Wow…I’ve been silent. But for good reason! C and I are officially homeowners! We closed on our house on March 4th and have been busy since then moving stuff in and getting settled. C is basically there and I am moving in at the end of April – the weekend before the wedding will be my last weekend in my apartment. I am slowly moving my stuff over. Today was four drawers from one of my two dressers with my PJ pants, hiking clothes, and t-shirts. Tomorrow – who knows. We’re getting a storm tomorrow. Nothing like snow on the first day of spring, huh? Welcome to Maine people.
We’re also at 47 days until the wedding. We actually got our marriage license the day we closed so technically, we could get married now.
Food wise…not a lot of cooking happening. Just a lot of packing. I did however make vegetarian korma tonight. And it was mighty yummy. We both like our Indian food hot (C more so than me). I should have made more of a sauce like you would get if you were at an Indian restaurant. It had a great flavor though and while maybe not truly authentic, was pretty much like something you could get in a restaurant (we’re also moving further from our favorite Brit-Indi place in Portland…sad face). Definitely a make again.
I also made seared scallops atop wilted spinach and parmesan risotto as our first meal in the house that wasn’t take out (moving week for C was a lot of sandwiches, grocery store sushi, and pizza). And it was also mighty yummy. I kinda freaked C out when I stopped by the house with groceries in the middle of the day (he works from home). While I was putting groceries away, he poked his head upstairs from our basement and said “I was 99.9% sure it was you…I wanted to be sure”. Since then, if I am stopping by during the day, I have let him know that I am. For us, you never can go wrong with risotto and scallops. Together, they’re fantastic.
Oh and we’ve started honeymoon planning…France, here we come!
I started to post the recipe for this the other day but got distracted. Oops 🙂 These cakes were delicious! And the avocado sauce? Out of this freaking world. The whole no meat for Lent has been interesting. We each had a meatball on Sunday at our marriage prep class but have otherwise been sticking to our observance. The cakes had a good taste to them – C kept remarking that they tasted like falafel and the avocado sauce tasted like taziki sauce. I didn’t notice but whatever. They were still good and a definite do again. I need to find another use for this sauce as well. It was that good. I forgot to purchase lime but I don’t think it lost anything. It will be interesting to see hope it tastes with lime though. And maybe leaving a couple seeds from the jalapeño pepper to add a little kick 🙂
Wedding front, we’re two and a half months away. We had our planning meeting tonight with our coordinator at the hotel where our reception is and are working on the finishing touches. I can’t believe it has been almost a year since C has proposed. We actually started dating four years ago next month – four years to almost the day that we move him into the house (we’re being traditional and I am not going to live with him until after the wedding – I will live there the week before with my parents and C will be elsewhere). It’s exciting and nervewracking. It has come so quickly and while I cannot wait for the wedding, I also cannot wait to start my life with this wonderful man.
Speaking of house – 12 days until we close! We have our final walk through on March 3 to make sure everything is okay. We’re also in the process of purchasing a washer and dryer (the current owners took theirs). Oh and purging and packing. I managed to purge a bunch of shoes and filled six 15 gallon garbage bags with junk from my apartment that I didn’t want to keep anymore. Go me.
This penne recipe has to easily be one of my favorite dishes to make, and probably the one that I can do from (almost memory). It’s pretty basic and easy to throw together, and relatively inexpensive. C already had heavy cream lying around his apartment, as well as crushed tomatoes (he makes his own pasta sauce), so I just had to get the pasta and sausage. The sausage is really what makes the meal. I’m telling you. It calls for 2 links, but I almost think that more could be used. The first time I made it, I didn’t remove the casing and instead sliced the sausage and cooked it that way. I don’t think that the recipe lost anything by being cooked either way, but I do prefer the sausage when it is broken up. I just would prefer more. Maybe it would be worth trying a mixture of both sweet Italian sausage and hot Italian sausage. It’s already a little bit spicy with the red pepper flakes, but the hot Italian sausage will definitely pick it up a notch 🙂 We’re doing leftovers tonight for dinner.
House front, no new updates. We chose our insurance company, if you want to call that an update. Still playing the waiting game. We close March 4th.
We also have our tasting on Wednesday for the wedding reception and meet with the coordinator the week after that to go over what our menu is going to be and what the evening is going to look like. That shoulld be fun. We spent some time this afternoon going over the set list for the band that is playing at the reception to choose what we want to be played and what we don’t want to be played. We also chose our first song, but that’s a surprise!
I really need to better at updating this. I have been very busy at work and frankly, haven’t felt like updating afterwards.
As for life updates, wedding planning is basically done! We have a tasting in a couple of weeks, and then set our menu for the reception. We also start our marriage prep classes after the Super Bowl (a requirement to get married in the Catholic church). C’s father is checking with his grower because he is growing our wedding flowers for us and we’ll go from there. I also had my first dress fitting on the 17th, which was a great experience. The seamstress was wonderful and made my dress look beautiful, with just pins! I cannot wait to see what it looks like when she is done with it. My bridesmaids are planning my shower and I cannot wait to see what they are going to do – I trust that it will be beautiful and classy, because, well, that is me!
House front – we are under contract for a beautiful home! It’s in Gorham, ME, about 30 minutes from where we both live currently. It is move in ready and is a home we can grow into, rather than grow out of. We’re conditionally approved for a loan and are going through underwriting right now. Our closing date is supposed to be March 4th. We hope that things keep going as smoothly as they have been thus far. Fingers crossed.
I really stink at updating this thing. I fell into the pattern that happened with my other blogs (like my LiveJournal…remember those days of LJ?). It became a thing where it was a “oh wow, I should update this thing” but the update became a short paragraph. I suck. Life has been busy, which I guess is a good thing.
Wedding update – we’re basically done! Yay! Wedding is in 135 days (but who is counting, right?). It’s exciting and weird at the same time. Weird to think that in 135 days, I’m going to have a totally different last name than the one I have been calling myself for the past 28 and a half years, weird to think that I’m going to have a husband, weird to think that I’m going to be living with someone who isn’t a roommate after 7 years of having roommates (between the four years of college and three years of having roommates when I first moved to Portland) and three and a half years of living by myself. The house hunt is going. There is one that we really liked, but we’ll see. It all comes down to financing. Don’t want to talk too much about it just in case things don’t go the way we want them to and we have our hopes all built up and end up disappointed. It’s been fun, and a learning process. Now we’ve started watching HGTV and home search shows, in addition to cooking shows. We lead a pretty exciting life, what can I say 🙂 Pinterest is going to come in really handy too once we get a house.
As for cooking, I have cooked a lot of recipes in the time that I haven’t posted. Do I feel like posting? Not really. I need to be better about this though. I like posting and writing about what I’ve cooked. It’s a good way for me to think about what I’ve done and what I could do differently.
I also need to start reading more again. And knitting.
So I have completely neglected this thing. Work and life have been busy so I really haven’t had the time to update.  House hunt is still going. We’re looking at 2 on Friday, one of which we really like (or at least it looks good via pictures…we’ll see how it looks in person).
For those of you who know C, you know that he loves singing. He especially loves singing around me. Why? Well, he’s not that great of a singer, so it’s not because I love his voice (sorry hun). He knows that it annoys me and makes me laugh given that he is utterly random in what he sings. Other times, it has to do with what is going on in a given situation. His motto is also “you are what you eat” so every time he makes meatloaf, he proceeds to sing…Meat Loaf. We also determined one time that Meat Loaf doesn’t necessary sing the most positive songs. We were talking about possible first dance songs this morning and one website suggested “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” – which is about a guy who wants to kill himself after being trapped into a marriage. Great. Almost as good as the time that someone told me about how they heard on the radio that someone wanted “Lips of an Angel” as their wedding song and were very upset when the DJ told them that it was about cheating. Because, obviously, you want your first dance as a married couple to be about either killing yourself or cheating. We don’t have any real frontrunners right yet, and obviously, we want to leave that as a surprise for our guests 🙂
Other wedding news – we have transportation to and from the wedding that day and I chose my bridesmaid shoes. The important things, you know 😉
House hunting – we went went around again yesterday with our realtor and looked at three more houses. One, we loved with some minor flaws that in talking with one another and our realtor, can be taken care of. It comes with an epic great room that we could use as a living room/music room (C has guitars, I have a baby grand piano that I’m getting from my parents) and be able to still have C’s disco dance Halloween party in. As our realtor said, we could have our reception there or rent it out. It really is that big. The other two yesterday just didn’t leave us with that vibe of feeling at home, including one that was a short sale and was in pretty bad shape. It was sad to see how quickly someone’s life can turn for the worse. We’ll be going around again in a couple of weeks and hopefully more will come out in that time.
Foodwise – these mini bbq cheddar meatloaves from Iowa Girl Eats are to DIE FOR. They were the perfect portion size for a person and the roasted broccoli Kristin pairs it with were also good. I love roasted veggies. They give an entirely new flavor to the vegetable and they make some vegetables appetizing – like brussel sprouts (seriously – make roasted brussel sprouts sometime. It will turn your way of thinking about them around entirely). There is nothing that C and I like more than carmelized onions and his apartment smelled wonderful they were done. I combined half a pound of ground beef with half a pound of moose meat that C’s father killed back in October. This was the first time I have every had moose and it definitely gave a bit of gameiness to it that I kind of was expecting given the fact that half of the meat was moose. The BBQ sauce gave it a great flavor and made a really good glaze. And who really doesn’t like ooey-gooey melty cheese? I think that that addition just MADE this meal. I can’t wait to have leftovers for my lunch tomorrow at work.
I was planning on making a chicken chili with quinoa for my lunches for this week before I realized that I was going to be gone from Wednesday to Saturday visiting my parents in Texas. They moved there in August for a couple of years for my dad’s job. When he is done, they’ll move back East. If my dad had his way, they would move to Maine (he went to college here and loved it).
On an ending note, for your entertainment, given the fact that I talked about meatloaf and Meat Loaf, I leave you with the literal music video of “I Would Do Anything For Love”. I should warn you, don’t be drinking anything or eating anything while watching this. It’s funny (on another note, make sure you watch the literal music video of “Total Eclipse of the Heart”).
Back to the grind of making a big thing for myself for my lunches for the week. It is really economical. I think I spent $23 at the grocery store on Friday for dinner on Friday and Saturday and the ingredients for my tomato, basil and cheddar soup, which calls for six servings. Love it.
This soup. Holy cow. It might be my next favorite tomato soup after the tomato soup with the cannellini beans. This also had a bit of a hearty flavor to it, but was definitely more mellow. It wasn’t an in your face cheddar taste. I might experiment a little bit with cheddar cheeses. I purchased the kind you get next to the milk and the yogurt at the grocery store, which was probably my first mistake. I really should have just gotten the kind you can get in the cheese section. I probably should have also gone to the largest of the grocery stores which is a mile from my apartment instead of the one the next town over. But I was out that way because I had to go to Target and figured I would just stop there rather than backtracking. Backtracking isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I know people who will come into town just to be able to go to Whole Foods or Trader Joes. Heck, I know people who would go to the mothership Wegmans in my hometown because it was the best.
But I digress. This is a good rainy day soup, which really isn’t the case today since it is 63 and sunny in Portland (one of my coworkers was wearing sandals). I’m looking forward to it for the rest of the week.
Other random updates – C and I started house hunting as I mentioned in Friday’s post. We didn’t go into anything but we drove around and got some ideas of what we can get for our money, which was good. We also taste tested some whoopie pies (Maine’s state treat…or dessert…I can’t remember. Someone will let me know, I’m sure). We’re thinking about serving them as dessert at the wedding in lieu of cake. Fun and different – seriously, people don’t remember the cake except for the bride and groom (as according to one of my friends). Anyone I’ve talked to who I have mentioned this idea to has said that they think it is a cute idea and would be a nice Maine touch. C even said that if he was given the choice between whoopie pie and cake, he would go for cake. The ones we tasted were good but kind of small. So we’re at the drawing board to look at sizes and price.
I’m updating this as a way to avoid putting laundry away, which just has to be my least favorite chore to do, after washing dishes of course. I have everything away, except for the stuff I have to hang up. It really WON’T take that long to put away, it’s just a pain.
I didn’t make lunch for myself last week because I had frozen leftover roasted vegetable pasta that my mother had sent home with me in August before they moved to Texas. It was okay, may have been better when it was fresh. I like roasted vegetables, but the longer they sit, the more mushy they become. It’s a texture thing I guess. I’m not a picky eater, but texture is important when you’re eating something, right?
Anywho, this weeks lunch is tomato, basil, and cheddar soup. I got to use my immersion blender, which seriously has to be the best invention ever, along with the slow cooker. Looking forward to it. It also has greek yogurt in it, which should be good.
Dinner tonight with C is skillet chicken parmesan. I’ll be using C’s homemade pasta sauce for it. I’m looking forward to this because it’s not the breaded, fried chicken parm that people know and love – including me. Updates on both recipes soon.
We decided on a band for the wedding, which is VERY exciting. I’ve also started looking at wedding cakes. I think we may go with a wedding cake with whoopie pies, but not sure yet. C is looking into transportation for that day. We’re also starting to look for houses this weekend! We’ve been looking for a little bit and have been to a few open houses, but we’re seriously starting to look considering we’re getting married in 6 and a half months!
Well, since as of last Thursday, we had 7 more months and as of Tuesday, we’re at 200 days (holy cow!), I figured it was time for a little update.
What we have done:
– location and date (obviously)
– rehearsal dinner
– reception
– hotel rooms for everyone
– bridesmaid dresses
– MY DRESS! (and shoes)
– photographer
– flowers (sort of…need to figure out what C’s father is going to grow – he owns a nursery and landscaping business and offered to grow some of our flowers for us)
Need to do:
– finalize invitations
– send out save the dates (that’s happening in January)
– engagement pictures (today’s activity…we’re going out at 5 to meet with our photographer)
– band (seeing one tonight)
– engagement announcement (after we have pictures back)
– cake (nom nom nom)
– my veil (minor…but still would like to have one)
– bridesmaid shoes
– tuxes for the guys
– plane tickets and arrangements for honeymoon (which reminds me that I need to update my passport which expired last month).
– marriage prep classes that are required to get married in our diocese – and basically anywhere if you want to get married in the Catholic Church.
The good news is that when I have to change all the important stuff over after I change my name, my driver’s license is going to expire anyways (my 29th birthday is two weeks after we get married so I figure…why not just do it than rather than updating it before the wedding and updating it AGAIN a month later. Tell me I’m being wise doing this, please). It’s exciting. I think I’m going to be more exicted next month when we’re at 6 months (and the excitement probably will be building each month after that – just a hunch).
Living life as I know how 