Cabin Fever & Chocolate Goodness

The guys I work with cleaned my car off yesterday, they're awesome!

I am officially snowed in. This would be okay except for the fact that Tom has been gone since 6am because he had to go plow, which means I am stuck in the condo all alone with just the animals for company. I really look forward to my weekends after working all week. We always go out to dinner Friday night, and Saturdays are usually spent running small errands because we literally do not leave the house weeknights. We did not go out last night for dinner because of the blizzard, and we are definitely not getting out today! What does a girl do when she is stuck home?



She brushes her very hairy dog

She stares out the window wishing the plows would show up already/her car would be magically dug out

She bakes chocolate goodness

She watches several episodes of The Vampire Diaries

At this rate the condo will be spotless by the time Tom gets home because I don't have room to bake anything else, and I only have a few episodes of Vampire Diaries left until I've watched all three seasons.

Homemade Amazing Brownies

I got off work early due to the blizzard and within an hour of being home I had to do SOMETHING. For some reason brownies sounded amazing, so I decided to try them out. I had NO idea how easy/amazing homemade brownies truly are! It makes me sad that when I was younger, my family always made cake/cupcakes/brownies using box mixes. Not only are they just not good for you, but they have all these ingredients you can pronounce in them so that they can sit on the shelves for years. I now bake everything homemade, and I'm so glad I gave brownies a try! They were incredibly simple and if you love to bake like I do, you most likely already have all the ingredients on hand which makes them basically FREE!

Ingredients:

1/2 Cup vegetable oil
1 cup sugar
1 ts vanilla extract
2 Eggs
1/4 ts salt
1/4 ts baking powder
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 cup flour
1/3 cup semi sweet or milk chocolate chips

Directions:

1 Preheat the oven to 350 and grease 9x9 inch baking pan
2 Mix the first 3 ingredients together (oil, sugar, and vanilla)
3 Beat the eggs into the oil mix until well blended
4 Blend the salt, baking powder, cocoa powder, and flour all together in a separate bowl
5 Blend together oil/egg mix with flour mix slowly, until clumps are gone
6 Stir chocolate chips in
7 pour batter into baking pan
8 Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until toothpick comes out clean when placed through center of brownies
9 Enjoy!

Exciting News and Crazy Snow Storms

Yesterday was a very exciting day in the Kuhns' residence. As I have mentioned in previous posts, Tom is currently in the process of applying to become a police officer. It will be a year in April since he started going through all of the different steps and yesterday found out that he is one of two final candidates for a town a few miles away from where we live. He has never gotten this far in the process yet and is so close, we are both very excited! He received a call from the town yesterday telling him that he had passed his polygraph and that out of him and the other candidate, the detective feels that Tom is more qualified. Hooray! They are now moving on to his background check which includes stopping by our home very soon to talk to me about Tom. It's a little intimadating knowing that a detective will be sitting on our couch asking me all sorts of questions about my husband, but I am very excited for the opportunity to brag about Tom and explain why he will make such a great police officer :)

The other exciting news we received yesterday is that we are receiving more for our tax return than we originally thought (which was basically nothing) so yay for more money! It's not as exciting as the police news but when you have several student loan payments money is good news too ;) So that is our life right now. We have sat and waited for ten months now, our entire life on hold it seemed, just waiting for some sort of good news. Tom had several doors shut in his face throughout the process and we were both beginning to feel very defeated and unsure of everything, so this huge glimmer of hope is reassuring and has given Tom extra motivation. If hired he will be going to the police academy April 5th for 5.5 months where he has to live on campus and only come home Friday night through Sunday. I'm not looking forward to those long months, but we will finally be able to start planning our future (babies!), so it will all be worth it :)

In dinner news, two nights ago I tried out this new recipe I had found on Pinterest for spicy Thai noodles. If you cannot handle a little bit of spice, I do not recommend trying these. I am a big fan of spicy food but Tom has a weak mouth and was dying throughout dinner (but he apparently loved the noodles enough to eat two helpings so he survived). The recipe was incredibly easy to make and I had everything already in my pantry which is always nice. It is vegetarian but I added chicken, which I might omit next time I make it.

Also, a snow storm is heading our way, set to hit Friday and bring possibly 12 inches. 12 INCHES. I know, we live in Connecticut so it should be expected, but last winter we maybe got a total of 12 inches all season and this winter the biggest storm was 6 inches, 12 inches in one storm is crazy! Especially when it's a work day and we don't get snow days so I have to attempt to get home in a foot of snow! And this is the reason I got an AWD Jeep Grand Cherokee...

Spicy Thai Noodles

Ingredients:
1 box angel hair pasta
1 TBS crushed red pepper flakes
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup sesame oil
6 TBS honey
6 TBS soy sauce
Green onions, cilantro, shredded carrots, peanuts (all optional)

Directions:
1. Boil noodles and drain
2. Heat both oils with red pepper flakes in pan over medium heat for two minutes
3. Strain out the pepper flakes and reserve the oil
4. Mix oil with honey and soy sauce and whisk together
5. Toss noodles with oil sauce
6.

http://pinterest.com/pin/27936460160847301/

Weekend recap & what I made for dinner last night

This weekend was an incredibly lazy weekend. Work last week was exhausting and by the time Friday night rolled around I was laying on the couch ready to pass out at 7pm. We stayed up so that Tom could watch the Bruins game and were in bed by 10. Yep, we're pretty wild and crazy people, going to bed at 10 on a Friday ;) We figured we would most likely wake up earlier than normal but go figure, the one night we go to bed ridiculously early Mika (the dog/alarm clock) decides she's exhausted as well and we don't wake up until our alarm goes off at 10am. Oh well, we had absolutely nothing planned for the day and obviously needed the sleep!

That morning I was browsing Pinterest as I always do, and came across this idea. I have always felt like the wall closest to the shower in our master bath was missing something and realized this would be the perfect addition to it. When we remodeled the master bathroom last year Tom took out the cupboards which was really closet space in the bathroom, so not only would the crates fill the void on the wall but it would also create more storage space, killing two birds with one stone. I shoved my phone with the Pinterest tab in Tom's face in the middle of his shower and exclaimed that we HAD to build the shelves right away. Luckily he agreed they would look great, and off we went to purchase all of the necessary supplies. I spent a couple hours on my knees in the basement staining the crates, waiting for them to dry, staining them some more, waiting for them to dry again, spraying them with water proof sealant, drying, spraying again. Last night Tom screwed on the hardware to hold them up onto the wall and put them up and I am SO excited to start using them!

 

So pleased with them!

The crate shelves were literally all we did this weekend, besides the usual grocery trip. Last night for dinner was a special, incredibly fattening treat for the two of us. I found a recipe (on Pinterest of course) for a cheesy potato soup in a soup bowl. Carbs and starch galore! It was super easy to make, fairly inexpensive, and there was enough left over for Tom to take for lunch today and freeze for dinner some other time. I threw a slice of bacon each on top as a garnish (because it wasn't fattening enough), and it was a great addition if you enjoy bacon/meat.

Cheesy Potato Soup

Ingredients
2 tablespoons butter
1 cup diced onion
2 1/2 cups peeled and diced potatoes
3 cups chicken broth
1 cup heavy cream
1 3/4 cups shredded sharp Cheddar cheese
1/4 teaspoon dried dill weed
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper
Bread Bowls (optional/completely necessary in my book)

Directions
In a large saucepan over medium heat, melt butter. Cook onion in butter until softened. Stir in potatoes and broth, bring to a boil, then cover, reduce heat and simmer 15 to 20 minutes, until potatoes are tender.
Puree potato mixture in a blender or food processor or using an immersion blender; return to pot over medium heat. Stir in cream, cheese, dill, pepper, salt and cayenne. Bring to a low boil and cook, stirring, until thickened, 5 minutes.

The finished piece- yum!

Meal Planning Part II

In my last post I talked a little about meal planning and how it has really helped cut costs when it comes to grocery shopping. Today I'm going to talk about another side of meal planning that helps save even more money. At the moment our family consists of two people plus three animals, but they don't really count when it comes to meal planning. When we first moved into the condo and it was all up to me to make meals each day, I often found it frustrating that there were not many recipes that only made two servings. I would make big dinners and either Tom took some leftovers for lunch the next day or it got thrown out.

A few months ago (it took over two years to realize this which means we were throwing way too much money down the drain), I stumbled across a web site a mom ran that talked all about freezing meals. Did you know you can freeze just about every type of food out there? Well I didn't, and it was like a light bulb went off in my head as I read through the different articles. It suddenly dawned on me that I didn't have to be throwing out all of this leftover food, instead I could put it into Tupperware or Ziploc bags and freeze it for another time!

Nowadays I try to make at least one "big" meal each week, usually on Sundays. This meal almost always ends up being some sort of casserole meant to serve 8 people, and I always follow it to a tee. This process has helped to basically cut our grocery bill in half, even though we are still spending around $60 on average each week. For example, we may go and spend $15 on ingredients that are not already in the kitchen to make a specific recipe. We eat the specific recipe for dinner one day that week, Tom takes a serving for lunch the next day, and the rest is split up into containers to be frozen and eaten at some point down the road (usually the next week). With some of the bigger recipes such as my favorite- Baked Ziti- I can get sometimes 3 extra dinners to put in the freezer! So even though we may spend a few extra dollars one week at the grocery store, if I can get four dinners plus a lunch out of the recipe I consider that a success.

Part of this blog will include recipes I have tried and loved, most of which end up in my freezer as part of my meal planning. The first recipe I introduce to you is French Dip, which I made yesterday for dinner and it was extremely popular. I always get nervous trying new recipes with Tom- mainly because every time he knows I haven't made it before he says things like "that scares me"- and I worry he'll hate it. Well last night I was extra nervous because the au jus sauce "scared" him. All my worries went away though as I sat with bated breath watching him take his first bite, when he turned to me with big eyes and enthusiastically said through his full mouth "mmmhm!" The recipe was incredibly easy and there were of course leftovers which were frozen and we will eat for lunch this weekend :)

Crock-pot French Dip Sandwiches

I found this recipe on Pinterest, the original site from here. I tried a couple different things based off the original recipe and it turned out perfect!

Ingredients:
2 lbs London Broil (or really any other roast)
1 packet Lipton Onion Soup mix
2 cups beef stock 
Dash of pepper
French or Italian rolls (this version of the recipe will make 4 large servings)
Swiss cheese (optional)

Directions:
1. Place the meat in the slow cooker.
2. Mix together the beef stock, onion soup mix, and pepper. Pour it over the meat.
3. Cook it on low for 6-8 hours.
4. At the end of cooking time, take the meat out and shred it with a fork While meat is out, run the "juices" from the slow cooker through a strainer to get any big chunks out of it, and into a separate bowl.
5. Place shredded meat back in the slow cooker (I turned mine down to "warm" at this point). Take half a cup of the leftover broth and mix it into the meat.
6. Turn the oven on (I had mine at 350), take out your rolls. Open up the rolls so that the inside is facing up, and place a couple slices of the Swiss cheese on each of them. Bake until the cheese is melted and bread is toasty.
7. Pour remaining "au jus" into little ramekins/bowls, spoon meat onto bread rolls, and enjoy! 

I would have posted a photo but was too excited/hungry to eat it :)  Next time!

And I'm Back

I really am the worst blogger in the world! Like I said in my last post (written in JULY), I knew these past few months would fly by and what do you know, it's already the middle of January! A brief catch up on what has been going on in the Kuhns house:

1. Tom is still working on becoming a police officer. A couple months ago we decided that if this is something he truly wants then maybe it is time for him to start looking somewhere else, besides Connecticut. After looking up different towns and states along the East coast, we decided the first towns to try would be Richmond VA and Savannah GA. Tom will be spending the weekend of February 15th in Richmond for testing/interviews, and is waiting to hear back from Savannah. He has also continued to apply to towns in CT because- as much as it would be exciting to move down South where it's warmer and the cost-of-living is less- we have made ourselves a home in our condo here, and the thought of leaving it all behind is kind of sad. This is what Tom wants more than anything though, and if it takes moving to Georgia to make his dreams a reality then I'm all for it.
2. We recently took an 8-week  therapy pet training course with Mika. Our hope is to one day get her licensed so that we can take her to hospitals, retirement homes, etc. All we need to do is pass the evaluation, which we have not scheduled yet as we are not sure what the future holds for us at the moment.
3. Back in September Tom and I celebrated our one year wedding anniversary, and our five year together anniversary! Where has the time gone? How is it possible we've already been together five years? When we first started dating we were 18 and 20 and so young, now here we are 24 and 26 all grown up, making grown up decisions and paying bills and all that "fun" stuff. 

Me and the husband at my brother's wedding :)

                                                               Meal Planning: Part I

As I said in my last post, I really want to try and blog about ways I am saving my family money, as well as recipes I am trying that I have really enjoyed. For the second half of this post, I want to talk about something I have really gotten into the past few months; meal planning. When Tom and I first bought the condo (going on three years ago!", we were not the best grocery shoppers. We would go in with absolutely no plan, no idea of what we really needed, and would just wander the grocery store throwing whatever sounded good in the cart.  All of a sudden we're at the checkout and the bill is over $100. Every. Single. Week. This used to be okay while I was still taking classes and had plenty of money to spare, but now that I have way too many student loans to pay each month spending over $400 in groceries alone was not going to cut it.

I had to find a way to save us money on food, which led me to meal planning. I had never really put too much effort into deciding what we would have for dinner, and each night I would stand in the kitchen wanting to bang my head into the counter because I had no idea what to make. Oftentimes this would lead to me complaining to Tom and us ordering pizza or Chinese food and spending unnecessary money on takeout when we had just spent $100 on food three days before. I needed to stop this cycle of overspending which led me to my variation of meal planning. This is not something that takes careful planning, if you have 20 minutes of free time to sit down you can do it.

Every Sunday morning I sit down with the grocery ads and look to see if anything really great is on sale, especially meats, breads, or items we eat a lot of that are buy one get one free. Then I look in the freezer to see what meals are already in there. I always try to eat whatever we have on hand to save us money, while keeping the "menu" varied. Tom could eat the same thing every other day, I on the other hand get bored with food fast, so I am constantly trying new recipes. By sitting down for twenty minutes and coming up with a plan as to what will be made for dinner each night- along with a couple other tips I will get into in the next couple posts- I have managed to cut our grocery bills down to an average of $60 (on an expensive trip) a week, saving us a minimum of $160 each month. That's a lot of extra money ;)

Where has the time gone?

It's pretty obvious that I'm terrible at this blogging thing, considering the last time I posted something was last October! I've been very busy lately and got to thinking about writing a blog with new recipes I try as well as ways to simplify our lives/become a little more "frugal". I was about to create a new blog when I came across this one and figured I would just start it back up again!

Life has become very hectic the past few months, and it's only going to get more crazy considering Fall is right around the corner. In March (on our six-month wedding anniversary) we completely lost our minds and decided to go out and get this little thing:

Her name is Little Kitty (how original, right?), and she has turned our house upside down. She's the complete opposite of Binx; always on the move, loves to play with/on all of the cat toys, feisty, brave, and LOUD. Little Kitty is constantly "talking", it's pretty adorable, and she does it so much it's rubbed off onto Binx and now he talks to us too. The two cats are best friends but Mika's still warming up to her, which was to be expected considering she tried to eat Binx the first couple months we had him.

On the work front, it has been very hectic the past couple months. I was recently promoted from Administrative Assitant to HR Coordinator (woo hoo!), so we hired someone to replace me. Well she was awesome and we became good friends fast, but she ended up getting a better paying job and left, leaving me to find a replacement again. Ugh. We finally found someone my boss liked, and she is starting this Friday which I am looking forward to considering I have been doing BOTH jobs the past two months. It's been pretty crazy!

The summer has been very relaxing with me and Tom mostly just hanging out on the weekends, but very soon that is all going to change. August 16th we head to Oregon for my brother's wedding! We'll be there until the 21st and the entire time we are going to be ridiculously busy. Wedding rehearsal that Friday(I am a bridesmaid), wedding on Saturday, Tom is planning a suprise overnight getaway for the two of us as an early anniversary thing for Sunday, Monday a surprise birthday dinner for grammi, then Tuesday we head home very early morning. It's going to be great to get home after almost two years and see all my friends and family that I have not seen since our wedding, because that's just too long to go without seeing all those special people. Also, my brother and his fiance had a baby June 10th, so I am now an aunty and get to meet my brand-new neice!

Anyways, the point of me starting this blog back up again is because life is so crazy busy, and it's only going to get busier. Once Fall hits, our first anniversary arrives, then the holidays start, and before we know it we'll be in March and that's just ridiculous. Not only is time flying by, but our world is about to get turned upside down. Tom is currently in the process of applying to become a police officer, a process that is long, tedious, and hard. We are really hoping that his dream becomes a reality and soon, especially since it could take over a year to be hired. Last week Tom had an itnerview with the town that is his number one pick to work for, and he passed! Next up is the background test on Wednesday, and if all goes well he will move on to the polygraph test, and if he passes that and the chief likes what he sees, fingers crossed Tom will get hired. Once hired, he then has to go to the police academy, which is a twenty-two week training program where he will have to live on campus Mon-Fri, and come home for the weekend. The next police academy session starts in October but as of right now the roster is booked, so if he is hired and cannot get into that session, he will go to the next one that starts in January. Before you know it we're in June (or April if we're lucky), Tom becomes an official police officer, and we can start seriously planning our future which includes babies and moving :)

 Life is going to go from zero to 60 very quickly, so I'm trying to set us up for success early, before it gets too crazy. I'm getting my finances in order (student loans are a killer), watching our spending (especially when it comes to groceries), and trying to find recipes that are quick, easy, and healthy. It's important to me that most nights a week we eat in and eat something that isn't going to give us a heart attack. I'm also the type of person that can't stand to eat the same meal every few days, so I have started scouring the internet for recipes that will satisfy our hunger while keeping the calories to a minimum and keeping money in our wallets. Because eventually when we've got a little one occupying most of our time, I'm not going to want to spend an hour every night trying to put together a healthy meal ;)

Batteries and Special Occasions

Tonight I write this post from our basement, with Binx under my chair and Mika curled up next to me on a blanket. Why are we down in the basement and not the warm, comfy couch upstairs like every night? Sweet, precious Mika decided few days go that it would be a good idea to chew completely through my laptop's wall charger, and that old thing does not turn on without the cord. So now I am without a laptop and forced to sit in the basement to write my blog so that my two fans are not disappointed. Tom just bought a brand new desk top computer a couple weeks ago and it's pretty cool, one of those all-in-one flat monitors that is touch screen and completely wireless so I am getting to test it out now. I guess that's a plus to my laptop being dead right now ;)

Anyways, this weekend was very relaxing and "wonderful" as my grammi would say. Saturday we took a trip out to the Yankee Candle factory in Deerfield Mass and spent a couple hours walking around looking at everything. It is a Christmas-lovers dream store (which I am!). Santa is there 24/7, there is a Christmas Bavarian village, a room where it "snows" every four minutes, and so many Christmas decorations and ornaments that they personalize for FREE! We got three of the cutest ornaments; one for Mika (she already has two from last year but oh well), one or Binx, and one for our wedding. After Yankee Candle we realized we were hungry and Tom started talking about this incredible deli up in Vermont, half an hour away. We ended up driving up there to have this great food which I ended up hating, but the drive was amazing. New England is gorgeous in the fall due to the leaves changing colors, and we just happened to drive through three of the states, it was a very scenic drive :) Anyways, here are our ornaments:

Sunday I decided while grocery shopping that I wanted to paint pumpkins, so we bought two pumpkins and some paint. Tom is not very artistic so he just bought the necessary tools and let me go at it. A couple hours later and a ton of black paint later, my pumpkins were ready for their big debut outside our door. Remember how in my first post I talked about how much I love my animals? My brother saw my pumpkins and called me weird, but I think they are cute (and so does Tom) :)

Today it was back to work but also two special occasions in the Kuhns family.

1. We've been married a month today! I can't believe it's already been a month, I feel like it was just yesterday I was standing in the bridal suite, nervous and excited, waiting to go meet my groom at the end of the aisle. Our photographer finally finished up with our pictures and sent me a link so I spent a lot of time looking through all of them today, they are SO good. If anyone in the CT/NY area is looking for a photographer for any occasion, check out Donna Cheung, you will not be disppointed!
2. My sweet little muffin man Binx turned one today! I remember that cold day early January when I raced to beat a snow storm and drove out to the middle of nowhere to pick up my little guy from the shelter he was at. He was so little and so scared and there were several times those first few weeks I thought he'd never come out from under the guest bed, but here we are nine months later and he is the sweetest most snuggly boy :) Here is a photo from hours after I got him home from the shelter:

Well that's about it for now. It's getting late and my fingers are frozen so I will leave you with a song to listen to called "You Already Know" by Train. It's a very fun, angry song and I always get pumped up listening to it so I thought I would share! Enjoy :)