Dinner Party

The week of Valentine's Day, we received a love package from Doc's parents.  In that package?  Two new cookbooks! So what do you do when you've got a couple new Martha Stewart cookbooks?  Well, you invite some friends over and try out not one, but six new recipes.  You warn your guests that dinner could either be totally awesome, or a total flop.

Lucky for us, it turned out to be totally awesome.

But before we could even think about eating, everyone had to meet Miss Lolli.

She was a good little fluffer-bunny for our friends.

Ok, enough of that.  Now let's get to the food.  Doc had the day off (President's Day) so he spent the day picking out new recipes and doing the cooking.  He decided on two appetizers, two entrees, and two desserts.

Up first?  Hot Spinach Dip and Mozzarella and Grape Skewers.  The skewers are the only thing I can say I helped on, and all I did was assemble.

Red grapes, mozzarella cheese, and prosciutto - a tasty combo.

The dip was scrape-the-dish-dry awesome.  We finally got to use the little casserole dishes I bought forever ago, so each couple had their own dip.

While we all stuffed our faces, Doc manned the stove and got the entrees ready.  And before we knew it, we were at the dinner table with big bowls of Pasta with Proscuitto and Peas...

...and Linguine with Sausage and Peppers.

Yuuuummmm.  Not only were these both very flavorful and delicious, but the recipes also made so much that all six of us were able to eat the first night, my parents and I had it again the next night, and there was still some left for my mom to take it for lunch on the third day.

Now, for the best part - dessert.  As I mentioned earlier, Doc decided to make two desserts instead of one - he sure knows how to make a girl happy!

First was a real Chocolate Mousse, not just a quick and easy three-ingredient mousse that I would make.

The mousse was good - really good - but the other dessert was A-W-E-S-O-M-E.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Pie:

The picture may not look like much, but trust me - this pie is GOOD.  So good that I've already requested in for my birthday dessert.  And since I love you guys so much, I'm going to share the recipe.  You should make it.  Trust me, just do it.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Pie

• 30 chocolate wafer cookies (Doc couldn't find them so he used Oreos minus the filling)
• 4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, melted
• 1/4 cup cold water
• 1 envelope (1/4 ounce) unflavored gelatin
• 3/4 cup packed light-brown sugar
• 1/2 cup creamy peanut butter
• 1 cup heavy cream

1 - Preheat oven to 350.  Process cookies in a food processor until finely ground (to yield 1 3/4 cups).  Add butter, and pulse until crumbs are evenly moistened.

2 - Transfer crumb mixture to a 9-inch tart pan with removable bottom.  Press firmly into the bottom and up the sides.  Place pan on a baking sheet; bake crust until set, 15-20 minutes.  Let cool completely.

3 - Meanwhile, place the water in a small saucepan (off heat); sprinkle with gelatin.  Let stand until softened, 5-10 minutes.

4 - In a food processor, combine brown sugar and peanut butter; process until smooth.  Add cream; process until mixture is light and holds soft peaks, scraping down the sides of bowl as needed.

5 - Places softened gelatin over very low heat, stirring, just until dissolved.  Add to peanut butter mixture in food processor; blend to combine.  Transfer filling to cooled crust and smooth top with a flexible or offset spatula.  Chill until set, at least 2 hours and up to 3 days.

The recipe suggests chopping roasted unsalted peanuts to sprinkle on top of the pie, but Doc did chocolate shavings and I think they make the pie even better.  Use whatever you like, but I definitely vote for chocolate shavings.

All of this good food just wore little Lolli out!

Full and happy friends makes for a successful dinner, I think.

The first pic of both of us with Lolli.

Is anyone interested in any of the other recipes?  If so, let me know in the comments and I'll share them, too.  I just don't want to go to the trouble of typing them out if no one's interested.

Guest Post by Lolli

dear miss kim,

thank you for my rope dog.  it's my favorite!  i think it's mom's favorite too because she's always trying to tug it away from me.  i growl and tell her it's mine.  i already started shredding the tail.  mom has to pick up blue strings all the time, but i try to tell her to leave them on the floor.  maybe you can come play with me again sometime.

love, lollipop

***************************

dear miss mary elizabeth,

thank you for my princess bone.  it's my favorite!  it helps make my teeth strong.  and thank you for my blanket.  it's my favorite!  it has my name on it so it's all mine, no one else's.  mom says lollipops are sticky and sweet but i don't think the blanket is sticky or sweet, i just think it's soft.  i like taking naps on it.  sometimes mom puts it on my head and says "where's lolli?" because it makes me disappear.  it's a fun game.

lots of licks, lollipop

p.s.  can you tell mom to give me more of those things called treats?  they're my favorite!

***************************

dear porter and grace,

thank you for my chew toy.  it's my favorite!  mom says i'm too fast when i play with it and i don't let her take a good picture.  when i try to chew mom's toes she always gives me this toy.  it doesn't taste the same as toes but i can shake it back and forth in my mouth.  maybe sometime you guys can come over to my house and we can play chase and i can show you all the good tee-tee spots.

cuddles and snuggles, lollipop

Our Weekend and Lolli Update

The kids finally got to meet Lollipop this weekend, and I think they love her!

Anna especially didn't want to put her down.  She kept holding her up like Mufassa does Simba in the Lion King.

Our two cute girls!

Anna, Lolli, and I cheered on the boys while they played a game of Knock-Out.

Friday night we were invited to a cookout at our friends' house.  They bribed us with food but I'm pretty sure they just wanted to meet Lolli.  (In fact, Mary Elizabeth admitted it here.)  We were ok with that, though, because we really like food.

We also really like their little girl.

Wesley was nice enough to let Wyatt borrow her tree swing.  I tried my best to give him a good push.

After dinner we played Pictureka while Lolli got acquainted with their dog, Ollie.  It was such a fun night!

Friday night was all play so Saturday morning we had to get to work.  Well, I'll admit I slept in a little bit, but Doc got right to work out in the yard.  Wyatt was his helper until I brought Lolli out to play and he decided to take her for a ride.

The kids played with her so much during the morning that she was exhausted by lunch time.  She fell asleep in Anna's arms so Anna set her down on her blanket that was sitting on top of the kitchen counter.  We all sat down at the table for lunch and she never budged, so she ended up being our centerpiece for the meal.  Poor thing was tired!

We spent the bulk of the afternoon at my parents' house.  I arrived first and got questioned by the little people about "Where the puppy dog is?"  Jett had to call Uncle Doc and sweet-talk him into bringing her over. 

Lolli had her first trip down the slide.  I'm not sure that she liked it.

Bren likes to hold "wolly."

While the kids were busy playing with the dog, I put together the hammock that we bought my parents for Christmas.  Everyone took turns pretending to nap on it and testing the weight limit.

And somehow, Lolli ended up getting it all to herself.

We stayed over at their house late enough to enjoy an impromptu cookout.  Nothing like burgers and dogs two nights in a row!  After church Sunday morning I got to work in the shop.  With the help of both Mom and Dad, I completed my first headboard.  It's for another room re-do I'm working on - hopefully more pictures soon! 

Update on life with Lolli:  Things are going really well.  She stays in her kennel during the day and does not mess it up at all.  She still cries when she's put in it but calms down eventually.  She's great about using the bathroom upstairs and only has accidents when we go too long without taking her out.  She's learned to go up and down the stairs by herself - a new talent that we're not proud of (an unsupervised puppy running around upstairs on my carpet is the last thing I want).  Her favorite things to chew on are our toes, and it's not uncommon for me to step into my slippers only to find them full of slobber.  One day last week she jumped into the shower with me.  It was an unexpected surprise for both of us.

Sunday night was a bit traumatic for her - it was time to get her first bath.  Even though she got wet in the shower earlier in the week, she hadn't been shampooed yet and it was definitely time. 

She didn't know what was coming - she was more interested in the cup I got out to rinse her with.

But as soon as I held her over the water, she threw those paws up and did not want to go in.

"Dad, stop taking pictures and get me the heck out of here."

I've never bathed a dog with so much fur.  I made sure I didn't miss any spots - even around her little mouth.

And then, y'all, the craziest thing happened.  The softest, fluffiest, cutest little white puppy that you've ever seen turned into...

...well, this:

Does anybody else think she looks like Splinter from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?  No? Just me?

Doc kept showing me "before" pictures so I'd remember what she looked like, and I kept reassuring her that she'd fluff back up.  I wasn't sure she would but my fingers were crossed.

And that's how our weekend ended - with a soppin' wet dog that wasn't too happy with us.  At least she smells better.

San Diego

Well, I'm back much later than I thought I'd be.   I had every intention of finishing telling you about our trip to San Diego last weekend, but life happened and I got busy.  So now it's Monday morning and I'm ready to wrap up our weekend stories from last week so I can move on and tell you about this past weekend.  Our first morning in San Diego (Friday) we were up bright and early thanks to the time change.  Since it was too early to go anywhere yet, we headed to the beach for a walk.  I enjoyed taking pictures of this little fella.  He was a great model.

We also sat and watched these guys for a while.

My Valentine, with part of our hotel back behind him.

On our walk, we stumbled upon the biggest and coolest sand castle I've ever seen.  And I think it was built the day before since no one was around, which means it survived over night.  It was huge!

I guess you could argue that this side of it was done with a mold of some sort, but I've used sand castle buckets before and mine have never turned out looking like this so I say it's still pretty impressive.  It has a clock!  And look at all the people standing around outside.

It was hard to get good shots of the other side of the castle thanks to the sun and shadows, but I still tried.  Check out the bridge in this shot.  I'm not sure what the round balls are supposed to be - boulders, maybe?

The castle even had stairs!

Here's another full view from the ocean side.  I seriously spent about 10 minutes staring at this sand castle trying to figure out how in the heck someone made it.  I'm going to have to step up my game the next time I'm at the beach.

There are lots of reasons why I think we should all up and move to San Diego (hello, 70 degree weather!) but one that I kept thinking about over the whole weekend was how much better my flower beds would look in San Diego.  The flowers there were all beautiful!

I was kinda obsessed with these things because they were all over our resort.  Don't they look like some sort of bird's head or something?

Now can you see it?

Weird, aren't they?  That's how every single one of them looked - yellow/orange things sticking straight up, one blue one out at an angle, and the green base.  Anybody know what those are?

Our main activity for Day Numero Uno was the zoo.  You can read all about our 4+ hour adventure here. 

From the zoo, we drove to the nearby Gaslamp Quarter.

This is a fun area for shopping but before we could even think about doing any of that, we needed afternoon drinks and, more importantly, to rest our feet!

We sat outside at a Mexican restaurant which was good, but it was really hard to get excited about chips and salsa when this was right across the street!

We window shopped for a bit but managed to leave the area empty-handed.  We were pretty tired at this point and wanted to make it back to the beach to watch the sunset. 

Not a bad way to end the day, right?

WARNING:  Cheesy lovey-dovey photo coming up in 3...

2...

1...

Oh yes we did take a heart sunset picture. 

There's those sunglasses again...

It didn't take long at all for the sun to be swallowed up by the ocean.

Did I mention that our hotel room was one of the only ones in our building with beach access?  I'm not sure how we got so lucky, but the fence around our patio had a little gate (the others did not - they had shrubs on the other side of their fence) that led right out to the beach.

And inside our little patio was this cute teeny palm tree.

After a quick dinner on Coronado Island we called it a day.  We had to be up early on Saturday for our whale watching adventure.  I told you I'd tell you where we went after leaving the bay...

We drove to LaJolla (pronounced LoHoya, Dad) for a very late lunch.  It was late because we had to wait a while for an available table - but it was well worth the wait.  Check out the view we had!

The food was pretty good too.

Our drinks here were pretty awesome.  The short one on the right is a blueberry margarita that Doc has spent the last week trying to recreate.  I think he's just about nailed it - they're pretty tasty!

 

As we left the restaurant, we passed this man who I've decided is what Doc will look like when he grows up.  This man was just sitting in his full suit, smoking his cigar, enjoying his Saturday.  Oh, and his blurry arm?  That's because while he was sitting there he was also practicing his golf swing.  Doc in a few years, I tell ya.

We walked down to a park-like area by the ocean and joined a crowd around some beautiful exotic-looking birds.

Lots of people - kids even! - were holding birds on their arms and and shoulders.  Doc showed little interest in even touching one of them but I begged him to hold one.  "Puh-lease hold one! Just long enough for me to get a picture!  Look, that kid's doing it.  It won't hurt or anything!"

He finally gave in and let the bird step up onto his arm.

It climbed up onto his shoulder...

...and then started nibbling on his ear!

He said it didn't hurt, it just felt a little weird.  "Ok, let me try!" I said.  "I'll come stand by you so he'll step onto my shoulder and then you can take a picture of me." 

But then as Doc turned and I stepped closer to him, I quickly changed my mind.  I could. not. stop laughing.

Why?  Well, that pretty little bird shat on Doc!

Oh yes he did.

There was no way I was getting close to one of those birds.  Especially since I couldn't stand up straight from laughing so hard.  A couple of guys standing around looked at Doc with pity and gave him a "Dude, that sucks." but no one came running with a paper towel or anything.  So Doc stripped off his shirt and we went on our way (yes, he had on an undershirt). 

Here I am standing on the edge of a nearby cliff.  It wasn't too terribly high, but definitely higher than the water looks in the picture.  I was actually a little nervous standing right there.

And just a little bit down the way, these guys were taking a little nappy-nap.  (Sea lions or seals? I dunno.)

If you ask me, that doesn't look very comfortable unless you get to be on top.  Some of those little guys are getting smooshed.  They had some friends across the way that kept barking at them. 

We had ice cream for dinner (what? we had a late lunch) and then hit the sack really early since we had to be up by 4 am to catch our flight home.  It really wasn't that hard to get up since we knew we'd be meeting our sweet new puppy as soon as we got home. 

So that was our trip.  Our sunburns have peeled off and we've re-adjusted to the time difference and are slowly but surely getting used to having an 8 week old puppy.  Life is good!

Whale Watching

Our big event last Sunday was a Whale Watching trip.  We left from the San Diego bay around 10:00 that morning and returned around 1:30. We found seats at the front of the boat before we left.  We were in the sun so it warmed up pretty quickly and we had to ditch our jackets.

It got much cooler as the we set sail, though, and we had to bundle back up.  As we made our way through the dock, our whale watching expert gave us some history of the things we were passing.  San Diego is home to a huge Navy base that's situated right on the bay.  Here's an aircraft carrier that was parked at the base.

Goodbye, San Diego!

Our excursion director told us to watch the buoys to see if we spotted any sea lions.  Sure enough, we found some basking in the sun.

This little lighthouse was the first one built on the edge of the bay.  Except, it was too tiny and it wasn't really on the edge at all.  Since it was so far inland, boaters continued to run into the land instead of making their way around it.

So then someone smarter came along and built a real lighthouse on the very tip of the peninsula.  Ah, no more crashes.

As we left the bay area, we got really close to Tijuana.  The navigator told us to turn off our phones unless we wanted to be charged crazy high roaming fees.  We did as we were told!

When we finally made it to the open ocean, we quickly found exactly what we came looking for: some whales!

We found a group of three grey whales - two females and male.  Apparently that's how they always travel - two girls and one boy - because the boys think they're hot stuff or something.  These whales were on the final leg of their migration to Baja, California.

A fin!

Can you see the kinda blurry spot above the whale on the right in the picture above?  That's mist in the air from their blow hole.  They don't actually ever blow a spout of water out of their hole, instead they're blowing out air and some water from their lungs and water that's on top of them gets sprayed with it.  Kinda like when we sneeze.

These were the only three whales we saw, but we followed their path and were able to see them a lot.  They would stay down for about five to seven minutes before coming up for air again.  It was fun to try to guess where they'd come up next.

We were one of three boats out watching these grey whales - one was bigger than our boat and one was much smaller.  It's against the law to cross in front of their path or get too close to them, but if you're idle and they come to you that's ok.  Look how close they got to this tiny boat!

After watching the whales for awhile, we left that area and went searching for dolphins.  Along the way, we watched these guys fish for some food.

It didn't take long for our navigator to find some dolphins.  We saw this set coming towards us first.

She (the navigator) said she could see a full path of them and that the captain was going to try to move our boat into their path.  She said they'd love to swim in our wake, and she was right.  They swarmed our boat!

I think this was my favorite part of the excursion.  I mean, the whales were cool and all, but the dolphins were AWESOME!  And there were so many of them!

Can you see all of them under water in this picture?

After the dolphins left, we had to start heading back in to the bay.  Here's a shot of where we stayed.  See the cone-shaped red roof to the left of the bridge?  That and all the other red-roofed buildings are Hotel del Coronado.  It was really nice!

So, as if the whole whale watching and dolphin seeing excursion wasn't cool enough, we just happened to be there on the same day as the Centennial of Naval Aviation Parade of Flight.  And since the Navy base is right on the bay, and we were coming in through the bay, the planes flew right over us!

Here are the Blue Angels:

I have no idea what any of these other planes are, so I'll just show you the pictures.

Ok, this part was pretty cool.  Right after this plane flew by...

...we looked up to see that someone had jumped out of it right above our boat.

We watched him twirl and spin all the way down.  As he got closer we could read the SEAL on his parachute.

And whaddaya know, that little fancy pants skydiver managed to land on his feet right in front of the audience at the Navy base.  Show off.

Because of everything that was going on that day (there were events at the Navy base and on the island all day long - it was a pretty big deal) we had to be escorted through the bay by these guys.

As soon as we got off the boat and saw how crowded it was all around us, we decided to leave the island and go somewhere else.

Where'd we go?  I'll tell you soon!