Candied Squash

A couple of weeks ago I went through a butternut squash phase. It blows me away that a vegetable can be SO good just by itself. Growing up every vegetable was usually smothered in either butter, gravy or cream cheese at our household. I can bake butternut squash with just water and be perfectly happy gobbling it up straight out of the oven.

One recipe I've been waiting to try is Pasta with Butternut Parmesean Sauce from Simply Recipes. This pasta was very yummy with a very good combination of sweet and savory...so in other words, it was rich. If I made it again I think it would have to be made as a side or with something bitter on the side. This pasta is a little too rich to eat by itself...which we attempted. I was very pleased that Kellen tried this recipe because he claims he doesn't like squash...and he liked it!

Another recipe I had on the waiting list was Butternut Squash with Browned Butter and Thyme from Simply Recipes. Butternut squash AND browned butter...yes please. I made it for Thanksgiving dinner at my parents in lieu of candied yams. I really don't like candied yams and no one eats them in my family. So I followed this recipe (omitting the Thyme) and at the end I spread the squash into a ceramic dish and tossed marshmallows on top. I then "toasted" them it in the oven...I in reality charred them and advise that you don't take your eyes off them this step. It turned out to be very good and MUCH better than candied yams. My family actually ate some. I consider that an accomplishment. Also, I was surprised to find that when saved and then nuked in the coming days it was even better! I LOVE dishes like that. When you warm them in a microwave the marshmallows melt into a syrup which is incredible. Give this one a try...maybe for Christmas dinner in a couple of days?

"Where the Locals Eat"

We were kicked out of the house this morning. We're to loud and the drums are too loud for us.

We spent the night at Kellen's moms in Logan so that they could record drums today. So I thought I would make up for us not having breakfast Friday of last week and take the girls out for breakfast.

I've been wanting to try Angie's ever since his mom moved to Logan. It looks homey from the outside and of course the slogan "where the locals eat" entices me. Apparently, it has the opposite effect on Kellen and he has been apprehensive about coming with me. I have a need to fit into local food scenes...being able to navigate eats like I have been living there my whole life. Not sure where that need stems from, possibly a mix of love for food and being a "know-it-all".



As we made our way inside my first impression was that this place had a quick pace. They quickly took us back to a booth and had us settled in while others were buzzing around chatting. I even noticed the manager walking around chatting with families and people he knew. Again, I had envy in my heart...pathetic I know.

Leah was pumped that they had crayons and was not much of a conversationalist after she set to coloring on her menu (I barely was able to get her to look up for the picture).

Our waitress was very pleasant and non-intrusive. They also had those translucent brown diner cups (some kind of nostalgic plus for me) and fresh flowers on the table...although wilting (it's the thought that counts). Again, playing on the local theme some of the servers were wearing Aggie shirts and I noticed you can get 20% off your meal if you bring a game ticket in.




Leah has a kids meal which was very generous...I ate her egg because I can not get enough of eggs lately!


I had the Garden omelet with FRESH mushrooms...hallelujah! Only thing...not just topped with cheese, infused with it...I'll admit it was good and I ate it all, but if your looking for a healthier version of breakfast this is not for you. I'm kinda at a loss what you would order...I guess the granola, fruit and yogurt.

Overall my expectations were met and I enjoyed the food. Now I just need to convince Kellen to join me...

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Big Ed's (The Hungover Breakfast)

 Located close to campus at the U of U and following in suit with the atmosphere of a lot of local campus eats...grungy with specialized menus and loyal followings. It felt like this was the the cool place to get breakfast every morning on campus, whether your a student, professor or local. The kind of place where you don't need a menu because you get the same thing every morning. Kellen described the vibe as "homey" and it's true...many of the customers looked right at home with newspapers or homework while the lone waitress called customers by name.

As we walked through the door I felt like I was intruding. Maybe it was the way everyone looked up with a weary eye as they noticed our newness to the establishment or it could have been my surprise to walk into such an intimate dark setting from the bright cold day outside. We quickly tried to blend in as we found a table and the waitress brought us menus...because WE would clearly need them.






The walls are covered with pictures of customers from over the years. Makes you kinda want to belong...



I had the vegetable omelet with hash browns and wheat toast on the side.



Kellen had the G.A.W.D, hash browns topped with chili, cheese, and a fried egg.

This place was all atmosphere. We had mixed reviews on the food. They offer the hardcore breakfast. Your not going to find any pancakes on the menu...but if you want some meat, toast and hash browns they've got it! Kellen really enjoyed his meal although he felt anyone could make it at home. I was not very fond of my omelet. I'm pretty sure the mushrooms were from a can...which is a big no no. I HATE rubbery mushrooms. I also thought the hash browns had a funny taste.

So if your looking for a home away from home, where the female cook can often be heard yelling out to the waitress from the kitchen and where you can establish a place where you sit and have "the usual" every morning...this is the place for you. I wouldn't recommend it for a stellar breakfast. 

Lily felt right at home...and look at those cheeks!!!

An Official Family Update

Happy Holiday's Everyone!

2009 brought our family a 5 year anniversary, a new edition and a lot of fun times together. I've enjoyed blogging about our family and my own endeavors. I'm hoping that in the near future I will have a re-vamped website so check back and tell me what you think.

Let me update you on our current happenings:

Kellen starts his last undergraduate semester in January. He is getting a degree in Communications and specializing in Public Relations. Last weekend he took the LSAT and spent most of his free time for the last three months studying for it. He feels that he did well...and I'm willing to bet he did VERY well. In coming months he will be applying to law schools on the west coast for fall 2010.

Right now I'm living it up at home with the girls while I'm on maternity leave from work. The house has never been cleaner :) We have a lot of fun together playing and crafting. I spend my free time reading, blogging and if I'm lucky sewing. The beginning of 2010 I'll start back at work which will be hard because I'll miss the girls and our routine. I'm still working at a local Emergency Department as a Crisis Worker. Fortunately, I enjoy the work I do and the people I work with which will hopefully make the return easier. I have only a few months until I will receive my official license as a LCSW which is currently my goal.

Leah is currently into Disney princesses and cutting paper. She sings all day long and prances about. She is excited to have a little sister and is very helpful big sister. Currently she attends a fine arts pre-school three times weekly. Her school is perfect for her...they sing, dance, try different art forms and make-up stories each morning. Leah is a very good and happy little girl who always keeps us entertained!

Lily sleeps most of the day, eats franticly when she does wake and occasionally opens her eyes long enough to give us some smiles. As of today she has started cooing and is working on laughing...but at this point it just sounds like she is hyperventilating. We are blessed to have two girls that are happy and love to sleep!

2010 will most likely bring a lot of change for us. Kellen will graduate this spring and we hope to move to Portland, Oregon at the end of summer. It's time for us to leave the state of Utah behind before Leah starts Kindergarten. We are grateful for all our blessings and the gift of family. Thank you all for keeping in touch and we hope to hear from you. Have a happy new year!

An Ice-skating First

Leah's aunt and uncle, Kalob and Harmony, wanted to take Leah iceskating. She has been talking about iceskating for a while but we had not made it much of a priority unfortuantly. Thank goodness for aunts and uncles that spoil our children with love and consideration.

It was seriously cold outside...20 degrees. Holy freak. I'm not one for exposing myself to that kind of torture and was talked into going last minute. I guilt tripped myself...who would miss their child's first ice-skating moment? So I threw on and layered everything I saw in sight in an attempt avoid the cold. Lily was nice and toasty in her sling and never even made an appearance during the event.

Harmony and Leah

I loved watching Harmony, Kalob and Kellen help Leah. She did pretty good for her first time!

 

How cute are they?

 

This photo captures how very spoiled Leah can be. She is sipping the hot chocolate that Kalob went and got her because she was crying...Kellen wrapped her feet in Lily's blanket to keep them warm...she's leaning on me and asking me to hold her hot chocolate so that she can eat Harmony's snack...Can she be more pampered?

Thanks Harmony and Kalob for being proactive!

In The Garden

 The Beginning

Mid-Summer

When Mother's Day rolls around I want to grow something! To me it signifies the end of stifling winter and sunshine and green is what I crave. A couple years ago I bought a honeysuckle plant for Mother's Day to grow outside our door. I wanted to smell it as I came in and out of our home. This year for Mother's Day I got a load of supplies for our garden plot. Gardening is therapeutic... and man did I need some therapy as I became more and more pregnant....growing right along with my little garden. Due to inability to sleep you could often find me outside working in my small garden as the sun was coming up and soaking up the quiet.

During my childhood my father often had a garden. We didn't contribute very much to it's maintenance but I must have caught on somewhat because some gardening abilities come naturally to me while the rest comes through research. This year I'm documenting what I have learned so I continue to grow as a gardener.

TOMATOES:
I planted multiple different kinds of tomatoes this year, Roma's, Grape, Jet Setters and Beef. I wish I would have taken pictures of the garden at the end of the season because the grape tomatoes were very impressive. I had one plant and they spread throughout the garden. I would definitely plant them again because of their output. Once they started producing I would bring back a sandwich bag full of them whenever I went out. It was nice having a variety of tomatoes on hand but I would not plant as many if I had a small plot again...it became a lot of maintenance to avoid them becoming a tomato plant jungle.

One thing I feel like I mastered this year was watering. I realized two things...when leaves start turning a yellowish color they are getting too much water (this goes for all plants) and when they start to wilt they are not getting enough. It's all about balance. This year I observed more and noticed that some plants only needed water once a week while others needed water almost every day. I would water individual plants accordingly. Paying attention to temperatures and weather forecasts was also important for water control. If it is going to be very hot I would water more in the morning or late evenings before the heat hit. If it is supposed to rain I would not water at all. Tomatoes like hot and humid conditions. A general rule is they like the soil to be kept moist but not waterlogged making sure you water around the roots.

Something that was new to me this year was pruning and it made a HUGE difference in my tomatoes. I constantly had other gardeners coming up to me and asking me advise on their tomatoes. There should be one distinct stem up the middle and I staked the one stem up straight. The trick is that you only allow 4 to 5 fruit bearing tresses to grow from the main stem.  Pinch out any additional side shoots leaving the top shoot intact. Be aware of suckers which grow in the V space of the main stem and branches...pinch these out ASAP.  Pruning directs energy to the fruit.

Additional Tips: Roma tomatoes do not need pruning or staking because they are bred to grow compact. Also, remove all the yellow leaves on tomato plants to prevent disease.

 SUMMER SQUASH (Zucchini): 
Luckily I had enough experience with Zucchini growing up to know that I could only fit one Zucchini plant in our garden and it would provide us more than enough squash!

Again, pruning was the new thing this year. This really helped with the excessive growth of squash. After 4-6 fruit have set you can start pruning. Use a knife to cut bigger leaves that are closer to the base of the pant leaving all others. DO NOT trim any stems. A good rule of thumb is trimming 1 out of 3 leaves on the plant. Again, this directs energy to the fruit.

Additional Tip: The leaves on squash can develop powdery mildew if they get to much water on the leave whether it's due to watering or rain. Try to trim these leaves or you can spray weekly with a mix of 1 part milk to 9 parts water.

Red Pepper

I'm pretty proud of this red pepper. It slowly turned fully red after what seemed like weeks. I made a red pepper sauce with it right away. It's really the only pepper I used. We use a lot of red pepper in our cooking so it is too bad that I was only able to yield one red pepper...I would like to grow more plants next time and figure out what I was doing wrong!

PEPPERS: 
I didn't learn a whole lot about peppers this year but honestly I wasn't that invested. Kellen really wanted a lot of peppers (which he never used) and tomatillos...neither are very expensive in the store and didn't seem very smart to grow but we were experimenting. Maybe my lack of interest led to the failure of the peppers and tomatillos... or maybe it really was the weather. At least we yielded some peppers unlike the tomatillos which grew bushy and looked promising but the husks never filled out...they may be a do-over crop.

There were a couple of things I did learn. Peppers (like most plants) need the soil around the base tilled regularly to avoid bugs making homes. A couple of times I did not get to this fast enough and I noticed bugs making their residence. Be careful when you do till because their roots are really shallow. Also, peppers like to have the soil moist but not drenched. It seemed counter-intuitive to me but peppers don't seem to like heat. Mine flourished when the days dropped into the 80's...which did not leave very much time for high volumes of production.

BASIL:

The basil was my pride and joy. One of my main motivations for gardening is to have a huge basil crop in order to have fresh pesto year-round. I got closer to my goal this year!

I learned that there is two huge tricks to growing healthy basil plants...one, they don't need much water. I would let the soil almost completely dry out before I would water it again. I would say every 3 days or even up to a week without water. Second, pinching out any flowers that appear. This is where I can use some improvement as I did not have the time to invest in the proper amount of pinching! Next time I would just pull of the entire top to prevent them from flowering and cultivate larger leaves. I started a few from seed and they did not do well do to bugs. Next time around I'll just work with plants at the beginning of the season.

Also, make sure you pick a few leaves off a number of plants rather than all off one. Making sure you harvest the top most leaves first. This year I would harvest enough to make a batch of pesto and then next harvest I would freeze it for winter. I also had a bug problem with the basil that I will have to learn how to manage better next time around.

I also tried Oregeno, Thyme, Cilantro and Bush Beans. The Oregano I would plant again because we actually used it, it was low maintenance and I think it would do well as a undergrowth in a flower garden. Thyme seemed kind of worthless because I don't like Thyme very much and it did not do well.  Cilantro was fun because it grew so fast from seed. The problem with cilantro is that it does not last very long before it goes to seed and is pretty cheap in stores. But it would be cool to have fresh cilantro always on hand in the backyard. Kellen and my sister thought it tasted much better fresh. If I grew cliantro again I would plant it every couple of weeks for a couple of months in order to always have a bunch. The Bush Beans grew a bit from seed and then slowly died off due to bugs and general lack of knowledge. They are a do-over crop because I love me some green beans!

KID TIP:

Leah wanted to water the plants every day. So in order to avoid over-watering everything I planted a few flowers (marigolds....which actually ward off lots of different bugs) on the outside of the garden so she could water to her hearts desire!