If you don't follow me on Twitter or don't pay attention to my tweets on the right hand side of the site, let me start this off by informing you that I skipped my cake decorating class Monday night.

Yes. The third class out of six total and I played hooky.

I just didn't feel like going. After a week with a friend staying with us, an exhausting Father's Day, and a house that looked like a tornado went through it-- I skipped. I stayed home, cleaned, cooked, and spent time with Michael and Clark.

I was responsible. I e-mailed the teacher, told her I wasn't going to be there, and asked for a list of what we did in class so I could practice before next week. Even in a class that I am clearly wasting money on by not going to, I wanted to be courteous and let the teacher know.

So today when Michael was taking a nap that I was hoping would be two hours long like the past two days, I ate my lunch and then set up my royal icing and prepared to learn from our book how to make primroses and daffodils.

Yeah, right.

My icing was so hard (which tends to be the way with royal icing) that my hand felt like it was going to fall off simply trying to squeeze the icing through the tip at the end of the bag. It also didn't help that I didn't start practicing until minute 45 of what I thought would be two hours of free time, but Michael decided to wake up at 60 minutes precisely.

Anyway.

Here I am with a flower tip trying to be extra careful to make my first primrose, but the stupid frosting won't even come out of the tip. So, either I had to add water to make the frosting a little less stiff, or just had to wait for it to warm up a bit and therefore it would make it easier.

Right then my bag sprung a hole because I was trying to use my fingers, rather than my palm, to push the frosting to where I needed it.

As I was moving the frosting from the one bag to another, I looked up and saw the book Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier sitting on my bookshelf (very small bookshelf). I thought, I really need to reread that. It is such a good book.

Then it hit me.

Cake decorating was stressing me out. Learning how to make flowers wasn't exciting, really. I thought it would be. But it wasn't. It was stressful. I had to tell myself to relax my shoulders, to not worry about anything else, to just focus on the frosting.

And no matter how many times I told myself, my shoulders would tense back up and I'd be thinking about the laundry, or a new recipe, or a book I wanted to read, or a post to put up.

I realized that I just don't like cake decorating.

I realized I don't have the patience for cake decorating.

I realized I don't have the "flare" for cake decorating.

I am a different sort of artist. As much as I want to be, I've never been good at using pencils, pens, paints, and so forth. I suppose I can now add frosting to that list.

I am grateful I figured it out. I honestly haven't decided if I'm going back to class or not. I'm not sure I want to continue to invest time, energy, and money into something I already know I'm probably not going to continue doing.

Don't get me wrong. I've learned some valuable stuff in the class already. But the thing is, I just don't see myself spending an entire day decorating a cake for someone's birthday or special occasion. I'd much rather pay someone who enjoys doing it to do it for me. Is that awful?

Within this small epiphany, I've been making my way through the movie Sylvia about Sylvia Plath. It came out in 2003 and as depressing as it is, it's a beautiful film. And there are parts of it that I've completely connected with.

For example it shows Sylvia (Gwyneth Paltrow) baking when she can't think of anything to write.

That is totally me.

It made me think that I've been throwing myself into my cooking so much lately because I just don't have the creative outlet in my writing at the moment. That doesn't mean I've lost it... it just means that I'm taking turns and I'll get back to writing when I really find a "subject", as she puts it in the movie. I don't seem to have a subject I'm truly passionate about.

When I do, I know I'll return to my writing with full force.

So, although in Practice Makes "Perfect" I seemed to think that spending time with cake decorating would make me love it, I've discovered that's just not how I work. Either I love something or I don't. And Cake Decorating seems to fall in the "don't" category. That may change in years to come... but for now... I'll stick to not knowing how to precisely make a rose or write correctly on a cake.

Having company over can sometimes be stressful. I usually go with easy things to cook, like chili, enchiladas, tacos, spaghetti. Those all seem to be crowd pleasers that you can never go wrong with.

The last time, however, Clark insisted that we have something different.

So, I made this... and I must say... it went over incredibly well.

Ingredients:

- 2tbsp Sunflower oil
- 1 lb beef tenderloin, sliced (I got the prepared stuff from the grocery store)
- 1 red onion, sliced
- 1 zucchini, sliced diagonally
- 1 red bell pepper, sliced
- 1 C beansprouts
- 8 oz can bamboo shoots, drained
- 1/2 C Cashews

Sauce:
- 4 tbsp cooking sherry
- 4 tbsp light soy sauce
- 1 tsp ground ginger
- 2 cloves garlic, minced
- 1 tsp cornstarch
- 1 tbsp tomato paste


Directions:

- Heat the sunflower oil in a wok or large pan over medium heat.
*Make sure to prepare your onion, bell pepper, zucchini, and sauce ahead of time!*
- Add the beef and onion and stir-fry for 4 to 5 minutes, or until the onion begins to soften and the meat begins to brown.
- Add your prepared bell pepper and zucchini. Stir-fry for another five minutes or so.




- Add the bean sprouts and bamboo shoots and let them cook for another 2 to 3, then sprinkle the cashews over the stir-fry.


- Last, but not least, add your sauce and let it bubble for 2 to 3 minutes to until it starts to thicken.




Serve immediately.


This dish goes great with brown rice!



This recipe was adapted from Simply Quick & Easy.

I hope you all had an amazing Father's Day!



For Clark's first Father's Day, we got him a him a Deuter baby backpack for hiking and stuff. He did get the present a little early, but we made sure to go out and use it yesterday.

Note: When a hiking trail says it's closed, it's closed for a reason. While I tried to explain this to my husband in the moment, he said they probably just did it because they didn't want all the tourists going through something they can't handle.

As I thought to myself, Or a part that no one can handle.

Clark decided it'd be a good idea to go through it anyway.

This is part of what we faced.







As you can see, they were redoing bridges that weren't there or weren't up to standard. We ended up going through knee-deep muddy water, a sort of bog, if you will, to get to the end.

I was not a happy camper. There would have been more pictures if I had looked at it as a "glass half full" type of adventure. But I definitely didn't, and still don't... really.

Luckily, Michael didn't seem to pick up on Mama's stress...since he slept through the crazy part soundly in his backpack on Dada's shoulders.

Needless to say, I used the "trump card" all day of, "It wouldn't have happened if you had listened to me in the first place and we would have stayed to the open part of the trail."

Clark's reasoning was that we would be out longer having to turn around on the trail and Michael would get fussy. Well, because we had to face parts that were not maintained at all with the baby and the puppy, we were out just as long as we would have been if we just turned around.

He certainly got the Father's Day adventure he wanted.

Although it was incredibly stressful on my part, and I flipped out because I was so afraid something was going to happen, it was, overall, a good time.


(Not a very good pic of me, but that's ok.)

Note: We definitely will not ever be doing something as irresponsible or ridiculous like that again. I made sure to ask Clark what he would do if Michael snuck into some closed off section of the woods when he was older and something happened to him. Clark didn't seem to like that so much.

Note: I've also learned I need to stick to my guns more and not give in just to make Clark happy... especially when it's a safety thing.

Well, clearly we got out alive. Just a few scrapes from bushes and wet shoes from ponds and such... but we made it!

Did I mention I started his Father's Day off with these?



Recipe to be posted by the end of the week!

In October of 2008 we were starting to get iffy with transportation.

I was working, I had the sorority, I had school. Clark had work, he was taking classes at the community college, he was trying to go climbing more. It was a mess. We’d be trying to take turns with the van, considering I could just walk down a hill to get to class, but with the sorority, I needed to drive, too.

On top of all that, Clark was considering attending classes at another community college that was about 30 minutes away. We needed another mode of transportation, but there was no way we could afford a car.

Clark started looking into motorcycles. I was not pleased.

I thought just a bike would do, but then realized he couldn’t ride a bike to a college thirty minutes away down the mountain on a major highway.

It wouldn’t work.

I thought maybe we could ask his parents if they could loan us a car temporarily, like my parents had done with our lovely 1998 Mercury Villager van.

They couldn’t do it.

All things were pointing to a motorcycle, but it came down to finances once again. We couldn’t afford it. There was no way possible unless we got a loan.

We looked into a loan, but a motorcycle is considered a “leisure” loan, not a transportation loan. We would need a cosigner on top of that, because we had no credit history.

We were stuck.

We went to my older sister and her husband. They were very understanding of several situations due to the fact that they were young and married as well.

They offered to lend us money with a payment plan that would have us pay it off in a year.

It was agreed on, we made a sort of contract, and we received a check to go toward a motorcycle Clark had found.

We made payments to the man as well. We gave him most of it upfront with the check from my sister and her husband, and then made payments from our bank account as time went by.

The motorcycle started being worth it. It made things a lot easier, but it didn’t ease my mind that Clark was out on a bike driving around.

I knew he was a safe driver… it was other drivers that made me nervous.

One of my sorority sister’s boyfriend got into an accident on his bike, and it made my anxiety even worse.

But, it was a good investment. It made us able to be separate and not worry about time limits and things like that. We were able to focus on what we needed to do, without worrying about if we needed to pick the other person up.

Being in school, being married and attempting to have a social life was harder than imagined. It was only going to get harder as college progressed, but finding small solutions day by day definitely made it worthwhile.

(Sorry for the blurry picture. My nice camera had a dead battery...oops!)

Thursday blessed me with a business venture. Someone decided to give me a nice little push through the door and out into the world. Let's hope I can handle it and this turns into something!

So, remember my May Day Baskets? Well, when Clark gave one to his boss, it was decided that I should market them to companies in our area.

Lots of realty companies run people's seasonal homes and rent them out to people who want to visit. What better way to welcome them than with a basket full of paraphernalia from our area and brochures so they can find their way around, right? Not to mention some goodies if they have kids, or goodies for the adults!

Well, yesterday I got a call. It was from Clark's boss's company, but a call none-the-less! It seemed his boss decided that this is what I needed to do. I mean, when something like this happens, do you really say no?

After a lot of last minute shopping, running around town, and finessing, I finished the basket (and delivered it) by 5pm.



This was my finished product. This Brevard Basket includes: Two coffee mugs, 1/2 lb of Coffee Cake Coffee from our local Proper Pot store, Two White Squirrel Water Bottles, Two White Squirrel Key Chains, Two White Squirrel Chocolate "Lollipops", a deck of Blue Ridge Parkway cards, a Brevard, NC car sticker, Four postcards, and a bunch of brochures for the area (a waterfall map, guide to our town, information on things that are happening here and around us, restaurants, and so forth).

This was a last minute dessert made because we were having more people over than we thought. With a couple hours notice, I'd say it turned out rather nicely and complimented the dinner (soon to be posted).

Ingredients (only for the sugar cookie base):

- 1 1/4 C Butter or margarine (3.5 sticks)
- 3/4 C Sugar
- 1 Large egg yolk
- 1 tbsp vanilla
- 2 cups unbleached, all purpose flour

Directions:
- Preheat oven to 350
- Prepare a pizza pone or stone with non-stick spray.
- Beat the flour until nice and fluffy. Add the yolk and vanilla, then add the flour in 1/2 C increments until you've successfully mixed it all in.

*Use the hand mixer/ mix master until you have to switch to using a spatula/spoon.*


- Transfer the mix to the prepared pizza pan. Sprinkle flour over it and then roll it out like you would any sugar cookie mix.
*If you have the time, refrigerate the mix for at least one hour, and longer if you can! It will be a lot easier to mold.*


- Use a bowl to create a perfect (or as close to perfect as you can get) circle.


- Make the dough about 3/4 of an inch to one inch thick.


- Cook the cookie for 12 to 15 minutes until golden around the edges. Let it cool in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes before considering adding the frosting and such.

- Add the cream cheese frosting from Red, White, and Blue Cake and top with fruit/berries of your choosing! Serve cold, so you may want to put it in the fridge until then (this will also help the frosting set).



*I only used blueberries and strawberries because that's what I had available to me, but I usually put anything from bananas to kiwi on there as well!*



Inspiration for the cookie base came from: Williams-Sonoma Cookies

It's summer time! What does that mean? BBQ, Burgers, Watermelon, Potato Salad, and all those good things! I thought that I should try a new BBQ recipe after trying a new turkey burger recipe. So, here it is!

Ingredients:

Pork:
- 2.5 Pork loin roast (try to find the leanest one you can)
- 2 tsp red wine vinegar
- 2 tsp Hickory liquid smoke
- 1 tsp garlic salt / powder
- 1 tsp sea salt

Sauce:
- 1 1/3 C tomato sauce
- 1/3 C tomato paste
- 1/2 C + 3 tbsp red wine vinegar
- 1/3 C molasses
- 2 tsp Hickory liquid smoke
- 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/2 tsp black pepper
- 1/2 tsp paprika
- 1/4 tsp garlic powder
- 1/4 tsp onion powder
- 1/8 tsp chili powder

Directions:

For the Pork
- Cover the pork in the ingredients listed above for Pork. Put in a crock pot and cook on high for five and a half hours.
- Take the bone out of the pork. The meat should be so tender that you can just pull the pieces of bone out of it without having to really work at it.






- Remove the pork from the crockpot and drain the pot of all the excess fat/liquid. Shred the pork using two forks on an extra plate or in the crockpot (once you've drained it).


- Add 1 1/4 C of the sauce and cook on high for another 45 minutes to an hour.




For the Sauce

- Mix together the ingredients listed in a pot on the stove and bring to a boil over medium heat. Reduce to low if serving on the side, or turn it off after boiling for 30 seconds to a minute.






*I would say make sure you have the tomato sauce and paste, the molasses, and the seasonings that you needed to cook your pork in. Everything else is entirely up to you depending on the flavor you want, but those ingredients are vital!*




Serve the BBQ any way you like it! By itself, on a bun, on a sandwich... the possibilities are endless!




Inspiration for the pork and sauce came from Skinnytaste.com!