Food :) Oh How I Love Thee! Oh, and a Bit of Hockey

So I'm back, at leas for a bit. I did some cooking over the weekend and made an absolutely amazing recipe that you all need to try.

Baked Crispy Coconut Chicken from Six Sisters' Stuff

Oh my goodness were they fabulous. Great spices, nice juicy chicken strips with a crispy crust and a lovely simple apricot dipping sauce to go along with it. Definitely something I'll be making again.

I didn't so much do the photography thing this weekend (hence me taking picture from the lovely sites I got the recipes from). I ran out of salsa last week. It was a sad day, but it did mean I got to whip up this recipe again (because seriously, why by salsa when you can make your own just the way you like it?). The recipe is so simple! My adapted recipe includes, a can of tomatoes, a big can of Rotel (I used a 28oz. can), half a lime, 2 cloves of garlic, a small chopped onion, 1/2 teaspoon sugar, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon cumin and about 1/4 cup fresh cilantro. Stick it in the blender and you're set :)

Photo adapted from here.

Saturday I went to the UW Women's Hockey game with some friends. It was pretty darn fun. Every year they try to "fill the bowl" and charge $1 for a ticket (students are free) as well as encourage people to bring a nonperishable food item to donate in addition, one of the law offices in town donated $1 for every person who attended. There were 12,402 people in attendance, it was great :) Not a bad way to spend a Saturday night.

I hope you all enjoyed your weekend!

Christmas Break Wrap-up and Happy Epiphany!

I like this picture. It does a pretty good job of summing up my family. We're a very happy crew for the most part (see the genuine smile on my dad's face :) with a lot of fun thrown in (see my brother's face, not quite sure what emotion I'd put with it, but he tends to make this face a lot).

Christmas was wonderful. The week following Christmas was wonderful. New Year's Day and Eve were wonderful. So all in all, well it was a wonderful break and holiday :)

We like our traditions at my parent's house, but we are always up for new adventures. Chestnuts (as you can see above) was one of this year's exciting new adventures. Did you know it's quite the complicated process to actually "roast chestnuts"? Head over to The Art of Manliness (I know, it cracks me up too) to see how it's done. There are knives, fire and whole lot of shakin' going on :) At my house we didn't really have the patience to hold the campfire popcorn shaker over the fire for 25 minutes, so we cheated a bit and stuck them in a rotating popcorn maker on the counter instead. Maybe there's a secret recipe that makes chestnuts amazingly delicious, if so, we didn't have it. They were alright, very interesting, glad I've done it, don't really feel the desire to do it again.

We all (me, my parents, my 2 brothers, my sister and my brother-in-law) made the road trip out to see my sister in Lincoln, Nebraska on New Year's Day. She's a School Sister of Christ the King and they had a lovely Mass to start out the day and then all of the families of the School Sisters spend the day eating and playing games and catching up. It's such a joyous occasion and they are all such beautiful witnesses of Christ's love and joy.

I hope you all enjoyed your Christmas and New Year's. Happy Epiphany! I do love epiphany, by the way. We had a lovely tradition when I was growing up where we'd each get to be "king" for about 10 minutes. We had 10 minutes of ordering people around, being fanned, having people bring us food, whatever we wanted. My brothers tended to make us all play Nintendo, I suppose whatever makes you happy. Enjoy the celebration, and the weekend!