Sunday, December 21, 2008

Seen this month's Asian Restaurant News??

Yeah, I didn't think that you had...but here it is! Complete with my pictures on the cover and inside...



and the pictures I like from the inside (can you see John making pizza??)



The restaurant where John works was featured as a success story, and Jade asked me to take the pictures for it. Pretty exciting to see them in print.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Baked goods craziness



This is actually the first year I've made and decorated gingerbread and I LOVE it! My favorites were the "James Bond" gingerbread men (with the bow ties, pictured above) and also the ones I made with winter scarves. My favorite of John's was his smiling star from the Mario Brothers games (complete with the song and added dancing).

I think John is making the dough for our third batch of gingerbread cookies tonight, and this is after making fudge (chocolate and peanut butter), truffles, no-bakes, Stolen (German bread), peppermint bark and cranberry chip cookies over the weekend! The peppermint bark and cranberry cookies were all me, but the rest? All John. What can I say? He's a total baking rock star (and I am a total baking rock star groupie). He even came to my rescue last night when I got tired of decorating the cookies to take to my office party.

Thankfully, we've managed to give MOST of the baked goods away...but there's still enough here to keep munching and munching and munching. At this point, I am totally sick of gingerbread cookies...but that still leaves about 26 other sweets to get sick of ;)

Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Sunday, December 07, 2008

Christmas Decorating!

Yesterday, we put up our Christmas lights and the Christmas tree. It was just a perfect day for it. It was snowing all day and totally Christmas-y. We put our LED lights on the outside of the house and then John put lights on the inside of our front windows. When we bought them last year, I wasn't sure about the LEDs, but now I love them. They are really bright and colorful...so when you turn onto our street, there's our house all lit up (it helps make up for the fact that our house is the only one on our street with lights)

We put the tree up next...I'm waiting until tonight to get a picture (it looks prettier without all the light coming in the windows). John put on his ornaments and declared that they tree was now "sufficiently geeky"...I'm still loving his Darth Vader ornament that talks when you turn the tree on (Callie was very curious about it this morning)...and of course the blinking tree topper that John got from his parent's house and fixed last year with a new string of lights, a glue gun, and a lot of patience...



I'm so excited--it finally feels Christmas-y here! I'm ready to wrap presents and listen to Christmas music 24-7 and bake Christmas goodies! =)

I actually started off this morning making pumpkin chocolate chip muffins a recipe that I found on a blog I really enjoy, Get Rich Slowly. They were so good...and now I'm trying to decide whether we need to eat all twelve or whether we should share. ;)

John's really excited because we're going to see Quantum of Solace this afternoon. He's already been you-tube-ing the theme song, trailer, and general James Bond music (which has now evolved into Monty Python clips...).

That's about it here--will post more pictures of the decor later!