I love birthdays!

Aaron and I went to Ackerly this weekend to celebrate my birthday with my parents. We had a great time. Aaron was able to go dove hunting a little while he was there and I was able to get my hair cut (which it desperately needed). I'm not even going to compete with Betsy on a lengthy blog about my hair cut. (Love you, B!) We ate good food, I got some shirts and money, and had a good time just hanging out and relaxing.

Pali went with us which is always an experience, but she did pretty good. As you can see from my pictures, I just LOVE my 55 lb. lap dog. She is spoiled rotten...she knows it and I know it.

Birthdays are just all-around good fun, no matter what age you are.

Kitchen Disasters

It took several months of getting used to this whole gluten-free thing, but I haven't had many problems lately. UNTIL TONIGHT! I really try to make our good ol' favorites and make them GF somehow. So as I was trying to figure out how to make our favorite chicken croissants GF the disaster began. Since the original recipe calls to open a can of crescent rolls, I knew it was not going to be a piece of cake (haha...not literally). I tried making a pizza crust from a GF mix I had, but that turns out kind of tough. Another mix required an hour to rise and then another 45 minutes to cook (not an option for an evening after school). So then it was on to another recipe that called for boiled chicken...since I had already started. So chicken enchiladas, nope didn't have enough cans of GF cream of chicken soup. Chicken and spaghetti, nope didn't have GF spaghetti. So we ended up throwing together things that we actually did have that included rotel, corn tortillas, velvetta, cream of chicken soup, and cream of celery soup. It turned out so-so...probably will be added to the already LONG list of GF recipes we will never have again.

I was really wanting to order a pizza or grab a burger, but those days are over. So just a small setback on our new diet journey...we'll get it ALL figured out soon enough I'm sure. Until then let the experimenting continue!

Cooking At Its Best

We just returned from Lubbock for the annual Chuckwagon Cook-off. This is certainly entertainment I married into and while we all enjoy it very much it is A LOT of work. Waking up at 5:30 in the morning, cooking until noon, and cleaning up until 9 makes for a long day. Aaron went on Thursday with Cody's dad and I came with Cody (his chuck wagon partner) and his mom on Friday after school. We got back into Abilene this morning and I was beat.

With 32 wagons there we were very pleased with our results from the cook-off. We got 3rd place with our dessert and 4th place in meats. Our dessert was apple cobbler and we were quite worried about it when they gave us the smallest fresh apples I've ever seen. (We usually get a huge can of peaches.) So we started the morning off by peeling apples for about an hour. Just what you want to do at 6:00 am by the light of a lantern. Our chicken fried steak was the best I've tasted in a while. I can say that because I had little part in that area. I try to get "jobs" doing something I can't really screwed up like peel potatoes or bread the chicken fries. I let the people that know what they are doing take on the breads and other things.

Here are some pictures of our fun!

Cody and Aaron getting out the cobbler.

Karen and I breading the chicken fried steaks.