Broiled Steak and Roasted Parmesan Green Beans

"Let's make dinner for date night!" we said. 

"I can make chicken in the crockpot!" said she.

"That sounds great" said he. 

"Oops, I forgot" said she. 

"We're already out so let's go to the store", said we.

"Hm, red meat sounds good. We have green beans at home... let's figure out how to make a steak without using the grill"

And so they did, and it was the most wonderful dinner ever. The end. 

We've never made steak at home before. Both of us like red meat, but we don't make it often because of price. We do however have a weekly date night budget, so we spent money from that budget for our steak (we had no idea what we were doing in the meat section so we hoped for the best).

We set the table (sparkling grape juice leftover from NYE - we're fancy)

Played the Louis Armstrong Pandora channel.

For our steak: Carson coated it in garlic, rosemary, steak sauce, pepper and Worcestershire sauce and threw it in a bag to marinate for a couple minute. Then we put it in the broiler on a roasting pan for 3.5 minutes on either side. We like our steak pink in the middle, and this was perfect. Carson claims he's never had a better steak and I'm going to agree with him - it was good! I've heard good things about putting butter on top with some garlic so that might be our next recipe.

And for the green beans. We chopped off the ends, chopped up some mushrooms to go with, threw some Parmesan on there, drizzled with olive oil, salt and pepper and threw them in the oven at 375 for ten minutes. I left them in there a bit longer so they would be slightly overdone. We've discovered that we LOVE our veggies roasted. Better flavor... I hate boiled vegetables.

End result. YUM. This could be a meal all it's own.

Date night success. A great meal for probably 1/4 of the price of a restaurant.

Winter Break

After almost a month of winter break, Carson goes back to school this week. He's in his last semester of grad school, so I'll be lucky if I ever see him! He's done a lot of studying on his own time this break, but it was great to have time with him to relax, too. My schedule is never the same, so over the break we sometimes had mornings together, but we mostly got afternoons and evenings, plus those super special times where Carson took me on that two-minute drive to work at 5am... not sure that counts as quality time though. 

On the last day of school, we went to Sonic to celebrate, just like we did for the first day of school (we love Sonic and wish it were as close to us as it was in Spokane!)

I looked through the pictures I have from his break, and few of them are of things we did... since I don't take pictures when we watch movies or go to Target. 

One thing Carson did get to do on break though? 

Sleep. 

He got a bad cold/sort-of-a-stomach-bug (he didn't throw up but he did feel bad) after we got back from Pennsylvania, which meant that he slept on the couch to avoid waking me up in the middle of the night. After he felt better, he got sick again, so he's gotten some quality napping time in. We spent New Year's Day just relaxing, and I know you can't tell from the pictures, but he felt pretty crappy on New Year's Eve.

We also ate. This masterpiece is from Melt. It's a macaroni and cheese grilled cheese sandwich, Melt's special for the month of December. Friends of ours raved about it, so we picked it up one Sunday and brought it home to share... good thing too, because that's a LOT of cheese. They have the special one day each July for a "Christmas in July" special too.

Oh, and we both got new slippers and PJs for Christmas (technically, mine are from the after-Christmas sale rack), so the break time has allowed for a lot of time wearing fleecey pajamas and warm slippers.

Frozen

What have we been doing since the year began? Freezing. 

We knew that last winter was considered normal or mild to these Ohioans, and when it snowed before Halloween we had suspicions about the amount of snow we'd get this year. Someone told me that we have exceeded last winter's total snowfall, and I'm inclined to believe them. It just won't stop! Thankfully, we're prepared for the cold weather with coats and new snow boots (we decided to budget for those back in October and have never regretted our decision) and electric blankets (best Christmas 2012 present ever - thanks Nana!). Still, it's been chilly and icy and wet. 

We accumulated a couple of feet in this snowfall... more came the next day but I was amazed at how far it got on Carson.

He's bending his knees for this picture (he had me take it to trick my Southern family members), but still. There is a little divot in our backyard where the snow gets extra deep.

The next day... after the porch was shoveled

I was trying to walk where Carson had walked the night before... and I couldn't get out there without snow getting into the tops of my boots (that's the fuzzy thing in this picture)

Poor Larson the Civic, nearly buried. The car, by the way, has been doing alright in the snow. We have all-weather tires and they seem to be handling well. I've been a chicken, so Carson has been driving me to work. I walked home one day (it was 4 degrees) and couldn't feel my face, so since then, he's been my chauffeur. 

After the snow melted a little bit, we had a few days of warmth and then... Polar Vortex. The name truly sounds ridiculous, but let me tell you, it was COLD. Never have I experienced such cold, and hopefully never again!

This was at 4pm on Monday

And this was Monday night. I took a million screenshots of the weather because I couldn't believe it. FIFTY degrees below zero with windchill.  

I wasn't outside very much so I didn't take real pictures, but the icicles I saw were impressive, sometimes stretching from someone's roof to the ground. There wasn't too much snow, but the wind and ice were certainly abundant. Schools were closed, as were some businesses, but work wasn't canceled for me. It was COLD working that day, but we have lots of hot drink options to keep us warm. One of my coworkers walked to work on Tuesday and his eyelashes were nothing but icicles when he came in the door.

I wore my coat on my breaks. Very cold in our back room.

Our furnace at home struggled to combat the heat outside, so we cuddled under blankets, while tacking up towels and blankets around our windows and doors. One of the windows on our door gets a little drafty (there's a crack in the glass) so we used some Press and Seal wrap on it and that actually worked well! We were thankful to HAVE power! I know just a few people who went without for a couple of days and can't even imagine.

On Wednesday, it warmed up to 20 degrees. You wouldn't believe how warm 20 degree weather feels when you've been living below zero for a few days. Everyone's mood at work was improved and relaxed. On Thursday I had an appointment and was so warm that even though it was probably 25 degrees outside, I went in flats instead of boots and didn't regret it. 

This has been a sponsored advertisement for the Cleveland Tourism Board. Anyone for a visit? 

;)

New Year's Eve

We began 2014 with friends. Just eight of us gathered at Carrie and Abe's house on New Year's Eve, and it was a delightfully small party. We played Apples to Apples and then Settlers of Catan as we welcomed 2014. We munched on appetizery foods and I made a little makeshift photo booth for the occasion. It was fun to spend the time with people we loved meeting in 2013! 

Ah yes, and Brooke and I took our annual year picture.

Burlap Pillow Cover

Something I'd like to do, particularly in these miserable colder months, is to keep myself busy with projects. I decided to do a project every week this year and post about it. I might have some lame little projects, and might have some a little better, some that work and some that fail, but I thought it would be a fun thing to do to keep my mind off of how gray it is outside. 

--

In Spokane, we owned the ugliest chair in the universe. And for some reason, we  moved without the chair but took the pillows. They're scratchy polyester and nothing we'll use. 

That's basically an invitation to make pillow covers. 

I gathered:
burlap

other fabric to put under the burlap that you'll never see

patterned fabric for the back of the pillow

scissors

old pillow to cover

pins

First I measured my pillow and cut my backing fabric accordingly, with a 1/2 inch of leeway all the way around.

I cut the burlap into strips about 2.5 inches wide. I didn't hem the edges but I did stitch along the sides to hopefully limit fraying.

Then I lined 'em up like this and pinned them in place. NOTE: What I would do if I were doing this again would be to sew them to the pillow one by one. But I didn't so I did it by hand later. Lesson learned.

Once pinned, I grabbed my backing fabric, cut it in half and hemmed each side to make an envelope pillow. Then I put both right sides together and sewed all the way around.

I flipped it right side out (thanks to the envelope, I didn't have to leave room)

And stuffed my pillow inside.

And there she is. I don't know why I don't try to make them look pretty before I take the pictures.

I took my pictures before sewing my strips totally in place. Looks better after that.

Here's to 2014!

Welcome, January!

2013 was a year of getting settled, with the strange knowledge that being settled probably wouldn't last long. It was by far a far more relaxing year than 2012 was, with all the moving and life changes that happened. It was nice to have a year like 2013, with fun adventures exploring Cleveland, getting to see family more times in one year than we have since we got married and definitely the comfort of having people we actually KNOW in the city.

I'm not sure that 2014 is going to be exactly like 2012 but there will likely be a little more crazy added to the mix. In the next couple of months, we should know where we'll be going next; in May Carson will graduate with a Masters in Theology and Religious Studies; we will likely move to an as-yet-unknown city in the summer... and that's all we really know. We'll be working on a few last things on our Cleveland bucket list over the next few months and saying farewell to the city we still barely know!

The second half of 2014 will involve finding a place to live, searching for a church home, getting to know people in our new area, creating a new bucket list of places to see and things to do in that place, and settling into the place where we plan to live for four or five years.

A lot is up in the air this year, which is actually becoming normal. In 2012 we had this exact same feeling of unknown, and currently I'm feeling very at peace with that, since I sort of know what to expect. A year from now, I could very well look back on this post and laugh, seeing then what I cannot see now, and in some ways I think I expect to. It's hard to have expectations about the next twelve months without any real sense of what they're going to look like.

Come what may, 2014, we raise our glasses to you!

(picture taken Jan 1, 2012)