Snow Days - How We Cope

We are snowed in for our second day now. Yesterday I was supposed to make Santa Fe stew for dinner, but I forgot to put it in the crock pot until it was too late SO, then I was scrambling to figure out what to make for dinner. I had to get creative...here's what I came up with. First of all, I had seen a segment on the Early Show a couple of weeks ago about recipes that use five ingredients and there was one (that actually only used three ingredients) for oven roasted tomatoes (you can find the recipe here). I had the tomatoes and was able to scrape up a little olive oil so I made those. Here's what they look like before:

Then I had some egg noodles and goat cheese so I cooked up the pasta:

Then I topped it with the tomatoes and some crumbled goat cheese:

I think it would be even better w/some fresh basil or spinach (something green) but given what we had to work with, it was pretty tasty! My husband also whipped up some brownies from scratch and oh. my. word. They're like fudge. It's a recipe he found online (he's going to have to go back and print it and save it because they are SO GOOD) that has a frosting made of butter, cocoa, powdered sugar, and a little honey. AH. MA. ZING.

And so today, I'm trying to figure out how to work those brownies off! I was supposed to run 4.75 miles yesterday but with temps in the single digits and wind chills in the NEGATIVE DOUBLE DIGITS, going outside is just not an option. So, here's my running track for today:

At the bottom of the stairs you can see my trusty foam roller - best thing ever for after running or just anytime to help get rid of sore muscles. At the top of the stairs, you'll see my new shoes I'm trying to break in. I got some FiveFingers. After running 8 miles last Saturday my feet were KILLING me and my cousin has just raved about how she has virtually no pain now that she runs in hers. So I went and bought some. Unfortunately, you can't just take off running in them as much as you were already running in tennis shoes - you have to work up to that because the FiveFingers make you use muscles that your other shoes don't! So far, I really like them!

Anyway, I looked up online and found that 20 flights of stairs = 1 mile so I took off this morning. This is my tally sheet to help keep track of how many round trips I've made (one mark = five round trips).

I'm assuming that when they say 20 flights they mean 20 flights UP, not one up one down. Assuming that is the case, I did a mile and a quarter in about 20 minutes, including one stop to change shoes, and two to get a drink of water.

That's about it I think. Now I'm going to go try and catch up on some reading while Milo is snoozing (and maybe have another brownie) and then I'll have to get back on the stairs later this afternoon. Ugh. I will say though, that we are having lots of fun having the Daddy home for a couple of days in the middle of the week! Hope everyone is staying warm!

I've Been a Busy Bee!

So, right away I'll say that this is either going to be one REALLY long post, or it will be multiple moderately long posts. I've been SUPER busy the last few weeks. I suppose I'll just go in chronological order.

First, just before my last post, Nathan and I had a "date night". I borrowed this idea from a girl at church - she and her husband like to try out new recipes together. So, Nathan and I made some lime chicken tacos and for dessert had homemade cinnamon chips with mango/avocado salsa. Not too bad. Here's what it looked like:



And apparently I'm only going to be able to do one picture per post so I guess I'll move on to the next...