Crazy November

What a busy month! Holiday portrait sessions and different celebrations made November go lightning fast for me. That's why this post never got published until today and it was secretly sitting as a draft for weeks. But here's what I had been up to the past couple of weeks.

I turned 28 (Ugh! why do we get old so fast?) I wish I took more pictures but as I'm getting older I'm becoming more camera-shy :P, so I just took (or had Brandon take) one of me...

...and one of my food. Hehe!

Thanksgiving

Black Friday. I was in Tampa that day because...

...I had to renew my passport there the day after. This is me at the place where I renewed my passport. Brandon doesn't like taking pictures when other people are watching (actually he doesn't like taking pictures at all, I just force him everytime) so we went to the back of the building just for this one.

Wyoming Trip. Can You Say Yeeehaw?

Here are more pictures from our trip to Wyoming last month.

The men's daily activity, playing video games in 3D.

GQ-ing it

It was always 70 degrees inside my sister and her husband's house which was understandable assuming that since she just gave birth, Kristine's body temperature was still boiling hot. And this was Wyatt's idea of keeping himself warm. I don't like it when he's laying on my laptop because he sheds a lot leaving gazillions of hair on the keyboard. But the entire time that we were in Wyoming we had to keep Wyatt inside one of the rooms, away from Harvey, because they would never get along. I felt bad for Wyatt that he was stuck inside the room while the rest were having fun, so I just let him do this.

And this is Wyatt's least favorite "housemate", my sister's dog, Harvey. Harvey who stained the carpet of our old apartment with his pee. Harvey who scratched our old aparment walls until some of the paint came off. Harvey who you better not leave in the house by himself or a cop will knock on your door because a neighbor complained of his non-stop barking and crying. Harvey, who despite all that, still melts my heart when he looks at me like this.

We had Christmas dinner at my brother-in-law's parents' house with the missionaries. Since both my husband and brother-in-law went on a mission, they had plenty to talk about with these men. After dinner they spent the rest of the evening playing cards.

Wright doesn't have McDonald's, Burger King, Olive Garden, etc. They have Subway and this restaurant (I forgot the name). So this place is the fancy place to eat in town. We ate here on our last night in Wright and there were only 4 customers. Me, Brandon, Justan, and Kristine. Haha. But I tell you, I'd pick this restaurant over the Cheese Cake Factory in Salt Lake City any day.

The food was t-t-t-tasty! tasty!

I don't know about you but I had never seen on a menu a steak as big as 32 oz. Must be very good because Justan ordered it.

Everytime I look at this pic, I feel like the moose is staring back at me. Don't you?

It was time to go back to Salt Lake the next day. :(

We just barely left Wright when we saw deers on the left side of the road as we were driving. There were like 10 of them but these 2 were running up and down the hill, one chasing the other. So I grabbed my camera and was lucky enough to snap a pic of these deers. If I lived in a small country town like Wright, I'd probably be chasing deers everyday to take pictures of them. :D

Changes

Happy New Year to you! (yes you, my reader :P) I hope you had a wonderful 2010. New Year resolutions taped somewhere in the house? Ha. I remember when December 2008 was about to come to it's end, Brandon and I wrote down our goals for 2009. We like to write down goals instead of resolutions although they're pretty much the same. I taped my list on our bedroom wall and Brandon taped his on the side of his computer monitor.

Speaking of goals, I'll try to update this blog more often this year. Maybe at least once a week? So wish me luck. Also, I'll make the following changes to my blog:

-Overall blog look. I'll make it more simple and more clean-looking. If I haven't mentioned it yet, I'm a minimalist. So less is always more for me. Always.

-Blog address. I didn't wanna do this but I'll be using the address of this blog for my photo blog. So I have to think of some new address. And maybe change the blog title too. Suggestions?

What are your goals and planned changes for this year?

Before the year ends...

...I'd like to update this blog and greet everybody "Merry Christmas!" Sorry I'm almost 2 days late for that greeting. I've been here in a small town in Wyoming with Brandon since the 24th to spend the holidays with my sister and her husband and in-laws...and her brand-new baby boy! Yay, I'm an aunt now! I'll have to post some pictures of her stinkin' cute babe here later. And since I'm on a vacation, I haven't done anything but sleep, sleep, and sleep.

So, since I don't get around here much often, I feel obliged to write an update of what happened since my last entry. I tried to remember as many as I could, but these are all I can think of for now:

November
I turned 27. That's pretty hard to believe, and even harder to accept that I'm getting older fast. Ha!

December
-I became full-time at my second job so I had to quit my other job last week because me working 2 full-time jobs at the same time just sounds insane to me.
-I became an aunt for the first time. What a blessing!
-I bought a new DSLR camera a week before Christmas as a Christmas present for myself. :)
-Christmas morning was awesome!

Pictures will be up for this post soon.

update (1/16/2011): and here are the photos! :)

We slept in on Christmas morning and didn't open the presents until about 10 a.m. So while the neighbors had already gone back to sleep after unwrapping their gifts, our excitement just started to kick in.

We did this tradition at the Bartons' residence (my sister Kristine's parents-in-law) and I was glad that we did. Why? Because me and Brandon got tons of presents from them, something that we didn't expect at all. They sure are amazing people, and ever since Kristine got married to Justan, I have always felt like Justan's parents are my family too.

We took turns opening the presents, and I was always itching for my turn.

This one is from my mom-in-law. I still don't know where to put it so its temporarily just sitting on top of the fridge (I hope Brandon's mom won't get to read post.) I suck at decorating and I'm so good at procrastinating to decorate.

I normally don't do the peace sign because it kinda annoys me that everybody does it especially when they do it in every picture. So this is probably the only peace sign picture I have and will ever have. Anyway, this was the last bag I opened because I wanted to save the best for last.

The fat guy in the funny red suit was so good to me this Christmas.

I'm inlove with my new baby.

Considering that it was a winter month and we had a good amount of snow 3 days earlier, Christmas morning was unbelievably beautiful in Wright that I honestly didn't care for a white Christmas.

To close this post, I'll leave you with a pic of my adorable nephew. I swear I couldn't get enough of this teeny-tiny guy. Meet my new favorite boy, Gavin!

Holiday Cooking Failure Part 2

Originally posted on my Friendster blog, January 2, 2009 at 11:56 am

As you can read in my previous post, I failed to understand a direction in a recipe which resulted to additional 3 hours of baking the chicken in the oven. I guess that wasn't enough lesson for me to be careful next time because "ooops! I did it again" as Britney Spears says. But this time, it was a different case...and worse. You may call me dumb, stupid, careless, or whatever you please but I'll still blog about it anyway.

It's a Filipino tradition to eat dinner at 12 am of December 31, the very first hour of New Year. I didn't do it last year which was my first New Year in the US but decided to start doing it again beginning this year with my husband and will make it a family tradition when we have a kid/kids already. So at about 9 pm on December 31, I began cooking. Again, I made more than enough for 2 persons to eat because I wanted leftovers for the next couple of days. I made pineapple ham, teriyaki chicken, brownies, and pansit(an Asian noodle that is present in every Filipino household during special occasions because according to Filipino and Chinese superstition, it represents long life. Yea, I'm kinda superstitious.) I wanted to make a sweet potato casserole too but didn't have enough time, it was almost 12 am when I was done cooking the last recipe. Everything came out great except for the ham. I cooked it according to the recipe direction but didn't like the result. The meat wasn't very tender. I like my ham to almost fall apart when I slice it. That night neither I nor my hubby ate the ham though he tried a slice. I hate throwing food so I just let the ham sit in the fridge until I figured out later what to do with it.

Yesterday all other food I cooked for the New Year was almost gone. At night after dinner, I decided to slowcook the ham. I remembered that on Thanksgiving, I cooked my ham in the slowcooker at low temperature for 10 hours and the result was perfect that my husband devoured it. It was a fully-cooked ham and this one I got for New Year is smoked. I figured that maybe a smoked ham needs longer cooking time than a fully-cooked ham. So I set it to 15 hours at low. Calculating the time, it would be done in the morning the next day (which is today.) So, I woke up at 9 this morning and immediately checked the slowcooker on the counter. It still had 1 minute and 3o+ seconds left. But when I checked the ham, this is what greeted me:

That's why it's important to cook more than one recipe

Before I decided to cook it "better".

Lost in Translation on Christmas

Originally posted on my Friendster blog, December 25, 2008 at 11:26 pm

Today is Christmas, yay! I love Christmases. So I prepared some food for me and Brandon earlier today for our Christmas dinner. Since there's only 2 of us, I only made a cake, 2 loaves of bread, and roasted whole chicken. Actually this was even too much for us but I wanted to have some Christmas leftovers the next day. I wanted the chicken to be fresh from the oven by the time we start eating so I made the pineapple upside-down cake first at about 2 o'clock. The cake turned out really yummy, and it also looked pretty. After the cake was done in a little over an hour, I prepared the loaves of pumpkin bread. I haven't tasted them yet but Brandon has and he told me that they're really good. But the problem is, the center of both loaves collapsed haha. They probably weren't done yet when I decided to take them out of the oven but the sides were already very brown, I was worried about burning them. Maybe I'm just not lucky at making anything that has pumpkin because the same thing also happened to the pumpkin pies I made on Thanksgiving and Halloween. Anyways, after the bread, I put the 3-pound chicken in the oven for roasting after marinating it with some spices for 30 minutes. I set the baking time to 1 hour and 15 minutes because that's what the recipe says. After waiting that long, I checked the chicken to see if it was done or if it needed to be cooked a little longer. It was still very raw and didn't look like it had been in the oven for more than an hour. So I set the timer again, this time to 1 hour and 45 minutes. When the timer went off, the result was the same, the chicken was still not cooked. In fact, it was still white. I was wondering what was wrong. This wasn't my first time to bake, and I have cooked meat in the oven many times before. Even before I started cooking the chicken, my guts told me that I misunderstood a direction in the recipe but just ignored it. It was already 8 o'clock and both Brandon and I were already starving so I decided to show the recipe to my husband and read the directions to him.

Me: The first direction says, preheat the oven at 350 deg. F. Then the 3rd direction says bake the chicken to a minimum internal temperature of 180 deg. F. Which temperature should have I baked the chicken at? 350 degrees or 180 degrees?

Brandon: The 350 degrees is the baking temperature and the chicken is done if it's meat temperature is 180 degrees. Don't tell me you've been baking the chicken at 180. It's only a warming temperature.

So yea, I was just warming the chicken the entire time. I haven't in my entire life used a cooking thermometer so I didn't know that 180 degrees was for the meat temperature. Of all the recipes I've used, this is the only one I misunderstood (well, by far haha). The cooking directions in most recipes say "bake at ___ (temperature follows)", so I figured 180 was the baking temperature. I baked the chicken again for another hour, this time at the right temperature :D. This is the longest time I've cooked something in the oven...4 hours total man! We planned to eat dinner at 6 but we ended up doing it at 9:15. Well, at least it's still not too late. Good thing I started preparing for dinner very early. But the chicken came out very juicy and tasty, so I guess it was worth the long wait.

The chicken that took 4 hours to cook, LOL

num-num!

Merry Christmas!