Hmm…

This conversation pretty much explains my week at work:

Me (to fellow intern Julia, who was trying to explain something to me): I’m sorry, but that part of my brain that holds information is full now, I have to go home over the weekend and empty it.

Chef Kristen (who was also part of this conversation…obviously…): So where does this information go?

Me: …into the trash can…

Chef Kristen: That’s what I thought.

;)

Yeah. It was a long week. Crazy getting back into the swing of things.

Thank goodness for the weekend!

More Treats!

Or, Arizona Part 2 :)

Okay, so I’ve already forgotten we I’ve left off…so the rest of this might not be in order. Which doesn’t really matter…because my memory seems to blur it all together anyway ;)

So we checked out this nifty cake place in Gilbert called Caketini:

I don’t have any pictures of the stuff they had on display, but they had an awesome Harry Potter themed cake on the counter, with broomsticks, scarves, and the hogwarts express coming right out of the bottom tier of the cake! We ended up chatting a little with the girl at the counter and she almost offered me a job! They are opening up another location in Scottsdale and so they are hiring. But I live in Illinois. Dang. ;)

After caketini we headed over to Elizabeth’s parents’ place and made some AMAZING cookies. With the last Harry Potter movie out and all, there are all sort of Harry Potter inspired recipes out in blogland, so we tried a sugar cookie recipe with butterbeer glaze. (you can find the recipe HERE – which I highly recommend you click on after you are finished reading my eloquence ;) We didn’t have the awesome hogwarts crests to put on top, but quite honestly, I hate the taste of fondant and wouldn’t really want it on my cookie anyway. The glaze was delicious enough…and SUPER easy! Another Harry Potter party, anyone??

They are best right after the warm glaze has been poured. Oh yum.

After that baking adventure, we went to Elizabeth’s wards’ Relief Society Activity. It was a clothing auction and exchange and it was pretty fun (though we didn’t really think the auction’s “hot items” were that cute…). We even found some things to take home. Liz found some cute things for Scott and a WAY cute black dress. I found a hodge podge of things. I’m still trying to get them to fit into my suitcase…

I’m trying to branch out on colors that I wear. See that yellow cardigan? I never wear yellow. I’m trying to be brave. ;) And those polka dots! I’m mostly opposed to polka dots…but that jacket was so cute…

I talked to John on the phone the next day and I told him about getting some new clothes at the exchange and he says something like “why is it that every time you go on a trip, you come back with new clothes?” (which is SO not true!)

What can I say? I’m a girl. I like clothes.

We’ve also made a trip to IKEA (LOVE!!!!!!!!!!) and we were admiring all the amazing kitchens. I want an IKEA kitchen someday. Did you know that they sell convection ovens?!??! Love. Love. Love. And since I don’t have any pictures of us while we were there, you get to see some things on my wish list :)

I’m kind of obsessed with these containers. I want to fill my whole pantry with an assortment of these.
John and I currently share one dresser. It’s not working for me. ;) I want one for ME.
This entire kitchen would be nice. ;)

We also went to a cooking class today at a store called FoodWise. The food was good. The class was a sales pitch, the whole thing. And the teacher lady was a little crazy. And once she started going on about organic food and how all we eat is pesticides…well, I have some opinions on the reliability of the label “organic” so let’s say her pitch wasn’t working on me ;) The other interesting thing is that almost all of the ingredients used were some form of dehydrated or freeze-dried powder or something like that. From a food storage perspective, yeah, those are great products. But her pitch made you think you should do this everyday. For every meal. Hm. Anyway…it wasn’t our favorite, but like I said. The food was good. And the class was free ;)

Only one more full day of vacation. I can’t believe it’s gone by so fast!

Trip to Arizona!!!

Part 1, I should say ;)

For my birthday, my parents got me flights to go out and see my best friend Elizabeth and her little family! It’s been so fun to see her, I haven’t seen her since she got married a year and a half ago.

My trip got off onto a very interesting start. I had a crazy busy week at my internship, the new pastry students were starting in the kitchens, we had a girl go to the ER and get stitches (they weren’t even doing knife skills!) And then another girl slashed herself with the chocolate tempering tool (it was sticking out of her bag and she didn’t realize it) and then ANOTHER girl almost passed out. Good first day, wouldn’t you say? I also had to get scaling done for the next two weeks because I was going to be gone and I had to have everything prepped for whoever was going to cover for me, AND had my scalings ready for me when I got back. I wish I had a picture, but my rack was so organized, it just made me happy to look at it. :)

Anyway, I wasn’t really sure when I was going to be packing for my trip, but it all got done (about 10 minutes before my ride was supposed to pick me up). I asked my friend Emily to take me to the airport and asked her to pick me up at about 6:15pm. My flight left at 9:15, giving us lots of lag time in case things got crazy. And crazy, they did get. (yoda speak?) At first, it wasn’t so bad. Emily missed the exit getting to my place and so she was about 15 minutes late. No big, my flight didn’t leave until 9:15! We hit a little bit of traffic on our way to the Midway airport, but again, no big deal. Everything was great. We got to Midway, but didn’t see my airline. Hm. That’s kind of strange. Maybe that blank sign was supposed to be United Airlines. I got out and unloaded and proceeded to go inside to check in. I look around. No United Airlines. FINALLY I pull out my itinerary. I stare at it for a couple seconds, then…*GASP!* I fly out of O’Hare!!!! I’m at the wrong airport!!!!!!! (WHY are there two airports?!) I frantically call Emily and ask her to come back. She was totally awesome and may or may not have gone quite a bit over the speed limit to get to me to O’Hare. To my credit (just ask Emily), I was pretty calm. I mostly felt like an idiot! Almost all of our other flights have been in and out of Midway, and I’ve had these tickets for months…I just assumed it was from Midway. Oops. With Emily’s awesome driving we still got me to O’Hare an hour before my flight left. Yeah, talk about amazing! I was a little flustered checking in and getting through security but when I got to my gate…well, wouldn’t you know, my flight had been delayed an hour. So I still had plenty of time :) Figures.

The flight itself was pretty uneventful. I was exhausted because I’d had to take the morning shift at work and that meant I was up at 4:30am and so by the time Elizabeth and Jeff had picked me up (they had trouble finding me at the baggage claim…turns out I was at terminal 2 and not terminal 4) and I finally crashed, I’d been up almost 24 hours. Whew!

Here we are when they finally found me in my exhausted, worn out glory. Yay!

I got in Thursday night and so Friday was pretty mellow. We went to the temple and hung out and talked about what we were going to do while I’m here. We made plans to make yummy desserts and this was our first creation:

Cookie Dough/Ice Cream Pie. Oh yes. Yumminess.

Saturday we went on a little road trip. We stopped at some lava river caves that go underground and the temperatures can get to freezing! I know, who knew I’d get cold in the summer in Arizona?! Elizabeth’s sister Elysse came along for the trip too!

You just keep going down, and down, and down. And it’s really cold. :)

The main reason we took this trip was to go to the Grand Canyon! I’d never been, so it was pretty exciting. I’ll never get over how BIG (I know, duh, GRAND) it was!
Sometimes it doesn’t even look real! It was amazing.

After the Grand Canyon we stopped at a small town on the original Route 66 called Williams and got dinner at an old fashioned diner. We stopped at a novelty shop (and tried on hats of course!)

We stopped and got milkshakes for dessert and then headed over to a ranch that Jeff’s family owns. We spent the night there and then headed back on Sunday for church and family dinner with Elizabeth’s family.

We’ve got more fun plans for the week! To include making yummy dessert foods. We made peanut butter rice krispie treats last night. I have been looking and looking for a recipe for these and since I’ve joined Pinterest, I’ve found so many awesome recipes, including these! YUM.

And I’ve made a new friend: Scotty! Elizabeth’s little boy is just ADORABLE. Love him. We’re totally buddies now.
Okay, is that not the CUTEST smile you’ve ever SEEN?! “Baby Envy” doesn’t even begin to cover it right now ;)

Stay tuned for more adventures!

Tonight’s Menu

So I’ve been loving my menu plate that I made with my mom when I went to VA. Every weekend I plan the week’s meals, write it up on my plate, and go grocery shopping for the week. I leave the plate out in the main room by the kitchen because John still ends up making dinner most days (I know, isn’t he fabulous?) and then he knows what I have planned.

Well, tonight, I came home and this had been added to the menu plate:

Kind…of…?

I get to the table and he says “I didn’t make stir fry”. So I’m thinking…”what did you make?”

Turns out he came up with some sort of fried rice concoction. Which was fine…but it didn’t taste so good. ;) (I have his permission to blog about this little mishap, by the way) He told me he’d used too much oil when frying the rice…and didn’t add any salt, soy sauce or garlic (which is what I add when I make it).

Oops! ;) It wasn’t all bad though, you just had to add a little flavor to it and it wasn’t so bad :) I guess he had added the egg and the rice and celery (which he used because he couldn’t find any green onion “for some reason”) when he finally realized: wait. this is not stir fry.

So we had a good laugh over it and now the joke is “wait, you DO know what that is, right?”

Ohhh good fun :)

Happy Birthday John!: A Western Story

Yesterday John had a birthday! Hurray!!! Lucky for us it was on a Saturday, so we had lots of free time to celebrate!! We started off the day with a birthday breakfast of blueberry muffins and presents!

I have a funny story for you about the muffins. It was already kind of late in the morning so I was kind of in a hurry to get them finished – I had a lot of party prep to do during the afternoon – so as soon as the muffins came out of the oven, I stacked them nicely on a plate, stuck in the candles, got them lit and sang John the birthday song and he blew out the candles. Normal, right? Well, what I forgot to consider was the the muffins were still really hot. And the four candles in the top muffins had completely melted into the muffins by the time we took them out to eat the muffins. Oops. ;)

Then came presents!

Not a bad haul this year, eh? ;) After we got ready for the day, we had some errands to run and I spent most of the afternoon getting ready for a western themed dessert and game night! A few weeks ago I made these super cute *ahem* manly cowboy invites to send out to some friends
I wanted it to look somewhat authentic, so yes, I did actually burn the edges of the paper. The pyrotechnics got a little messy and the bathroom smelled like smoke for a little while…but oh, it was worth it. ;)

Then I set to work getting the food done. I spent most of this week getting some prep done when I’d get home from work. So I went from one kitchen to another ;) I also put together some mini cupcakes for John to take to work on Friday.

I was finally able to try this new chocolate cake recipe that Chef Josh at school had given me several months ago. It turned out really yummy! With the remaining batter I made the cake for the party. I also tried out a recipe for peanut butter mousse. (I know, watch the drooling)

I had a fun spread put out for our guests, all western themed of course :)
It wasn’t until after I made the labels and put everything away that I thought of “Buffalo Chips” for the tortilla chips. Oh well ;)
This was the best one ;)

And I just have to show you the inside, after we cut it :) Yummy chocolately peanut-buttery goodness…

I had it all set out for munching and at the last minute I made this fun birthday banner – with my cricut of course!!! :)

We got all dressed up in our western gear and we were ready to party! Our friends Emily and Shawn were the only ones that ended up being able to make it, but we had a great time and played one of our FAVORITE western games: BANG! Emily and I totally won the first game, when she was the Sheriff and I was the deputy. We “killed” the boys off pretty quick ;) During the second game, the boys were knocked out again pretty fast and then Emily and I duked it out for a good half hour, when she finally beat me. She was an outlaw and I was the sheriff.

The boys weren’t too happy they got kicked out so fast, but what can I say? We had the luck of the draw that time ;)

We finished the day happy, sleepy, and full of yummy food. Happy birthday John! I sure do love you!

Serious Vinyl-age

Like my new word? ;) My mom sent me pictures of the finished projects that she used my vinyl for (from THIS POST) and it looks SOOOOO good so I had to share it with you :)

The Powder Room (it’s the bathroom…in case anyone was wondering ;)
My mom has this awesomely huge walk in pantry…jealous…
Door and mailbox numbers! I think they turned out really nice
This is on the bathroom mirror that my siblings use. I love this quote :)
And now everyone has some form of vinyl on their laptop. I mean, who doesn’t love customization?! I forgot to take a picture of my mom’s though…she got penguins :) Dad of course, wanted a BYU Y

AND NOW for the unveiling of my KITCHENAID!! I literally opened the box, put it on the counter, and cut out my vinyl. And I’m in love. I cut out a pretty quatrefoil design and slapped it right on there. I think my life is complete ;)
Love. Love. Love. Love. Love!!!!!!!!!! THANK YOU to Mom and Dad for an AWESOME graduation gift! AND to Mom and Dad M for a gift card to Williams and Sonoma so I can get some fun attachments for this baby! Big plans my friends, big plans :) :) :)

And I’ve already been able to use it for cookies and cake and frosting. More on that in the next post. I’ve literally spent all my waking hours in a kitchen this week ;)