Cookbooks

For some unknown reason I have a huge aversion to looking in cookbooks when I need a specific recipe. I love having cookbooks, and I love looking through them to see what kinds of yumminess they contain, I just never think to turn to one when I don't know what to put in something that I want to eat. (Unless I already know that the recipe I'm looking for is there.) So the other day I decided I should make banana bread because our bananas were on their way out. Did I look in a cookbook? No sir, I did not. I sent an e-mail to my sister saying, "I need to make banana bread. Can you send me the recipe?" Then, about 5 minutes later, I realized that any one of my 26 or so cookbooks was likely to have the very recipe I was looking for. SO I e-mailed back a "never mind" and started looking. Sure enough, I found 7 recipes for banana bread and one recipe for banana oat pancakes. We decided to try out the pancakes and they were really, really yummy. So maybe now I'll start using my cookbooks more. (For things other than dessert!)

Weekend Fun

Well, we've been playing most of the weekend. Yesterday my sister Laura and her husband were up here on business. They had dinner with us (it was really yummy by the way) and then we drove up Provo Canyon and took a bunch of pictures. It was beautiful and the weather was perfect. Definitely what I needed.
Then this morning we went to the Memorial Day sales at the craft stores. Yeah, we spent $300 on fabric. I feel like I should be really nervous about this whole starting a business thing, but I'm really not. Maybe because we haven't actually tried to sell anything yet. Right now it's just a bunch of sewing and I can totally do that. And I even enjoy it. Hopefully it works out and we can actually make money from it. We're going to need that eventually.
Any how, this afternoon we had "barbecue" yumminess. I put that in quotation marks because we had hot dogs and we cooked them in the microwave. Not exactly my idea of what a barbecue should be, but what I really wanted was corn on the cob, watermelon, roasted potatoes and homemade ice cream. Since we had all of that it didn't really phase me that we were eating nuked wieners. It was yummy! (Even the hot dogs.)

Trial Run

Okay, here are my first attempts. The ones that only have ribbon are going to be embroidered as soon as I figure out what stabilizer to use. Let me know what you think.

Super Find

So we were randomly walking down the ice cream aisle at Walmart today and we saw carrot cake flavored ice cream with cream cheese swirls. "What's this?" we wondered. Then we thought, "Well if you like carrot cake, and I like carrot cake and we both like ice cream, how can we go wrong with this?" And let me tell you, it's delicious. Just one more thing to help me in my efforts to be less fat. :)

More Random Stuff

Remember on Monday when I wrote about how incredibly hot it was? Today it's 46 degrees. And I don't mean Celsius. It started raining yesterday and it just got colder and colder. We had to sleep under the blankets last night and that hasn't happened since we got back. It's been kind of nice. Probably because I know it will end soon.
We've been getting ready for Leo to come. I know we still have nearly 2 months left, but once Ty starts school next month there will be things I can't do. Like this:

That's right, we put the crib up yesterday. Partly because we were tired of the box taking up so much space and partly because we just wanted it to be up already.

Also, I've been playing around a lot with the new machine. A lot of stuff in our house is now covered with embroidery. Like our pillow cases. And I did some on Leo's clothes too. (Our poor little boy is going to be such a little nerd with all of his custom-embroidered clothes.) Fortunately we bought some burp cloths today so I can start putting stuff together for real.

Oh, and our peas are starting to get flowers on them. That means they're going to be ready to eat soon! I'm very excited.

Happenings

Just a quick update of what's been going on here the past few days.

• I went to the doctor on Wednesday. He says I'm too fat. (Shocking, I know.) We're now eating a low(er) carb/ high(er) protein diet. It's been a little difficult because I just don't know how to a make a meal that doesn't involve bread/tortillas/various carbohydrate-filled yumminess. At least I'm trying, right?
• Cold Stone now makes chocolate cake batter ice cream. (Don't you love that that came right after the little speech about our new diet?) It's basically the best thing they've ever done. Now I don't have to get chocolate sauce mixed in with my cake batter ice cream. I can just stick with the brownies and nuts/coconut. It makes me happy.
• It's hot here. Really hot. (Read that as 88 degrees plus humidity.) I know it could be worse than that and probably will be before Leo gets here, but I'm dying. I have to wear my hair up every day (which makes for a really attractive Kristen, let me tell you.) And yesterday at church I got so hot I had to leave early just so I didn't faint. I love being pregnant!
• There are millions of beetles in our garden. it's okay though because they eat each other and not our veggies. They do, however, like to sneak into our house and they are hard to get out. I mean, if they don't get a personal escort to the door/window they just come right back to whatever it was they were on when you flicked them away. It's a bit annoying, but at least they aren't spiders.
• Speaking of spiders . . . we gave our first family history lesson today. Part of our job as consultants is to go around to peoples' houses and motivate them to get started. We've taken months to finally get around to it, but now that we've done one it's much less intimidating so it should be easy to keep going. (The reason that has to do with spiders is that as we were leaving we saw a big, hairy, green-faced spider on the people's window. Then we saw a massive pile of ants. It was weird.)
• Last of all, I took a class on how to use my sewing machine today. Holy cow, it does everything! It even sews on buttons. And I learned a bunch of ways to make it look like I did fancy hand stitching on the edges of things when really I didn't. (Keep that in mind if I give you something that looks like it took hours to make!

Radishes

Does anyone have any good recipe ideas that involve radishes? We've run out already, (All we could come up with was soup and salad!) and we're finding that radishes are somewhat difficult to give away. Who knew?