Cooking with Jamie

As you can see I did NOT make it to goal # 3 in January, which was to cook a fabulous meal. I'm not sad about that, however, because I spent the time getting to know Jamie Oliver and his cooking ... through various shows and reviews. Jamie's approach is fresh, organic and quick. He says we eat too much processed food and the reason many people say, "I hate veggies" is because we just throw them in a pot of boiling water, and turn them into gooey mush. I have decided to test this theory on Conrad, the VEGGIE HATER. I am REALLY excited to try the process! I've seen Jamie on Oprah, I watched his series Jamie's Food Revolution, I've started watching his show on the Cooking Channel AND I bought one of his 7 cookbooks, also called Jamie's Food Revolution. I got it on Amazon, and if I like it, I may buy more.

Conrad has agreed to try this way of eating for a bit, so today I went to the market and came back with:

We're not going vegetarian, everyone calm down! I just didn't find it necessary to take pictures of meat. I just don't know if we have ever, at any one time, had this many fresh veggies in the house or not. I'm TOLD by Jamie, that veggies can be good and what makes them good?

White wine, fresh herbs and parmasean cheese- the BLOCK of cheese. You grate it yourself. The stuff in the tub is crap-ola. I would also like to say that I have NEVER cooked with fresh herbs. Not in this lifetime! I've seen them growing in people's yards and windowsills, and maybe I'll grow them myself if this works out, but I am TOTALLY a dried oregano off the shelf kinda girl. I think mostly anything goes ... but I bought dill, thyme and rosemary this time because my meat choices for the week were pork and chicken ... and of course, I got some potatoes, so these were the obvious choices. I am not a huge dill fan, but for some reason fresh dill on potatoes sounds REALLY good. So ... anyway, I'm trying!

We're not cooking tonight, and tomorrow is Super Bowl so we're having... snacky stuff, but pork chops and califlower are on the menu for Monday. I know that sounds disgusting, but it's not gonna be. You just have to see what I do with it.

Wish us luck!

Karyn

My Baby

YES! She IS a supermodel!

Kah

Goals Update

Goals 1 and 2 are DONE!
I paid $1500 and then on Friday I paid $500 more AND joined 24 Hour Fitness.

I am well on my way to Goal 3 as well. I ordered Everyday Italian from the library. I watched a cookbook review show and they said it was really easy to follow. I think Conrad's favorite food is Italian, so I'm going to try that for my FABULOUS meal.

I feel good. Well on my way!

Kah

Goals

I've decided not to do resolutions this year. I hardly ever do anyway ....

I do have a Bucket List of sort I keep hanging in the guest closet. It's things like Visit an Island (did that in 2007 when I went to Hawaii) and Visit Boston, Eat at Paula Deen's restaurant (did that in 2008), Visit Ireland, etc etc ....... and as I accomplish those things, I just check them off.

This year, someone suggested or I heard it somewhere (sorry if you were the one who suggested and I forgot and am not giving you credit!) ...... that maybe it would be ok to have 3 goals a month = 36 goals for the year ........ this seems very do-able and sort of exciting to me. Of course now we're 1/3 through the month of January, so forgive me if my goals are lame this month. I will update here at the end of the month if the goal(s) were accomplished!

January

* Join 24 Hour Fitness
* Pay at least $2000 towards my Citibank card
* Cook one FABULOUS dinner

February

* Bring lunch at least 3 times, each week
* Workout at least 4 times, each week
* Read one "classic" novel - like : Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, Alice in Wonderland - something "hard" and written 100 years or more ago. I am such a modern, novel nut - this will actually be VERY difficult.

Ok, so those are the first two months. Let's see how I do, huh?

Kah

January Blues

I am NOT a good person to hang out with after the holidays. For some reason, I get the holiday blues SUPER bad. I don’t even know why – so far, we have goals this year that will REALLY put us in a different position going forward. It should be a happy time.

I think the problem is things have been REALLY rough for my family since the end of August. Not Conrad and I as a family – I mean … my family before I got married. It has been tough. August and September were REALLY blue and depressing. I talked to my Dad in November to see if I was crazy and he said yes, it had been a rough two months. October and November seemed to be better and I really do think my favorite holiday is Thanksgiving. It’s like these two great days off – and you don’t HAVE to be anywhere or DO anything. You have nothing to buy – no houses really to run back and forth between. It’s football and HOPEFULLY cool weather (not this year) and eating and the Macy’s parade. I LOVE Thanksgiving … so November was great. December though hit another rough patch – and it was a sadder Christmas than usual.


Now January is upon us – and I am hoping in the next few weeks I can get back to happy. Conrad and I have gone through the house and de-cluttered and given away a ton. He has cleaned out a few closets, I went through my clothes – and my kitchen stuff. I put away all of Christmas and we’ve cleaned quite a bit at home. I still need to scrub the bathroom down and do some small things, but I didn’t make it a goal to do EVERYTHING before we returned back to work. What a nightmare those three days off would have been and I’d have come back to work with a backache … and a bad attitude. As it was, I just came back with a bad attitude. LOL ……. I’ve basically just told myself, hey, use January, the entire month, as a getting back to basics, cleaning, de-cluttering month and that’s what I intend to do.


I don’t know if we will MOVE during 2011, but I think we’ll begin to build for sure. So part of this is looking at things and saying “wow, do I REALLY want to move 20,000 baseball cards to the new house?” and then realizing no, let’s go through them, see what’s good and toss the rest. Same thing with clothes, socks, shoes … it’s crazy the things you can accumulate in a lifetime! I could NOT believe how many socks I had and how many were actually shoved into one drawer. I kept the best ones, the ones with no holes, the one’s that were cool or also really fuzzy. In the winter, I LOVE the fuzzy happy socks.


Anyway, this is where I am. I am hoping for happy, but clinging somewhat to the events of the past months. It’s amazing to me that people can’t see their behavior effects other people so much. I don’t know how I could behave badly and think the rest of my family wouldn’t be upset, disturbed, sad, mad, etc … about it. I don’t know if I care too much what other people think … or if the people in question are just incredibly self absorbed and selfish. I guess one day I’ll figure that out. In the meantime they need to STOP having so much power over me. Lord grant me the serenity to just ROLL my eyes at them and march forward!


Also the year just FLEW and I am hoping this one goes really slooooooooooooow.
Kah

CLING CLACK!

Conrad's parents got me some cool presents for Christmas but these were pretty out of the box thinking!

Those are PINK Smith & Wesson handcuffs WITH their own carrying case. I love them and until I got them, I didn't even know I NEEDED them.

Super cute ... and I'm thinking I will be carrying them around with me in my glove compartment. You never know when you'll need to take down a perp and have them good and tussed up, waiting on the po po!

Kah

Happy New Year

Happy New Year!

We went to dinner like we always do New Year's Eve - it was Jasper's in The Woodlands again (last year too!) ... and as always, it did not disappoint! I even tried duck and uh - yeah, I didn't like it. But at least I tried it!

Then, since it was also the 5 year anniversary of our first date, we cracked open a bottle of Dom Perignon.

Conrad got this for a Christmas present several years ago ... and to make it MORE sepcial, we realized it was a 1993 bottle. The year we graduated (together) from high school!

We had a great New Year's - and we've spent a good part of the holiday weekend cleaning up, donating things ... getting closets cleaned out. Things went on Craigslist to sell .... Putting things away, putting Christmas away - cleaning ... just trying to start fresh. EVERYTHING didn't get done, but I think if we do a little each day, we can be organized by the end of January. We should all TOTALLY take the entire month to get it together!

Here is to 2011:

KAH