Labor Day Goal - Check!

Ok there was one thing I wanted to get accomplished this Labor Day and that was reading the second installment of the Hunger Games. I read HG last Fall and thought it was pretty good for a young adult book. Lots of violence and a story that I got invested in. Well book 2, Catching Fire, came out last Tuesday and I was dying to go buy it. So Jared and I went to Barnes & Noble and it was not there. I thought it might have sold out because there were 275 holds on it at the library before it even officially came out. So we went home and decided to get on the bikes and go head to Target. It wasn't there either. I was actually ok with this because I was still engrossed in my other book at the time. Jared suggested we give WalMart a try before we headed home. And wouldn't you know, it was there. Wahoo!!

Catching Fire was even better than the first. I read 150 pages my first night. I could not put the stupid thing down. Love the storyline, love the characters . . . this was a great book to start off my fall reading season with. If you are a book reader and not afraid of a little futuristic theme . . . pick these up now. Start with book 1, you won't be sorry.

Door Ding and Ditch

So I thought I would post a pic of the ding on my car door that I found last week. I actually thought it was funny because whoever dinged my door tried to rub off the red paint that they left with their finger. My car is black and so it's always dirty. I could see their finger swipes. What's even better is it looks like they then licked their finger in hopes of the paint coming off. You can't see that the paint is red from the picture. LOSER! Thanks a lot red car . . . 'preciate ya.

PS . . . it's really not as big as it looks. Don't let the reflection of the car fool you. That was a grey Accord I was parked next to that you can see reflected in my door.

And the winner is . . . (at least for now)

The flat gooey snickerdoodles won out. I found a recipe for the puffy cookies and it looks like one of the secrets is shortening v. butter. So Jared and I tried out the puffy cookies and we decided that we both loved the flat gooey ones a lot more. I apologized to Jared that I had to make more of the same dough all over again and not something different. We'll just say he wasn't very sad. So I'll share that recipe.

3 1/2 cups flour

1 Tbs baking powder

2 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 tsp cinnamon

1 cup butter, softened

2 cups sugar

2 eggs

1 Tbs light corn syrup

2 1/2 tsp vanilla

To set aside:

3 Tbs sugar

1/2 tsp cinnamon

In small bowl combine flour, baking powder and soda, salt and cinnamon. Cream butter until nice and fluffy. Add sugar and beat until combined. Add eggs, corn syrup and vanilla. Beat until creamy. Gradually beat in dry ingredients until combined. Let chill in the refrigerator for at least an hour. I actually like it when it's chilled for a few hours, even over night.

Roll table spoon size dough balls in the sugar and cinnamon that was set aside. Bake in preheated oven at 375 degrees for 10-12 minutes. These cookies taste super good nice and warm and good the next day after begin stored. Here's pics of the puffy cookies v. the flat gooey ones. Look at the gooey-ness in the picture of the flat pic that I loaded.

Some Summer Reading

It's no secret that I'm a crazy reader. I can't go a day without doing any reading. I don't go to bed unless I've done some reading before hand.

Something that happened that I didn't plan for was that I read like 3 books this summer that were centered around WWII. And all three have been excellent. In fact, I'm not done with the third one but I'm blahgging it anyway because it's going to be my favorite, I can already tell. It's so good. I already know which of my friends will pick it up. Ok so here are the 3 WWII books. Skeletons at the Feast, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and The Book Thief. That's the one I'm reading now that is so so good.

Another excellent series that I read the sequel too this summer is the Tea Rose series. I read The Winter Rose this summer and it so good. They are long though, like 600+ pages long and the books themselves are huge. Good historical fiction and not to mention that the covers are beautiful.

Starting Tuesday, my first book of the fall comes out. Catching Fire. It's the second Hunger Games book and I way stoked for it!!! Then 2 weeks later, Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger comes out and she wrote Time Traveler's Wife so I'll definitely be reading it.

Also, everyone congratulate Jared. He got his library card this week. hee hee. We're such nerds. Oh well, I lllloooovveee it.

I have a question . . .

So totally random question . . . ya'll know that I like to cook right? And I think I'm pretty darn good at it. Anyone . . . comments are welcome as I'm putting this out there. If I were to start making meals, ready to go, ready to eat that were good meals, say better than your average chicken dishes. Meals that you would definitely be impressed with . . . if I were to start making meals for a minimum of 4 people a meal . . . do you think people would pay to have meals already made for their families? And what if they were delivered to their house? Do you think there would be people that would do that . . . even if it was moderately priced? It wouldn't be cheap but it wouldn't be knock your socks off expensive either.

Just putting that out there.

The August Review

So I didn't post a ton this month. I've been busy with various things so here's the run down.

Ok so as posted before, I decided to learn how to ride a motorcycle spontaneously. It's one of those things that I always thought would be cool to learn and I just pulled the trigger. I like to think of it as working on my marriage. hee hee. Jared rides and so I hate for him to be out there all alone seeing the sites and me sitting around the house watching all my BBC shows or reading my books. So I'm being selfless and trying to spend more time with him. Not bad, huh? This is me in the church parking lot just getting started. Don't worry though, I've graduated to major streets. Tonight we took a ride into Farmington. So fun!! Got a few bugs stuck in my lipgloss but I'm still alive.

Next item. This is just a funny pic of my cat. He loves boxes and crawled into my boot box that had the lid attached. He got in a laid down. Silly boy. Psst . . . don't look, I'm hiding.

I'll do a separate post about some of the books I read this summer. Saw Time Traveler's Wife last Friday with some neighbor friends and it was really good for being a book adaptation. I loved the book and thought the movie was pretty good. TTW will probably be on my list of top 10 books I read this year. I know 10 seems like a lot but we're pushing 50 books this year so far.

Lastly, I discovered Cutler's cookies. This was not a good thing. I have a craving for one of their cookies about once a week. I especially love their brownie marshmallow cookies. Yum!!!

Oh . . . I used to have the best snickerdoodle recipe that made puffy cookies instead of flat ones. I'm on the quest to finding that recipe again. Jared and I tested out some snickerdoodles this week and they were yummy. Gooey and yummy . . . but flat. Once I get that figured out, I'll post it.

Crouton Chicken Anyone?

I love it when you realize you have more friends than you thought. The more the merrier I say!! Apparently quite a few of my neighbors like that I put lots of recipes on my blahg and so I'm happy to oblige with more. This recipe comes from my best friend in high school. So this one is tried and true and been a long for awhile. It's also a favorite of Jared's. Here it is.

Crouton Chicken

6 skinless chicken breasts

6 slices swiss cheese

2 cans of cream of mushroom soup

1/4 cup cooking white wine (you can use chicken broth if you don't want to use wine)

2 Tbs melted butter

Your favorite croutons

Preheat over to 350. Arrange chicken in a greased glass casserole dish. Put a slice of cheese on each piece of chicken. In medium size bowl, combine mushroom soup, white wine and melted butter. Poor over chicken and just pour it all into the casserole dish. Sprinkle lots of croutons on top. You can put as many or as little as you want.

Bake for 45 minutes uncovered. Serve chicken on top of a bed of your favorite rice. mmm, delish! Here's a bad pic I took of it before I cut into it.