Whoa What a Weekend

Warning! If you are vegetarian or vegan - DO NOT read this.

We kicked the weekend off by taking Sweet P to her first festival! The Rock 'n Rib Festival was going on this weekend downtown in front of the BOK Center. So Friday afternoon we headed out to try some award winning ribs. It was a bit warm to be walking around gnawing meat off a bone, but we still had a good time and the ribs were awesome.

If you've never been, you should try making it out next year. If you go before 5pm on Thursday or Friday you don't have to pay to get in.


There were several vendors set up so we had to check them all out before deciding on the one to try.


It was a tough decision because they all smelled so good. But, we finally agreed to try Johnson's.




Mmm. Meat.




Johnson's was a good choice as this is all the was left:


We are still working on tiling our kitchen and with a stove in the middle of the room, I couldn't cook the entire weekend. So Friday we took Sweet P for some Senior Tequila's for dinner!

Mmm, chips, salsa and queso. Plus, a great sleeping baby!

Sleeping baby until the crazy women drinking margaritas woke her up!

We headed on home and got some sleep for a full Saturday of working on the floor again. As we tiled, we enjoyed listening to our Cowboys beat the Hurricanes 65-28!

WHAT!? Another OSU touchdown!?

Go Pokes!! Sorry TU.

OSU receiver Justin Blackmon hauls in a touchdown catch as TU's John Flanders tries to defend Saturday in Stillwater. Blackmon caught six passes for 174 yards and three scores. TOM GILBERT / Tulsa World

Dad brought over some treats from Dunkin' Donuts!

Mom came over and brought us lunch from Hideaway and watched Sweet P so we could finish laying the remaining tile in the kitchen. Tiles are all laid and now all we have left to do is the grout!!! I'm ready to have my kitchen back.

This was not a great weekend for a new mom to lose that lingering baby weight...oh well! It tasted good and we were very productive. Hope you had a tasty weekend!!

Homemade Banana Bread Muffins (with chocolate chips!)

FRIDAY FOOD DAY!




Here's another recipe from Tasty Kitchen! I think this is my new favorite place to find recipes!

I've never made homemade banana bread so I don't really know how this recipe compares, but it was SO simple and fast...and delicious.

I didn't have any muffin tin liners so I made mini-muffins instead. I kind of like mini things better anyway, you can just pop them right in your mouth and they're gone!

So here's my photo tutorial for making banana bread with chocolate chips...

Preparing the dry ingredients.


Mashing the bananas.


Adding the wet ingredients.




Adding the bananas.


Mixing in the chocolate chips.


In the pan and ready for the crumb topping.


Preparing the crumb topping.


Crumb topping on and ready to bake.


Ready to eat!!!

Admitting My Weakness

Apparently it means you are mature if you can admit your weakness, so my weakness?

Donuts!

Donuts are to me what kryptonite is to Superman...they make me weak.

And I'm not too biased. I like donuts of all flavors, brands, shapes and sizes.

This became pretty obvious while I was pregnant. The following pictures were taken throughout my pregnancy...

Cinnamon Sugar Cake Donut


Assorted Donuts from Daylight Donuts


Your basic Chocolate Glazed Donut (again from Daylight)


Making my own Donut Holes




Chocolate Glazed Donut with Sprinkles from Dunkin Donuts


Assorted Donuts from Dunkin Donuts


And these are just the ones I took pictures of! As my pregnancy progressed, the photo of the donut became an afterthought while getting the sweet, sugary goodness in my mouth became much more important.

Welcome Sweet P

You may remember this post a while back when I was working on Sweet P's announcements. I realized I didn't post the actual announcement!

So, here it is! My wonderful sister supplied me with the photos. Thanks again Ashley!

Shrimp Etouffe'/Gumbo

I tried another recipe from Tasty Kitchen and it was awesome!! I started off making the "Shrimp Etouffe' Easy and Delicious" recipe and then started adding leftovers.

I had shrimp in the freezer and searched the easy recipes (by rating) on TK. The 10 minute cook time and 15 minute prep really caught my eye. I didn't like that there wasn't a picture, but I went out on a limb and tried it. It seemed easy enough and with a 6 week old baby girl, I need easy and fast.

I steamed some brown rice in our rice cooker. I LOVE our rice cooker.

Anyway, I started the rice and began preparing the recipe.


 

I realized I still had frozen okra from the garden in the freezer - so I added a bag of it and cooked it for about 8-10 minutes.

After adding the shrimp, I remembered we had an ear of grilled cajun corn leftover - so I quickly cut off the kernels and added those.

Then it was time to add the sauces.

Stir it all up, serve on rice, and voila, it's ready to eat!

What I Did This Weekend

I hope you all had a great weekend! Mine was mixed with a lot of fun, a lot of work and a ton of baby time!!

The husband and I took Sweet P on her first fishing trip. It was a long car ride and not a lot of fishing.




We thought it would be cool enough outside with a ice breeze on the lake...we were wrong. About 5 minutes into fishing Sweet P started getting too hot and hungry. So I took her to the car to feed her and about 30 minutes later we left the lake. It was nice to get out of the house anyway!

On the way out we saw a bunch of deer!





I should also mention we took along our little dog, Duncan. He's a great fishing buddy and just loves being outside.


So, when he saw the deer out the window he started going crazy! After I snapped a few photos of the deer we opened the car door to see what he would do with the deer.



Why are the deer running? Because of the little blur!




They all ran behind the fence and stopped when they realized what he was. A small little dog that can't do much to them.

He was proud anyway.


We drove on and saw even more deer in front of someone's house! I think it's pretty cool that you can just drive down a road in Oklahoma and see stuff like this.


Did you notice the baby fawn!? Too cute.

And on to the work part. We are going to be selling our house soon so we have a few things to do before we can put the house up, including the kitchen. When we moved in the kitchen had hideous wood parquet floors. And one day the dishwasher started leaking and all the wood got sogged. So we pulled up the wood and found speckled laminate tiles.

We decided to put in ceramic tile...with my dad's help!

I think it's going to look great! We still have a lot of work left in the kitchen...but we have progress!!

Thanks dad!

Hope you all had a great weekend! And here's to a wonderful week!

The Day Job

This morning marked the start of Tulsa Area United Way's 2010 Campaign to raise $24,067,551 for the Tulsa Area. The kickoff was held downtown at ONEOK Field and we had great weather and an awesome turnout. Hundreds of volunteers got together to celebrate the start of the annual campaign before going out into the community and working on volunteer projects at TAUW's 61 partner agencies.

As part of the program, the 2010 Trailblazer companies (local companies that run early United Way campaigns) announced their total of $3,416,278!



The 2010 campaign video was shown and you can check it out below:




And a side note, for those of you who don't know, I work at the United Way as the Senior Designer. I designed the logo for this year's event and got to see it on the big scoreboard at ONEOK Field.

Zoomed in


And zoomed out. You can also see the logo on all the t-shirts!


And this year's t-shirts!


So, thanks to all the volunteers that went out today to work on volunteer projects in the Tulsa community!