Busy Rainy Weekend

If you caught Shawn's post before this one, or if you live on the east coast, you're aware that it's been raining on and off here for the past week and a half, and the sun hasn't shown much of its face in days. Waking up to grey skies is a huge de-motivator for us, so we've been laying around all week. But this weekend we were tired of being tired.

My mom's birthday was on Sunday so I spent Saturday evening baking up a storm; I needed to make a dessert that would travel well and brave the rain and humidity, so I made pot de creme and chocolate brownies; I have no photos of either, but trust me when I say they were delicious. The pot de creme were insanely rich and so filling that two people could share one ramekin and both be completely satisfied. And my brother claims the brownies were the best I've ever made. You'll have to take his word for it!

Shawn's friend and bandmate Dan came to see our new digs for the first time and stayed to watch some football on Sunday too, so when I came back from my mom's birthday celebration I made the guys some cookies and later Shawn made us all some tasty pasta for dinner. There was lots of tasty food going around on Sunday!

It was gloomy again when we awoke later than usual on Monday morning, but just when we thought it'd be another blah-kinda day, motivation hit us and we decided to clean and re-organize the pantry and the kitchen cabinets!




The pantry before and after - it may not look like much of a change, but it's much better organized than it was. We have a lot of food storage containers - glass pyrex, plastic containers, and plastic restaurant takeout boxes; they're much more accessible now. I also keep and re-use peanut butter containers and jars, but use those much less often, so we moved them lower. All of my baking stuff gets its own shelf, and that's been organized over time as I collect boxes from work. Remember what our pantry looked like in our early days here? Much better now.






We've re-organized the cabinets several times since we moved in, but I think this was the first time we pulled everything out at once, scrubbed the shelves down, and put everything back in a more logical fashion. It was hard to tell where things should go when we didn't have our rhythm in the kitchen, but now that we've got our groove, it's clear to see where the plates are more accessible and where it makes more sense for the coffee mugs to be.






Shawn and I both really like this photo; it makes us wish we could rip the doors off the cabinets and display our wares proudly, but alas, we're merely renters here.





And today I made some more dog treats to give out as samples. I also took some fun photos of the treats to use for the etsy shop. At first I thought - 'photographing dog treats on plates? ridiculous' but my first set of photos of just the treats and nothing else turned out awful, so on second thought, photographing dog treats on plates isn't such a ridiculous concept. They look good enough to eat!

I also made some cinnamon roll muffins today; it seems to be the trend on Tastespotting lately so I wanted to try my hand at it. Unfortunately, the recipe I used this time around wasn't as good as the last recipe I found for cinnamon rolls. The muffins were tasty but they were nothing spectacular. I think I'll try making them again with the recipe I used last time (the one that caused such a ruckus on facebook). Then I'll show you how those turn out!

Peace, love, and cocoa puffs!

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Where were we last week???

It's been quiet on the blog this past week; well, it's been pretty quiet in our lives too so we haven't had much to say. Here's a quick recap though: I've been putting in some extra hours at work lately so I've been taking a lot of naps and drinking lots of spiced tea (We've been getting so many great tea samples at work!), and Shawn's been busy cooking away and trying new recipes. Last week we bought some ground turkey and ground beef and he made turkey beef chili pepper burgers. Then he used the leftover meat to make fried meatballs two days later - yummy! Oh, and our friend Christine came to visit on Monday and pretty much made us dinner - pesto chicken caprese pasta - mmmm! It went down so fast we didn't even have time for pictures!






I've also been working on getting my homemade dog treat business up and going. Yes, you read that correctly, I make homemade organic dog treats! It started as something fun to do for my mom's dogs and friends' dogs, but I've started giving samples out to customers and their dogs love them too, so Bark Bites was born. There are no products for sale on the etsy page yet, but there will be soon! Right now though I'm focusing on getting a bunch of samples together to give out at work and to nearby pet shops, in hopes of getting the name out at least.



We don't have a printer, so I'm stamping and hand-printing each label. It takes some time, but the treats are handmade, so why shouldn't the labels be?
But back to people food! Did someone say... burgers?







How about those fried meatballs? Seriously, we're talking fried balls of beef. With some mashed potatoes, of course.






Oh, and did I mention the shell pasta covered in homemade pasta sauce and freshly grated parmesan?













Yeah. That's dinner in this house. But have you seen dessert?





I call these inside-out peanut butter cups - it's my take on Ashley from (neverhome)maker's peanut butter bites; the recipe caught my eye the other day so I went ahead and made some; I thought they were tasty on their own, but Shawn said they needed a little something extra, and the inside-out peanut butter cup was born! Next time, I'll make them with milk chocolate in the center; the dark chocolate was too overpowering for the peanut butter cookie. But they were still super tasty!
That's it for last week's recap!

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