The Story on Morning Glory

Today Jack and I went to our first story time!  I was super excited.  I'd looked at the story schedule and was looking forward to hearing. 

When I was little, my aunt owned a gift boutique in my hometown called The Holiday House.  She had all kinds of things from crosses to hang on the wall to baby blankets.  If you needed a gift in Palestine, this is where you went!  We spent quite a bit of time there growing up, and I spent many a Christmas season wrapping gifts in the back.  And due to that, I LOVE wrapping beautiful gifts and making perfect bows!  Anyways, at some point, they carried a book titled Good Dog, Carl.  For some unknown reason, my cousin who is 4 years older than me, read the title of that book and from then on, he would consistently comment "Good dog, Carl" to every accomplishment we made...and being the younger cousins, my sister and I thought it was hilarious, which, of course, made him say "Good dog, Carl" to us even more!  I don't remember ever reading the book, just knowing it was Good Dog, Carl. 

Lots of new things going on around here...

First, Jack is really walking.  Like, really walking!  And he loves it.  He thinks it is soooooooo fun and pretty much laughs every time he's walking!  It's been so fun to watch him figure it out.  And I swear, it happened all in about 2 days!  One day, he couldn't walk.  The next, he took a few steps.  The next, he was walking across the room!!  I'm working on getting a video.  Problem is, when he sees the video camera, he wants to grab it.

Next, Jeff and I were away from Jack over night for the first time last night.  Whew.  I'm not gonna lie, I missed him!!  But I didn't miss him when I got to sleep until after 8am.  :)  Jeff made reservations for us to have dinner at Wolfgang Puck's 560 restaurant at the top of Reunion Tower and it was so good.  The view was amazing and we had such a good time just being together! 

Monday was my birthday...birthday's get a lot less exciting when you get old.  Now, pair that with the planning of Jack's birthday, it's totally not a big deal to me.  But I had a great birthday!

Sunday night I went out with some great friends to a fancy schmancy restaurant. 

Ok, not really, but look at that sin nature already developing in my little boy!  Knowing...flat out knowing...what he's supposed to do, and just clearly deciding not to do it.  Nobody taught him to disobey...he just does it!  And yes, he knows what no means.  He definitely knows.  Or at least he did last week...

And yes, he does this weird thing where he runs his mouth along the table.  I don't know.  It's weird and gross.  But apparently very fun!  And so is kissing the wall. 

Last Sunday we hosted a Mexican themed church pot luck supper at our house...yes, we're a little crazy...but it was a great time!!!  About 60 people, big and small, packed into our Morning Glory home to fellowship over some yummy, yummy Mexican treats.  It was the hottest day of the year so far, and my biggest fear is that people would die of heat stroke.  Our 50 year old "Weathermaker" is large and in charge, doing a good job of keeping the house cool...but 60 people and 105 heat just might put it over the edge!  EEK!

I made some sour cream chicken enchiladas, and I've got to share the sour cream sauce recipe. It's to die for. (Can you tell I like Mexican food? I seem to get very dramatic about it.)

Sour Cream Sauce

1/4 c butter
1/4 c flour
1 can chicken stock
1 c sour cream
1 can green chili's

Melt the butter in a big sauce pan. Once it's melted, dump in the flour and stir constantly until it's well mixed, making your roux. Once that's well blended and browning, add in your chicken broth. Once it's mixed well, remove it from the heat and add in your sour cream and chili's. Sometimes, if I'm feeling spicy, I add in a little jalapeno juice from the jalapeno jar. Mix it up and eat it up!

To make your enchiladas, just chop up some boiled chicken and toss it in a corn tortilla. Top it with cheese, and roll it up! Fill your pan with the enchiladas and pour the sauce over it. Sprinkle with a little cheddar and pop it in the over until the cheese is melted.

Yum, yum, yum!

On Sunday, I made it into an enchilada casserole...just to make it more pot luck friendly! So I just layered my chicken, cheese, tortilla and sour cream sauce in my crock pot and let the sucker go! It was a big hit. I could also see using the sauce over some chicken, black beans, and rice. It's so good, I literally lick the pan.  It's also a super yummy dip.

The Mexican fiesta food was delicious.  From grandma's queso, to El Chico's guacamole (recipe rumored to be stolen from a former employee), to some Mexican lasagna, there was definitely not a shortage of food or conversation!  And I think we still have about 5 bags of left over chips.  I'm thinking it's time to make some salsa! 

The BEST leftovers, I have to say, is a bag of Julio's corn chips.  I'm not kidding, ya'll.  These chips are TO DIE FOR!  I can't even put it into words.  While I was in college I worked at a youth camp down in the Texas Hill Country.  We had a lot of kids from San Angelo, and pretty much all of them would bring these Julio's chips.  One taste turned to a few handfuls, turned into a few bags, turned into an obsession. 

Well, we've made it almost a year with our little boy!  Wow.  I can't believe his birthday is in less than a month!

Now, I swear, the minute he turned 11 months, he started being crazy.  Two weeks ago, if he was crawling toward something he didn't need to touch, Jeff and I would say no, and he'd stop.  And he was easily distracted into forgetting about whatever it was he initially wanted.  Now, if he's crawling towards something he doesn't need to touch, Jeff and I will say no, and he'll stop...and turn around to look at us....and then turn around and look at whatever it is he wants...turn back around to look at us....crawl a little closer...turn back around to look at us...and go ahead and do what he wants.  All the while, Jeff and I are in the background telling him no!  I mean, it's crazy.  And if he's removed from the situation, once he's back on the floor, the first place he'll head is back into trouble!!!  Crazy, I tell you!

With his crazy bout of  disobedience comes the most adorable personality I've ever seen.  It is just breathtaking to see my little baby turning into a little boy.  He is funny!  Just this morning he was making faces at me to make me laugh!  He still loves to play peek a boo, and loves to be startled and surprised.  He's more independent...hence the naughtiness (he loves to sneak into the bathroom and unroll a roll of toilet paper).  I've been giving him space to play...if I'm in the living room and he crawls in the den to play, I love just listening to him talk to himself and bang his spatula and ladle around!  Until he spy's Vincent's dog food bowl, and before I can get in there, he's got a mouthful...oh well, protein, right?  He loves to be tickled and LOVES to laugh!!  Which is just too much to handle.  He's just so much fun.

He's a good little eater.  He loves mango, kiwi, and macaroni and cheese (and apparently fish sticks...yes, he ate a fish stick...for breakfast...am I a bad mom?), loves yogurt and adores Cheerios.  He's down to half of his morning bottle...I'm a little worried about getting rid of that morning bottle.  Once he wakes up, he is READY for that bottle.  We'll see how that goes.  We're supposed to be bottle free by 12 months!  He is a big fan of fruit bars, and could eat an entire bag of goldfish crackers.  Seriously.  His love for Saltines continues and the big hit recently has been a Simply Fruit jelly sandwich (on double fiber bread...sometimes we have issues).  He's a big fan of that!  And if he's had a jelly sandwich, you can tell, because somehow it ends up over everything in the whole house.  I can't for the life of me to get him to eat any vegetables.  Remember his love of carrots?  Apparently it's gone.  Hopefully he won't always reject anything green, but for now, it's straight up fruits!

Yesterday was the first day of school for lots of schools around here.  It's weird to not be getting ready to start the year...but I am beyond blessed to have this adorable thing for my boss for another year!

Jack is going through some crazy sleep times these days.  My wonderful napper is talking for an hour before actually going to sleep, waking up crying in the middle of the night, refusing to take naps all together...good times.  Who knows what's going on.  Last week he was up at 5:45am, now he's letting me sleep until 7 again.  Crossing fingers that this crazy sleep stuff is just a phase.

In the mean time, Jack is LOVING his monkey or, as we like to call him, "Monk". 

It's so freakin' hot outside these days...there's nothing do to that doesn't involve a lot of sweating, which is bad for everyone.  So, life is boring right now.  We go swimming (which I must take pictures of!) and that's about it.  So, that's why I have nothing to write about but cooking.  Because basically my day consists of waking up at 5:45 am (thank you, Jack) thinking about dinner, making sure I have everything for dinner, getting excited about dinner, cooking dinner, eating dinner, saying that dinner was good, and going to bed...mixed in with a lot of being a mamma.  Hence the onslaught of recipes lately.  One day life will get more interesting and so will my blog...but until then, hopefully you enjoy the recipes!

I've found that the more I cook, the more boring I get with the things I cook.  I mean, you can't beat a good ole fajita night, but when I get lazy, I get boring, when I get boring, I cook chicken marinated in some kind of marinade with a salad....over and over and over and over...boring. 

When my friend Sarah made cashew chicken a few weeks ago for our Bible study, it inspired me to get my Asian cooking on.  (Jeff recently taught me that calling people or places "oriental" wasn't PC...so now I know to call things "Asian"...rugs are oiental, people are Asian...that's my PSA about all things Asian.)  Up until a few years ago, I swore I hated Asian food.  Hated it.  Truth be told, I really had never tried it.  I'd just heard about nasty Chinese buffets.  And growing up in small town east Texas, there weren't a lot of Asian restaurants to try out. 

Then one day I was introduced to Pei Wei.  Ok, not totally authentic Asian food, but yummy none the less, and gave me confidence to quit saying I hated Asian food and give it a try.  Now I love it!  From sushi to fried rice, it's one of my favorites.  Only second to Mexican food...but mainly because Mexican has the whole chips and salsa going for it.  You simply can't beat that.

I digress.  I don't ever cook Asian food just because I'm not familiar with it.  I mean, Mexican food?  Do you have beans?  Do you have cheese?  Do you have tortillas?  You've got dinner.  Easy enough.  But not being as confident in the Asian flavors, I haven't done much of it. 

This week, I decided to brave the Asian food dinner.  I love friend rice, seen the hibachi guys make, so I thought I'd start with that.  I was doing some research for a good recipe and stumbled across this Shiok website.  The best thing that I read about fried rice is this:

One of the most common questions I get as a chef is about making good fried rice. This usually puzzles me because "fried rice" in Asian food is hardly haute cuisine. In fact, it's the very opposite of it. Fried rice is not one single dish. It is more of a way of combining leftover rice with leftover anything else and turning it into a one-dish meal...fried rice is more of a formula than a single recipe.

I love reading that!  I can do left overs with few boundries!  So, reading on, the chef gives some great tips on how to get your rice ready to be fried and a few other tips that were really really helpful.  The biggest thing he stated over and over again is that your rice can not be freshly cooked to be fried up right.  It should be old...at least hours old, but better if it's days old, and cold or even frozen.  Interesting.

I have a torrid relationship with rice.  I don't like minute rice, and every time I've tried to make old fashioned rice, I've either burned it or it's been soupy.  Not good.  At all.  So with my fried rice adventure looming in the foreground, I decided it was time to spring for a rice cooker!  And it is...amazing.  It's huge, can cook up to 20 cups of rice (no, I can't think of a time that I'll need 20 cups of rice, but if there ever is a need, I'll be there) and cook it PERFECTLY!  It was so easy...dump in the rice, dump in the water, snap the top, press the button...30 minutes later, perfectly cooked rice! 

So I cooked my rice Monday morning early and stuck it in the fridge to cool and then the freezer to get it really ready to get fried.  And I have to say...maybe it was beginner's luck, but my fried rice turned out GOOD! 

So, here's a basic run down of what I did.  I didn't measure things out, I just kinda went with the flow...

Fried Rice:

To start off, I marinated some chicken breasts in a yummy Lawry's Sesame Ginger marinade (YUM), diced it up into bite sized pieces and fried them up in the skillet in a little sesame oil.  After the chicken was cooked, I took it out and set it aside. 

Now for the rice. 

• Put a few turns of oil (I used sesame because I had it, but you could also use canola or vegetable)in a large skillet and start heating it up.  (FYI, I don't have a wok, but the huge skillet worked just fine).  You don't want too much oil or it will be too greasy...so go light, you can always add more later.
• Smash a few cloves of garlic and toss them in the oil to infuse the oil with flavor. 
• Slice a few thin slices of fresh ginger and toss those in the oil to get that ginger flavor mixed with the garlic. 
• Once the garlic and ginger pieces brown, take them out. 
• Now, toss in your cold rice.  Stir fry it around for a few minutes, warming up the rice and coating it with oil. 
• Once it's warmed, toss in your choice steamed veggies.  I used carrots and peas, but next time I want to toss in some water chestnuts.  I love their crunch!  And bean sprouts.  Stir fry for a bit until everything's warmed. 
• Toss in the chicken and continue to stir fry. 
• Push aside the rice in the skillet to make a "hole" in the middle.  Crack 2 eggs in the hole and saute them until they are kinda set before tossing them with the rice. 
• Add in a little salt and pepper (I also added in a few red pepper flakes and a little ginger) and soy sauce. 
• Stir it up until all mixed and serve! 

I love banana bread.  Who doesn't?  Is there a better smell than banana bread baking in the oven?  And I am going to share with you today the most WONDERFUL banana bread recipe ever.  I'm not kidding.  I get compliments on this bread from every single person I've ever baked the bread for.  And not like "Oh, you're so nice to bring banana bread," type comments, more like "This is the best banana bread ever!" comments. 

When I graduated college, I moved in with my best friend since 3rd grade.  Although we had a rocky start (I was basically a little punk who didn't want to be nice to the new girl) we overcame that unfortunate incident and eventually became best friends!  We were inseparable through grade school and high school, and went our separate ways in college, her to TAMU and me to TCU.  I was so blessed to have her as a friend during those ridiculously trying high school times...who knows where we would have been with out each other!!

Why are you waking up at 5:45am these days?  What made you decide to make the switch from 7:30am to 5:45am.  And 5:45am on the dot.  How do you know? 

And why aren't your naps longer when you wake up at 5:45am?  Shouldn't you be making up for that sleep somewhere?  Aren't you extra tired?  Because mommy is! 

Doesn't all this crawling, pulling up and general mischievousness make you more tired?  Doesn't swimming at Grammy's, playing with Vincent and laughing at your daddy make you want to sleep more?

And why don't you sleep later when you go to sleep later?  It doesn't matter if you go to sleep at 6:30pm or 8pm, you still wake up early. 

Why?