Will I Survive?

My sisters and I decided to do a challenge for the month of February and not eat any sweets/desserts (i.e. candy, cookies, cake, brownies, ice cream, etc.) 

The Rules

If any of us cheat at any time we put a dollar in the pot and that money will get divided among the non-cheaters at the end of the month.Valentine's Day is a free day (believe you me I will be taking full advantage of that day!!). BUT...If none of us cheat then we will all go away for a night at Green Valley Ranch (just the girls). So if any us us cheat then we all lose our night away. Why are we doing this, you ask? Because we are crazy! Our husbands think we are, anyway!!

We have been talking about his for about a week, but now that January 31 has rolled around I have started getting a little anxious and borderline scared about not being able to eat any sweets.

Vanilla Diet Pepsi may be the only thing that keeps me sane through the month of February.

Will I survive?

I Cooked Somthing New

(A little blurry, sorry.)

I tried out a new recipe last night. My goal was to try a new one every week but that hasn't happened this month. This was an Italian tortellini soup I found here. I changed it up a bit. I used hot Italian turkey sausage instead of beef because it's healthier, and chicken broth instead of beef broth, because that is what I already had in my pantry. It made A LOT of soup. I should have halved it. You could get a good 8 servings from the recipe. I also made some yummy biscuits from here. These are my favorite biscuits to make when we have soup. They are DE-Lish and pretty healthy too! Actually I have gotten a lot of yummy, healthy recipes from this website (like this yummy chili).

This is mason eying us down as we ate it right in front of him. I think he knew he was missing out on something good!

What have you been cooking up in your kitchen?

Never Again.

Because one of my new year goals is to try new recipes I decided to try my hand at making a cake from scratch. My sister and her family and parents came over for dinner Saturday night so I thought that would be a good time to try it out. (By the way, we had pulled pork sammies and they were DE-LISH --finger lickin' good! Especially with my brother's homemade rub and b-b-Que sauce.) Anyways, so I learned that there is a reason cake mixes from the grocery store are so popular...making it from scratch is so gosh darn hard. I thought the hard part was over until I went to frost it. I was in the middle of making the frosting when I realized I didn't have enough powdered sugar. A cookbook I have says that you can substitute powdered sugar with granulated sugar and cornstarch. That is either a lie or it doesn't work for frosting because I tried it and my frosting was really grainy like it was made with granulated sugar (oh wait, it was). So, I drove to the store and bought store bought frosting.

I like this shot because you can't tell it turned out looking like the leaning tower of Pisa.

It was a good experience and I did learn a few things:

1. It is best to use powdered sugar when the recipe calls for powdered sugar.

2. You can mix milk with lemon juice to make buttermilk.

3. Betty Crocker does it best. 

Christmas 2011

Mason's grandma Fox gave him and his cousin matching pj's. These guys are destined to be best buds.

This face makes my heart melt.

Christmas morning. Mason learned how to sit up all by himself over Christmas.

"I can't put my arms down!" (as soon as we put him in this suit I couldn't get that quote out of my head -such a classic movie!)

We may need to get a dog. He got pretty excited when Sheeva came around.

This was out year in Salt Lake City with Ryan's family. We spent Christmas as Ryan's parent's house then headed up to the cabin in Bear Lake for a few days. The weather was exceptionally nice. Cold, but at least sunny and blue skies. We had a great time with Mason as he experienced his first Christmas. We took advantage of his young age and didn't get him anything. (Are we horrible parents?!) He doesn't know any better yet and has lots of grandparents that adorned him presents. Hopefully he doesn't ever ask what we got him for his first Christmas!

365 Day Project

Mason has a blog of his own! 

Check it out here.

Watch him grow throughout 2012.