Top Chef Night... with guests!

So, as has been the case, we cooked for Top Chef night. Usually it has been MC's night (and I'm still trying to get her to start a blog to at least log her cooking too) but she had a lot going on so I volunteered to take care of it. This was a little different too because we had guests!! Ian and Caitie are avid Top Chef watchers as well, so we invited them over to join in dinner and watch the show. It was a lot of fun!

I tried a recipe from the Biggest Loser cookbook called Southwestern Pileup or something. Usually I am very rigid about following every direction and measurement, but I just sorta winged it through most of this one. It was pretty simple so it wasn't hard. It called for a pita, but I liked the look of the flatbread better. I seasoned some chicken with mexican spices and garlic and grilled it, then toasted the pita a bit in the oven. I spread a layer of roasted red pepper hummus, then added the chicken, red peppers, cilantro, tomato, black beans, and cheese. Bake for like 7 minutes and voila! It was pretty darn scrumptious, especially for being so simple. I also had some guacamole and sour cream for people to add to taste and paired it with some chips and salsa.

At the time I actually forgot to take pictures, but luckily the flatbread pack had 5 in it, so there was one left over for me to recreate the meal for my lunch today. I had to get a snapshot somehow! :-) I'll probably be a little more adventurous when friend's lives aren't on the line ;-) and will have some more complicated recipes in the future. For now, this'll do though!!

Quick Valentine's Blurb

MC and I decided to go pretty low-key for valentines. It WAS our first valentine's, but cash is kinda tight so we thought we'd just keep it simple. We had a wonderful day of just hanging out and enjoying each others company. We were going to start the day off with a 5k, but it got canceled due to rain (weenies!). So we came back to the apartment complex and did a short jog on the treadmill. After the jog I fixed us up some breakfast and made MC a special plate. Notice the hearts on the toast on the left as well! She saw this recipe and it looked absolutely perfect for a little valentines meal. :-)

Top Chef Wednesday!

Usually this would be MC's day to cook and I would get tomorrow, but with Valentine's day being this weekend we modified our schedule a little bit. Also, MC had a little dinner shindig to attend in the evening and we wanted to get a run in before Top Chef/dinner so it made sense for me to make something quick and easy. I decided I would make some soft tacos since it would be easy for MC to just grab one or two since she didn't need a whole meal.

It wasn't anything fancy, but the twist was that instead of ground beef, I tried a tofu crumble meant to resemble it. I cut up green and red peppers, tomatoes, and onions and tossed it all in a skillet for a while. I heated up some black beans and chopped up some spinach and wrapped each up in a wheat tortilla. It was very scrumptious! I have been intrigued by meat alternatives, but haven't really tried that many. It was healthier (the 10 oz package had like 220 calories and very little fat) and it had a different flavor, but a good one. A simple, but successful, meal indeed! It was a great recovery meal too since MC and I got a little lost on our run and what was supposed to be like a light 1.5 miles, turned into about 2.9 miles. Fun!!

Taking after my sis

So MC and I have decided that we are both going to work on developing our culinary skills. Since we watch Top Chef every wednesday, we thought that would be a good cooking night since that show always makes us super hungry anyways. I don't know if I will keep track of MC's cooking or just log what I am doing, but we shall see how it develops. Since we were having a cold spell, we thought that during our dinner and show on wednesday would be a good time to christen our fireplace!

We just made a simple little fire, but it was fun doing it for the first time in our new place and the spinach stuffed chicken MC made was super scrumptious!! And this picture is a bit of a prelude to the apartment post I swear I will make sometime soon. We hope to clean stuff up this weekend and take some good pictures so I can show everyone our new snazzy living quarters.

So thursday it was my turn to do some cooking. We have several cookbooks that we have been perusing a lot lately and two of them I have been looking at especially. The Biggest Loser and Quick & Healthy. Both are really nice because they not only have recipes that are pretty good for you, but they have the nutritional information, which makes keeping the fitday journal up-to-date through our culinary exploration much easier. I decided to cook pecan-crusted chicken from the Biggest Loser book and I paired it with german red cabbage with apples from the Quick & Healthy book.

The chicken was very good and flavorful, though the recommended serving size was a little small (1/4 pound of chicken). The cabbage was definitely on the experimental side. I think I could have used a larger skillet and I think I "simmered" at a little bit too high of a heat. In the book the apple slices looked intact, but in mine they started becoming more like applesauce than apple slices. Overall, it was still pretty good! VERY flavorful, almost too much so. I think having larger pieces of chicken so it would need less of the cabbage as a side would have been about perfect. All-in-all it was a pretty successful meal and pretty good on the health side as well!

Maybe having a set day with something specific to post (like back when I did weigh-in posts) will help me keep this thing a little more up-to-date as well. We shall see!

Awesome Weekend Trip

Man, I have been really slacking when it comes to making posts as of late. Things have been a little hectic, but I've gotten into the groove of the semester a little more so hopefully I'll be able to post more consistently. I STILL haven't gotten some good pics of the new place, but I'll get things tidied up soon and I can make a post about that. I don't think there has been a lot that is worth blogging about since my last post so I'll just talk about more recent happenings.

This past weekend MC and I had our first flight together! My friends Jake and Jamie were in Iraq for 15 months and got home not too long ago. They are stationed in Colorado Springs so we decided to have a ski trip / get-together for everyone to visit since we hadn't seen them in forever. Since I only have class tuesday and thursday and I can easily miss my monday meetings, we decided to take a long weekend for the trip.

We got up early on friday and headed over to the airport. We had super awesome seats on the plane. Best view in the house! (if you like engines that is haha).
There was a lot of fog in Atlanta so our plane got delayed and we ended up missing our connecting flight to denver. Surprisingly, Delta automatically rebooked us on a later flight so it ended up not being a very big deal. We rolled into Denver a few hours later than planned and we headed over to Hertz. Turns out they were having a deal for a cheap upgrade so instead of a Rav4, we were big pimpin' in a 2009 Escalade!

The trip to the house in Breckenridge was a little rough. It was pretty snowy so it was slow going, but good thing our Escalade handled it just fine! While I was super glad to have a large SUV like that for the drive, I am always entertained by the other cars that I see on the road. I feel kinda sketchy in some of the conditions with my all-wheel drive, yet see little cars passing me... like a Porsche Carrera 4!!

The house that Roper found was pretty awesome. It was like 10 minutes from the slopes and had plenty of room for all of us.

The first day we mostly stayed together. MC did frickin' awesome!! She took off down the slope with a good amount of speed and was really tearing it up. Towards the latter part of the day the group split up a bit and we pretty much shut down the mountain. It was one helluva day on the mountain! The rest of the evening we hung out at the house, had a great dinner, and just caught up with everyone. It was really good hanging out with everyone, especially the Ropers since they had been out of the country for a long time. We decided to have an "experts only" morning the next day. J.D., Roper, Adam and I hit the slopes right when they opened and got in tons of good skiing and boarding. Unfortunately, a lot of the places we were going were much less accessible to the lone snowboarder (myself), so I ended up doing a lot hiking, mostly through pretty deep snow. Times like those will remind you that you are at like 12,000 feet!! We still got tons of awesome back country time in and then met up with everyone else for lunch. After the previous day and that morning I was pretty wiped out so I just did a couple runs after lunch then MC and I headed down to the bast to wait for everyone to finish up. After we got back, we showered up and had dinner at Bubba Gump's, where the food was pretty good, but the service was pretty shoddy. Had a nice little stroll through downtown Breckenridge, snapped a picture, then headed back to the house.

Roper and Jamie had to work on Monday, so they hung out and played Taboo with us for a while then had to hit the road. It was sad to see them go, but we had a frickin' awesome weekend hanging out with them and everybody. After they left, most of us didn't last very long after a couple long days of boarding and skiing.

We got up early the next day because there were winter storm warnings all along the route from Breckenridge to the airport. The first half of the drive wasn't too bad, but then it got progressively worse.

It was definitely the kind of drive that keeps you on your toes! Most of it really wasn't that bad, but I had to pay a lot of attention. Needless to say I was pretty stoked to finally make it to the airport and relax. Everything went fine on the flights home and we rolled in last night around 9. Still feeling a little beat, but I'm trying to get some research done this afternoon since I didn't get much done this past week. It'll probably be a kinda busy week getting back into everything, but I'm sure I can handle it.

Well, I guess I have procrastinated enough. Hopefully the use of images will help liven this post up. I'm still working on bring more consistent with that as well. Back to the research!

Ski Trip 2008

Ok, so I've been saying that I am going to try to be more like Amanda and my sister and start using pictures in my posts more often. Since I uploaded my last batch of pics to Facebook, I will just like those directly and see how that works. We'll try out some of my other picture hosting sites as the need comes.

I don't know how detailed of a post I can really create considering how much went on over the past week. I could detail it, but most of if would be pretty inane to read over so I will try to keep to the high points and let the pics do a little more of the talking.

So the snow...

We had tons of it! By far the most snow we have ever gotten on a ski trip. I forgot the exact final tally, but we got over 40 inches of snow during the week we were there. 40 frickin' inches!!! It was awesome. Some of it was the kind that had big dry flakes and there was little wind so it just stuck to everything. Some of the bare trees looked like coral because every little branch was covered. It was awesome!

I also started to get a little more comfortable with the rails this year. Typically I just hit the flat boxes (like below) because they have a wide stable platform and aren't really that tricky.

This year I started to branch out a little bit. I still didn't hit any of the really narrow metal rails, but they had some cool "rails" that were basically bent over trees, and a couple of rainbow boxes (like below) that were pretty fun to hit. I landed what was basically a 270 off one little jump and started having a little more fun trying different things over the rails instead of just hitting them and hoping I don't die. haha

I was pretty stoked because, though I had been talking about it for the past few years, I actually demo'd some new boards since mine was about 9 years old. It is a huge board that is perfect for big steep powder runs, but not really suited for doing any kind of tricks or terrain park kinds of things. So I demo'd three different boards and ended up loving the first one they gave me. So I actually ended up snagging it and it was so much fun and perfectly suited for hitting the parks a little more. I love it and can't wait to give it a little more exercise when I go out to Breckenridge in January.

Another super duper exciting thing about this trip was that it was the first time that MC had ever been skiing!! We got her a lesson on the first morning and then I tried to give her a little lesson the next day, but snowboarders don't make the best ski instructors. ;-) Didn't help that I've probably skied once in the last 11 years! So dad gave her some more pointers and she did absolutely awesome.

She improved so much over the week and it was so much fun having her there with everyone. We've brought friends and significant others on our ski trips in the past, but this one was by far the best. So much fun! Lauren and her even got to build a super snazzy gingerbread house. Apparently, MC has wanted to build one for years but never got a chance to. Glad we could help out!!

Now we still have to build a snowman and go ice skating, so I guess it is good to leave a few things to be done in future trips. ;-) It was also cool that my Aunt Janice (Dad's sister) got to come along. We only lost her once and she seemed to have a lot of fun as well. I also kept with my postcard writing. Hopefully no one got left out (when you are writing 30 postcards it's easy to get a little discombobulated!) and I hope they travel quickly! I also added another postcard to my collection where I get someone from the destination of my vacation to sign it. Since I was in and out of the snowboard shop (forgot to mention that I also got a kick ass plaid travel bag since my existing snowboard bag had a huge rip in it) I got the guy who actually picked out the board that I ended up buying to sign it. And my collection grows!!

Well, hopefully the new style of embedding pictures will continue and make this a little more entertaining to read. It has been a long day of traveling, so I think I am going to pack things in and hit the sack. If anything doesn't work or looks crappy or odd with the addition of the pictures, leave me a comment and let me know so I can try to get a hang of the best way to do this.

** EDIT **
I forgot yet another unique experience associated with the trip! Lauren, MC and I decided to take the shuttle and bus to get to Radio Shack (instead of dad driving us down in the rental car) to try to get her phone fixed. We took the shuttle to the main Avon station, then hopped on the bus. Not too long after we were on the bus, I was talking about my trip on the bus in Breckenridge my freshman year spring break. We were taking it to the grocery store and we heard a loud noise and the driver asked us what it was. I told him it sounded like he blew a tire, and sure enough he did. Anyway, right after I told the story, our bus stopped, then jumped a little...

We had stopped coming out of a round-a-bout and we think the guy was looking to see if it was clear to merge and didn't notice that we had stopped and totally rear-ended our bus. We sat there for a few minutes waiting for a new bus to come pick us up, then the driver said that we were like a block from where we were trying to go so we just hopped out, braved the snowstorm, and walked the rest of the way. Catching the bus to get home was fine, but it was definitely an interesting experience to get in a wreck while riding the bus.

Turkey Trot 5k

A brisk (low 30s) 5k in Johnson City. It was pretty jam packed with people and we accidentally started a little far back in the pack so our actual time is probably 30-45 seconds faster than chip time. Lauren decided to take it easy and run with mom and me so it was a fun time to run all together. Hadn't really been running much lately, but I was happy with how my legs felt. Mostly got slowed down by a lot of nasal drainage due to a stuffy nose and the cold weather.

30:55

Mom - 30:55

Lauren - 30:55