Happy post Valentine's Day

Hope everyone had a great Valentine's Day, mine was delicious :)  I'm not really a big Valentine's person, but it is a good excuse to go get some good food.  If you can't tell, I LOVE good food.  It's a miracle I'm not morbidly obese.  Originally Aaron and I were going to go to a sushi restaurant close by called The Blue Fish, if you are ever in the Dallas area you have to go!  It is phenomenal; really cool and unique dishes and modern on the inside.  They have this appetizer, stuffed jalapenos, jalapenos stuffed with crab and cream cheese then fried and covered in eel sauce, to die for.  It is kind of pricey though so we decided to avoid the crowd and save some money, and I cooked dinner for him.  French bread with olive oil dip and spinach salad with bacon and a homemade balsamic vinaigrette for appetizers.  Then fillet topped with mushrooms and a red wine and balsamic reduction, lobster tail with herbed butter, mashed potatoes and asparagus with lemon zest and feta.  We had chocolate covered strawberries with pistachios, pecans and toasted coconut for dessert, and then we were in a food coma.

I bought 6-8oz. fillets from the butcher section, fresh, not the packaged one.  The quality was so worth the extra money. I topped them with sea salt and lots of cracked black pepper and seared them on both sides for about 3min. each.  Then I finished them off in the oven at 375 degrees for about 10 min until they were medium rare.  You may have to do more or less depending on the thickness of the steaks (mine were pretty thick).  For the mushrooms, I sauteed them in olive oil with salt and pepper and at the end added a little red wine then simmered it until it had reduced down.  Then for the reduction sauce I took equal parts red wine and balsamic vinegar, brought it to a boil and then simmered it till it was about half the amount I started with.  At the end, while the sauce is still simmering, I added brown sugar to thicken it up.  Drizzle some reduction on the plate, top it with the fillet, then top the fillet with the mushrooms and a little more of the reduction.  These are probably horrible directions if you are trying to replicate, but I didn't use a specific recipe, and I have no idea what measurements I used.  I improvise A LOT and just mix stuff together.  Anyway, it was delicious and I even impressed myself.  Great quality meat totally makes the difference.

We got all of our wedding photos back today.  They look AWESOME, kuddos to Sheryll Lynne Photographers!  If you would like to see all of them here is the link: http://slphotographers.instaproofs.com/  the password is tutt2011 

There are so many, and lots of pictures of all the guests too. If anyone wants to buy prints they are 15% through the rest of February.

Happy Friday!!!

So glad the weekend is here :)  Since I'm not working yet, I'm stuck in the apartment by myself.  i try to keep busy, but it's nice to have someone to hangout with all day on the weekends.

Bosley is running, i mean sprinting, through the apartment right now like a psycho! I swear he is bipolar; one minute sprinting like a mad man, and the next minute he is the laziest dog in the world.

My case and point above.  He loves to mess up the bed as soon as I make it.

I got my haircut last week and not gonna lie, I was freaking out about it.  I needed a haircut and wanted to do something different, but I had gotten my hair done at the same place for so long. I worked at a salon through high school and then continued to go there through college.  I've seen so many friends go to nice places, expensive places sometimes, and get their hair butchered; my worst nightmare.  I wanted to go somewhere close, because driving here is the worst.  Traffic and road work are so terrible, a lot of times you can't even get around with a GPS.  Having said that, everywhere in Las Colinas is so expensive, I'm not going to spend $80 on a haircut!  I finally found a salon close by that didn't cost an arm and a leg and he did an awesome job.  I was very relieved and will definitely go back.

I've been on a roll lately trying new recipes. I made a tuscan pork tenderloin the other night, that is roasted inside a baguette.  Sounds fancy, but totally easy and so GOOD!  The bread absorbs all the flavor and juice from the pork; honestly I think it was the best part of the dish.  It calls for fresh herbs, and I did use fresh garlic and rosemary (because I love both, and they taste phenomenal), but substituted all the other spices with dried versions.  Honestly I don't think it makes that big of a difference in this recipe.  It also calls for fennel pollen; I have no idea what that is or where to get it. I just used dried fennel and it was good enough for me.  Here's the link: http://joanneweir.com/recipes/mains/pork-roasted-the-way-the-tuscan-do.html

I'll be trying another new one this weekend.  I'll let you know how it goes.  Hope everyone has a good weekend, and on that note GO CATS!



first post

So I am new at this.  Never thought I would be a "blog person", but since I am so far away from my friends and family now, I thought it would be a good way to share what's going on in my life.  Here's what has happened since Aaron and I got married.
We left the next morning to go on our honeymoon.  We stayed at the Majestic Colonial in Punta Cana Dominican Republic.  The resort was beautiful, the beaches were beautiful, the people and the service were great, however the food was terrible and we both got food poisoning.  It was a bummer, but we did get to do some really cool excursions with the cash we got for the wedding.   We did a spa excursion where we went out on this boat in the middle of the carribean sea and got massages and other random spa treatments. So relaxing :) Then another day we went swimming with stingrays and sharks.  That was really cool, a little freaky, but cool.

As soon as we got back to Kentucky we had to finish packing up all my stuff and the wedding gifts, and we left for Dallas the next morning.  With the exception of the honeymoon week, I felt like my life was pure chaos for a good month.  We got to the apartment late that night, and started to move all my stuff in the next day.  We were very lucky that my mom and Karen came down to help us.  We finally have everything settled. Oh, and for those of you that may have wondered, Bosley was very good in the car!  He got drugged with a healthy dose of benadryl and slept almost the whole drive :)
We're living in an area of Dallas called Las Colinas.  It's about 5 miles outside of downtown Dallas.  I love it.  It's a really cool area, not downtown, but there is still a ton to do, all kinds of good restaurants and shops right by the apartment. The other good thing is Aaron's office is so close, less than a mile away.
 The apartment complex is right by a lake that has sidewalk all the way around, so it's great to take Bosley for a walk or run, and then the lake has these canals off of it that run all around the Las Colinas area.  It's really pretty, especially at night when all the buildings are lit up.
Since I'm not working yet, I've been cooking a lot and trying new recipes so I thought that I would share them here.  Superbowl Sunday, we went to a party and I made buffalo chicken potato skins. Normally I'm not big on potato skins, but these looked awesome so  I decided to go with it.  Will be making them again!  They were delicious, I think Aaron ate 4 or 5.  They really weren't that hard.  I used shredded rotisserie chicken (i love to use it for anything i can, so easy) and frank's buffalo sauce instead of the recipe they used .  I love frank's. I also served them with ranch instead of blue cheese dressing. Here's the link http://www.closetcooking.com/2012/02/buffalo-chicken-potato-skins.html

Then last night I made white chicken enchiladas, also delicious.  Again I used rotisserie chicken for the filling.  I also modified the recipe a bit, which I tend to do a lot.  I didn't have green chillies in the cabinet so I poured verde salsa over the top after putting the sour cream sauce on.  I also put a little verde salsa in the filling.  They were delicious, the sour cream sauce tasted like a restaurants version.  I made mexican rice and black beans for the side.  Will definitely use this one again.  Here's the link http://www.letsdishrecipes.com/2011/02/white-chicken-enchiladas-with-green.html