Royal Wedding Part Deux

 

So just because we already had a royal wedding party six days before the wedding (what? lifetime was re-airing their movie, can you think of a better excuse to wear a hat?), you didn’t think we could resist partaking in the fun at 3:30 AM Friday? Right?

Emily knows where I live. Partially because she lives two floors down, but just in case, I thought the Queen mother could welcome her (and her to-be-SIL Natalie, whom we love, hi Natalie!).  Pip Pip, Cheerio!

 

I heard snickering outside the door as she knocked.  Success!

 

The plates version 2.0

Twinkies and pepperidge farm cookies.  Do I need pastry tips or what? I thought my take regular frosting/dye it blue/stick it in a zip lock bag/stick it in the fridge/cut the tip off method, otherwise tried and true, was solid gold.  That method was having none of the royal fun. Blimey.

Emily’s mom is a music teacher and she sent over gloves, the perfect final touch!

 

Except for this perfect final touch.  Am I a whiz with crepe paper or what.  That may stay up a while. It may also cause you to break out into rounds of  ‘Rule Brittania’ or various spice girls songs.

 

Emily made this amazing savory French toast casserole.  It had crusty bread, eggs, cheese, spinach, potatoes, seasoning and sausage from her parent’s farm.  So good!

Is she ready to be somebody’s wife or what?

Finally, the main event…

Were you as smitten as we were? Totally worth this lethargic mid-morning state.  Happy Royal wedding everyone!

Shout out to my mom and her silly 4AM teacher watch party, and Bowler’s sophisticated viewing tonight!

It's the Freakin' Weekend

Anyone else happily humming R. Kelly right now? I mean, I hate to quote the guy, what with him peeing on underage girls and all ... well ... and generally being a pretty creepy dude. However, he does know how to make a good weekend anthem, and those songs are just so darn catchy.

In other weekly events, my high school BFF was in town briefly for work and stayed with me. We got to chat about her wedding, reminisce, discuss the great tragedy that was the cancellation of Arrested Development, and eat. She ALSO asked me to be in her wedding in September.. whoop whoop!

So obviously, I baited her to come with promises of snacks [caution: you are about to see a bunch of pictures of food with varying degrees of orientation, lighting, and quality] . I made FAUX jalepeno poppers by cutting up green peppers, smacking (yes smacking) them with 1/3 less fat cream cheese, dunking them in an egg mix and coating them with bread crumbs. A little baking later and VWALLA... all of the gooey deliciousness of poppers without being fried (and made at home no less). I am a big fan of these. huge. We also had sweet potato fries.
Early the next morning I made my shacker a breakfast of champions. She requested real bacon... sheesh, Bridezilla. Joke's on her though, I used low sodium. mwahahahahah. I made an Egg McLauren with english muffin, tomato, spinach (okay that's the picture of mine, hers was sans vegetables), slice of cheese, poached egg, and a bit of bacon. YUM. Easy peasy and delicous.
So what's a girl to do with a bunch of Bacon lying around? Last night I tried my hand at baked potato soup. Now... I tried once last year to make a fancier version with leeks and brie. I got all my measurements mixed up (i know, knock you over with a feather) and it tasted like liquified brie. Delicous, but so rich i thought i was going to die. Of happiness, but possibly of cheese and richness. So last night's impromput soup consisted of:

• One honking potato, cubed with skins on (why the soup is that darker dingy color)
• 2 cups veg broth
• 1/3 onion sauteed in bacon grease (i felt a little dirty doing it, but it smelled pretty great)
• 3/4 cup milk
• 1/4 cup plain low fat yogurt
• topped with crumbled bacon (the one sauteed with the onions), cheedar, and a dollop of low fat sour cream

It rocked my socks off... but it needed sourdough bread. Yum leftovers.

SOOOOOO..... you say, what is on the agenda for the rest of the weekend? Well tonight is a big alumni/reunion/shindig of Johns. Tomorrow I will race back to KC because I have something VERY VERY exciting to attend. My friend's magazine is throwing a party...

And my boyfriend will be thereSo will my doctor...

And so will my BFF
And most importantly so will these ladies...

Who are hilarious..


My mom's sisters are AMAZING and i can't wait for them to come down to Missouri for fun and the O! you Conference that will be right HERE in KC! (um.. just a few blocks from my apartment) Can I get an Amen? Oprah here we come !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Should've been a boy scout

GOSH i like being prepared. Other than the fact I'm pretty mediocre at tying knots (and camping, woof, don't get me started on that)... I think I was pretty packed for everything for this fun filled wedding weekend. I kicked it all off with making cookies for Boss's day on Friday.



They were oatmeal raisin and I had to go downstairs to borrow brown sugar from emily (you know, just being neighborly) and then assembled the cookies. True to form, I realized two-seconds-too-late that I had forgotten an ingredient. This time around? Vanilla Extract, which only hours earlier I had John pick up at the store for me. I tell myself that I don't think it made a huge difference. My boss politely said that it didn't. John made a face. Rude.

Can I have a raise now?

Post baking I assembled the greatest last-minute-emergency kit EVER to bring to the wedding (or more specifically getting ready at the church). Why? Because I am the world's best personal attendent that's why. Tide-to-go pens, needle/thread/pins, sharpies, extra toothbrushes, oil blotting strips, scotch tape, the list goes on. Many of which came in handy, especiall the trash bags (if John tells you those were his idea, he is full of lies. Lies I tell you).

This is us at the church. Holla, loved my Banana dress and clutch. The shoes were from last summer and I heart... even though I'm still nursing the blisters (I was wearing them for nearly 12 hours) from that day

The wedding was great, I felt super useful (running around like crazy) There was a lot of laughing at the ceremony and reception, and they did a good job of making it personal, which is always wonderful. Everyone said I do, the sun was out, the beer overfloweth, and yours truley had some QT on the D floor. What more could you ask for really?

Sweet brother/sister moves:

Oh boy.

Last night after a quick grocery trip I tried my hand at making my own salsa..... NOT from a recipe. crazy. caution to the wind. flying by the seat of my pants over here. I just chopped up 1.5 tomatoes, red pepper pieces, poblano pepper pieces (mild is how i roll), red onion and poured in some lime juice, and pulsed it in the food processor. YUM. Okay it was probably a little too mild, I might add more pepper later (and I did miss the cilantro), but It made me think I have been CRAZY to be purchasing the store bought kind all of my 26 years. See ya PACE picante mild chunky vegetables. Our days are over. I am through with getting my salsa manufactured somewhere like NEW YORK CITY. (new york city?). I might even wear my cowboy boots whilst eating it next time. I'm so authentic.

Also for good measure, below is what I ate for breakfast not long ago (edit: I've had a blueberry Z bar since then... love those things)

I'm off to make more Salsa jokes to myself for the rest of the day. This weekend is John's college reunion (fun!) and then all of my aunts are in town for the OPRAH CONFERENCE!! I can barely contain my excitement. Also tonight I'm hosting my high school BFF while she's blowing in and out of town for work. Oh the excitement. Oh the joy. Oh the photos to come.

All Hands on Deck Granger!

First off let me tell you how my week has been.... for an illustration I would like to use a visual tool a la a calendar that Angela from the office might have (or anyone in my accounting department for that matter, hey-oh) :

Staying cool as a cucumber (or Obama) during this week? Failcat.

So it was my last week of Grad School and my stress-o-meter went so far below the orange line that Kramer would've been proud (Geez Lauren, stop watching so much syndicated TV you say.... well.... we'll get to that). After my group presentation on Tuesday I got this bad boy:

And then Wednesday morning as I went to turn on the TV to get ready to the sound of Matt Lauer telling me if the Jackson family had reached a custody arrangement yet (and other such info-tainment.. i want news people!) This happened (please view the following picture with lightening bolts).... a BROKEN TV

Which prompted me to go to Target over my lunchbreak to purchase a clock radio so I wouldn't have to get ready the next morning in silence (I need news, sorry itunes).

Except that exactly 20 minutes after I had gotten back to work I realized I lost my iphone (or rather left it in the radio aisle at target while i debated getting one that was an ihome)

All this stress made me need an emergency organization break. I'm not kidding. I'm such a control freak that when I get overloaded I just need to create a little order in my life. So 3 tiers and 9 compartments later my sewing kit got organized. WHEW that helped.

Except that yesterday afternoon I had a small meltdown as I attempted to run around like CRAZY to pull together my team's enormous proposal (20-70 pages with two pages of bullet pointed instructions on formatting and content), study for my final, and unplug my stupid work phone that was ringing itself of the hook.

Luckily for me (and anyone within stomping/yelling/punching distance) the class is OVER OVER OVER OVER OVER (as is yesterday, the most stressful day of my life) and I am officially an MBA. I can't wait to add those letters to my business card. Okay not really, but I am excited for them to imaginarily exist. *sigh* Even better? Open weeknights. MWAH it's a beautiful thing.

In other exciting news, in addition to NOT getting enough homework done this weekend. My nerdy partner-in-crime and BFF from high school came to KC so we could finally get a little of this in our lives:

In honor of her visit I made a YUMMY blueberry french toast bake that the iphone helped me find.

• Cream Cheese
• Blueberries
• Sugar
• Maple Syrup
• Vanilla Extract
• Eggs
• Day old italian bread (technically it was fresh when i bought it so i cut it up and put a fan over it for a few hours... how macguyver is that?)

It was basically pouring sugar down your throat at 8 in the morning.... but like that's a bad thing.

In other news I got my parking ticket repealed, John is giving me an old TV of his (i'm not ready to jump on the $flat screen bandwagon... i kind of wish i didn't have a TV at all), the iphone was recovered just a few short hours after it's dissappearance (amber alert!!)..... I killed that test and now I am liberated of all things school.

Currently I am eating breakfast fruit at my desk and life is figuratively and literally a bowl (gladware) of cherries :)

How do I look?

Remember that show that used to be on E! called how do I look? Well that had Anna Devane (Robin Scorpio's mother from General Hospital and superspy from All My Children who stayed at Wildwind and married that nut job David Hayward?) good times.... anyway the actress from all of that is also the host of this E! makeover show. At the very end of the show during the big reveal said formerly frump-tastic guinney pig would walk out on the stage with new highlights and usually a wrap dress and look into the camera and awkwardly force the words... 'How Do I look?'

So..... new blog format..... how do I look? To thank for this transformation we have the oh-so-talented and generous melissa who was kind enough to put together a fancier look. Thank you!! :) sidebar though: apparently the links may not work so well so if for any reason you want to link to the ACTUAL recipe that I've chronicled my time attempting to recreate then let me know and I can scrounge it up. Yes scrounge. A distant cousin to scurry.

Anyway, on to the eats! There were actually some truley fantastic things I had planned to make this week. They would've made me go overboard on superlatives, fireworks would've gone off and a choir of angels would've been singing in all their glory. Except..... it's really pretty cold outside and when i'm not in class, running errands in the snow and single digits makes a can of annie's organic spaghettios seem all the more appealing. I know, I know... that's not exciting. Well with my lack of grocery trips happening this week, below are the simpleton eats I hadn't tried before.


For lunch today I made a turkey sandwich that had Avocado (oh that's right), a swiss lite laughing cow wedge, spinach, sprouts, cucumbers and pretzels. I'm loving the pretzels on there.. except that since I threw this together on my way out the door this morning (as opposed to immediately before eating) the pretzels got a little soggy in the cheese. Note to self, add those later. Otherwise this comes highly recommended. I had it with a side of NF yogurt and bare granola. Perfecto.

This morning I opted for something a bit more fancy. There is a food blog that is so inspiring, except for the fact that it's not exactly healthy. However, Aunt Anne... you would love this guy from closet cooking. The recipe calls for scrambled eggs (i used 1 egg and 2 egg whites), sundried tomatoes, and freshly grated parm over bread with mayo (i used WW and Vegan mayo). It's like regular eggs and toast got a fancy facelift.

Last night because I didn't go to the store and couldn't spend the entire night on the sofa in PJs eating cheeze-its and dark chocolate M&Ms (don't worry, that did NOT happen the entire time the news was on. at all. okay a little) I was running out of options. Because Avocado always sounds delicious and there was one ready to go, I took any and all fresh-ish vegetables and threw them in tacos. What you're looking at off the coast of South America there (my new $1 placemat to round out my collection with American Presidents) is Fish tacos! Shrimp, spinach, black beans, corn, salsa, diced tomato and red onions. LOVELY.

And now my lovelies, I am off to work, sneak in some homework and in general waste away the minutes until I am home from work and class and am engrossed in all things Sawyer. Adios amigos!

Cake = heaven

This weekend was filled with tons of glorious sloth-like behavior. My least exciting weekend in recent memory and to me it felt like I had checked out of life to sleep and read and do or not do whatever I wanted (the not-do was heavy in the homework area). This is the time of year where weekends start filling up fast and having a minute to breathe and enjoy some solitary confinement felt pretty indulgent. Also because I wasn't out traveling/eating/dressing up/boozing/shopping/reflecting on how I had a friend in college that was a pimp.... I made a few homemade things which were then glamorously photographed. After work on Friday I was in the mood to use some of the coconut milk I had used for my Thai shrimp earlier in the week. I melted some dark chocolate and made a coconut milkshake! It tasted exactly like a Mounds/Almond Joy candy bar. Amazing!

Feeling fabulously rested the next morning I decided to make some whole wheat pancakes.. EXCEPT that I didn't have any milk (or even soy milk) and no real butter. Luckily I found a recipe that didn't include any of those ingredients. I ended up making from scratch Vanilla/Banana Whole Wheat pancakes:

• whole wheat flour
• sugar
• baking powder
• baking soda
• salt
• egg
• yogurt
• water
• oil
• vanilla extract
• mashed banana
  

The flavor was pretty banana/vanilla-ey (yum) so I don't know how it would be plain. A little later I went to Yoga and even finally bought a class pass to get me through the month. I haven't been to a chiropractor in forever and intermittently doing yoga has been the reason. Lately however, as I hadn't been to a class in months... plural. shameful. Increasingly all kinds of cracks and creaks and aches have been happening in my shoulder/neck/back/chest area. I'm thinking spending money for a month of yoga is better spent than my copay to the chiro. Yes?

I also hit up the library, where I checked out the above selection of DVDs. I love old movies and musicals, so I thought Follow the Fleet seemed right up my alley (plus who doesn't love Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers?). It was okay, I sort of kept picturing my grandma going to see it as a little girl and thinking how much movies had changed. Also Fred Astaire was a little, scheming, funny sailor. Sort of a combination of my brother (in his Navy days) and Zach Morris. How likable is that? It sort of made me gag though how women viewed men back then. This movie was released in the late 30's or so and reflects the complete lack of independence females had and/or wanted. This girl meets a guy for four hours and then takes out her life savings to restore some boat he might like. Not to mention he was kind of a jerk to her in the first place. Where was the He's Just not That into You book then? Finally when his other options have run out they end up happily together forever. And you expect me to be satisfied with this ending? It just made me want to burn a bra. Seriously.

I also rented Annie Hall because I feel like there are tons of cultural references to this movie, so I was ready to see what all the fuss was about. I think my problem is that as long as I have been old enough to know who Woody Allen is (sometime around 11 years old I saw his ex wife on Oprah talking about their story) I knew he married his step daughter. EW. I mean I whine, I talk about my problems, I'm paranoid and have moments of unabashed insecurity. However I found him extremely resistible. Why was this movie such a big deal? (sidebar, loved Diane keaton, and her nerdy/trendy 70s wardrobe).

However did I mention how much I love the library? It's just 4 blocks or so from my apartment and it's a beautiful big building with all kinds of interesting programs and things to do. I worked in the campus library in college and the local library was pretty much our weekly source of movies and books growing up. I forgot how peaceful and nice it is just to be there.. definitely something I plan to use more in the coming year.

So after a long day of movies, cleaning, and more nothingness, I made another creation from Ellie Krieger's cookbook. the Portabella/Gorgonzola/Sun dried tomato Paninis. I think I O.D.'d a bit on that cheese with my pizza earlier in the week, and it was soo rich!

I decided I was hungry and hour later and made a Whole Wheat half sandwich with apricot jam and blueberries. YUM.

Sunday morning I woke up early, did some Yoga, watched Meet the Press, This Week and in general felt like a contributing member of society (sometimes i just hate sleeping the day away!) I made a semi turkey sandwich thing which I very much considered brunch. Egg on a turkey deli slice with tomato, spinach, and grilled cheese and wheat toast. Nice.

I even went to mass (once again, no excuses, the cathedral is 4 blocks from my apartment), and then walked to the new downtown grocery store. Laying on the couch with John I proclaimed my undying need for cake. The following resulted in this:

Is it just me or is cake totally heaven sometimes? I can go days eating vegetables and be perfectly content and then all of a sudden I need a fix of sugar from a baked good. That was yesterday for me.

We also had Pineapple stir-fry. I used a frozen onion/pepper mix and added in a can of pineapples with the cubed chicken. It was over Jasmine rice and we used soy sauce because the sauce that was recommended on the bag of stir fry turned out pretty nasty (bbq sauce plus fruit juice plus soy sauce... it was gross, it was tossed).

So I am back at work this morning and am sad that my company doesn't recognize Dr. King. Note to self: next job work for the government/financial institutions/or education so I can start getting some of these days off! I hope everyone is having a fabulous Monday and is getting geared up for this, a most exciting and historical week!! :)