.  Hahah I wouldn't either!

Thursday was the hardest day for me.  After work we went out to Costco to buy all the meat and sausages.  Originally I was going to make short ribs, but then when we got to Costco, they were about $5/lb compared to the $2.50/lb for regular baby back ribs.  So baby back it was.  The packages were huge too.  There were three racks per package and I got about five servings per rack compared to five slices of short ribs per package. Yikes!  With two packages of ribs, we had plenty to feed everyone and had to force them to take some home.  I also bought chicken apple sausage and habanero and cheese sausage.  Yummy!  I still prefer chicken apple sausage over the habanero, but it was nice to change it up a bit.  I probably won't buy them again though.

What is a birthday barbecue without some cake?  One of Nick's favorite flavors is Mint Chocolate Chip so I went and scoured the web for a good recipe and found one on Epicurious.com.  I find that usually recipes on this site are a little more involved than the ones I find on Allrecipes, but the Chocolate Mint Layer cake looked doable.  Since it was for a party I decided that it would be easier to make cupcakes instead of a multi-layered cake.  My mom had me look at a boxed cake box to see about how long to bake them and it turned out great.  What a good idea!  The temperature was the same so I didn't have to try to do funky conversions or guesswork.  I was fine until it came to filling the cups.  As some of the reviews said, the batter was really liquidy, which made the cupcake flutes really difficult to fill without making a giant mess.  Since I'm kind of a neat freak getting the chocolate batter everywhere was really frustrating me.  After my mom said that she usually holds each cup and fills it over the bowl and then gingerly puts it into the pan I started doing that instead of bringing my ladle over the already lined pan.  It was just a complete mess.  Filling the cups before they hit the pan worked pretty well, but since they were quite liquidy it made it a little difficult to get the cups into the pan without spilling.  I had contemplated putting my crushed Andes in the batter, which would have thickened it up a bit, but the recipe specifically called for the candies to be put on top.  I thought that maybe since the batter was so soft that all the candy would sink to the bottom.  Not the case.  I think that if I make these again then I will remember to mix the candies into the batter.  Dropping the candies on top made the cupcakes look messy and ugly.  Everyone seemed to like the actual cake so I will probably make it again sometime. The only thing that had me boggled was that there were no eggs in the mixture.  I had never seen such a thing. 

Mint Chocolate Chip cupcakes

Along with the cupcakes Nick had suggested that we make s'mores for dessert since we were going to be lighting the fire pit.  These were a hit!  I think everyone liked these more than they liked the rest of the food.  I'm glad that they are easy bunch to please (this will help me refine future bbqs).  I think everyone just enjoys s'mores.  It brings out the kid in us all.  Sometimes in Riverside my roommates and I would make s'mores using the flame of our gas stove.  If you turn the flame high enough you can have s'mores all year long!  This time we used soaked bbq skewers to roast the marshmallows so that we didn't actually have to do it camping style and forage for sticks in our back yard.  With the left over ingredients I have from the s'mores I think I will be making some S'mores Crumb Bars for Nick and Linda.  I will probably do this for next week's baking excursion.  I'm taking a break this week since I'm a little burnt out from the bbq. 

Smores!

I really liked the strawberry plate that we made for Jen Jen's baby shower so I wanted to do one for Nick's bbq.  Costco only had black berries, so I had to settle with those.  I really enjoy having these platters that are really pretty to look at and they're so easy!  It makes for a nice table and it keeps my stress levels low.  It seems that no matter how small or large my dinner parties/bbqs are, I get stressed.  I think it just comes with the territory.  "Why do I continue to have them?" you may ask.  It is quite simple, really.  I love to see happy people enjoying my food and knowing that they are having a good time.  I've never met any people who don't enjoy being fed (I don't have any friends, that I know of, with eating disorders) so it seems natural that to please myself I cook for others, right? Right.  The water was inspired by all those spa day trips to Burke Williams with the family.  The water was pretty tasty and looked pretty in the new jug that I got my mom from Costco.  It reminds me of all those times at the spa...ahh those were the days.

Nick hard at work at the grill.  

I don't grill.  For some reason I just never learned how.  I probably should because it doesn't really look that hard.  I've always just relied on other people to do it.  Plus, it also means that I don't have to do the cooking.  Hehehe.  I think this summer I will start slow with the grilling.  I tend to burn anything I put on there because I'm too impatient.  I really want to do some beer can chicken and now that I have a grill that's big enough to do it, I want to. 

Tim eating Nick's hard work

Around the fire pit

Saturday night Nick and I headed out to the city for a little private dinner celebration at the House of Prime Rib.  Oh it was good.  We of course got the largest portion they offered and finished it.  Boy how I love my beef.  What had me even more floored was the dessert.  I'm usually not a dessert person, not even really a sweets person at all, but the Crème brûlée was to die for.  Oh. My. God.  I have never tasted one that was so divine.  Unlike normal Crème brûlée, it was not in an average 5.5 oz ramekin, but in a flat dish that you'd normally see serving a dip of some sort.  It made all the difference.  The flatness of the dish, probably about half an inch thick, allowed for the custard to be thin and the brûléed top to stand out.  The ratio of brûléed topping to sweet custard was what had me.  Usually in when the Crème brûlée is served in a ramekin there is too much custard to the thin amount of sugary brûlée.  The brûlée gets lost in the subtle sweetness of the custard.  This however, was different and it blew my mind.  Whenever the day comes that I make creme brûlée, I'm doing it in a flat dish.  The only thing that I regret is not taking a picture of it.

The House of Prime Rib

While I was having the bbq, Emmy was off to Davis to get some booster shots and a furcut.  For some reason the groomer didn't cut the fur around her face or tail.  Her front "racing" furs were also left uncut.  She looked absolutely ridiculous.  Her mane looked as if her collar was pushing all her fur up on her head, but really it was just that the groomer buzzed all the way up to her neck and stopped so that her long fur hung over the shaved part...like a bowl cut!  So on Saturday after I had recovered from the bbq and cleanup, I took an hour to cut her fur.  You can tell that it's not professionally done and it's a little choppy in some places, but it's much better and closer to how we had her in the past.  She was a really good girl and sat still while I was snipping away...probably because she didn't want me to accidentally stab her with sharp shears. 

Fixing Emmy's furcut

Sunday after everything was settling down Christopher and I headed out to Home Depot to get some herbs for my vegetable patch and then to Costco to get fish for dinner.  Since it's been pretty nice out, Nick came back over and grilled fish for us while I planted my herbs.  I'm still not that keen on fish so I got myself a separate tuna steak while my family and Nick had salmon.  Nick marinated the salmon in garlic, lemon zest, EVOO, and a little pepper.  While he was cooking it he put lemon juice on top.  For the tuna I just marinated it in garlic, EVOO, and pepper.  With our fish, Nick grilled up some asparagus and I made garlic noodles.  Grilling is great because the clean up is so easy plus you get to be outside in the nice weather.  Yay for Spring time!

Lately I've started using Olay's Regenerist Micro-Sculpting night cream.  I love it.  Before I had been using Olay's anti-aging night cream and it seemed to work well, but then there was coupon in Costco's little booklet so my mom got me some Regenerist.  The cream smells so good and after two weeks it actually seems like there is a little difference in the fine lines on my forehead. I was just using anti-aging cream as a preventative, but it looks like it's actually doing something for me!  You can never start too early in my opinion.  Plus out in NY the weather and stress was giving me premature wrinkles.  I think it was mostly the weather.  It was so dry and cold there that I would put straight Vaseline on my face and it would just feel like a heavy lotion.  I definitely think that Regenerist is a good investment since I can see small changes that I didn't even know where there to change.  I never really noticed the little expression lines before they started to get smaller.  Like other night creams, Regenerist is a little heavy, but it absorbs well and you don't need to put that much on to cover your whole face.  I make sure to get all over my eyes since I'm always tugging at the sensitive skin around them to wipe off make up. My skin glows more, probably because I've been getting more sun, but it also looks tighter like when I was back in college.  I really never realized how skin ages over the years.  I guess it's starting to hit me now that I'm getting a little older and have had so much harsh weather and sun thrown at me.  The only down side to the cream is that the pot is a little large, which would make traveling with it bothersome.  (And it's a little pricey.)  I've taken my other pots of night cream with me on trips, but they were significantly smaller.  There is much more plastic to the container of this cream.   Though very appealing looking plastic, it is still bulky to carry.  Other than that, I love the actual product.  The first few nights of using it I couldn't wait to put it on because I enjoyed the scent so much.  It reminds me a little of the old Herbal Essences shampoo scent, which I miss terribly. 

I think I mentioned before that for book club this time we are reading Vladamir Nobokav's Lolita.  Well, it took me a month to finish and when I did, I felt like I was supposed to write a paper afterward.  It is just one of those books that scream "required reading" to me.  There was plenty, and I mean plenty, of content and style to analyze in this book, but I chose not to.  Of course there were times that I just couldn't help myself by underlining something or writing in the margins, but in general I tried to breeze through the book.  In general I thought that Nobokav did an excellent job of making the main character likeable, for lack of a better term, despite the fact that he was an unrepentant pedophile.  The way that the narrator described the children was very similar to how others would describe a beautiful woman, which of course had me a little miffed at the blatant objectification of the female body.  I really did enjoy how the character knew he was wrong to be so in love with young girls, but couldn't help it.  It definitely gives a different perspective on things like love.  Sometimes I wonder how writers get so into the character, especially one like this.  I'm actually tempted to buy his autobiography just to see if he explains how he got inspiration for Lolita.  The narrator's passion for young girls was so utterly convincing that I really want to know how Nobokav did it.  I think it doubtful that he himself was a pedophile since he's gone into great and even better detail in his other works, so I really, really want to know how he wrote a character who was so convincing.

On an opposite spectrum, I've gone back to reading Bret Easton Ellis.  I'm on a mission to read all of his work.  So far I've read two of the seven and am working on the third.  Right now I'm reading The Informers which is awesome, but I can't really tell you why.  It is a series of short stories with linked characters.  The thing is, nothing really happens.  Nothing happens!  Yet I still find it to be a page turner.  There is always so-and-so is sleeping with so-and-so and then the short story ends and you're thrust into another story with related characters.  Everyone knows everyone and is doing everyone, yet there is nothing really going on.  You reach a point where when reading you're like, ooh plot!  But then the next story starts.  The whole book is kind of like a puzzle.  There's not really anything there until the end of each short clip.  I feel like I'm piecing these relationships between people together to try to get a whole story.  Pretty cool if you ask me.  Maybe that's why I keep turning the pages.  I still have about 50 pages to go, which I'll probably get done tonight so I'll let you know what I think next week.   So far so good. 

I think, if my memory serves me correctly, that I've already over explicated about how Ellis writes about the degeneration of LA locals.  Basically how LA has its own little niche of groupies that all get sucked into the city and can't escape.  They conform to the commercialism and superficial qualities of the city, all wearing designer clothes and driving expensive cars.  Everything is glamored up to make the characters think that their lives are peachy except that around them their friends are ODing or being murdered by drug dealers.  Everyone is in their own cloud of drugs and can't be bothered by what happens to others.  There is one particular section of the book that is cleverly written as a series of letters from a girl who is "visiting" LA from NJ (she later decides to live in LA and drop out of college).  Within a five month period she is transformed into an LA clone.  It was great.  Ellis also used some pretty neat symbolism, but I won't get into that.  I find it inspiring that Ellis can write stories where not much actually happens, but still has the reader invested because the characters are so messed up that you can't help but wanting to see if they die or not.  Morbid, I know, but it gives a different perspective on how glamorous LA actually is.  Ellis is quickly becoming my favorite author.  JK Rowling, move over!

Cooking, cooking and more cooking

 To kick off this cooking weekend I started Friday afternoon by making the Greek Lemon Cake I found on Allrecipes.  First road block: Christopher and I went to Safeway looking for cake flour.  I know the stuff exists, but Safeway didn't have it.  We scoured those shelves looking for it, but it was no where to be found.  It's a good thing for Allrecipes' resources and reviews.  According to the flour article, you are not supposed to substitute all purpose for cake flour.  However, there was a reviewer who said that if you use regular all purpose you take out two tablespoons for every cup to get the same sort of result.  Since I've just started baking I can't actually tell you if it had the same texture and consistency, but it seemed to work out fine to me. 

It was super delicious even though it was a tiny bit under cooked.  There was a little portion that was "custardy" as my mom put it.  Woops.  The rest of the cake was good though!  The recipe started with peaking egg whites, which I was apprehensive about in my last post.  I've seen this done quite a bit on Barefoot Contessa, Paula Dean, and even when my mom has done it, but I'm impatient.  I beat the egg whites until the mixing bowl looked like it was full of bubbly loogie and then added the sugar.  Apparently the loogie-like egg whites become more like meringue, which I knew but chose to ignore.  I figured that it had been beaten long enough and I hadn't done it correctly.  It's a good thing my mom was around to tell me that I needed to leave the whites to beat longer.  Thankfully they came to fruition even though I added the sugar way too early.  So after beating the heck out of those egg whites they finally fluffed up like they were supposed to.  I swear that if I didn't have a stand mixer I would never, ever bake.  Anyway, putting together all the ingredients took a lot longer than I thought it would.  I'm hoping that when I start getting better this will speed up.  Once the cake was done I topped it with confectioners sugar.  I thought about making a glaze and frosting it that way, but I kept envisioning pools of gloppy glaze and decided to go with sprinkled powdered sugar, which is pretty fool proof.  Even though the cake was completely cool before I powdered it, (I let it sit over night) it was a very moist cake so after a while the sugar started to soak in.  This could be because it was a little under cooked, but I can't say for sure.  Hopefully half a year from now and many cakes later, I will be able to look back and say, yup, cake flour makes a difference and yup, it was too moist because it didn't bake long enough.  Time will tell.

Greek Lemon Cake

After making the cake I thought I was going to be too burnt out to cook, but it was actually refreshing.  The pressure was off and I was back in a realm to which I am a little bit more familiar with.  While my cake was baking I was measuring out spices to bring to Nick's for our dinner and for the dinner that we were going to be making with Linda.  Linda and I planned to go grocery shopping together, which we did, but I didn't want to have to buy all new spices so I prepacked them in little baggies (clearly marked of course) and took them with me to Nick's place.  

For some reason I had been craving fajitas for a couple of days but didn't want to go to a Mexican place and pay a lot of money for good, but fattening food.  I was a little discouraged with making fajitas ourselves since the meat needed to be marinated and I wasn't picking it up until I headed over to his place.  I don't know why, but I was reluctant to do a dry rub on the meat even though I love dry rubs.  After realizing this, I decided that dry rubbing the meat would be just fine for the fajitas.  After googling "dry rubbed fajitas" I found a good recipe on Recipezaar.com.  Along with making the fajita meat, Nick went to a local Mexican restaurant and picked up rice and beans and we also made our own pico de gallo.  The meat turned out so well.  It had an awesome kick to it.  Yum yum yum. 

Fajita burritos that Nick and I made Friday night.

On Saturday before heading to Nick's where Linda and Rob were coming for a mini cooking lesson and to make dinner with us I made my dad and myself giant bagel breakfast sandwiches.  (My mom and brother were at a band thing.)  On the toasted bagel were two slices of cheddar cheese, kielbasa sausage, and two sunny side up eggs with ketchup.  Oh it was delicious. 

Stuffed to the gills, I was ready to start making dinner with Linda.  Hehehe.  With sharp knives in hand, Linda and I set out to start making our own enchilada sauce and enchiladas, both recipes from Allrecipes which is my go-to recipe website if you hadn't noticed.  My mom said to me on Friday while I was watching my egg whites peak that I choose difficult recipes when just beginning.  I am starting to think she is right.  The enchiladas weren't difficult in the sense that we had to do extravagant things.  It's not like we were trying to make an aspic or something, but it took a lot of work.  

Linda did pretty much all the cooking with Nick and I milling around and trying to hold ourselves back from checking the status of the chicken too many times.  It is a lot harder to not step in than you think.  When I first started cooking my mom showed me how to dice and onion, but I refused to do it her way and would do slices and then chop into a dice.  I think it killed her a little bit everytime she saw me do it.  She'd always show me how to do it, but would then step back and let me figure it out the hard way that her way was better.  (I'm stubborn.  It runs in the family.)  Eventually I learned the right way to go about dicing an onion.  I also would always hold the knife at the handle and not at the bolster where you have a better grip and more control.  When Nick showed me how to hold the knife I resisted at first but then acquiesced after watching a few instructional videos.  By starting on garlic that is easy to cut and low to the cutting board (I have a harder time with using proper knife form on larger vegetables like thick carrots so I started with smaller stuff first) I was able to get the hold down while also using the rocking motion that I was finally getting used by holding the handle.  Holding the knife down at the bolster actually makes it easier to do that rocking motion, who would have thought?  Thank goodness Linda is much more receptive than I am.  She picked up the bolster hold, which feels really awkward at first, quickly and was chopping away in no time.  

Anyway, the whole point to me getting side-tracked is that it's much more difficult to stand back and let someone learn than it seems.  This is exactly that saying "Give a man to a fish, he eats for a day.  Teach a man to fish, he eats for life."  Once things were going smoothly and we had our mise done I reverted to my cleaning lady mode and started cleaning things as Linda used them.  This worked out well so that she always had uncontaminated knives and cutting boards to use.  By the time we were ready to assemble the enchiladas we were getting tired so Nick suggested that we do them lasagna style.  It was the best idea of the day.  Linda layered tortillas, enchilada filling, and our enchilada sauce up so that it was basically a Mexican lasagna.  Again, Nick and Rob went to get beans and rice from a restaurant so that we wouldn't have to make that ourselves.  The enchilada lasagna was soooooo good. It was a major success and I think, even though it was was labor intensive, that I'll be making this for my family. 

Linda hard at work

Rob also hard at work

While we were slaving away at our enchilada feast, Christopher and Briana were getting ready to dance the night away.  Awww how cute they look!

Briana's prom

On Sunday I spent the day at home doing stuff around the house.  After lunch Christopher and I went to Costco so that I could get dirt and plants for my vegetable patch.  We got 3 tomato plants (I ended up going back for three more while I was planting yesterday) two green bell peppers, and a pepperchini plant.  I have a feeling that the bell pepper plants were mislabeled and that we got two pepperchinis instead of two bell by accident.  The leaves of one of the "bell pepper" plants looks just like the pepperchini plant that we got.  By the pointedness of the leaves the mystery plant is not a bell pepper.  If I remember correctly from my planting in NY the spicy peppers have pointy leaves and the bell have rounded.  Oh well.  We'll see what happens when it starts to sprout.  

Things were going pretty well until the allergies hit.  I think I was only outside for an hour before I could barely open my eyes and was sneezing up a storm.  Getting halfway through de-weeding the strawberry patch I decided to take on the vegetable patch that had a bunch of weeds and wood in it.   That's when I started seeing nickle-sized brown spiders with spindly legs scurrying across the dirt towards and away from me.  (The bugs hide under the wood.)  There was more than one girlish squeal and sprinting across the yard.  My dad, who was putting a sealant on our patio, would just shake his head.  Since the strawberry patch was relatively safe, I went back to weed that section.  By the time I finished with the strawberries, my allergies were killing me.  Christopher came to my rescue and evacuated all the debris and weeds from the vegetable lot.  He also put in more dirt, hoed, and watered the patch so that I could plant.  (I asked if he wanted to take a picture by his hard work but he declined.)  I did however take a lovely picture of how miserable I was.  The rest of the night, even though I showered, I my nose was runny.  I felt like I was drowning in my own snot.  I had to plug up my nose so that it wouldn't drip on the food that I was preparing.  After a couple glasses of wine which usually clogs me up right away I was no longer drippy but at a normal nasal passage state...that's how runny I was.  At the end of the night after dinner I was drained.  My vegetables weren't planted, but at least Christopher cleared out the area and I got my strawberries in better order.  

Before vegetable patch

After vegetable patch

Before strawberry patch

After strawberry patch

Miserable allergies

For dinner I had picked up some pork tenderloins at Costco.  I rubbed them down with two different spices.  I also made a veggie dish with all the stuff in our fridge.  My mom always buys all these vegetables that look awesome but then we don't eat them all.  This time I cut them all up and put them in one big stir fry. 

Grilled pork tenderloin with Southwestern and Middle Eastern Rub from my Good House Keeping cookbook.

I don't know how she did it, but she managed to get a grass stain on her eyebrow while we were outside doing yard work.  She says that she was also working very hard, which is why she has the stain.

Green brow

As promised in last week's post, here are pictures of our new patio.   After a lot of hemming and hawing, my parents finally decided that they needed someone to come in to do the patio.  Originally my dad wanted to do the patio as a project with Christopher, but after doing the Eagle project, there wasn't much time left to do the patio.  My dad had done a little side area of our house where we now have the grill, but it took quite some time for him to get it the way that he wanted.  By actually hiring someone to do it, the patio was done in three days.  Three days! The guys basically had to remove all the dirt that was piled where the deck used to be.  (My mom was hoping that my dad and brother would get it done before weeds started to grow on dirt pile, but that didn't happen.)  So the contractors dug up all the dirt and remaining bricks, leveled and graveled, and then laid the new bricks.  It was a noisy process and the guys were here from about 9am until 7pm everyday, but they got it done really quickly.  They even replaced the beams to our overhang for us.  Granted, they are a little crooked, but they're going to come back to fix it.  The patio makes the yard look soooo much bigger.  We still have to do the rest of our jungle-like backyard, but my parents want to do that themselves.

Before

See the giant pile of dirt with weeds on it?  That came from the little patio that my dad made.  He had to remove some of the dirt so that when he laid bricks down it would be same level as the cement pathway.  Sometimes while playing Emmy in the back I look around and think, this shouldn't be that much work.  And then I remember that I'm squeamish and don't like bugs or getting dirty.  We used to have a little "rock pond" right behind the fish pond that I would play in and build little rock mounds.  Yeah, that's all under a nice layer of weeds now.  I'm also not sure what my parents are planning to do with the 600+ bricks from our old patio plus the extra bricks from the new one that are now stacked on yet another patio area in our yard.  Make another patio with it?  We all know our backyard is big enough for another patio.  Hahaha.  I still think that we should have gotten a pool...something which my dad, brother and I have been wanting since I was a small child. 

During

After

I still can't believe how fast these guys got the backyard done, but now that it is, my mom is on a mission to find nice patio furniture to fill the empty space. 

This Sunday I'm going to try to get two little patches of land de-weeded and junked so that I can start a little vegetable and strawberry patch.  Well, I should say I'd like to revive our weed-filled strawberry patch and give it some love.  I will try to remember to take before and after pictures of that process.  Right now those little plots of land have weeds that are almost up to my knees and have a bunch of wood piled in it.  I'm going to try to overcome my fear of bugs by wearing pants, boots, sweatshirt, and gloves...probably a face mask too.  It always worked for me in NY, so it should be fine for this weekend too.  If this turns out well then maybe I'll attack that weedy rock pond area to see if I can make a difference out there.  I've already dedicated my weekends in May to cleaning out our garage so I don't know if I should attempt to do more work in the backyard.  Seriously, you'd think we were hoarders if you saw the garage.  I will also be sure to take before and after pictures of that.  My goal is to be able to fit two cars in the garage again before it gets too hot to clean the garage.  After cleaning the study and my parents room, I have the confidence (and had enough recovery time from the last "great purge") to start this major project.  My mom says that most of the stuff is mine, which is good since I know how to let go of stuff that I haven't seen in years.  My dad, however, would keep every last thing if he could. (...That broken receiver may come in handy someday you know...) 

As I said in the last post, I made a cake for my friend Linda.  The recipe instructed to grease and flour the pans so that the cakes didn't stick.  My mom said that she always uses parchment paper on the bottom instead of flour.  I should have done that instead, but I wanted to try the technique that the recipe suggested.  I didn't think I put that much flour on the bottom, just a thin coating, but when I turned the cakes out they were an ugly shade of puke brown.  Instead of using the ganache like I had intended, I used premade frosting instead so that I could cover the ugliness.  I will not disclose how much frosting I used, but it was waaayyyy too much.  For a first try it wasn't bad.  I resorted to crushing Butterfingers to top the cake with so that I could cover the crumbs that got mixed in with the white frosting.  I seriously think that frosting the cake was harder than following the directions, which I checked three times and made sure the oven was on Bake twice.  It turned out well though.  Linda and Nick said that the cake was moist, which is always a plus.

First attempt at a multilayer cake.

This week I will be trying a Greek Lemon Cake from Allrecipes.com. I am a little apprehensive about having to peak the egg whites, but I'll make sure to have my mom around in case I need to holler for help.  Linda and I are also cooking this weekend, something I'm much more comfortable with.  We will be making Enchiladas and Spanish rice.  I will also try to remember to take pictures of that.  

Other than the new patio and my first multilayer cake, I saw How to Train Your Dragon.  It was sooo super cute!  I loved it and highly suggest seeing it.