What is motivating me this week?  Vacation.

In 4 more working days.

Can't hardly wait.  And it's highest temperature is supposed to be 70 degrees.  AAhhhh!  

I'm tempted to pledge to do all the cooking for the entire weekend.  

However, the boost in motivation to work out that I was hoping for by watching all these athletes is missing.  Completely.

Maybe I'll find it tomorrow.

Tonight I made some delicious pizza bars.  I promise to post the recipe tomorrow with pictures but I've been making it in-between the commercial breaks of the Olympics.  I know. You're not surprised.

I have to bring snacks for tomorrow nights Bible study and I was sitting at work having no clue what to make.  Then I remembered the pizza bar delights.  They are one my most favorite things my mom makes for dessert.  I quickly searched for the recipe but I couldn't find the 'right' one anywhere.  I briefly debated making it with a brownie recipe but it would be like making your favorite graham cracker cookie crust with regular pastry crust instead.

Not okay.

Also.. this happened.  

I saved it for an entire day before using it.

This is one of my biggest accomplishments to date and you should be proud.



P.S. After the heartbreaking men's gymnastics final yesterday I cheated and looked earlier today to see if the women fell apart as well.  I just needed to prep myself because my poor heart can't handle the drama.  Tonight totally made up for last night.

Thank goodness.

P.P.S Apparently gymnastics isn't my husband's most favorite sport ever because he's been snoring for the last hour.  It adds a fabulous background cadence to the floor routine music.  Simply beautiful.

Let me tell you all the exciting things that we've done this weekend.

We watched diving.

We watched gymnastics (Jordan Wieber.. heartbreaking).

We watched beach volleyball.

We watched swimming.

We watched the ageless Bob Costas (he's 60!).

Oh, and my sister and I finished a huge project.  But more on that later.

Anyways, you get the point.  Our couch has booty marks permanently imprinted.  

It's pretty great.

Actually, today we also deep cleaned our entire main level of our house, went grocery shopping, and went to the pool.  And went on a bike ride.  And folded laundry.  And watched Olympics of course.  However, if we knew that the Olympics were on regular TV all day we probably would have gotten much less accomplished.

P.S. We swim laps at the pool.  Casually because we kind of suck.  We had the next Dara Torres next to us today.  I think she swam 4 laps for every 1 of ours.  And was still going strong as we were leaving.  

After a couple weeks at pathetic attempts to not eat out we've been trying to champion our eat at home cause.  I feel that I should let you on to Cale's best meal ever.  Well, one of the best for sure.

It's super easy and great even when people over.  

Really the secret is some delicious focaccia bread.  Most grocery stores sell it and since we're the least picky people ever, we love every flavor except moldy flavor.  

Cut it in half, top it with your favorite cheese on whatever side you want and then broil both halves with the inside faced up (so you're toasting the inside of the sandwich).  Then we usually fill it with lunch meat and then slice it into pieces and let every person top it with condiments and whatever veggies they want.  Plus, then if there are leftovers, the bread doesn't get soggy from all the additional vegetables.  

It's awesome every time, doesn't heat up the house too badly, and takes about 5 minutes to assemble start to finish.  Perfect summer meal for Cale and Megan.  

My brother's back!  (For only 2 weeks but who's counting.)  I literally ran around work like a madwoman and coerced all my coworkers to come in early to get everything done so I could meet them all for lunch.

I missed that guy so much! 

At 90 degrees we're still running about 30 degrees below Qatar so I guess this is sweet relief.  He had lots to do in his 2 weeks home.  Then he's back until December.  Then he's home, then he's back.. to somewhere else.  

He had to hurry down to Colorado Springs to be in one of his friend's weddings tomorrow but we were able to shove some Panera down our throats and talk about our upcoming vacation.  Actually he really had to hurry down to make it to the tux shop to get fitted before the wedding, then run to rehearsal, then run and find a hotel, etc.  Yikes.  We're just hoping that the pants are long enough and they didn't mess up the waist size to badly.  One can hope.
 
Being will all my siblings brings me back lots of years and whenever my whole family is together and makes my heart happy.  Plus I got an extra best friend now so that's even better.

In other news, how about the Opening Ceremonies.  Our ideal feast was a bit fragmented due to crazy work schedules from both Cale and I, crazy traffic for my sister, and the ceremonies starting as soon as we turned on the T.V. 

We made sure to have bangers and mash, tea, and shortbread cookies.  Except no one likes gravy in this house so we had bangers and mash minus gravy.  And we might have added ketchup and buns to make them brats.  Might have.  But it was still authentic. Trust me.

We also might have fallen asleep before the U.S. made it in to parade of nations.  We were awake for the 'S's' and then next thing I know we were to Great Britain.  Whoops.

By far my favorite part of the ceremony was the dancing gentleman.  Please tell me you remember this.  They were the guys in the top hats?  Hilarious.

And Michael Phelps already lost... Holy smokes.  Talk about pressure for the rest of the games.  The after race interview was heartbreaking.  And I'm hardly even a Phelps fan.  Except I'm an Olympics fan so I guess that by default I'm also an Michael Phelps fan.  Maybe?

Anyways, the rest of my two weeks will be filled with only one thing.  And that's called watching the Olympics.  And working occasionally.  But really that's it.  I love them that much.

Our only hope is that we make it through the games without any major injuries.  To ourselves.  

We tend to get over ambitious and forget that we may not be Olympic caliber athletes.  Perhaps.  I'll keep you updated. 

Hi Grandma!  Are you reading this?  I miss you and I love you!

I do not have nearly enough of my Grandma's recipes.  I need her to send me more.  Anyways, one of my favorite meals that my Grandma makes me is this delightful buttery delicious chicken.  I request it whenever I visit her which is next to never.

Distance and no vacations are hard.  Luckily, my baby sister will have a car at school next year so all we have to do is convince my Grandma that flying to see us all of the time is the best idea ever.  Because it is.

Back to the recipe...

The original recipe calls for chicken breasts but I didn't have any of those so I used chicken tenders instead and it worked out perfectly.  Also, this took about 10 minutes to prepare.  And it's so delicious.  I'm not sure if I've mentioned that yet.  

Yesterday I had the chance to go down to Colorado Springs and help some of the people who lost their homes to the fires.  Our church has regular service projects but they usually fall on Saturdays and since my job is crazy I can hardly ever make it.

P.S. Cale would have come to but he had to work. Boo.

Anyways, we're still having a heat wave out here.  Except I'm not really sure we can call it a heat wave because it's lasted for like 2 months.  Whatever.  

Regardless, we had to wear head to toe body suits and masks and gloves.  And the body suits were meant to keep everything out.  Which also means it doesn't let any air in.  Talk about sweaty.  

We drove to a neighborhood that was completely destroyed by the fire.  Everything was burned to the basement so in most cases we were sifting through 3 stories of house.  Most everything that was left was either ashes, metal, or glass.  Imagine your whole house being reduced to metal, ashes, or glass.  For instance, I found the metal hard drive for a computer but the rest was literally ashes.  It was unreal.  

They had the homeowners come in before hand to kind of map out their houses for us.  For instance, we would know the approximate location of the kitchen or the china cabinet so knew to look for anything remaining from that area.  Or we knew the location of a bedroom so we could sift through for jewelry.  

The particular house we were going through had already been mostly sifted through but they were still missing  a ring.  (I'll save you the tension, we didn't find it.)  But the area of the burned out house also happened to be the crawl space.  We found the metal wires of a fake Christmas tree (that was all that remained), some intact ornaments, and buried underneath a whole pile of ashes we found an entire nativity scene.  How this survived unscathed when everything else was ruined seems odd to me but it was so cool when we found that.

Please keep these people in your prayers.  I think in a lot of disaster situations it gets media attention and sympathy when the tragedy strikes but is soon forgotten.  In this area of town, building new houses is still far off in the future and in the mean time these people have to start gathering the pieces of their lives and live in temporary places.  I can't even imagine... we are so blessed.

A couple of great things happened today.

So I try to make it to yoga on Monday and Thursday nights.  I picked two nights because I figured that the majority of weeks I would make it to at least one of those nights.  My theory was working perfectly except for the past 2 weeks when summer business got busy.  

Tonight we are having a gourmet dinner of DiGiorno frozen pizza.  At 10 PM.  American laziness at it's finest people.

That's it.

I mean, I'm also popping popcorn.  

But really that's it.

We had no idea what to make for dinner and were about to resort through drive-thru Panera.  Except that would be 3 times this week.  

I wish I could say we were joking but alas, we are not.  I knew that once we discovered the delight of drive-thru Panera our out to eat budget would once again sky-rocket to that of the Duggar's.

One quick question, can I blame this lack of cooking on the heat wave?  And if the answer is no, why not?

Regardless, have you heard that a new Bourne movie is coming out?  This may be one of my all time favorite movie series.  Right after Princess Diaries of course.  So this means I'm really excited.  It also means that we're watching the Bourne Identity tonight.  Got to get up to date on the series.

P.S.  When was the Bourne Identity first released.  I did not realize it was so old.  Gosh, that means I'm that old.

Today at yoga we were practicing going into a head stand.  I put my head on the ground with both legs, feet, and arms still touching the ground and almost tipped over.  I guess I have a lot of practicing left to do.  Why this doesn't embarrass me never ceases to amaze me but I just go with it.  Who cares really... I figure it makes everyone else in the class feel excellent about their own practices and since yoga is all about the release of selfishness I figure I'm just being the ultimate yogi.

Ha!

Also, for the first time I had a male yoga instructor.  Imagine typical yoga guy. Ding! Ding! This is him to a 'T'.  He has longish hair, he speaks in a kind of sing song voice, he rides his bike to and from class, etc.

And I really enjoyed class.  I don't know why I wouldn't have but I thought it would be really uncomfortable.  Not at all.  It was great.  Shame on me.

In other news, I'm not sure if you're aware of the proximity of the Olympic Games.  EEeeeee!  So close.  The menu is slowly taking shape.  The fish part is not happening based on people other than Cale and myself participating and the fact that the smell of fish makes my mom nauseous.  

Therefore... we'll be having:
- English bangers (think brats)
- Salt and vinegar potato chips (humor me... this is for fish and chips)
- Shortbread cookies
- Scones
- Iced tea
- Newcastle beer

We might make it a English/American mix and throw in things such as Coca-cola classic, hamburgers, potato salad, etc.

More ideas?  Please share!

Back to my movie.  Toodles!  (That's what they say in England.. or not)
 

I've been eyeing this recipe for quite some time.  It turns out I probably could have handled this by myself and next time I'll suck it up and make it by myself.  Yes, it was that wonderful.  But for the first attempt, I made sure I had my 2 trusty assistants by my side.  

My husband needs to grill.  Obviously.

My sister is really like co-chef.  Even when we have bigger and badder projects to tackle we make sure we at least make something.  This time I really gave her no choice in the matter.

As we were setting this out at the table, my husband looked at both of us and said, "This is all new."  Code for- I have no idea what you just set in front of me... I don't think I'll like how this tastes.. and there are 2 different sauces (my husband is anti-sauce to the extreme).  He took one bite and then kept eating.  

Must have been delicious.

Plus this salad is served cold (except we decided to go with warm chicken).  And it's been hot.

This would be really fabulous if you were having people over.  You could have the noodles in one bowl, all of the veggies chopped and in bowls of their own, and then a choice of protein (chicken, beef, shrimp, or tofu).  Then the toppings and dressings could be at the very end.  Not that I've thought about it or anything.

The original recipe that I [kind of] followed was on Smitten Kitchen.

What I actually did was found below.  Note that for the lime juice I used the kind in the plastic lime container because I just didn't have the gumption to squeeze that many limes.  Call me a wimp.  

I actually didn't have to buy any 'specialty' ingredients to make the sauces since I had purchased them for pad thai.  So if the ingredients below look like things you'll never use again, you will.  Especially if you enjoy Asian-esque types of foods.

Cold Asian Noodle Salad with Chicken

Dipping Sauce (this reminds me of the dipping sauce you get with Spring Rolls)
6 tablespoons Asian fish sauce
6 tablespoons brown sugar
1/3 cup tablespoons lime juice
2 garlic cloves, pressed through the garlic press
1 tsp chili flakes

Peanut dressing
2 tablespoons Asian fish sauce
3 tablespoons rice vinegar
7 tablespoons lime juice
3 tablespoons soy sauce
1 one-and-a-half inch chunk ginger, peeled and chopped roughly
1/3 cup tablespoons natural unsalted peanut butter
1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
Smidgen of cayenne pepper* This gets all mixed in the food processor or blender so the ginger doesn't need to be cut perfectly

Salad
1 Package of rice noodles
1 cup of snow peas
1 cup of sprouts
1 cup of julienned carrots
1 cup of cucumbers, sliced and then cut into quarters
1 cup of sliced bell peppers
***You can use a mix of water veggies you want.  This is just what I happened to pick up at the grocery store and we loved the mix

Toppings1 1/2 pound chicken breasts
Green onions sliced
1 cup of roughly chopped peanuts
Roughly chopped fresh mint

Combine all ingredients for the dipping sauce and make sure that all the brown sugar is dissolved.  Mix all ingredients for the peanut sauce in a blender or food processor.  The original recipe said that it should be about the consistency of heavy cream and I found that to be true.  Mix together 1/2 of the dipping sauce and 1/3 of the peanut sauce and marinate the chicken for 15 minutes.  (The original recipe also called for chicken thighs.. um. gross. But real foodies say that it adds to the flavor so go for it.)  While this is grilling, make the noodles according to the package directions (usually something like pour boiling water over noodles and let sit until cooked).  Rinse the noodles in cold water and let drain. Grill the chicken and slice thinly.  You can either mix everything together for everyone or have everything separate and let people mix to their personal preference (assemble noodles on bottom, then veggies, then chicken, then toppings and top with dressing).  Use the excess dipping sauce and peanut sauce and mix everything together.  Enjoy!  

Bah!  My baby sister turns 21 today.... unbelievable!

Afterwords, we went swimming of course.  Because that's what we love to do.  And it was hot.

And then we met up with the family for some Mexican food and a Rockies game.

By this time it was pouring buckets but don't worry.  Our seats were literally the very top row of the stadium.  Which would almost be horrible except that the top row has a little covering so we stayed mostly dry.  Awesome.  Someday I'll figure out how to take better pictures with my phone so I can actually upload them without being super pixelated.   


Technology is awesome except when you don't know how to use it.