And how was your weekend?

Happy Tuesday, my friends! Did you have a nice weekend? We had a rather busy one.

We were supposed to be going to a classical concert outside San Jose State University on Friday night but I was exhausted and incredibly sore after a new routine at the gym and three hours of baking, so we joined the neighbours for some wine and hot tubbing instead. It was a wonderful way to spend a Friday night and my
muscles were very grateful!



Saturday morning we were off to the Guglielmo Winery nearby for their quarterly bottle your own wine event. This is a great wee event where they blend up their excess wine and sell it off for $7 a bottle, and if you buy a case you get free access to the buffet of sausage, garlic bread, cured meats, cheeses and baguette.

The wine can be a bit hit and miss depending on the blend, and sadly this was not one of the better ones. It's still better than a lot of the crap you can get for the money in the supermarket so we got a case to put by for when Greeny & Nadine get here next month (5 weeks today to be precise - WOOHOOOOOO!!!)




Once we were home we had a short space of time to frost the mountain of mini cupcakes I had made the previous day to take to John & Teo's housewarming party. Luckily my handsome assistant, aka the Hubby, took care of the frosting duties while I was busy clearing up and working out how to successfully transport 70 mini cupcakes on a train. The answer? Carefully!!!

The featured cupcake this weekend was the butterscotch with salted caramel frosting, and everyone appeared to enjoy them. They might even be rivalling my chocolate chip cookies and my Oreo truffles for the top spot in my friends' affections!!

Fun times were had at the party, including a thorough testing of John's new BB gun. No people or animals were injured during these tests, but a Diet Coke can was disintegrated and a broken garden chair was, well, destroyed further!

Just another Saturday night in sunny California!!











After a brief hangover on Sunday I surprised everyone, including myself, by making it to the gym - more for a muscle stretch than a real workout it, but I felt better for at least trying.



In the evening we finally made it to one of the free classical concerts that Symphony Silicon Valley and San Jose State University put on every summer. We really enjoyed the ones we went to last year with Eric and Rose and were looking forward to them again this year, but unfortunately we managed to miss all but the final one on Sunday :-(

We spent a lovely hour or so listening to the music in the sunshine and enjoying a glass of wine and some leftover cupcakes. Oh yeah, and some free ice cream! :-)

Well, I'm off to the gym now. I have a fun afternoon of tidying out my shoe closet to look forward to - but don't worry, I'm not getting rid of any of my babies!! We just ran out of room so we got some more shelves to help make them more comfortable :-) If you behave yourselves I might show you some pics when I'm done ......!!

Laters .... x

Dish of the Day

Good morning!! How are you all today? Just wanted to stop by and tell you about the rather tasty snapper I made for dinner last night! Snapper with zucchini and tomatoes and orzo, to give it its full title.

As I mentioned yesterday, i haven't really cooked fish before - especially without Hubby at my back to monitor my progress! But he was upstairs slaying dragons or something so I was left to my own devices, armed only with Nadine's earlier advice to poke one bit of fish to see if it was ready then give Hubby the intact portion (cheers, hon!!)

It became clear towards the end of cooking time that I hadn't fully prepared for this recipe so I was somewhat running around at the last minute, but I was fairly pleased with the end result.

The fish was a little overdone, but that was down to my panic cooking and then having to spend a wee bit longer keeping warm in the oven than it should. The pine nuts in the orzo were a little under-toasted, but that's because i'm an idiot and didn't notice until two minutes before serving that they needed toasted! I thought it might have been a little lacking in flavour, but that's probably because I used dried herbs instead of fresh and may not have used enough.

Even so, Hubby proclaimed it to be delicious and of restaurant quality!! Yeah, right!! I think he may have been a little generous with his praise, but i'll take what I can get - thanks Hubby!! Definitely one to transfer into my recipe notebook! Thanks again to Cooking Light for their inspiration! For anyone who cares, here are the recipes - snapper with zucchini & tomato with parsley orzo

In other news, my parcel from pinupgirlclothing.com arrived and I was very disappointed to find the dress of joy I had ordered was too small *sob* Now trying to decide if it is something I will fit into once my latest goal is reached or if I should send it back for a bigger size. FYI, here is the dress in question ... pinupgirlclothing.com

There will be no kitchen adventures tonight as it is Wednesday, therefore eating out night. I'll let you know if we have anything noteworthy. Today's challenges shall be limited to getting my ass to the gym (third time lucky this week?) and clearing up the paperwork shitstorm that appears to have accumulated in the corner - fun times!!

Laters .... x

Sausage-tastic!

As promised yesterday, last night I had another go at making sausage risotto, and I am pleased to report that it was (mostly) a success!! Hurrah!!

My first attempt had been a bit of a disaster and I wasn't too sure why. Hubby and I both agreed that the flavour was fantastic but the texture was mega stodgy. For some reason I ended up having to use a hell of a lot more liquid than the recipe called for and I had to cook it a lot longer too. It was all rather disappointing, but I knew it was something I wanted to try again.

I had decided that perhaps my stock wasn't hot enough when I was adding it last time (the recipe calls for it to be simmering but not boiling and I think I may have been a little cautious) so I decided to focus on that this time. 

A risotto is quite a tedious thing to make as it requires constant stirring for about half an hour or so, and I was glad of my newly developed biceps from my recent adventures at the gym!

I got to the end of my stock about 5 minutes before the end of the half hour so I ended up putting about another half cup in, but still a lot less than last time!! Also, the rice wasn't quite done so I gave it another 5 minutes before serving, but again this was way less than last time.

End result? Not bloody bad! I jumped the gun a bit taking the rice off as some of it was still a wee bit underdone, but it was edible! It was also a bit on the salty side as we had used a normal stock cube plus one of Hubby's homemade chicken stock cubes, and my extra half cup of liquid was also stock (I'm fairly sure last time I just used extra water) But these are both things that can be easily fixed for next time!

If you are interested at all here is the recipe I used, once again from my beloved Cooking Light magazine! sausage & spinach risotto I halved the recipe so it would just serve two, but I still used two sausages as no-one should ever have to share a sausage! I also threw in a handful of peas because everything tastes better with peas! :-)

I really enjoyed getting back in to the kitchen and cooking something fun, and cant wait to try some more new stuff! Tonight I'm going to cook snapper for the first time so I'm a little nervous - I'm not very good with fish and usually leave it for the Hubby to cook, but I suppose id better learn at some point! I'll let you know how that goes ......

Well, now I'm off to hover by the window waiting for the FedEx man to deliver my fabulous new dress from pinupgirlclothing.com - my new favourite website - and if he doesn't arrive too late I may even get to the gym, as my fabulous new dress will need a fabulous flatter stomach to do it justice!! (or maybe some Spanx instead ........)

Laters ....!! x

Best. Anniversary. Ever.

This weekend Hubby and I celebrated our 11th wedding anniversary. Normally we would go somewhere for a nice meal but we wanted to do something a bit special this year so we booked ourselves into the Four Seasons hotel in Palo Alto on Friday night. We had eaten there once before and the meal was exquisite, but it is one of the places that you have to drive to so we had wanted a good excuse to go back and stay over so Peter could enjoy the wonderful wine and not have to worry about getting us home!


As that hotel mainly caters to business guests Friday night is the quietest night of the week, and the restaurant was practically empty. Friday night is also when they run their half price wine offer, so we were able to get a rather divine pinot noir that would normally be way out of our price range!! :-)



The meal was, once again, exquisite! I cant remember word for word what I had to eat as the titles were quite fancy, but essentially I had a chilled tomato soup with mini croutons and some kind of cream dolloped in the middle, followed by snapper with sun dried tomatoes, marsala soaked raisins and almond couscous (this is actually what I had the first time we ate there so I already knew it would be good!) Now, to clarify just how good this meal was, I hate sun dried tomatoes and I have never voluntarily eaten a raisin in my life, but I cleared the plate and it was delicious!!!










For dessert we both had the doughnut balls which came with chocolate Guinness sauce and salted caramel sauce for dipping. O.M.G!!! We had to restrain ourselves from drinking the rest of the sauces when we had run out of doughnuts!!

We finished our wonderful evening with a couple of drinks at the bar then retired to our room. It was only one of the basic rooms, but it was still really nice!! One wall was all floor to ceiling windows with views over the San Francisco bay and ...... errrr ....... Ikea.

Yep, they really are the same all over the world!!

We had a nice lazy morning on Saturday reading the paper in bed, then a wonderful brunch back in the restaurant (crab cake with poached duck egg and Parmesan creamed spinach - yum!) then Hubby checked into the spa for a nice long massage. Massages aren't really my thing, but I enjoyed having the room to myself while I caught up with my magazines.




We were home in time to catch up with some friends who were having a wee party at the pool in our complex and spent a nice hour or two drinking and lazing in the sun.

When dinner time rolled around we figured it would be near impossible to find somewhere nearby that would be able to seat all 10 of us so we decided to order an obscene amount of ribs from our local barbecue restaurant and take them back to ours. It wasn't pretty. It wasn't polite. We all stood around our kitchen island like savages and devoured the meat, and dear God it was good!!

!

Quote of the night has to go to John, the only other guy there, who turned to Hubby after he'd had his fill and announced that it was now time to fight for the women!

Once everyone had digested their meal most people went off for some late night hot tubbing, but I was too tired so enjoyed a quiet hour or so sipping prosecco and listening to 50s/60s music - bliss!


Sunday was a bit of a return to normal as Hubby had to do some work and we had to go grocery shopping (boooooo!!) but we did manage to finish off our anniversary weekend in style with some more bubbles!!

So, like I said - best anniversary ever!! Thank you, Hubby, for yet another awesome year of marriage, and a wonderful weekend of celebration! How on earth are we going to top that next year?!?!?!

LOVE YOU!!! xxx

Hello!! It's me again!!

I know, I know!! It's been, like, forever since my last post! Well, actually it was May, but it feels like forever! How have you all been? Things have been pretty quiet chez Kavanagh, hence my radio silence. 

The most exciting news from the last couple of months has been the awesome progress on my weight loss challenge! I had managed to lose about 4lbs earlier in the year but was really struggling to shift any more, so I decided to make the most of Hubby's two and a half week business trip last month and made myself huge pots of healthy bean soup and veggie bean rice to live on while he was away - fortunately they are two of my favorite meals anyway so it was quite easy to stick to them. 

I also spent an obscene amount of time in the gym, but the result was another 6lbs off so by the time Hubby came home I was back to 170lbs, the weight I was when we moved to America - hurrah!!! Ive managed to lose another 6lbs this month which pretty much puts me back at my happy size - more hurrahs!! I don't really want to lose much more weight, but I would like to improve my current shape so I will be spending even more obscene amounts of time at the gym trying to convert some of this lard to muscle. *groan*

But at least I wont have to "diet" anymore and I can get back to my cooking which I am really looking forward to, and will give us more stuff to chat about again - yet another hurrah!! First up, tonight we're going to have another bash at a sausage and spinach risotto I tried a while back - I don't think I told you about the first attempt as it was ... well ... a bit shit! I'll let you know how that goes!

Now, please don't be worrying that I'm going to disappear again for months!! There's way too much exciting stuff happening that I'll just have to tell you about!! Curious? Well, here's a little teaser of what to look forward to:

1) Hubby and I will be doing a cheeky wee road trip at the end of the month, which will include a few nights in Vegas catching up with Hubby's sister!!

2) In a mere 6 weeks we will have our first visitors from Scotland, which we are ridiculously excited about!!!

Oh, and I'm totally going to have to show you all the pretty new dresses I've bought to celebrate my return to fabulousness!!! 

Well, that should do for now. Stay tuned for a little rundown of our anniversary weekend coming up shortly, and of course, tomorrow's exciting risotto update ......

x

Getting my crafty on :-)

Yesterday I had a bash at making jewellery. I love unusual jewellery, and inspired by my endless hours of trawling through my beloved etsy.com, I wondered if I might be able to make my own pretty things.


There is a wonderful crafty emporium nearby called Michael's which I discovered when I was looking for baking accessories, and they have a large selection of beads and stuff. I popped in for a quick browse and before I knew it, an hour had passed and I had a basket full of twinkly beads! After a quick reassessment (and reality check) I narrowed the basket down to the makings of two bracelets, and this is what I made .....
 

 
First up is this little beauty. Now, I know it's nothing fancy or complicated, but this is something I would pay real money for in a shop so I am very pleased with myself!! And I even have enough beads left to make some matching earrings at some point - win!!







I'm going to file my second piece under Work In Progress as i only had a loose plan in the shop and it didn't quite pan out. I love the little felt flowers, and I think they look very pretty on the lace, so my new plan is to go back and get some more flowers in different colours and have a continuous band all the way round. I'll let you know how that goes.




So, all in all, I am rather pleased with my first foray into jewellery making!! You never know - you might even see me selling on Etsy one day .......?!?!?!?!

smug.com

I am feeling rather pleased with myself tonight! Finally, after several months of negligence, I started my guitar practise again - hurrah!! Granted, I am back to square one again, but I have had a lovely afternoon plucking away and trying to make recognisable notes :-) Hopefully this time I can actually make some progress ....

My second reason for celebration is that I cooked myself dinner! Well, not so much that I cooked, but more because Hubby called last minute to say he was going out with some colleagues for dinner, and I still cooked!!

Anyone who knows me knows that when left to fend for myself I generally resort to takeaways, frozen pizza, or Crunchy Nut Cornflakes - yum! I did consider popping round to Chipotle after he phoned, but I had already defrosted the pork for the pesto and mozzarella stuffed chops I had been planning, so I decided to have a go anyway.

Well, after my last couple of fails (I didn't even bother reporting Thursday's chicken satay fail - so bland!) I am delighted to report that tonight was a success!!

A couple of tweaks to make for next time:

1. Use thicker chops as they were a bit tricky to slit open to stuff. One was fine but the other was less stuffed and more strategically packed to stop the filling escaping through the many holes ...
2. More seasoning required in the coating 

But all in all they were bloody delicious - so much so that I ate the second one too!!

Cooking win = diet fail! Whoops ....... :-)
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