Presents!!

Guess who got a new camera!! That's right me! Hopefully this will make me take more pictures and blog more!! Now all I need is a new computer! LOL...I am very thankful to my parents who got me this wonderful camera for Christmas! They are amazing! I will share some of the pictures I took with it yesterday on Christmas.

Swans

I was up at my parents house last weekend. They live on a lake and they had swans on the lake on Sunday.

Fall is here!

Fall has arrived in Northeast Indiana!!!!!! Here are a few pictures from my parents house!

Banana Bread

I realized that we had some bananas that were going bad so I decided to make banana bread the other day. I could not remember my mom's recipe so I had to go with the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook's recipe. (My mom has the Good Housekeeping Cookbook and I absolutely LOVE it! I want it so bad!) It wasn't too far off of my mom's recipe though.

The recipe was:
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/8 tsp nutmeg
2 beaten eggs
1 1/2 cups mashed bananas
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup cooking oil or melted butter or margarine
1/4 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

1.Grease bottom and 1/2 inch up the sides. Combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, and 1/4 tsp salt. Make well in center of four mixture; set aside.
2.In a medium bowl combine eggs, bananas, sugar, and oil. Add egg mixture all at once to flour mixture. Stir just until moistened. Fold in nuts.
3.Bake in a 350 degree oven for 55 to 60 minutes, or until toothpick inserted into center comes out clean. Cool in pan on wire rack for 10 minutes. Remove from pan. Cool completely on wire rack.

This is what it looked like before I put it in the oven....and I forgot to take pictures of after it came out!

Breaded Green Beans

The other day I was off so I decided to go to the grocery store and of course I was hungry. So I picked up a few extra things. (My mom would always have to ask if I was hugry before we went to the grocery store and if I was she would have to get me something to eat first because I would always put extra things in the cart!)

One of my extra things this trip was fresh green beans. I have had a recipe for breaded green for a while and have wanted to buy some and try it. So the green beans looked fairly decent so I grabbed some.

Here is the recipe that I used:
1 egg, beaten
1 cup milk
4 cups chicken broth
6 to 8 ounces fresh green beans
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup plain, breadcrumbs (like Progresso brand)
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon onion powder
1/8 teaspoon garlic powder
1/8 teaspoon ground black pepper

6 to 12 cups vegetable shortening or oil

1. Prepare beans by bringing 4 cups of chicken broth to a boil. Boil beans in the broth for 15 minutes and then plunge them into ice water to keep them from getting too soft.

2. Combine beaten egg with milk in a shallow bowl. Measure 1 cup of flour into another shallow bowl. Combine bread crumbs 3/4 teaspoon salt, black pepper, onion powder and garlic powder in a third shallow bowl.

3. Working with a small handful of beans at a time, remove them from the ice water and coat them with flour. Shake off any excess flour. Dip the beans one at a time into the egg and milk mixture and then coat each one with the breadcrumb mixture. Lay the coated beans on a plate until all of them have been breaded.

4. Heat shortening or oil to 350 degrees F. Use the amount of oil require by your fryer.

5. Fry the beans in bunches for 1 1/2 minutes or until golden brown. Drain on a rack or paper towels, then serve them up with the wasabi-cucumber ranch dip.

Serves 2 to 4 as an appetizer.

I don't have fryer so I just pan fried them.

Here are a few pictures:

New Favorite Salad

So I am about the worst blogger ever!!! I'm sorry I haved posted anything in a long time. Life is just super busy and after being on a computer all day long, the last thing I want to do when I get home is get on the computer at home.

In other news, I made the best salad ever on Saturday. Angi was nice enough to have me over for dinner with her and her husband. She made the best lasagna and you should check out her post about it at www.angiy.blogspot.com. (I still need to learn how to do links on words!) But I asked her want she wanted me to bring, and she suggested a salad, like Olive Garden's house salad. Which is awesome!!! Well I googled Olive Garden's salad and found a recipe, which turns out that I already had it in my computer files!

Here is the recipe that I have (I don't remember where I got it or else I would give them the credit):
Olive Garden Salad

Olive Garden Salad Dressing:
½ c. mayonnaise
1/3 c. white vinegar
1 tsp vegetable oil
2 Tb. corn syrup
2 Tb. Parmesan cheese
2 Tb. Romano cheese
¼ tsp garlic salt – or one clove garlic, minced
½ tsp Italian seasoning
½ tsp parsley flakes
1 Tb. lemon juice

Salad:
1 large head romaine lettuce
slices red onion
black olives
2-4 banana peppers
2 small tomatoes, quartered
½ c. croutons
freshly grated Parmesan cheese

For homemade croutons:
4 slices sandwich bread
1 clove garlic, minced
3 Tb. butter
salt and pepper
dried parsley flakes

Mix all dressing ingredients in a blender until well mixed. If this is a little too tart for your own personal tastes, add a little extra sugar.
Chill one salad bowl in freezer for at least 30 minutes. Put lettuce in bowl. Place on top of lettuce red onions, black olives, banana peppers, tomatoes, and croutons. Add some freshly grated Parmesan cheese if you like, and add plenty of Olive Garden Salad Dressing on top.

For the homemade croutons:
Cut off crusts of sandwich bread, and cut bread into cubes. Melt butter in small saucepan and add minced garlic. Toss sandwich cubes in the butter and spread out in a pan. Sprinkle salt and pepper and parsley flakes to taste. Bake for 15 minutes at 350°, turning half way through baking.

Sorry I don't have any pictures, I forgot to take my camera to Angi's. The best part of the salad was definitely the croutons though. The are so easy and SO good!!

Another One to Add to the List

I love my lists! I make them for everything! But this list I am talking about is my favorite stores!! I have a lot of them...Target, Barnes & Noble, Old Navy, Bath & Body Works, Ulta (thanks Angi!) I have a new one to add to it....the Family Christian Store (Thanks to Angi again!) :-) After going to dinner with Angi and her husband, we went to Best Buy and then the Family Christian Store. I fell in love! I seriously could spend HOURS in there! It was amazing. I got a couple of books and a ring. I really wanted so many more things, but had to control myself to what I got. Haha. There were some pictures that I would love to have for my house that I will one day have. One of the books I got was only $5 because I got their Family Perks Memebership Card. It is called For Women Only by Shaunti Feldhahn.














Here is what Barnes and Noble.com says about it.

Yummy Salsa!

I just finished making salsa for the first time. It is really good but next time I need to step away from the jalapenos. It's a little spicy! OK....a lot spicy!! It is the simplest recipe ever. I took one large green bell pepper, 2 medium white onions, 4 large tomatoes, and 2-3 jalapenos with the seeds removed, and a handful of cilantro. Add salt to taste and anything else that you might think of. Its not really a science, I just taste it at every stage of adding things. When it is the right heat and taste for you, its done!!!

I tried to take pictures but they don't look so good. Maybe next time I post a recipe I will try harder to take good ones!!

The Love of My Life.....

....Well, at least one of the many, THE YANKEES!!!! My dad was born and raised in Bronx, New York, so I became a Yankees fan as well. I am sitting here wathcing a Yankee v. Red Sox game waiting for my other shows to start, and it got me thinking about the game that my brother and sister-in-law got my dad and I tickets to. It was a couple of years ago and it was in the old stadium that they have now demolished after they built the new stadium. That weekend was a fun one. My dad and I flew out just for the weekend. My aunt stil lives on Long Island so we stayed with her and my brother got use four tickets so she and my dad's best friend came with us. It was my first major league baseball game. It was a gorgeous day starting out. We got there early and went one of the Yankee shops at the stadium and we both got jerseys. We went in and got our seats which were awesome by the way, right at the end of the tarp on the first base side and very close to the right fielder, at the time it was Bobby Abreu, who is no longer a Yankee. The only down fall to the game was that there was like a 45 min. to an hour raind delay, but we came back out after the rain stopped and the Yankees beat the Mets!! I forget what the score was, but it was an experience that I won't ever forget and I hope that I get to live again. I would love to see the new stadium.

Here are some pictures from the game!

Movie Night!!

Saturday night I went to dinner and a movie with my friend Heather. We went to Applebee's for dinner and they had Long Island Iced Teas on special so of course I had to get one...they were really good and I hadn't had one in a long time! They also have an awesome salad! It is called the California Shrimp Salad. It is Bib lettuce with avocado, hard boiled eggs, black olives, and an avocado dressing! It was SO good!

After dinner we went to see Eclipse. Yes, I am in love with the Twilight Series! I have read all the books, and seen all the movies and will probably own them all when they come out. Ok so I already own the two that are out now. But this movie was by far the best out of the three! It was so good! We just kept saying how much better this one was than the other two!

After the movie, we went over to a Heather's friend's house and just hung out. I didn't get home til 4AM and that is something I haven't done in a very long time. I realized that I am getting old because it took me about 2 days to recover from it! LOL!

Shopping!!

Angi and I went to one of the two malls we have here in good ol' Fort Wayne. Of course it was the smaller of the two, but it has better stores. And its an outside mall and it was gorgeous on Saturday so it was a good way to start my long weekend. We went to Bath & Body Works first and we got coupons so of course even though I wasn't planning on buying anything I got a bottle of their new signature scent Forever Sunshine and a free Mentha lip gloss!! Angi got a way better deal and to see it check out her blog at http://angiy.blogspot.com. We then went to Ulta so I could get some shampoo and conditioner. I got the best deal ever!!!! I got a liter of both Paul Mitchell Tea Tree Shampoo and Conditioner for $38!! You can't beat that! Tea Tree is the only thing that I feel gets my hair the way I like it. If you don't know, I have curly hair that I have not liked my whole life. I have grown to love it, but I absolutely did not like it when I was younger. So Tea Tree takes me back to a time when I loved washing my hair because it would get all the kinks out and it would feel so clean.

In His hands now....

I have been in a funk lately that I couldn't seem to get out of. I finally figured out how to get out of it. I have decided that there are things that I can't control and I have left it to God. It is in His hands. I know He has a plan for me and I know that He will take care of me. Just wanted to let you know! :-)

Quarter Life Crisis

I am going through what I like to call my quarter life crisis. I am 24 almost 25 years old and I have no flipping clue as to what I want to do with my life. Oh I have a Bachelor's degree in Psychology, and in the perfect world I would be almost done with my Master's if I went straight through. I am actually glad that I didn't do that. Like I said before, I have NO clue! I want to do family and marriage counseling some days, then I would like to do school counseling some, and then I think I would be so happy at a desk all day long doing busy work.

I also I am going through something that I don't know how to describe! Its not exactly a faith crisis, its more like I want to figure out what I believe. My parents come from two different religions. They are very drastically different. I understand both of them for the most part. I want to learn more about both of them and figure out what I think about them. I know what I have been told about them in classes in college (I went to a Catholic college so I had to take religion classes) I just want to make up my own mind. My parents are awesome because they have never tried to force either of religions on my sister, brother, and I. We are baptized in one and I know that they both believe that it has been an issue sometimes, but I think that they respect us to make up our own mind! And I love them for that!

Me and My Mom!!

This is my mom and I at a wedding a couple of weeks ago!

She likes to try to talk while taking pictures!!

And I look super pale next to her!!

P.S. Angi you would be proud only the second take and in both my eyes were open!!! :-)

Books, books, and more books!

If you know me, you know that I LOVE to read. I could make a career out of reading. Well, probably not because I only love to read what I want and on my own time table.

I have been in a funk lately and I didn't know how to get out of it. I know I was bugging people with my funk because I was bugging myself! You know it is bad when you are conscious of how depressed and annoying you are. I have been talking to Angi about wanting to read the Bible. One day we went to Barnes & Noble (my favorite store) and were looking around and I remember seeing a book on my last trip called The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale. I really wanted to read it because I was being so negative about everything that I needed something to help me change my way of thinking. I haven't gotten very far in it because on that same trip that I bought that book I saw a book called Guy Like Girls Named Jennie by Kerri Pomarolli in the Christian Inspiration section. It is about the author's dating relationships and how they lead her to be closer to God. It got me interested in it when I read the back of the book.

This is what it says: "Discouraged with dating books written by authors who married just after puberty and then tried to give relationship advice-'I didn't meet my husband until I was seventeen, and I'm so glad I waited'-stand up comedian Kerri Pomarolli decided to write her book as a single woman in the trenches trying to meet Mr. Right."

"In this tell-it-how-it-is book, Kerri offers a glimpse into the mind and heart of a single woman as she shares her personal stories of joy, frustration, pain, and late-night snacks. Guys Like Girls Named Jennie is a humorous and moving story of one woman's search for real faith and true love."

I am about half way through this book and it was so good. It is funny and moving. It has helped open my eyes as to what is good for me and what I need to change about myself. I think it is giving me more confidence about myself.

Then we went back to Barnes & Noble a couple of days later and found a book called Princess Unaware by Brenda Garrison. Again I am not very far into it because I have been reading the Jennie book as I call it. I will let you know how the Princess book goes as I get further in it.

This is the Princess Book.

I'm really bad at this......

I know I know...it takes me forever to write a post! I figured I better get one up here before Angi, my best friend, gets home from Florida.

And speaking of Angi, her and her husband flew down to Florida last Sunday out of our local airport. In the airport we have an aviation museum, in which my grandma and grandpa donated some of my grandpa's air force memorabilia. I haven't been able to go see it because it is upstairs in the terminal and I rarely flew and if I do it is very rarely out of our airport (normally its really expensive.) But since she was going there I asked her to take some pictures of his things!

This is his bomber jacket with the yellow bombs signifying the number of missions he flew. On the jacket is also a piece of metal shrapnel that hit him.

This one is his honorable discharge papers.

I am so lucky to have these pictures and I can't thank Angi enough!

The last one is my grandpa standing in front of the plane he flew in wearing his bomber jacket.

My grandpa was so proud of his service to this country. He was a true American and proud of it! And I was so proud of him for his bravery and his ability for unconditional love for his family and friends. He is my inspiration in everything I do. I try to make him proud of me for the way I live everyday. He was one of the best men I know and love. The anniversary of his passing is right around the corner and I can't believe his has been gone for almost a year. When I think about it it sometimes feels like it was yesterday and I miss him everyday! I love you grandpa and know that you are looking down here from Heaven and taking care of our family!

Day Off!!

Last week on my day off I went for a drive most of the day. This week I had a productive day off! I woke up this morning and started to clean and clean and clean! I really needed to do it and I figured it was a good day to. True, it was gorgeous but I opened the blinds turned on my iPod and got to work! Of course, this was after my 3 cups of coffee! Yes, I know I really need to cut down to one cup...maybe 2 everyday. But I feel as though I deserve it.

It was a stressful week at work and I don't forsee it calming down anytime soon! It really sucks when I am not thrilled going to work. I have only had one other job in my life and I LOVED it!! I used to work at a tanning salon and was unofficially the assistant manager. Considering I worked there for 8 and a half years, I earned it. That job got me through high school and college. I used to complain about it all the time when I was working there, but looking back now that its no longer open I miss it so much. Its not just the job that I miss. Its the people. My customers were the best customers anyone could ask for. Working there so long I got to get to know them and their families. I got to see their kids start out tanning for vacation in middle school, then tan for prom and graduation. The clientele that we had was such a close knit family and it felt as though they extended that to me as well. I would have some customers who would sit there, ask me how I was doing, what was going on in my life, and talk to me about everything under the sun for a good 20 minutes. I miss them! And when you think about it, that is something that we are missing as a society. Going out of the way to ask someone how they are doing today and really listening.

I would really like to be somewhere that would happen again. Or at least somewhere I am happy to be. I know all jobs are stressful but I would love to be somewhere I can be myself and love what I do.

Relaxing

I had today off work and it was gorgeous outside, so I decided to go for a drive and get my car washed....of course it will probably rain now that I did, but that is besides the point. The car wash I go to is across town (I go to that one because I have free lifetime car washes there!) and since I love to drive through town I went the long way and I loved it! I don't know why but driving is when I normally work out things in my head, think about things, or just relax. And today was a day that I just relaxed. I really don't have much in my life that I have had to stress about or think about or work out. There have been those days that I cried almost the whole time because I have had a lot going on either stuff with guys, friends, family, or just been so stressed that I don't feel better without driving around town. But today was definitely not one of those days. It was actually just what I needed to make my day that much better! Especially when I stopped and got a new non-fat, no-whip caramel frappuccino from Starbucks!!

Can You Dance?

My sister and I used to take dance classes when we were younger, and sometime I really miss it!

The reason that I am bringing it up tonight is because my mom and I have watched So You Think You Can Dance and the new season has started tonight! Everytime that I watch this show it makes me want to take dance classes again! I know that I would be horrible I'm sure because I haven't taken classes since I was like 10.

Watching it tonight is also making me miss my mom. For all of you that don't know...I moved out of my parents house in February. Yes, I was 24 years old when I moved out....hey, its expense to live on your own and I definitely wanted to stay as long as possible! LOL! So I had to move out when my parents decide to move to the lake. Even though I talk to her everyday I still miss coming home to her cooking dinner and us watching tv in the living room together. My dad drives a semi so he is normally gone all week, so it was just Mom and me through the week. And I said he is normally gone all week because he is at home right now cuz he had shoulder surgery about two months ago and is off work for at least a couple more weeks.

Blue Jay

So I lost someone who was very near to my heart last summer. You know the old saying, You never really know what you have lost until its gone....or something along that line. I know what it means now. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't miss my grandpa. He was one of the coolest guys I know. Everytime I hear a bird chriping or even look at the leaves on the trees this spring I think of him. The birds chirping makes me think of him because he would always sit outside and "talk" to the birds by whistling which sounded very much like a bird chirping. And him and my grandma lived in Florida for 6 months out of the year. And I would always ask him when were they going to come home to Indiana, and he always said when the leaves are back on the trees. This was the first time that the leaves were back but he wasn't. I know that he is in a better place with no pain and watching over me and my family (enjoying it getting bigger and bigger.)

The first on is a Blue Jay that I saw in my neighbors yard that reminded me of him. The second one is him when he was in the Air Force.

A Little More About Me

I know it has taken a little long for me to post again. (Trust me I've heard about it! :-D) Its kind of hard for me because I am very guarded as to what I say and put on paper (figuratively) when I know others (no matter how few) are reading it.

The reason I picked the title of my blog is because it has been drilled into my head by my mother. She is constantly telling me that everything happens for a reason. We may not know the reason right now and we may never know the reason but there is one. Also, she has always told me that God does not give us more than we can't handle. These are what help me get through the rough patches that test me. Hopefully I will find out my reasons for what He has been putting me through lately. I think this is the hardest test I have endured yet, but I know that I will get through it because I have the best family and friends a girl could ask for! I know that they want only the best for me and they want to see me happy like I always have been! I want to thank you guys for that! I know I don't say it enough but you guys are my rock and are what holds me together!

Starting Out

Ok....so I am starting this blog for many reasons. A)To make my best friend Angi happy she has been bugging me for YEARS to start one! B)To get things out because I tend to hold things in and maybe this will help me be a happier, less stressful person. C) To find out who I am.....Angi you had your crisis a couple of years ago and now its my turn! and D)Maybe this wil help me be a more open person! If you stick with me, maybe we can get through this and see how it turns out!

(P.S. Be forwarned I like my !!!!!!!!!!!)