Another Holiday, Come and Gone

    Saint Patrick's Day is such a fun little holiday. It can be celebrated by everyone, not just the Irish...or people in Ireland...or just Catholics. 

    A brief history about the day. Saint Patrick was kidnapped by Irish raiders. He was told in a dream to flee from captivity and return to his home, Britain, where he joined a church and studied to be a priest. He was called back to Ireland as a Bishop and one of his teaching methods (folklore) was to preach about the trinity using the three leaves of a shamrock. Even though the original color associated with him was blue, green has become more popular throughout the centuries. The wearing of green was mostly meant to wear a shamrock on your clothing. 

    Enough of history, it's just a fun tradition to celebrate! Being here at home gives me plenty of time to think of ways to celebrate, some ideas come close to insanity. 

    For the first few hours of the day, I cut out little shamrock confetti. No stencil or anything. I just got paper, scissors and a green marker. I made enough to scatter all up the stairs and all over the floor! Most of them are about the size of a nickel. 

I think they are cute and look pretty good for silly, free-hand cut outs!

    Later, I got ready to make the dessert for tonight. My grandma gave me tons of little cupcake things for several holidays, and one of the packets had shamrocks on it. What a great idea! But I didn't have any cake mix...or a car to go get some....Have no fear! I made brownies in those little cupcake cups! So I made the brownie mix, put an overflowing tablespoon in each cup and I let them cook into perfect brownie bites! (Turns out though when you put more than a tablespoon in a cup, you have to let it cook longer or the batter doesn't cook and the middle of the brownie caves in)

    Once the brownies were all done and cooled, I started coloring the frosting. It would be silly to not have a green dessert for Saint Patrick's Day, but what could I do! I couldn't color the chocolate brownies...the brown would have covered the green! But once again, have no fear! I just made green frosting! I got out our cream cheese frosting, put in some food coloring, and voila!

A scrumptious green dessert!

Look at those cute little shamrock cups!

    I had the decorations all done, the dessert ready for eating. Jared was getting off work soon. Time to work on dinner! I didn't have much that was green and the idea of coloring our chicken green sounded pretty gross to me. But what else was there? There was pasta! And green beans! I cooked the noodles, put the coloring in and mixed them all together. The green beans were easy; just had to heat them up! The sauce was red...I failed in that aspect. If I had used the Alfredo sauce and colored it, it would have been the exact same dinner we had Tuesday night! Never have the same dinner twice in the same week! 

    Jared came home and liked what he saw for dinner and he enjoyed my little decorations scattered on the floor. He had the genius idea of coloring our drink green too, to match our green dinner! The meal looked all icky and green, but it sure was tasty!

(Green noodles, green beans, and green milk. Everything tasted normal!)

    That was our Saint Patrick's Day! Simple, but worth a memory! We both dressed up in green to avoid being pinched (him mostly at work. I just have a lot of green, so all I had to do was get dressed for the day!)

    I hope everyone else had a great day as well! Holidays are here for a reason: to give us a break from daily routines!!

    The tally for movies watched for the other person is the same with: Jared 4    Stephanie 4

    We're going to try and keep it even for a while. See how long it lasts! :)

Rapunzel with a cold

    Jared made an interesting comment as he walked out the door today, leaving for work. He said I'm a little like the fairy tale Rapunzel, being all shut up and away from society while in our apartment (on the second level). We even have to walk up a flight of stairs after walking through the door before we get to the living space! My own little tower.

    So maybe it is a little true. When he takes the car most days, I'm stuck here in the apartment. It's been too cold to do very much outside and I don't have many reasons to leave the apartment, except to walk down and up a hill to get the mail some days. The only other valid reason to leave is to do the laundry, but every time I go outside in the rain or cold, I come home freezing and sickly.

    Today, I woke up with a terrible cold. It has been forming slowly over the past week, but yesterday my voice started getting low and raspy (it does not sound sexy when it happens to me) and this morning Jared just laughed at me when I tried to talk and only half the word would come out loud enough to hear.

    So today, I am Rapunzel with a cold. Jared cracked some jokes and said I could go outside today on the patio. Woo hoo. And that I have permission to open our patio door :) So I guess he isn't a terrible person keeping me locked up in here. In fact, he doesn't even lock the door when he leaves!

    This means I should grow my hair out super long. I won't bleach it though like the Rapunzel in Tangled. I like my hair darker colors too much.

    But maybe I will throw caution to the wind and I'll open the door today! It's supposed to be mostly sunny and rather warm in the afternoon! Who knows, maybe some fresh air will help me get over this silly sickness. I'm supposed to be studying for a midterm next week, but my brain is not working fast enough right now. Slow and steady should win the race though (or pass the class).

    The running tally of movies watched for the other person has changed to a tie! Jared 4     Stephanie 4. 

    Jared is such a sweetheart and watched most of Bambi 1 and 2 with me. Some clever person on YouTube combined the two stories into a full movie and I love it. Even though we haven't officially finished it, it counts as a tally for him :) What a great husband!!

Hooray for Holidays!

    For those who didn't know, yesterday was National Pi Day! In honor of the fun holiday, I thought I would try something new and make a pie! I loved being in the BYU Daily Universe newsroom when there would be random but awesome holidays, like Chocolate Day and Pi Day because Kaye would always want to celebrate them.

    I was able to find some simple recipes that I had all the ingredients for (which isn't very much!) But I found a crust recipe that only needed: flour, cooking oil, salt and milk. I have all of those things! Started making it, and it seemed to be OK. Not as thin as I would have wanted, but it was the best I could do with only my hands! :)

    Next was the filling. I had forgotten Jared and I ate one of the last two apples the night before while watching a movie! But we have a bunch of oranges...don't worry, I didn't make an orange fruit pie! I just used that one, last, sad apple, which ended up being just fine! I mixed it with the sugar and cinnamon and put it all in the pie dish to bake!

 It looks so happy in its little home!

    When it came out, it looked and smelled so good! Almost seemed like a normal pie, which is really all I wanted.

It wasn't burned or anything! And it looks so nice on the wood table.

    If anyone wants the recipe, just let me know! I'm sure everyone has their own recipes, but this one was totally easy and if I can do it, anyone can!

    Now that dessert was made, it was time to start working on dinner. Jared wanted chicken and we got some green beans for a nice side dish so we thought we would just have that. But I found a small simple idea on the side of the green bean can! I made the decision to make what the can said. 

Ta Da! Chicken and Green Bean Alfredo! It's just pasta, chicken, green beans and alfredo. hahaha!

    So dinner was made, dessert was ready. All I had left to do was wait for Jared to get home and tell me I'm an awesome wife! :) Which he totally did!

Pi Day was a great success and I'm excited to make an even better pie next time!

    Dinner was super filling, so we had our little Family Home Evening before eating the pie. Jared was in charge of the activity because I did the lesson and treat.

We played a card game and ate pie when we had room in our tummies for it!

    This morning we woke up to a great view out of our patio window. The trees are blossoming and everything is looking so beautiful!

I'm excited for when we get patio furniture so we can sit outside on the weekends and enjoy the wonderful weather and scenery! (And the pool is super close, so I'm sure I'll be over there tanning as soon as I can!)

    The running tally of movies watched for the other person has changed again! Jared 3     Stephanie 4. 

    Jared was super great and watched Kronk's New Groove with me on YouTube! I love Disney movies and that one is a favorite of mine!