Happy Halloween

So today I am braving the unknown and roasting a chicken. For all the cooking that I have done, this is NOT something I have done before, even assisting my mom. To start, I did some research. I found the right recipe. I then read more. And totally confused myself. Some recipes said to put the bird breast side done, others said to put butter under the skin. But they all started the oven at the same temp: 425. I went to the store, picked up a 6.5 lb oven roaster. Came home, read the packaging. And was even more confused!!! The package said to roast at 350. For 2.5 hours! So I called my mom. She said to pre-heat the oven to 425. Put the chicken in and turn the oven down to 350 and roast. Since the chicken I got has a pop up thermometer, she said to roast for the short amount of time, then check the pop up to ses how much more time I should leave it in. So that is the plan.


On a side note, yesterday I discovered the joy that is the produce and fresh foods section at Whole Foods in Annapolis. I've been there before, to the old location, and wasn't really impressed. There were strange brands and different kinds of foods that I really wasn't interested in trying or needed. But yesterday was a different experience. They had some great looking apples and other produce. I went with my friend and we got stuff for dinner last night. We got some really good sweet chipotle balck bean dip. To die for!!!! They even had organic heavy cream in the cool bottles. I got one because on top of cooking chicken, I'm making butter again! Yum.

Well I hope everyone enjoys their end of October today. The weather is great outside!!!!

Theifing.

A few weeks ago R and I stole my nephew for a few hours while G was working. We took him to a pumpkin patch and the beach. We enjoyed some pizza and playing in the sand. This Sunday we are stealing him again for a family brunch. He is really excited! Me too! Can't wait to see this smiling face! Saying Cheese!

Picking out a pumpkin... "this one is heavy"

"I found it"

Climbing around in Baabee's car.

Making sure the "punkin" rides in style and safety

Cutting his pizza with a knife and fork. So sophisticated.

Never mind, hands work best!

Getting a chance to run around the boardwalk. Peaking in the sign Now it's beach time, complete with flying sand.

"Look I found some driftwood"

Napping with the "punkin" on the way home. Shaking up some bottles.He loved being hung upside down by Uncle Ruf Ruf

Look who found some monies! Oh this could be trouble!

The gingerbread cake Extravaganza

Here it is folks; my gingerbread cake making adventure. The results smelled and tasted fantastic! The whole point behind this baking was to use up the ginger, clove, and nutmeg spices I had in my pantry. Well when I decided to make cup cakes instead of a whole cake I discovered that I did not have any cup cake pans. Oops. So I went out to the store and bought two. And decided to buy all-spice. Which is was the recipe called for to begin with. So now I still have ginger, clove, and nutmeg. And on top of that I have to figure out how to use up the all-spice. Oh well. I'm sure it will be a great adventure. Any recipe ideas floating around out there would not be turned away.

*Sorry about the lack of pictures, but the blogger thing wasn't uploading pictures.*

Freshly bakes cup cakes.

The end product. They tasted as good as they smelled!

Gingerbread cake.

About to make this: http://www.food.com/recipe/gingerbread-cake-78628
And cover it with this: http://allrecipes.com//Recipe/cream-cheese-frosting-ii-2/Detail.aspx colored with yellow and orange for Halloween. And with candy corn and gummy bugs and worms for decoration. I am excited!

A quick update on the baby blanket. I started over for a third time. With red, blue and green yarn. But the right brand and right size. So far so good. A picture will follow. I'm hoping that a 3rd time's the charm with this blanket. I have plans for the yarn that I first started with. I am going to try and make the blanket that I first started with. So we will see.

The first true fall weekend

So a quick update on the blanket. RIP. =( I had to pull it apart. I found out that I had somehow added 3 extra stitches from the time I started row one to the time I did row 30. It wasn't pleasent. BUT, I talked with my mom and she and I both agreed that now that I have had lots of practice with the basic double crochet, I can try a blanket that has some variation in the stitches. So I chose one with a shell pattern. Now the hard part is figuring out the gauge. I'm still kinda stuck on that, so I hope to figure it out while watching some Sunday night football. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

On a better note, R and I spent the day yesterday at Hershey Park with his roommate and girlfriend. That was a good time. The weather was great! Nice and cool with no clouds in the sky. We made it to the park around lunch time and managed to get two roller coasters done before an hour was up. After that we walked a lot. I mean a LOT. The is one park that has hills all over it. That made it easier to eat all the gross, greasy park food. We just walked it off. C and I managed to make it through one last roller coaster. It was called .... well I don't remember what it was called but you sat down in the car with an over the shoulder harness. It wasn't a wooden roller coaster. It then dragged you up a huge hill and dropped you, sending you through the station and out the other side, through a couple of loops and twists and then pulled up a huge hill on the other side. So now we were backwards. It then dropped you down the hill and back through all the loops and twists and back to the station. It was just like 6 Flags Two-Face except you were all facing the same way and the track is underneath you, not suspending you. K and R went on one last roller coaster while C and I went shopping for some T-shirts and other goodies. We stayed at a hotel in Harrisburg and went to eat dinner in a firehouse that had been coverted. I didn't get any pictures, but the beer tap at the bar was an old fire hydrant. The whole place was pretty cool. The food was fantastic!!!! Even the price was good. We then tried the heated pool. It wasn't heated. It was inside a room that was heated, but the pool was too cold to swim in. I would have liked to get a chance to swim in it, because there was 2 walls of portholes at the bottom of the pool. They looked through to the hotel bar.

Today we went to visit the National Civil War Museum. That was pretty cool. They had some great displays and a ton of information. If you wanted to spend the whole time reading the walls and displays you could. I just looked at the pictures. We picked a good weekend to go. It was the last weekend of the season they had anything going on. Today they had the 44th Mississippi doing a live camp weekend thing. Complete with shooting demo. We learned the history of the outfit. They started the war with over 100 men. They ended with 9. One cool thing that was done in the Civil War was that when a unit lost men, they didn't add replacements. As casulties rose, the unit would get smaller and smaller until it was integrated into a bigger unit. Also, the units were geographically based so the men from the same town all fought together. This has all changed now. Replacements are added to a unit and men from all over fight together in the same unit.

I ended up with a puzzle from the gift shop. Its a scene from a ballroom. I'm excited to start putting it together.

Well it's time for football. Everyone enjoy the cool weather!

It's officially fall.

It's officially fall. So to celebrate, yesterday and today I made chicken soup. I have a recipe that I took off the foodnetwork.com by Emril. I made it once before and it turned out ok. Not great, just ok. This time, I used a whole chicken cut into pieces, two whole bulbs of garlic, and two boullion cubes. I know that last ingredient is kind of cheating, but last time, even when I used salt and garlic salt, it just was missing something. I made the soup stock yesterday while Russell and I were out. When I drained everything the stock was a beautiful, rich, dark brown color. Last night it had been light yellow. I was really excited because now it looked like all the homemade stocks that the food network chefs use. Score one for me! I tasted it and it was yummy. It definitely needed salt, but I didn't add any yet. Russell and I were getting ready for a date night so I quickly put everything away. This afternoon, I shreaded the chicken and began making the soup itself. Onions, garlic, carrots, and celery all went in. The chicken too. Then the stock. I brought it to a boil and added salt, garlic salt and tons of pepper. It is absolutely delicious!!!!! Because it is chicken NOODLE soup, I'm supposed to add noodles as well. Right now my plan is to cook the noodles separately and add them as needed so that I can have left overs with noodles that are not soggy.

Next cooking adventure? Butter. Again =)

PS: the baby blanket is coming along great! Pictures soon to come.

Learning how to crochet.

My mom must love it that I am learning to crochet.... I have called her more than 6 times in the past three days to ask her questions about it. =) Earlier this week I got to meet my friend at JoAnn fabrics to search for the right yarn. We ended up with all the right stuff, plus a little more for a future project of necklace making! So I got a book on how to crochet a blanket and all. I read it from cover to cover. I looked online for clarification for some terms.... who knew that "drawing up a loop" meant that I had to pull the loop through the other look already on the hook. Not me. Thanks Internet!

To start I took my "practice" yarn and played around with stitches. This isn't a very good picture but I am using light colored yarn and it doesn't like the flash.

I then took a skein of my "baby neutral" yarn and book with me to work yesterday and got started. Once I got into the rhythm of things, (and called my mom three more times) I calculated my gauge and chained 158. Ugh!!!! Try counting that high when everything looks the same. I got distracted some times and had to stop and re-count. From there I started on the double crochet. Doing that into a tiny single-with chain was ridiculously hard. It took me over an hour to finish it. I didn't have anything to hold onto and I was trying to count stitches to make sure I got it right... well I finished with 155 instead of 156. So I called mom again. =) We got the problem all worked out and I now have 5 rows worked.

The only problem now is that the length is supposed to be 34 inches. The single chain was a few cm over that. With the first row it grew to about an inch longer. Now I have over 3 feet of length. I did think that maybe I am pulling my stitches too tight and that is effecting the stretch of the yarn, but I have no idea.

I am hoping that if I loosen my stitches, maybe that will shorten the length of the rows.

And now.... I go back to crochetting!