No sonnet, bonnet, or parade. Still a stellar Easter.

This may not have been Easter 2005: Best Easter Ever, but it was still a good one. Jason wasn’t sick or in school, and now we have a couch. Yes, the bar is pretty low.

A few things that made this an excellent Easter:

1. An Easter-y sacrament meeting. Ours included a (per usual) stellar musical program. Primary was not as good, but you take what you can get with nine-year-olds.

2. A veritable Easter feast. We had ham (at Jason’s request), rolls, updated funeral potatoes from a NYT article about food of the latter-day saints subtitled “A New Generation Redefines Mormon Cuisine”, and green beans.

3. A box of chocolate all the way from Lexington. Old Kentucky Chocolates is the best. If you’re ever in the area, try the chocolate-covered grapes. I’m not April Fools-ing; they are seriously delicious.

4. Seeing our families. Yes, it was via FaceTime (or Face-to-Face, as Hannah calls it in her Spanglish), but that counts.

5. Spring so close you can literally feel it. Come on, sixty degrees!

latest/greatest

I ordered my 2012 moleskine planner on January 4th. On January 24th, Amazon let me know that the planner was nowhere to be found. I scoured the internet with little luck and begrudgingly ordered a similar one from an obscure Oregon bookstore (and prayed it was legit). Twenty days later, my planner arrived and I have felt infinitely more organized ever since.

I made wheat rolls. They are delish.

While perusing Wal-Mart in search of a one-year-old appropriate board book (Wal-Mart has terrible book selection, it turns out), I found socker boppers! I’m pretty sure the ones my fam owned in the early 2000s were called sockEM boppers, but the concept is the same. We used to have bopping tournaments for family night, because nothing brings the spirit like being walloped in the face with an inflatable mitten by your four-year-old brother.

I made heart-shaped crackers. Less delish, but kind of cute.

Before dinner on Jason’s birthday, I made him try on a fedora at Banana Republic. He makes it look good.

Even Rosie got into the birthday spirit on February 8th.

Tonight we picked up our glasses! Depth perception seems a little off, but I think that may be because we both have the correct prescription for the first time in a while. To good vision!

Pre-Christmas Dinner

Last year, Jason and I decided to have our own little Christmas dinner before heading up to Connecticut. I had always wanted to try making turkey (and love eating leftovers). It was a lot of fun, so we did it again this year. This time, we invited John and Brittney, who brough the amazing mashed potatoes. Jason made the exceedingly moist and delicious turkey all by himself and cleaned the house while I was at work.

I forgot to get a picture of all four of us, but I promise they were there. Dinner was great, and then we sat around talking and eating Ferrero Rocher and pistachio cookies until late.

Afterward, I thought the whole thing was kind of like a house un-warming party. Today we start packing up our stuff. It’s sad. I think we’re going to miss a lot of things about Lexington.

new england thanksgiving

Location: Grandma Funny and Grandpa Bill’s house in Suffield

Time: 2:00 PM

Attendees: Grandma and Grandpa, Maureen and Fran, Kelley and Jen (and Pat), Mom and Dad Frost, and Jason and Amanda. Also, Uno the cat came down to play during dessert.

Familiar Thanksgiving foods: Turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, sweet potatoes, cranberries, rolls.

Dishes I’d never had for Thanksgiving before (but subsequently loved): mashed turnips, roasted brussel sprouts (not chocolate-covered, Dad), creamy onions, and mashed butternut squash.

Jason and my humble contribution: rolls and an apple pie. Also, Jason mashed the turnips.

What we came away with (besides very full tummies): a big bronze bull named Ferdinand. Photos to come.

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving with Jason’s family. We sat at the kid’s table with Kelley, Jen, and Pat and had a great time catching up.  After dinner, we went to see the Cmara’s finished kitchen (gorgeous) and then I ate more QVC candy than I’d care to admit.

I failed to get pictures of anyone (though I did make Kelley take one of Jason and me) and I snapped one of the autumn tree before we left to send to Dave. 

over the weekend

I slept a lot, but we also went to Laura’s for a Welcome Home from Cambodia/Autumnal Chili party and knocked out another autumn goal by eating roasted acorn squash for Sunday dinner.

Oh yeah.  We also made a new roll recipe.  They were pretty, and kind of tasted like pretzels (which I blame on honey and kosher salt). 

November for real

I made orange rolls late last night and while they were rising, the kitchen smelled like Thanksgiving. We’re sticking around this year and, while I’m looking forward to a four-day weekend, it will be weird to spend the holiday away from Utah. I guess we can drown our homesickness in rainbow jell-o and apple pie…or just watch the worst Christmas movie ever made:

Why would anyone pay $49.94 for this?!

I don’t know why, but Hannah and I watched the cat version of David Copperfield every single year.  I can still remember some of the songs–and my confusion over inconsistency in animal clothing.  Some of the characters wore full Victorian regalia, while others favored only tunics or (gasp!) nothing at all.  Troubling.  I’m glad Mom “accidentally” taped over it.

We’re not the sort that start playing Christmas music at Halloween, but we did pull out some Christmas tunes on Tuesday night.  I’m so excited for the holidays!  We also put up our little ernie pine (but not in our house.  It’s currently serving as the Angel Tree at our ward building), which brought back good memories of Christmas 2009.  I’m delighted that we’re not moving across the country five days after Christmas this year.

Other things I’m looking to which I am looking forward:

Those chocolate, whipped cream, and graham cracker chocolate drops

Pistachio cookies

Finding/displaying the tiny nativity that I bought at the BYU bookstore on Christmas Eve last year for $3

White Christmas on Christmas Eve (fake Christmas Eve, probably, since we’ll be in CT for real Christmas Eve and I’m not sure anyone likes that movie quite as much as I do)

Mint truffle hot cocoa

My first New England Christmas

Our weekend in food

I’m vehemently opposed to playing Christmas music before Thanksgiving (exception: “¡Happy Birthday Guadalupe!“).  However, I have no qualms with eating Christmas food in early November.  Thank goodness our Kroger agrees.  We picked up our (first) half-gallon of peppermint stick ice cream on Saturday and have enjoyed it very much. 

Note that we are in Edy’s country now; no more Dreyer’s for us.

On Saturday we also went to Billy’s BBQ for lunch (thank you, Grandma and Grandpa).  We polished off a big order of fried banana peppers and still had room for delicious barbecue.  In the afternoon, Jason switched between the BYU and Utah football games, while I fell asleep on the couch at half-time. 

We made caramel apple pork chops for supper on Sunday, which is just as decadent as it sounds.  I made rolls and Jason made mashed potatoes: a veritable Sabbath Day feast.  We finished off with (of course) more peppermint ice cream. 

The weather here has warmed up; it is supposed to be in the sixties all week.  This bodes well for Mary and my lunchtime walking.

Come and gone

I’m a little sad that our much-anticipated Utah trip is over.  Sigh.   I need to come up with a new thing to look forward to.  General Conference, perhaps?

We had a low-key weekend, which was just what we needed.  On Friday night, we attended a picnic for Jason’s grad school class at Spindletop Hall, the UK alumni club.  Interestingly, Spindletop is the former home of Pansy “Awesome First Name” Yount, wife of Miles Franklin Yount, who had something to do with the Yount-Lee Oil Company.  The drive out was stunning and the weather was perfect.  I especially enjoyed the chocolate-chocolate chip cookies available for our free and unhampered consumption.  Yum.

On Saturday, we shopped for groceries and watched the BYU game (and wept) and went to the University of Kentucky game against Akron.  The UK stadium is surprisingly nice and our Wildcats killed the Zips.  What kind of mascot is a Zip anyway, you may ask?  A kangaroo.

We had a relaxing/fun sabbath day and finally learned how to play Settlers of Catan.  It is more fun than I expected, especially when you are the Brick Mogul.

A Tale of Two Memorial Days

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity. (Who votes that Dickens be required to use semi-colons like the rest of us?)

Memorial Day 2008:  Jason and I have been invited to a barbecue.  It rains.  We decide instead to make sincronizadas (tortillas with queso oaxaca and ham) at my apartment while waiting for my parents to pick me up for the annual Pullan Memorial Day party.  I do not invite Jason because I think it would be too weird.

Memorial Day 2009: We have been married for almost a month.  We go to the Cracker Barrel for breakfast with my immediate family.  We go to Target to spend gift cards.  We go to the annual Pullan Memorial Day party together.  2009 = far superior to 2008.

This Memorial Day, we did not go to the ward picnic because Jason didn’t feel well.  I grocery-shopped and we made a potato salad for a different party in the afternoon.  Now we’re back and we’re going to call my family in a few minutes.  They are at the annual Pullan Memorial Day party and we want to know how the festivities are progressing.  Maybe tonight we will eat some ice cream (or the rest of the orange rolls.  Since we skipped the party, we’re stuck with two dozen.  Great.  I’m sure we (I) will eat them all, but that can’t be healthy).

Last but not least, here are a couple pictures we took at Arlington National Cemetery in April.  I think it would be cool to be there today.

Greater with a grater

We have a ward party tomorrow morning in commemoration of Memorial Day.  It’s a potluck breakfast and, since I thought it would be tacky to bring our half-eaten bag of off-brand Cheerios, I decided to make orange rolls.  Unfortunately, we left a few things at our old apartment in the storage unit when we moved, so we are cheese grater-less.  I zest-ed (verb? I don’t know) the orange with a potato peeler, then carefully used a knife to chop up the pieces until they were teeny tiny.  It took a while.  It would have been a lot easier with a grater.  I also didn’t have shortening (but this I knew in advance), so I made a different roll recipe and filled it with the orange filling from my Grandma Pullan’s cookbook (also partially because we left our muffin tins (4!) in Utah.  You never realize how many recipes require a muffin tin until you lack one.  Not to worry, though; here in Kentucky, we improvise).  We’ll see how these turn out; thankfully, I still have half a batch of dough left so we can bring plain rolls in case the orange ones are less-than-savory.

The final product

In other news, we have been officially called and sustained as members of the Activities Committee!  Pretty exciting.  Things I like about this calling: 1) No conducting responsibilities 2) We get to do it together 3) It gives us another reason to go to every ward party.

For Hannah, here is a picture of one of the shirts I purchased with my gift card. I like it.