Having fun leads to time flying.

Hold on.  It's November?!  How did that happen??  The Sandias had their first light dusting of snow a few mornings ago.  Fall is officially over.

I've been lousy at keeping up with my blog.  What can I say... just too much life going on, I guess.  And now it's almost the holidays!  I can't believe this.

Let's see... in the last couple of months we have enjoyed the fall weather, completed a couple of bike races, entertained family visiting from out of town, participated in some classic New Mexico traditions such as Zozobra and the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, worked on small projects around the house, been to concerts, cooked a lot of good food, traveled to Vegas for a weekend, celebrated Halloween for a full week... All of these things could have warranted blog updates, but the truth is that I've been having too much fun to bother sitting down and writing about it.  I've also gotten back into Crossfit pretty heavily, and have spent a lot of my time lately either at the box or at home recovering from my workouts.  More on that later (my thoughts on the matter have evolved quite a bit since my first experience).

This year we are sticking around Albuquerque for the holidays.  I'm pretty excited to enjoy this season in our new home with friends and family.  And hopefully lots of snow!  I'm going to blog more often.  And maybe I'll even post some photos and stories from the last few months that somehow blew by too quickly.

Winter is coming!!

That one time we made a laundry room...

When we were looking at houses last year, one of the things that Josh and I both agreed we really needed to have in a new house was a laundry room.  The first two houses that we put offers on both had huge, awesome laundry/utility rooms (I'm not dwelling on those anymore, I'm just sayin').  This house, the house we ended up buying and now inhabit, did not have a laundry room.  But structurally, the house was well-suited for some renovation that would allow for the construction of a laundry room.  Plus, Josh would get to tear out a wall and use his demolition skills.  So, hey, what the hell.  Let's build us a laundry room!

This is what the "laundry area" of the house looked like originally:

Basically, there was a small, inset section of wall between the kitchen and the bathroom where the tall, upright water heater and a stacked washer/dryer unit lived (the washer/dryer were no longer in existence when we purchased the house).  And like everything else, it was pink.  And carpeted.

I made a schematic so that this upcoming description won't be too confusing:

First of all, we have a massively huge bathroom in the middle of our house.  This room used to be a bedroom, and at some point somebody decided to make themselves a giant bathroom with two entrances and a walk-in closet.  It's cool to have such a large bathroom, but it's a little odd.  And most importantly, we did not need a large walk-in closet in our bathroom.  We decided to remove the wall of the closet that once created the "laundry nook" (it's the purple wall in my handy little drawing) in the hallway between the bathroom and the kitchen, thus creating an open space that we could use as a laundry room.  We also sealed off the closet door into the bathroom (shown with green dots).

I wrote a post a while back about Josh's demolition skills, and this room really put those skills to the test.  First he tore down the wall to create the open space we needed.  After we had removed the old water heater, Josh noticed that there was a little bit of water damage to some of the floor boards underneath, so he had to cut a chunk of the floor out and replace a number of boards.  This actually proved to be convenient, because we also needed to reroute all of the pipes for the water and gas lines to the back of the new room we'd created in order to hook up the washer, dryer, and new water heater.  So, Josh spent many days under the house, climbing in and out of the giant gaping hole in our floor.  And then he patched the floor!  And then we patched the walls!  And then it was starting to look like a real room!

We decided to install a tankless water heater in place of the old, standard one.  This is great because it's way smaller and we were able to hang it on the wall above the washer, and it's really efficient.  The down side to reorganizing this room and installing a new kind of water heater was that Josh needed to cut new vent holes through the roof of the house, which was a bit of an ordeal.  This ultimately resulted in us having to strip and re-seal the entire roof, but that's a story for another day.  The bottom line is that he did in fact cut holes through the roof of the house, and we now have a nicely-vented water heater as well as a light/fan combo to help ventilate the room.

After we had finished patching up the walls and ceiling, we tiled this room the same pattern as the kitchen and the bathroom on either side of it (these three rooms were all tiled at the same time).  I chose to paint this room a bright golden color because there are no windows nearby and I wanted to be sure that it didn't just feel like a dark closet all of the time.  I like the yellow quite a bit, and it looks really nice when you see the blue kitchen cabinets in the background as well.  I found a good deal on a front loader washer/dryer set on Craig's List, and after a fair bit of spillage we finally managed to get everything connected and in proper functional order.  We turned on the newly-rerouted water and gas pipes, and nothing exploded!

Finally, I bought these cool shelf brackets online and used some of the old boards we salvaged from the office demolition to make some shelves for the wall.  I'm still debating putting more shelves on the opposite side of the room, but haven't decided yet.

We still have a little bit of cleaning up around the edges to do in here, but overall it's in good shape.  I mean, this room didn't even exist before- we made it!  So, finally, your before and after shots:

Paint ALL the walls!

When we said we were re-doing the entire inside of our new house, we meant it.  When we're done with this baby, not a single wall nor ceiling nor door will be the same color as it was when we purchased the house.  I've got a pretty good jump on painting most of the house already, but there's still quite a bit to do.

Some of our friends came over one night in the first days of our housework and helped to prime all of the non-white walls.  That made a huge difference and really made it easier for me to paint most everything else by myself.  Luckily, I've been spending a bit of extra cash for the good, thick paint and we haven't had to use more than one coat on most anything.  The darker colors (like the red we're using in the living room) needed two coats, but otherwise it's been pretty smooth sailing.  Then one of my old field school students came to visit ABQ for a few days with three of his friends, and we let them crash at our old house in exchange for some help painting.  So in the span of only about 3 hours, we got two rooms painted!  That was pretty awesome.

I spent more than a week painting the kitchen cabinets, and THAT was a doozy.  But I'll save that for a different post in itself.  Also, all of the walls in our house are textured.  Textured walls look nice, but damn are they a pain to paint.  Especially the ceilings.  Have you ever tried to paint a textured ceiling in a 350+sqft room, by yourself, in poor lighting?  It's a terrible idea!  My arms were aching, my neck was sore, and I still had to go back the next day and paint over a bunch of spots where the texture prevented the roller from covering everything.  But it looks good now, and that's what matters.  My kitchen and bathroom are no longer pink.  That's all that matters.

I plan to post before and after photos of all of the rooms once they get finished, so you will be able to see all of the colors then.  You'll just have to trust me that they look damn good.  We're pretty good at picking out awesome colors, if I do say so myself.

Also, I made the amazing discovery that the little 49-cent paint tools from the hardware store can double as bottle openers!  GENIUS.

SOLD.

Yesterday we closed on our house.  Closed!  As in, I own a house!  The wait is over!  I don't have to go through the horrible process of home-buying again for many years!

(I was admittedly very sad that the selling realtor did not put up a "SOLD" sign in front of our new house.  They simply took down the sign.  I really was hoping to have a photo of the house with the sold sign.)

We get the keys Monday morning, and Monday after work we'll start tearing the place up to get some things done before we can move in.  I'll post updates as we get some of the work done.  Today we went to the hardware store in preparation and I was giddy with anticipation.  Bounding from aisle to aisle wanting to buy everything for every project I could dream up.  Josh reeled me in and we only bought supplies for dealing with carpet removal for now... and then I took about 1700 paint color cards home with me.

In other news, we just returned from a fantastic Hawaii vacation.  We spent more than a week between Oahu and the Big Island, and it was amazing.  I'll get some photos and stories from the trip up here soon, but between getting over jet-lag  closing on our new house, and trying to clean the current house, I haven't exactly had a lot of time in the last two days.  This month has already been insane, and I don't foresee it getting any calmer!

Finally, the end to our real estate journey.

I was beginning to wonder if our home-buying process would ever come to an end.  But, guess what?
WE HAVE A HOUSE!!!

Our official closing date is April 12th.  And then I'm a real homeowner!  Two weeks ago we finally received our short-sale approval from the bank after two months of waiting.  Much to my surprise, after that was processed, everything has moved very quickly and smoothly.  We had our inspections last week and everything looks good, and all the paperwork is done and turned in.  Now I just show up with a down payment check, sign closing documents, and get the keys!!  I don't think I can come up with words for how excited and relieved I am to be done with this process.  This is big.

Our new house needs a LOT of work.  It was built in 1950, and walking through it, you might think that the interior of the house has not changed much since that time.  We're talking horrible carpeting, pink and purple paint, wood paneling, funky hanging ceiling tiles, and nasty fixtures.   Structurally, it's a great house and it's in great shape... but cosmetically, we've got our work cut out for us.  Luckily the exterior has been spruced up relatively recently, so we won't have to do very much to the outside.

I'll post more photos of the whole house once we've actually closed.  And then you should expect a slew of posts about the various projects we'll be doing to the place.  I love before and after pictures, and we're definitely going to have some good ones with this place!  We're thinking that we'll spend a good two or three weeks working in the house before we actually move in.

It feels pretty amazing to finally know that we will be settling down soon.  Our current house has been half-packed for months and I can't wait to unload in a brand new space.  I am completely ready to jump head-first into fixing up this new place and making it awesome for us.

Oh, but first (and the reason we're not closing on the house until the 12th), we're going to go to Hawai'i for a little beach and volcano time!  Celebratory umbrella drinks will be consumed.  Then we'll be nice and refreshed to come back and start in on our new home.

And now, in our SIXTH month of trying to buy a house...

Purchasing a house has turned out to be way less romantic and awesome than I had imagined it would be.

This post would be written in a very different tone if I had chosen to write it a few weeks ago.  It would be angry and seething, and probably with a good dose of 'woe-is-me'.  The (very) long-story-made-short is that we are not getting the amazing house that we'd been waiting on since late September.  Basically, the bank decided that they were having to put too much effort into the sale, so they cancelled the entire transaction.  And we can't do anything about it.  We spent four months doing everything they asked, being unbelievably patient, dealing with moronic bank realtors, and being led to believe that there was absolutely no reason that we would not own this house if we just stuck it out.  Then the bank simply changed their mind.

We filed complaints with the regional office of Freddie Mac's Homesteps program.  We called the selling realtor's office and complained.  We tried, but there was nothing we could do that would change the outcome.  We're just not getting the house.  We spent four months making plans for what we were going to do to this house, how we were going to fix it up, what we would do to the yard, and getting excited for the list of projects we would begin as soon as we were able.  Needless to say, after the bank informed us that all of those plans were now shot, I spent about a week feeling heartbroken, depressed, and pissed off.  I had let myself get really invested in the idea of this house and the thought of having to go out and find something else just killed me.

I've had a few weeks to digest everything now and although I'm still pissed off, I know that things are going to work themselves out.  After a couple weeks of down time, we took to the streets and starting house-shopping again.  Josh and I have put an offer on a different house now, and it really has potential to be a cool one.  It's not like the other place-- we're simply not going to find anything else like the other place-- and it's not in the North Valley, but it could still be really great.  I think this whole situation has made me realize that for the time being, we don't need to be so focused on finding the perfect house.  If we can find a cool house that we will enjoy and can make our own, and especially if we can find a good deal on such a house in this market right now, then we need to take advantage of that.  Five or ten years down the road we can focus on trying to find our Perfect House, but for now I think I'm alright with a Pretty Cool House.  Especially if it means that the purchasing process will be smoother and faster and less horrible.

If you liked it, then you should have put a...

A couple of weekends ago, Josh and I traveled to Tucson to ride El Tour de Tucson again.  We spent time with our friends there and we had a fantastic race.

Oh, and also, pigs learned to fly.  In other words...

I got engaged.

... more on this later, on the race too!

Sale Pending

Do you hear that?  That's me, squealing with excitement.  We're so close!!

Offer

The past few days have been a bit of a whirlwind.  Long story made short, I put an offer on a house today.  Yes, you read that correctly.  I put an offer on a house.  This was not expected or planned at all prior to this past week, but it happened.  I'm simultaneously both super excited and super nervous about it.  I put an offer on a house!  That sounds ridiculous.

We had not been planning to start seriously looking for houses until the late fall or winter, but in the last week we found a really great house in our current area of town (the North Valley, which we love), and it was just too good of a deal to pass up.  A really, very fantastic house with tons of character.  It's a short sale situation, which means the process could take a number of months due to paperwork and dealings with the bank, so there will be a lot of waiting.  And of course there's no guarantee that the bank will accept our offer on the house, or even come back with a number that is doable.  But we're optimistic.

I don't want to jinx anything so I'll hold off on the details for now, but my fingers are crossed tightly.  Everybody should think positive thoughts of brick floors and adobe fireplaces for us!

Avocado Mac

Oh.My.Goodness.

Last weekend I made Avocado Macaroni & Cheese, and it was the best recipe I have tried in a very, very long time.  Everybody knows that I love me some macaroni & cheese, so it may not be much of a surprise that I made this dish pretty much as soon as I had set eyes on it.  Thank you very much, Pinterest.  

Here is the original recipe.  I know it doesn't look incredibly fantastic in the photos below, but seriously, this was delicious.  Creamy and cheesy and avocado-y.  Disclaimer:  Even with the lime juice blended in, the avocados turned everything brown after a day in the fridge, so I recommend leftovers simply be consumed before they get the chance to become leftovers.

8 oz. whole wheat elbow macaroni

2 cloves garlic, minced

2 large avocados, peeled and pitted

2 tbsp. fresh lime juice

1/3 cup chopped fresh cilantro

2 tbsp. butter

2 tbsp. all-purpose flour

1 cup milk

2 cups shredded Monterrey Jack cheese

Salt and pepper, to taste

1.  Bring salted water to a boil in a large pot and add in macaroni.  Stir and cook until Al Dente, about 87-9 minutes.  Drain and set aside.

2.  While the pasta cooks, make the avocado sauce by placing the garlic, avocados, lime juice, cilantro, salt and pepper into a food processor or blender.  Process until smooth and creamy.  Set aside.

3.  For cheese sauce, place butter in a small saucepan and heat over medium heat.  When butter is melted, whisk in flour to create a paste.  Whisk in milk until smooth.  Stir with a wooden spoon until the sauce starts to thicken.  Add Jack cheese and stir until cheese is melted and sauce is creamy.

4.  Place macaroni in a large bowl.  Pour avocado sauce over the macaroni and stir until well-coated.  Ass the cheese sauce and stir until macaroni is coated and creamy.  Season with salt and pepper, to taste.  Serve warm.

*I added Parmesan cheese to the dish when I mixed the avocado sauce and cheese sauce into the pasta.  I also added a cooked chicken breast, cut into small chunks.  The addition of chicken made this into enough food for more than two full meals for two people.  De-li-cious.

Salty goodness

Last week after our POD arrived with all of our furniture and boxes, I was so excited to be able to make real food again that the kitchen was the very first thing I set about unpacking.  Then I baked some bread.  Not just any bread, mind you, but pretzel bread.  And it was delicious!

I usually find excuses to put salt on my bread.  Because I love salt.  The great thing about this bread is that it totally fulfills my salt-overload cravings.  Here is the recipe that I followed to make the pretzel bread.  I followed the recipe exactly, and ended up with about 12 sandwich-bun-sized rolls.  And instead of regular coarse salt, I used some rosemary-flavored salt (yes, and it is amazing).  Josh and I ate the rolls with our pasta dinner that night, and I've been using them for my sandwiches at work all of this week.  I had thought they would turn out much smaller than they did, so I wasn't expecting to be able to use them for sandwiches, but it turned out to be a wonderful unintended outcome.  I definitely will be making these again and again.

When Meg's away...

This is what happens when I spend too much time out of town.  I guess we're just going to have to upgrade to a King-size in order to accommodate Callie's new fondness for stealing my half of the bed.  

They're dropping like flies.

Congrats to Liz and Justin!

This past weekend, my good buddy and partner-in-adventuring Liz got hitched.  The wedding was held at Lost Dutchman State Park, with an amazing view of the Superstition Mountains.  Not too shabby, huh?

We arrived to the festivities on Friday night to party with the happy couple and other friends, went for a great hike up to the top of Flatiron Saturday morning, and celebrated the nuptials late into that night before finally crashing in our tent.  I must say, having your wedding guests camp at the reception site is a pretty fabulous idea.  The reception was a ton of fun, and I got to hang out with just about all of my favorite Tucson people (many of whom I don't get to see nearly enough).  This guy, for instance:

And these crazies:

And lots of other folks that I didn't get photos of!  And then there's this guy.  He's alright.

So another one bites the dust, but I'm super happy for Liz and Justin.  They're basically the same person, which seems to strangely work out pretty well for them, and their wedding was a perfect testament to their fun and outdoorsy-ness.  Well done, Mrs. and Mr. Cutright-Smith-Mapula, well done.

CinnaPearNut Goodness

Cinnamon, pears, and walnuts.  Three wonderful things.  How could something that combines these three things possibly be bad?

To back up a bit:  Josh has recently decided that he wants to create his own hard cider.  There have been many strange boxes of equipment shipped to our home in the last couple of months, lots of over-sized glass bottles, and a newly acquired (and malfunctioning) full-size freezer.  I'm afraid to step foot into the workshop in our backyard because I'm pretty sure it must resemble some kind of scary science experiment with tubes and hoses and dry ice and beakers.

This weekend I presume that the workshop/brewhouse must be just about up to Josh's brewing standards, as we made a special trip to the orchards down in Willcox to procure fruit and cider.  [And delicious apple cider donuts, although that was entirely for my own appetite and had nothing to do with brewing hard cider.]  Josh figured out that he would be able to purchase unpasteurized apple cider without having to do the dirty work of pressing the apples himself, so we didn't actually buy any apples.  We did, however, buy about 25 pounds of Asian pears.  I love pears.  And given my recent promise to try more baking, I decided to make something yummy with some of the freshly-picked fruit.

At first, I thought that I would try to make a pear pie.  Most of the recipes that I could find online for pear pie seemed to basically be a variation of a standard apple pie, and honestly, that didn't interest me.  So then I found a simple recipe for "pear cake".  With a few tweaks of my own, I made what I am going to call a CinnaPearNut Bread.  With frosting, I might call it a cake.  But without frosting, and with a consistency similar to banana bread... it's a bread, not a cake.  And either way, it's delicious.  Find the recipe below.

The only things I might change about this bread would be to add more cinnamon, use pears that are a little bit more ripe for a bigger flavor, and to chop (but not puree) the pears and walnuts.  I think bigger pieces of fruit and nut would be good.  Overall though, I'm proud of this first attempt.  It's moist and sweet, but still pretty subtle.  (Look at me, trying to sound like some kind of uppity food person.  Ha!)
I'm pretty excited to smear some Nutella on a slice of this stuff for breakfast.

(As for the original part of this post, Josh bottled up some of his cider tonight and did some mad-scientist-y kinds of things in the workshop.  I don't know how long this process takes, but presumably there will be drinkable hard cider in some amount of weeks.  I'll report back about that later.)


CinnaPearNut Bread

Ingredients
4-5 fresh pears
1 cup white sugar
1 cup brown sugar
1 big handful crumbled walnuts
1 tablespoon cinnamon  (not sure how much I used exactly, but it was a lot...)
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 eggs
3 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions
1.  Peel and thinly slice pears.  Mix pears with white sugar, brown sugar, nuts, and cinnamon.  Let sit for 1-2 hours, then puree in a blender (you may opt to skip the puree step... I did it this time, but probably will choose to leave it chunky next time!).
2.  Preheat oven to 350 and prep either a cake pan or a couple of bread loaf pans (I used bread pans, and it worked really well).
3.  Stir (by hand) the flour, salt, and baking soda until mixed.  Add these dry ingredients to the pear mixture and also add the oil, vanilla, and eggs- mixing by hand until evenly blended.
4.  Pour batter into prepared pan, and bake at 350 degrees for approximately 45 minutes to an hour (keep an eye on it- I originally set a timer for an hour, but everything was done after 45).

Cinnamon Cheesecake. 'Nuff said.

Uh-oh.  She's breaking out the apron.  You might want to get the fire extinguisher ready.

I have spent the last month doing a lot of nothing.  Floating between jobs, without money to spend, and not willing to venture out into the Tucson summer heat, I've been spending the vast majority of my time sitting around the house.  Two days ago I secured a new job [Hooray!  I'll write more about this later...], and found myself suddenly inspired to actually do something with my ample-yet-fleeting free time.  Still facing the issues of low funds and high temperatures, I decided that I was in a mood to bake something.  So, last night I baked some homemade bread, baked a tasty dinner of chicken parmesan with spaghetti, AND made a cinnamon cheesecake.  I still don't really know what got into me.

Who knew bread was so easy to make?  Between that and the chicken parm (also surprisingly easy and tasty), we dined quite well last night.  And cinnamon cheesecake?  Ohmygod... SO GOOD.  And easy!  Of course, I typically take triple the amount of time necessary to bake anything because I'm so slow and un-confident about my abilities in the kitchen, but it was three hours well spent.  And the cheesecake is spectacular as a breakfast food.  (Have I ever mentioned that I recently discovered I am slightly allergic to cinnamon? I am indeed, and I don't care.  I love the stuff.)

I plan to start putting more effort into cooking and baking.  I know I say that every few months, but I'm pretty serious about it this time.  My schedule is going to be funky for the next few months, but I aim to make time for trying new things in the kitchen.  If this experiment is any indication, most things actually are quite a bit easier to make than I've always believed.  You've just got to strap on the apron, turn up the tunes, and get to cookin'.  Because cake for breakfast... I mean, that really makes everything worthwhile, doesn't it?

My backyard is cooler than your backyard.

Most people who have been to my house know that I've got a pretty sweet deal.  Most people who have been to my house during the daytime hours also know that my backyard is one of the best parts of my very sweet deal of a living situation.  My landlord's father (who built this house in 1947 and passed away a couple of years ago) put a great deal of time into the yard over the many decades he spent in this house, and it's obvious that things have been well-cared for over the years.  Part of my rental agreement is that I take good care of the yard and the plants in the yard, and though I've always seen to this task with care, I've recently begun to find it actually quite enjoyable to spend time pruning, planting, watering, and maintaining the yard and it's growth.

As for inventory, the permanent plants of our backyard include:
Citrus-- One huge lemon tree, one huge grapefruit tree, one tangelo tree, one small orange tree, and three unidentified decorative citrus trees (they're probably oranges, but the fruit doesn't ripen and is mostly just for show).
Roses-- About 30 linear feet of heirloom roses, some of which are taller than me, and all of which have amazingly beautiful flowers.  Two shades of pink, red, peach, whitish-pink, and yellow.
Desert Plants-- We have a few prickly pear cacti, a few funky ground-cover cacti, and a bunch of agave.
Flowers-- Bougainvillea and Birds of Paradise.

And as for landscaping and design, our yard also includes:
A tiled counter-top with a built-in charcoal grill and storage space underneath.
A slatted, arbor-style patio roof that provides partial shade (and somewhere to hang our hammock).
Numerous handmade tables and chairs, including a full-sized picnic table with benches.
A functional underground irrigation system with both sprinklers and drip-lines installed in almost every planting location possible.

So, yeah.  It's a pretty sweet deal.

Josh and I have been saying for quite some time now that we wanted to get a lime tree for the backyard.  A couple of weeks ago, we took a trip to one of the nurseries here in town in order to get a lime tree, and we ended up spending a couple of hours wandering around the place.  We bought the intended lime tree as well as a few other small plants and a hummingbird feeder.

Mesquite Valley Grower's Nursery

When we got home we planted the little tree in a pot and began to go about cleaning up things in the yard and trimming up some of the plants that had been hit hard by the freezes we had earlier in the year.  Josh decided to take a look at the irrigation system, which up to this point we had never used because my landlord had matter-of-factly stated that it did not work.  Not surprisingly, Mr. Engineer decided that he could and would repair the system.  It took a few trips to the hardware store, some digging, and some searching for leaky hoses, but we now have a fully-functional drip system which not only provides water to 95% of the plants in our entire backyard, but also is on a timer!  I never thought that watering everything by hand was very much of a big deal, but I must admit that I'm quite excited about the prospect of not having to worry about keeping things hydrated during our intensely hot summer.

Engineering.

The lime tree!  It's a Mexican Dwarf lime tree, and is already showing the first signs of new fruit.

My avacado tree is growing!  Started this from a discarded pit a couple of months ago.

So, in addition to trimming back everything, repairing the irrigation, planting a lime tree, and potting a bunch of other small plants that I've picked up over the last couple of months, I also planted sunflowers along the entire length of the back wall.  I'm hopeful for these because if they actually get as big as they're supposed to (5-8ft), it will look awesome!  We also painted the picnic table red.  It pops.

In this picture- taken from the back door of the house- you can see the roses (along the wall on the right), the brick and tile counter with grill and big silly dinner bell (the charcoal grill is built in, and we also have the stand-alone gas grill), the patio arbor roof, the picnic table which is now bright red, one of many agave plants with stalks, and numerous citrus trees in the background.

This bike has been hidden in the back of the yard behind the citrus trees, but I moved it when we had some workers come to trim the trees.  When I moved it, I found a small license plate bolted to the back which says, "1956 TUCSON".  I'm thinking about planting something pretty in the front basket.

I don't really think that any of these photographs do it justice, but I imagine that the general idea will come across.  The general idea is that my backyard is cooler than your's.  If you don't believe me, just come visit and see for yourself.

Mission: Pie

“Just a pie! It’s downright expert. It could solve all the problems of the world, that pie.  A thing’a beauty … how each flavor opens itself one by one, like a chapter in a book. First, the flavor of an exotic spice hits ya, just a hint of it … and then you're flooded with chocolate, dark and bittersweet like an old love affair.  And finally strawberry, the way strawberry was always supposed to taste but never knew how ... ”

I've never been much of a cook, and up until recently my baking skills have been nonexistent.  But I've gotta say, I think I've discovered that there is something very satisfying about baking.  And nobody can argue with a house that smells like baked goods.


The quote above is from the movie Waitress.  It's an adorable movie, with pie.  Lots of pie.  I highly recommend it. I decided to bake a pie for a dinner party a couple of weeks ago, and was browsing the internet for recipes containing strawberries and chocolate (two of my favorite things in desserts).  While I have seen Waitress a few times, and always comment on how amazing the Strawberry Chocolate Oasis Pie sounds, it was not until my online recipe search that I was reminded of that particular pie.  Armed with a few pounds of strawberries, a big bag of chocolate, a recipe loosely derived from the namesake pie in the movie, and my new baking apron, I was on a mission.  Mission: Pie.

Although I didn't follow it exactly, this is the recipe that I took most of my cues from for this experiment.


The pie in the movie included a chocolate crust, but I decided to use graham cracker crumbs to make my own crust (to which I may or may not have added some melted chocolate just for good measure).  The pie basically consisted of a layer of thick and creamy chocolate filling, with a second layer of sugary strawberry deliciousness on the top.  I probably ate about a pound of strawberries in the process of this endeavor, and had slightly pink-stained and yummy-smelling fingers for quite a while afterwards.  I also made some whipped cream to top things off, which made things look prettier, but I didn't manage to get a photo of it.  So, the final result:

Everything turned out to taste really wonderful, although the pie was more of a cobbler for the first 24 hours, since the crust was pretty crumbly and the chocolate hadn't had enough time to really harden.  With due credit to my friends, nobody complained about having to eat a Strawberry Chocolate Oasis Cobbler instead of a Strawberry Chocolate Oasis Pie.  But man-oh-man, after sitting in the refrigerator for a day, it was just about perfect.  Talk about a breakfast of champions!


I'm going to try to start baking more, although I'm trying to limit myself to only baking when I know that other people will be able to help me eat whatever I make.  ... So, who wants some pie?

Decking the halls, as well as everything else.

It's December!  Which means it's the holiday season!  Which also means I get to decorate all kinds of things, such as:

A Christmas Tree!

The House!

 

Cookies!

Dogs!