At Texas Roadhouse in Greeley

Then we went over to our friends Matt and Jamie’s house to play some Texas Hold-Em poker (a very Texas night for some reason) and ring in the new year. We played tournament style which takes way too long for my patience, but is fun for a night counting down the hours, minutes and seconds to the new year.

After about three hours of playing everyone starts getting restless and not paying much attention to the game and instead starts telling jokes and messing around.

Me and Hailee playing around

To add a little spice to the night, Britton and I had  decided beforehand to play a practical joke. We found some “untearable toilet paper” at the dollar store the other day. Britton inconspicuously traded out the regular paper in the bathroom for the un-tearable kind. We thought about removing all the regular toilet paper under the bathroom sink, but thought that might be too mean, so he just removed and replaced the roll on the spring.

After about 2 hours of playing poker, finally someone went to the bathroom. Britton and I waited to see what would happen. Finally, our friend Erin came out and said “Matt and Jamie, what IS this stuff? It’s just about impossible to tear. Are you trying to re-use your toilet paper?” They were mortified and said, “We just bought it at Wal-Mart the other day.” Britton and I just laughed along with everyone else, and no one knew it was us for the longest time until we came clean. We were just shocked that Erin was actually able to pry it apart and even used it!! That takes some doing. It was pretty hilarious.

Erin with the TP around her neck

Finally as we were nearing midnight only Britton, Erin and I remained as the last three in the poker tournament. We decided to call it and Britton and I took first, and she took second. So we walked away with $60! Not too shabby!

This was the final table. I had the most chips (on the right)! Yay

Erin, Jamie and Me- Making the Money-haha

It was a fun night out with friends and a great start to the new year. We hope everyone has a wonderful and prosperous 2012!

Friday we baked cookies all day long. Then Saturday we spent the evening with Britton’s family. On Sunday we went over to my grandma’s for Christmas dinner. And on Monday we took Britton’s niece and nephew out to lunch and to pick out a present of their choice. So while it was nice to sleep in, we didn’t really get much of a break otherwise. The time went by rather quickly and 2012 is rapidly approaching as well. We hope you all had a nice holiday with friends and family.  Britton and I are looking forward to 2012 and our next trip to Puerto Rico which will be at the mid to end of January.

Thanksgiving 2011 at Grandma’s house

Then we went over to Britton’s family’s house for another meal. So we were highly stuffed.

While we are happy to have a four-day weekend, in some ways we are ready to get back to the normal work week for a few reasons. 1) My car broke down when I was out doing inspections on Wednesday. We had to get it towed from Fort Lupton back to Greeley. Because of the holiday they won’t even look at it until Monday. That makes me a little anxious. And 2) Britton is on-call this whole weekend, so on Monday he’ll get to turn the pager over to someone else.

Other than that, we’ve been enjoying the time off and the opportunity to think about our lives and be thankful for all we have. We’ve accomplished so much this year! It’s amazing. We are so thankful. Since the holidays are about bringing family together, it also made me remember how much I miss my dad. Holidays are hard like that. Sometimes in a weird way, I am happy I still have such strong feelings about my dad inside me though. It makes me feel like he is still here, somehow.

We’ve taken a couple of walks and even walked down inside the Greeley ditch (since it is empty this time of year) to stay out of the crazy wind. It’s like finding a new world to explore down there. Old ditched (literally) rusted bicycles, tree branches and crawdads line the bottom. We avoided Black Friday like the Black Plague and stayed inside and made turkey sandwiches, tea and brownies. We played Wii Frisbee golf, bowling, and the airplane game on Wii Sports Resort.

This week we also got our medical student who moved into the basement bedroom, but she is with her family this holiday weekend, so we have the house to ourselves. We also got our vacation time approved and are planning on going back to Rincon toward the end of January! We are already making a list of all the things we want to do when we are there!

Anyhow, that’s what we’ve been up to lately -the highs and the lows. Happy Thanksgiving!

A nice spread of avocado and other snacks!

The Avocado Diva brought all of these avocados straight from small-scale farms in California. We learned all about different types of avocados including such varieties as Zutano, Bacon, Pinkerton, and the most famous: Haas. The type we were most impressed by was the Mexicola! According to the Avocado Diva, Brenda, this is the original wild Mexican avocado. It looks sort of like a fig or a plum and the skin is edible! The skin has a sort of nutty flavor to it. This is also the variety that you can use the licorice smelling leaves in iced tea. What’s more, is unlike most of the hybridized varieties, this one you can grow true to form from the seed. So we are going to try and sprout some here and maybe in PR too!

The small black, smooth-skinned Mexicola Avocado in comparison with another variety

We bought a variety box of them and are looking forward to enjoying our gourmet avocados for the next couple of weeks! Yay! We did find two or three avocado trees on our property in Rincon, so this makes us all the more excited to eat off our land! We learned today that there are avocados that mature at different seasons. Some are summer varieties and some are winter while others are year-round producers. We would love to be able to eat these all year round!

Holding a small Mexicola next to our box of goodies

Recruiting for the cooking class at Milliken’s Beef and Bean Day

Even before this new assignment at work, I’ve always been interested in nutrition and good food. But I’ve never been much for the cooking side of things. Eventhough I know that people who cook more at home tend to be healthier than those who eat out, I still just never got that into cooking.I love to eat good, whole, homemade, delicious and nutritious food, but always thought of cooking as a pain and only something Britton and I had time to do on the weekends. The work week usually meant (and sometimes still means) a quick throw-together of pasta or rice, frozen vegetables and fish or chicken.

It is still hard to fit in time to cook, but ever since I have been coordinating and collaborating to help facilitate a program called “Cooking Matters” in Milliken I’ve been intrigued with trying a few new things. In Cooking Matters we have a nutrition professor from CSU (Fort Collins) as well as another health educator helping to teach the course which is primarily geared at the underserved populations.

Everyone always has their usual bag of tricks when it comes to preparing food (like our evening throw-togethers), so a healthy cooking class helps to open your eyes to the wonders of all sorts of foods.

Cumin-Would be nice to grow in the garden -I wonder if it would do well in PR

In fact, I think I’ve found my new favorite spice: cumin! I’ve never even paid much attention to it until in the class we made hummus -which is just basically pureed garbanzo beans, garlic, salt and cumin -so easy! And the cumin makes all the difference! It is also what makes Mexican food so delicious. Not only that, but this spice, like many spices boasts health benefits as well such as being a good source of iron, helping with digestion, and even cancer prevention!

Anyhow, we had a bout of cold, rainy weather this week and weekend, so for fun, we stayed in and cooked up a bunch of food. Some of these included:

Hummus with pita chips
Pearl Barley and vegetable chicken soup
Chai tea
Enchilada lasagna -slice up whole grain tortillas into strips about the size of lasagna noodles -do not cook! In a cooking pan sautee chicken, add enchilada sauce, can of tomatoes, lots of spices like cumin and oregano, sliced bell peppers (and jalapenos if you like it hot), black olives, etc. Put this mixture on top of the strips of tortillas in a large dish (13×9) and layer as you would lasagna. Add shredded cheese and bake in the oven for about 30 minutes at 350 degrees. Uncover for another ten if you like the cheese browned. Let sit for a bit. Add fat free greek yogurt or sour cream if desired on top.
Apple Crisp -Made with about 5 fresh apples with the skin still on sliced to about an 1/8 inch. Pumpkin pie spices (ginger, nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon), brown sugar and a tiny bit of flour. For the topping (the crisp): A little butter, brown sugar, quick oats, flour and more spices mixed together and put on top. Then bake in the  350 degree oven for about 30-45 minutes.

Slice of Carrot Cake!

Betty Crocker’s Homemade Carrot Cake -Made with 3 cups or about 8 freshly grated carrots and applesauce in a 1 to 1 complete exchange of the oil and decreased the sugar from 2 cups to 1 1/2 cups. Also added nutmeg, ginger, and cloves in addition to the cinnamon that was called for. Added chopped walnuts. And made the cream cheese frosting Betty Crocker called for (but made with lower fat neufchatel cheese). This was SOO good. And not too terrible nutrition wise!

Yum! Lasagna

Then last night we cooked up traditional lasagana only we used ground turkey in place of beef and added a lot of vegetables.

Cooking is still a pain with all the prep work of chopping and dicing, recipe reading and substituting and of course the cleaning up afterward, but the results are sooo delicious and so much better than any pre-processed options out there.

So while I started out as the reluctant coordinator of this cooking class, I am definitely turning into a convert! Plus I’ve been able to meet all sorts of nice people in the class as well. I would suggest to anyone who has “food issues” -like being overweight, picky, or a fast-food fiend that the best help is a cooking class! Very practical and fun! You control what is in your food and therefore what goes into your body. It is a freeing feeling. Cooking matters! It really does!

Littlefoot the green egg layer

So…one day we went out and found a very obviously green egg! They are so cool. Now you know that the Dr. Seuss story wasn’t completely made up! We CAN have green eggs and ham!

The egg shell color is determined by the breed of chicken. A brown egg or green egg is no more (or less) healthy than a white egg. What makes an egg healthier is what the chickens eat. Because white eggs are from the industry standard Leghorn (like Omeleto) they are often considered less healthy than brown eggs that are from heritage breeds – like our barred rock. But really, it’s about their diet. On the outside the shells may have a different color, but inside the color only changes if they have a more varied diet such as being on pasture eating bugs, green grasses and the occasional mouse. If you want to see the inside difference between a conventional store-bought egg and our backyard hens’ eggs, you can see it here.

Otherwise, here’s the outside cool variety of colored shells.

Variety Pack: carton of eggs including the green eggs and speckled eggs