GOOD EVENING!

Hello World.
Quick update.
My dad came by for a visit this afternoon. I love having company, especially family. We sat around showed him our Cape Hatteras pictures, had pizza for dinner and sat around some more. Made for a great afternoon.
Phil has been very busy with school the past two weeks. He did take a break for his birthday last Thursday though and we went to the movies. We hadn't been to a movie in a while, probably since the 4th of July, and that was to the dollar theater, so the $20 just to get in and the $6 for a SMALL popcorn was quite a shocker. Dollar theater from now on!
It finally rained here in the desert. Oh wait we live in North Carolina, honestly, it was getting to the point where one could not tell the difference. Very thankful for the rain and the cooler weather. Its still strange to me that it is so warm still, and nearly October.


~Christie

Bakers Log

10:10 pm Monday September 20

There always seems to be that period of time when starting a new job, that no matter how well I do I always feel like i didn't do it fast enough, or nice enough, or delicious enough. Then there are the days when things are undeniably bad. Those days, when on your way home from work you think about dropping your resume off at a couple of places, just so you don't have to face your mistakes again the next day. Thankfully I've only had a few of those day, and lately i leave work with a good feeling rather than an I'm not really sure how that went feeling.
Here's a little insight into what I get to work with.
Things I have been doing at work the past few weeks:

Tempering Chocolate using the tabling method (playing with puddles of chocolate on my work bench)

turning this

To this

To This! Ok... so i've never actually made anything like this, but i could if i wanted to, using my tempered chocolate

Making bread (feeding the dough baby)

Turning something like this...

To this

To something like this... sure, i will try to get some pictures of things that I actually made myself...

Cookies (the past couple of weeks i have been making batches of cookies that i could literally drown in)

I think you all know what cookies look like, plus its past my bed time.

Over and out

Nothing new

This week I have Wednesday off of work. How random. It has been a lovely day thus far i must admit.  Its the same temperature outside right now as it is inside, perhaps a little warmer outside, but i've got the screen door open and the ceiling fan on. I love having the windows open.  I knew weather would be different down here in North Carolina, but yesterday on my jog i was downright confused as to what was going on. There were leaves falling all along the path i was on. Large, brown, dried out and perfectly crunchy; they smelled perfectly of fall as I crushed them under my feet. There was just one thing that was not making sense to me. I was not wearing a cute plad shirt, jeans, and my fall boots to keep out the slight but wonderful chill in the air. (I realize that this is not jogging attire anyway, but stick with me here.) I was wearing a tank top and shorts, because there was no chill. In fact what breeze there was, was very welcome because it was 94 degrees without a cloud in the sky!
Please note that I am not complaining, how could i possibly. I am merely expressing the fact that even though I could be just about to experience the most wonderful fall season of my life, a piece of me still misses the short but sweet Minnesota version.

Nothing new to report, because if you know me well at all you know that the fact that I fell on the concrete in the parking lot in front of our apartment  on Saturday and bashed my right elbow so hard that today (Wednesday) it is still slightly swollen and less than slightly black and blue, is not a shocking story. This is just another page in the chapter of small injuries that i have accrued over the years. Really though, I'm fine. It still works. The popping really doesn't concern me yet. Good news though, if it should happen to concern me, i got my health care package from work yesterday! Three Cheers for 90 days of a steady job that i enjoy and health insurance!!!
Cheer! Cheer! Cheer!

Enjoy the weather wherever you are!
~Christie

Anniversary/ Birthday/ Labor Day

As I sit here amidst the mess that is well known as the return home from vacation, I have to smile, because I know that the trip was well worth the 4 loads of laundry and the pint of sand that we will never be able to get out of our living room carpet ( at least until we get a vacuum cleaner that doesn't BLOW, literally.), but mostly I have to smile because I know that it will take at least another week for all of this laundry to get put away. My own fault, I am aware, this is just how things are.
Taking us all back for a moment, I am proud to say that our last couple of dinners (not disregarding the lovely beach bonfire hot-dog and Cheeto's with a juice box meals) have been very successful, apparently all the motivation i needed to change things was to wine before the entire Blogging world about my own laziness, and ta da! instant accountability! and there was also the dread of actually having to go to McDonald's again for a balanced meal.

And now a recap of our mini Anniversary/ Birthday/ Labor Day vacation.
One thing to note as i recount this adventure is the fact that 0% planning on either of our behalfs, aside from our final destination, went into this weekend trip... 0%

I had to work on Saturday morning. Thus the 1 single plan that we had was to leave as soon as we could after I got home from work so that we could maybe make it to our campsite before the sun set. I got home at 2:15 pm and we left for Cape Hatteras for the 1st time at about 3:20 pm. We forgot a couple things, like our beach chairs, so we turned around and left for Cape Hatteras for the 2nd time at 3:40 pm. We had a cooler in our backseat with an already melting bag of ice in it, but no groceries. We "planned" on picking some up when we got closer to our destination. This is all fine and well, but we never really got around to making a list of what we wanted to bring along to eat. This is what we ended up with. Hot Dogs, Buns, Ketchup, Juice Boxes, Smores things, Plates, Paper Plates, Cheeto's, Granola bars, 2 bananas, and Twizzlers. (note that we had failed to pack any kind of device that would allow us to cook the hot dogs  or smores over a fire, and that we had also failed to pack a lighter, which means (unless you are Bear Grylls; although we are big fans of his show, we are indeed not Bear himself) there would also be no fire.) With groceries in tow we arrived at the coast at about 7:30 pm. There is only one main street that spans the length of the peninsula, and there were parts of it that were still under water and sand. The going was slow but it allowed us to really take in the sights all the way down the 1 1/2 hour strip of road. As the sun sank lower in the west our confidence that we would be able to find a campsite before dark sank with it. We ended up missing the street that would take us to the campground that we wanted by about 20 minutes, when we reached the Ferry at the end of the peninsula it was plan B time. We chose to camp at the 1st site we found. After picking up some firewood and a lighter mere moments before the corner store turned out its lights we found ourselves in an ocean view campsite fending off giant gnats and hungry mosquitoes as we struggled to put up our tent in the light of our headlamps. The night ended on the beach under more stars than perhaps either of us has ever seen at one time, with a blazing fire and some well deserved hot dogs and juice boxes. A Birthday unlike any other.

Sunday, we woke up in time to catch the sun rise with our camera. Phil had never been to the beach previously, and thus thought it would be best for him to start his morning off wearing the wool socks he had, had on the night before to fend off the mosquitoes, and his canvas beach shoes. Why did I not stop him from committing such an atrocity? So that I could share the moment with all of you of course.

Phil standing ever so close to the waves in his shoes and wool socks = the next picture.

After the sun was up and hot we drove our Rav 4 right out to the beach and camped out on the sand till lunch time.
 Fried seafood sandwiches and fries! (fried oysters are officially the 2nd item on my list of foods that I just cannot enjoy. The 1st being liver.) We bought boogie boards and battled the waves; a battle which I apparently lost considering the giant raspberry on my leg. I got sun burned and Phil just got tan. Looking out over the water at one point in the afternoon i saw fins two fins, three fins it was a pod of dolphins! They were pretty far out there but they were dolphins for sure. (according to the combined knowledge that Phil and I have of marine biology)  Frozen custard just before sun set, and another fire on the beach completed what I would call a perfect day.

Monday we packed up early and headed back home, but we didn't get very far before we parked the car, got out our beach chairs and spent a couple more hours taking it all in (pictures, as well at literally taking a giant Conch shell that I found). We got home in time to unload the car, build a sand castle with what was left in between the seats and on the floorboards (we didn't really, but we very well could have), and take it to the car wash. Then I cut Phil's hair so that he didn't have to spent the next week washing sand out of his hair which we aptly and affectionately call "the web".

 And there you have it. Anniversary/ Birthday/ Labor Day from the Matta's View.

Earl is blowing away our vacation / The Quest for Culinary Inspiration.

This is where we are/ were planning to visit this weekend.
 (Cape Hatteras)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/02/us/02hurricane.html?src=me

 at least it won't be crowded if we do go!
Perhaps the mountains are calling us this weekend, although it would be a shame to miss the beach all together, having been so close to it the entire summer. I guess that's what happens when you don't have any real income until July and then you fly too and fro across the country with what little income you have, and then once you're back on your feet you buy a car. ...Yep... The new car, however, means that we are able to go somewhere this weekend with pretty high assurance that we will get home again, us and our car. We love the Camry, but she's quite a gamble these days.

I've decided to be more adventurous with the dinners I make. I feel like i'm not living up to my potential in my home kitchen. Its not that i don't make good food, but that the good food that I make is familiar and predictable, and I paid $40,000 (I say "I" here but what I really mean is my wonderful Father, whom I am currently attempting to pay back on a regular basis)  to overcome the familiar and predictable. I didn't just pay the money to get a degree either, I loved what i was learning and I was good at it, I am good at it. SO how come my friends who got their degrees in Accounting and Public Relations have better meals than I do?  I have tried 4 new meals in the past week 1/2. The Sweet Curry-tuna Salad was good, but so much more work than a tuna melt, which is one of our standards. The Thai Spicy Asian Noodles that I made yesterday were good, but I made the soba noodles by hand and cut them too thick, so it was more like eating Asian chicken and dumplings than pasta. I ended up throwing away a good hours work worth of noodles and boiling regular spaghetti to go with the leftovers. (Bummer) The Orange Ginger Chicken Slaw needed to be either orangy or soy saucy, and not both. And lastly (well these are not in any kind of order anyway) I made a killer omelet, which I am very proud of, but the thing is that the recipe was supposed to be a breakfast burrito, and even if i had wrapped 1 or 2 tortillas around the gigantic thing, it was still ordinary.

I'd like to think that if I could afford all the ingredients that I want to work with, that  we would have exciting meals at least 3 times a week. ... its nice to have dreams.
what are we having tonight? Probably tacos or maybe we'll use those McDonald's coups. we have lying around...