friend kidly

Since husband was out of town on business yesterday I decided to bake some cupcakes to greet him on his return today and in honor of our anniversary. To my dismay I had only one egg and really didn’t feel like trekking to the store. Lucky for me my good old trusty copy of Joy of Cooking had a “one egg cake” recipe. Ok, so I cheated by using store bought frosting but half homemade is better than all store bought…right? The cupcakes are pretty good but next time I probably won’t use whole wheat flour. They taste a bit corn muffinish and that’s the only thing I can attribute it to.

Ooh, I also received these little lovelies today.

I spared you all a shot of them on since my legs are patchoulied out right now. I’ve been eyeing these for over a month now and was finally able to make them my own. I think they’ll make great spring/summer shoes, we shall see anyway.

Believe it or not our 8 year wedding anniversary is coming up next week; on tax day to be exact. It recently occurred to me that I’ve been married for the same length of time that I lived with a step-dad and step-sisters. The comparison doesn’t really mean anything it just struck me as odd mainly because that seemed like a big chunk of my life when I guess it really wasn’t.  Obviously the older I get the shorter eight years will seem.

As an early anniversary gift husband and I decided to purchase a grill…finally. This will be our first grill in seven years as our first one was purchased then immediately stolen shortly after we were married. Needless to say we were pretty shocked to find it gone especially because it was merely a charcoal Weber. I mean come on, who steels something like that? Anyway, we broke in the new grill with two lovely rib eyes along with grilled carrots and asparagus. A nice pre-anniversary dinner. I’m actually looking forward to summer now that I can picture long warm evenings and lots of cooking outdoors.

I’ve gone soft, motherhood has really gotten to me.  Putting my issues with Roman Polanski aside, I finally put this movie in my queue.  It arrived here and sat for almost three weeks before I got a chance to view it (gotta love Netflix for just that reason).  I attempted to watch it one afternoon and got about 20-30 minutes in when I decided to turn it off.  I couldn’t stomach the material.  It was done so well that I couldn’t watch anymore loss of life.  I didn’t have this problem prior to being a mom.  Human misery and death were never my favorite movie topics and were upsetting, to say the least, but I could watch them if they were relevant to our history and the shaping of our current society.  Someday I might give this movie another try but until then I can’t wait for Juno…

Well, let’s hope not.  I’ve been using my new stainless steel cookware set (a lovely Valentine’s gift) for a few weeks now and am glad to say that I’m very happy.  Mostly to be rid of the creepy Teflon cookware but I’m also pleased with the performance of my shiny new pots and pans.  We went with Gourmet Standard as they were rated right up there with All Clad but are a fraction of the cost.  So far no problems with sticking and everything is cooking very evenly.  I pretty much love them.

Today we kicked off Spring by going to our local farmer’s market/street fair with our friends and their wee ones.  I picked up some lovely broccoli, carrots, asparagus from a local organic farm, some fresh baked rosemary sourdough bread and some yummy garlic feta, basil humus and pita…YUM!  Charlotte seemed to enjoy the people watching and looking at the petting zoo animals.  A fun time was had by all, just check out flickr if you’d like to see the evidence.