Some Homebaked Goodness!

While perusing one of my favorite websites (Tastespotting - Love it!) I stumbled across this photo.

Photo found at Jamiecooksitup.blogspot.com

Don't these make you want to run into your kitchen and make a huge mess with flour? Because I certainly did! The recipe was a bit fiddly (I'm not a great baker) but totally crazy delicious.

I made these puppies for Thanksgiving this year (mine did NOT look that pretty) and after that small success, I decided to try some of her other recipes. Matt and I had the braided sandwich loaf last night, and man was it good (but again, not as pretty as hers turned out, but closer to the mark than the rolls. That means I'm getting better at this baking business, right?)! And since it makes two BIG loaves, I froze one of them before rising and baking for after the baby comes. I'll let you know how that one turns out.

So, if you're ever looking for some totally delicious recipes for dinner, side dishes or desserts, look no further! You won't be disappointed!

 

Consider my brain wrinkled

Did you know that the plural form of octopus is octopuses? I had always assumed it would be octopi, after the latin tradition (e.g. radius to radii, etc.). But because the word is derived from Greek, octopous, you add an -es to the end and call it good! Crazy, right?

Now in honor of my newest brain wrinkle, I submit for your approval the video that caused it. It's crazy what you'll stumble upon when you can't sleep.

Turkey Day 2011

Happy Thanksgiving!!

As I was prepping our Thanksgiving feast this morning, it struck me that this will be the last Thanksgiving Matt and I spend alone for a VERY long time, so I'm going to revel in the slow, relaxed pace of the day today. I'm not going overboard on anything. Just having the basics. No fine china, no fancy tablecloth, no flowers, just me and Matt enjoying some good food and thanking our lucky stars for our little girl on the way.

This year, I would have to say the thing I'm most grateful for is pinto bean. Matt and I didn't have the easiest time getting pregnant, so to be able to have kids without having to turn to fertility treatments was a blessing (both financially and emotionally). I'm grateful that Heavenly Father thinks well enough about Matt and I to bless us with one of his precious spirits and I hope we're able to be blessed a few more times (although, not too many more times!). I'm grateful that after a rough start to this pregnancy, things settled down into a more manageable discomfort. Throwing up and feeling nauseous ALL the time was no fun, and not sleeping for several weeks was no fun either. But the latter third has been more comfortable. And even though things are starting to be uncomfortable and I complain, I thank my lucky stars that I am not on bed rest, that my baby is perfectly healthy and active, and that I've made it this far into my pregnancy with very few problems.
 

I would be remiss if I did not mention my gratitude for my family, friends and especially my Savior for His love and sacrifice for me. I have a firm testimony in the love of Christ and how freely His love is given to all. 

I hope you are spending your Thanksgiving exactly how you want to this year (whether with family or not!) and that this day is full of gratitude and good food! And bonus, here's a photo of me from today. I'm almost 38 weeks. What?! When did that happen!

You can come out now!!

Baby Shower

I didn't take my camera, not did any body else for that matter, so unfortunately I HAVE NO PICTURES... AGAIN!!!!!! Oh, but someone did take pictures of the cakes. Priorities, people.

Lemon Raspberry Cake - just like my wedding cake! It was my favorite!!

Black Forest Cake - Super delicious and both were made by a super talented lady in my ward!

It was so nice to have my friends and my family there to talk to and catch up with. Our surrogate family, or "The Other Davises" as we like to call them, hosted the event for me and let me tell ya it was really nice. My only request for my shower was to have friends and good food. And there was plenty of both!!

One of the really great things that Shanon did was have everyone bring a decorated onesie in different sizes. They are SO adorable and I love them so much! I'm going to take a permanent marker and write the names of the people who gave them to me so I can remember them every time my little girl gets dressed. I can't pick my favorite! And I *love* that they are homemade. So a BIG thank you to any of my readers who came and decorated onesies for me!

Blogger Hates Me

Recently, I switched my blogger account over to a different email address. Since then, I've had nothing but trouble with my google reader and the blogs I've been following! I've even had Matt look at it and he can't figure out why it's doing what it's doing. Ugg. I have a love/hate relationship with technology and this is exactly why. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't! Why can't it just work?!

Favorite Things

Here are a few of my favorite things right now:

Sweet potato pie

No, not the blue grass band (found here and also very good!), but the actual pie. We got a boatload of sweet potatoes in our produce box and I've struggled with using them all up, so I decided to make pie. I used this recipe from Allrecipes.com and it is fantastic! I doubled the recipe because I had almost 3 pounds of sweet potatoes and thought it couldn't hurt to put more sweet potato in each pie. It turned out great! So much better than pumpkin pie (to me, at least!) and I could use some of my NC goodness.

Adele

Photo courtesy of www.adele.tv

I love this woman's voice! But I don't like her live. I've heard a few live recordings and the woman has some serious pitch and support issues that makes it hard to listen to. I also recently saw one of her videos on youtube and she was smoking. SMOKING!! Why is she trying to ruin her beautiful voice? I don't quite understand it, but I truly think she has a beautiful, rich quality to her voice that is so pleasant to listen to.

Pan Am

Photo courtesy of worldscrews.blogspot.com

What can I say? I'm a sucker for anything set in the 60's! I just love the fashion and the hairstyles! I also love that it follows the lives of the stewardesses. I've always loved flying and secretly wanted to be a flight attendant for a long time (until I realized they keep crappy hours/sleep schedules and are away from their families for long periods of time). The acting is passable, at best, and the plot is the same every episode, more or less, but I still love it. I can't help myself!

T-minus one month, and counting...

As of today, I have exactly one month left in my projected pregnancy time-line. Now I realize that this baby could come earlier (if I could be so lucky!) or later (unfortunately, what is most likely) depending on this baby's sense of timing. I just can't help feeling excited but completely neurotically crazy at the same time.

In other news, we got our pack 'n play yesterday from my mom (thanks, mom!!) and in my excitement, I set it up immediately!

Sorry about the quality! My BGC battery was dead!

I was so proud of myself, having set it up all by my lonesome. So needless to say I was surprised when Matt came home kind of grumpy. After some prodding, he finally admitted that he kind of wanted to be there when I set it up and he felt like he missed out! What can I say! My excitement ran away with me! I'm so sorry, sweetheart!!

Also, I got the best compliment yesterday in yoga! My teacher came up to me while we were doing a modified moon salutation and she whispered in my ear, "You have great body positioning and awareness! Your poses always look just like they do in the books!" I was so happy to get this compliment especially because I try VERY hard to self correct and know where my body is in space, and at practically 9 months pregnant to boot! I felt like that was a win for me, especially when I feel like I must look ridiculous trying to modify the poses to get around the soccer ball in my belly. Have any of you felt like you've had a "win" moment recently?

Nesting

I think I'm finally feeling my nesting instincts kicking in. All I want to do is move furniture around. I don't necessarily want to clean anything. Just move things around. We've also been struggling with how to make the nursery/craft room and guest room work for us upstairs and I think I've finally figured it out. I honestly cannot believe it didn't occur to me sooner!

I really want to keep a guest room available for friends and family to stay at any time (because I know how much I love to sleep on a bed, rather than an air mattress). But I don't want to give up having a craft area. And since the baby will be here soon, we were basically trying to fit three rooms into two.

But I have realized that there is an unused room in our house with lots of storage built in and we won't have to sacrifice closet storage!!

We have since painted those cabinet doors white. It looks much better now. :)

Ta Da! I'm moving my craft stuff into the green room. Currently the most action it sees in a day is when I go get something from my "pantry". I don't even walk into that room that often!! So, when we were trying to figure out where to move my craft stuff, it dawned on me to utilize that space and all the shelves built into it! :) Here's the plan:

• Reorganize the shelves so that the bottom shelves are empty for craft things
• Add a DIY drop down table where the orange cabinets are in this picture, replacing the current cabinet doors. This is be my new desk
• Make curtains to cover the bottom few shelves and revamp the current curtains that are covering the pantry
• Move everything downstairs

I think it will be fantastic once it's done! Now I need to get to the really awful part and start organizing and cleaning out. Blech!

Homemade Laundry Soap

We were about to run out of laundry detergent when I came across some startling news about it: you can make your own for MUCH cheaper. AND it supposedly works just as well.

What the what?! How have I not known this! Any way, I was immediately intrigued and set about researching different recipes and the one I went with is this (it happens to be the simplest as well):

Ingredients:

• 2 cup washing soda (NOT baking soda. They are different, chemically speaking)
• 2 cup borax
• 1 - 5 oz bar of soap (you can use any really. Doesn't seem to matter which, but I used a castile soap with a lovely lavender scent. Others have also used Fels-Naptha or Zote which are marketed as laundry soaps in bar form. I didn't see these at Target when I bought everything, but your grocery store or Wal-mart may carry them)

Instructions:

• Grate or otherwise mangle your bar of soap into small, small pieces
• Mix together with washing soda and borax
• Put in a container

And done.

It seems much simpler and easier than the liquid detergent recipes. Any way, other recipes seem to say you should use about 2 tablespoons of the dry detergent per load (or a little more if it's really dirty). When you break down the costs, it's just unreal when compared to the liquid Tide I've been using.

Tide (Free and Gentle liquid) =  ~ .28 cents per load

Homemade = ~.07 cents per load

I've seen some people's calculations as low as .05 per load because they used regular ivory soap, but I really liked the lavender scent. But one of the best parts is you can even use this in high efficiency washing machines because it is a low sudsing (is that even a word?) detergent. Cool, huh?

I've still got a few drops of Tide left in the bottle, so I'll use that up before I'll breaking into my new batch of homemade soap, but I'll be sure to let you all know how it goes!