End of Summer Adventures - Part 1

With summer drawing to a close, my husband and I found ourselves staring at our calendars one day and came to one horrible realization: With summer camp over and the start of school two weeks away, we had no one to watch our two oldest children.  At 11 and 6 years old, we couldn't leave them at home alone.  So, with much grumbling and negotiating, my husband and I agreed upon the days that we would each take off from work to stay home with the kids.

It's been a busy summer for me and my husband; I was promoted at work and traveled internationally, while my husband attended a couple of out-of-state conferences and took on extra responsibilities at the office.  Our kids, however, weren't experiencing such grand adventures.  So I figured that if we couldn't afford to go someplace fabulous (like Europe!), I would at least try to be a good parent and take them to some of the amazing national parks that we have here in the D.C. area.


I won't lie - it was also a great excuse to try out my newest acquisition, courtesy of an award that I had earned at work.  After years of a rinky-dink point-and-shoot, my Nikon D5000 is a pretty sweet upgrade!


Our first adventure took us to Great Falls Park in Virginia.  We went early in the morning, even before the Visitors Center opened at 10am.  The kids weren't sure what to expect; I think they had a good time, though.  There were squirrels and grasshoppers and caterpillars and butterflies!!!  

Great Falls, VA - 55mm, f/14, 1/160s, ISO 200

Birthday Cake Goodness

WARNING:  This is a reeeeeally long post with a lot of pictures.  It will also cause insatiable cravings for chocolate that cannot be ignored.  You've been warned.

It all started with an indecisive Birthday Girl and a recipe that one of my favorite food bloggers (who, incidentally, has a fantastic name!) posted just in the nick of time.

Beef Stew Goodness

A few of months ago, I went out to lunch with a coworker and two of our foreign liaisons at a small Belgian/French bistro near the office.  Since I'm not a fan of the very popular mussels, I decided to go with the Flemish Beef Stew.  Simply put, it was amazing.  It must have lasted all of about 2 minutes on my plate - it was that good.

Not to be outdone by a highly trained and experienced chef (and the restaurant's exorbitant prices), I decided that I would resurrect the Belgian Beef Stew recipe that I had discovered in a Cooking Light issue a couple of months prior.  I had not tried said recipe due to my husband's ridiculous aversion to all things beef stew.  I finally managed to convince him that my version wouldn't taste anything like the Dinty Moore version that he kept envisioning, and I was permitted to try the recipe.

I am so glad that I did!  This stew is absolutely amazing.  Go on, get thee to a grocery store and get the ingredients.  You will not regret the time and effort involved, especially if you serve it over mashed potatoes.

Unaccompanied Minor Travel FAIL

Today, my daughter traveled from Grandma and Grandpa's house back home on an airplane for the first time.  Grandma and Grandpa were terrific - they drove her from our house to theirs to spend the week, showed her a great time, then bought her a one-way plane ticket to come home.

Unfortunately, that's where the trouble began.

From hobby to income?

One of my favorite hobbies is photography.  I'm certainly not a professional by any stretch of the imagination (I have friends who are), but I do enjoy taking pictures of my kids, my yard and my adventures in cooking/baking.  A few months ago, I decided that I really loved some of my pictures and that they might look halfway decent on the otherwise empty wall in my front living room.

I really love how this wall turned out.  One of my favorite photographs is featured in the middle:

Several other pictures are featured on either side, some from our yard and two from our trip to Massachusetts last October.

Every time I walk into this room (which is where my hubby is usually stationed at his computer), I stop to think about how proud I am of these photographs, especially since they were taken using the macro function of my tiny little Canon PowerShot SD1000.  I've thought about putting more of them up around the house, but I can't decide where to put them (it would look cluttered to add more in the living room, wouldn't it?).  A friend suggested that I should sell some of my photographs.  That thought has been stirring around in my wee little head for some time now, but I haven't actually done anything about it.

And then a sign appeared at the entrance to our neighborhood.

Can someone tell me why I do this again?

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

Exhibit A is the pile of books (some from the local library, some from my personal library) that will be resources for the paper I'm writing on the Vicksburg Campaign of 1862-1863.

Exhibit B is the pile of readings that will be resources for the paper I'm writing on the threat to national security posed by cyberwarfare (incidentally, can someone please figure out whether it's "cyberwarfare" or "cyber warfare" or "cyber-warfare"?!?).

Take a second and consider the differences between the two images.

Did your immediate response sound something like, "Gosh, it seems like there are an awful lot of books in the first picture compared to the puny pile of mostly hand-scribbled notes in the second picture!"  Yeah, I said pretty much the same thing when I actually looked at everything piled up on my desk.  Such is the difficulty in writing on a topic of current interest that lacks authoritative research vs. a topic that has entire library shelves devoted to a single battle.

Just for fun, here's a picture of my handwritten notes for my paper on cyberwarfare (and no, I can't figure out why Blogger isn't allowing me to rotate the image):

Can someone please tell me why I keep choosing to study a topic that no one else seems interested in writing authoritatively about?  It's becoming increasingly difficult to recycle my own material and still make it seem fresh.  Seriously, when I have to run out to the bookstore to grab the one copy available of a book that was just published last week so that I can have an actual book in my bibliography, what does that say?

I'm starting to seriously reconsider my area of focus.  Maybe I should just get my M.A. in military history instead of cybersecurity policy?

I need a pep talk, stat!!

School, Hawaii and family - oh my!

So it's funny how life gets in the way sometimes. I've been meaning to post an update for ages, but never quite got around to it. There was this whole thing with the end of Fall semester (A's in all my classes!  3.7GPA!), my parents visiting for Christmas, a new job... I also went to Hawaii in February to celebrate (and sing in) the wedding of one of my best friends. Seriously people - wedding in Hawaii on the beach at sunset! Highly recommended. (Especially if I'm not singing, because then I wouldn't be so wigged out and fun could be had by all.) I also tried kayaking for the first time, which was also pretty fabulous.

Fabulous seems to be the word of the day, oui?

Oh, did I forget to mention the new job? Yeah, it's pretty fabulous, but it's one of those jobs that takes a long time to explain and then I can't really talk about it anyway. So... it's a fabulous job and I love the people I work with. The best part is that I get to go TDY to some amazing SE Asia countries this summer. There will be lots of pictures.  Guarantee.

With that, I leave you with this picture, taken just a couple of weeks ago in my yard:

Let the holiday cooking begin: Sweet Potato Casserole

As soon as my birthday rolls by in September, my mind immediately turns to the food extravaganza that is the Holiday Season. Sure, Christmas is great and Halloween is fun. (It finally dawned on me this year that Halloween, in its current over-commercialzed form, must have been created as an excuse for adults to gorge guilt-free on the subsequent kid-collected haul. Brilliant!) However, my favorite part of the Holiday Season (yes it's capitalized - it is that important) is the food, which is why Thanksgiving is my knock-down-drag-out favorite holiday of the year.

When I was in the Navy and stationed in Hawaii, my friends and I would take turns hosting Thanksgiving at our homes. Every year provided a new logistical challenge, as our quaint (read: tiny) military housing became increasingly cramped as we tried to pack in our growing broods. Still, we didn't care - after all, the holidays are about the closeness of family right? We were a family, and we loved sharing our favorite stories, jokes and dishes with each other.

Now that we've moved to Virginia, we have new Thanksgiving traditions. Every year, we drive out to share Thanksgiving dinner with my husband's family, then drive home so that I can prepare my own turkey the next day (otherwise, we wouldn't have Thanksgiving leftovers! The horror!).

Every year, even though no one seems to eat it but me, I prepare Sweet Potato Casserole. My grandmother taught me how to make it when I was very young; I've been making it for so long that I can't remember a Thanksgiving or Christmas when I haven't had it on the table.

It's not the Sweet Potato Casserole that has been buried under a mountain of marshmallows. This is a more traditional Southern version with an amazing brown sugar-pecan topping. I plan on making this in the next day or two, you know, just for quality assurance purposes in advance of Thanksgiving. I posted this recipe on Facebook the other day for a friend in need (I hope it turns out ok for her!), so I thought I might post it up here. If I'm sharing the love with my family at the Thanksgiving table, I might as well share the love online too!

Sweet Potato Casserole
Courtesy of Grandma Edna, who always called it "Sweet Potato Souffle"

3 cups cooked/mashed sweet potatoes
¼ cup granulated sugar
¾ cup light brown sugar
1/3 cup milk
½ stick butter, melted (DO NOT use margarine!)
½ tsp salt
2 tsp vanilla extract
¼ tsp pumpkin pie spice (or a mix of cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg)

1 cup light brown sugar
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup chopped pecans
½ stick butter, melted (again, DO NOT use margarine!)
sprinkle pumpkin pie spice (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Spray baking dish with Pam or other non-stick spray (I prefer the butter flavored one!).

Mix first eight (8) ingredients and pour into a 9"x13"x2" baking dish. Mix remaining ingredients in separate bowl and crumble over top of sweet potato mixture.

Bake at 350 for 30 minutes or until bubbles appear around the edges. Serve warm and enjoy!

The tradition continues...

Unfortunately, my string of having lousy birthdays continues! Not because of my hubby or family (they've been great!), but because of other uncontrollable circumstances.

For example, the original plan was to go on a lunch cruise around the Potomac. First Day of Fall cruise and all that. So what happened last week? Cruise got canceled. They wanted to "upgrade" us to the dinner cruise, but as we have small kids and no babysitter, that didn't exactly pan out.

So far: Birthday Gods 1, Shauna 0.

Next example: The back-up plan was to go on a tour of the US Capitol and have lunch downtown so I could get my history geekness on (and get my husband some culture!). Everything is looking good so far, except for the fact that the lunch place I'd picked out has a "business casual" dress code - not good news for tourist activities. That's ok, we can improvise and just find something, right? WRONG! That would have required that we actually MAKE IT DOWNTOWN. Couldn't find a parking spot at the Metro, and had we driven in, we would have missed our reserved tour time at 1010, and the next one wasn't until 1430. The tour is 1.5hrs, so we wouldn't have been able to make it back home in time to pick up the kids and meet my uncle for dinner (who called yesterday to say he's in town).

Updated score: Birthday Gods 2, Shauna 0.

So, hubby and I decide we're just going to wing it. First attempt at merriment wasn't too bad; beautiful drive (despite the low, dreary clouds) out to Winchester for some apples and a shared apple cider doughnut (YUM!!). Ok, we're doing better! When we finish, we drive through Winchester and stop at a little antique place. We find a teacup and saucer that matches the MIL's china set. Yay!

Visiting team scores! - Birthday Gods 2, Shauna 1.

Aaaaaand that's when tragedy hits. We drive out to Middleburg looking for lunch. First place we try isn't open on Tuesdays. Second place we try wants $8 for a grilled cheese sandwich (!). Third place we try has several outside tables full, so we decide to see what's up. We grabbed a table and waited for the waitress.

And waited. And WAITED.

Finally she showed up to get our drink order: "What do you want to drink?"

No, there wasn't a "Hi, welcome to the Red Horse Tavern! My name is _____, and I'll be your server today. Can I start you off with some iced tea or a glass of wine?" She just went straight to "What do you want to drink?" and tossed the menus on our table (which, btw, was dusty and had cobwebs - EW!). When she returned more than five minutes later with our iced tea in cheap plastic picnic cups (seriously, I have bought better cups at Costco!), she was "ready to take [our] order." Nice.

A little while later (while we were marveling at the women nearby fawning over their dog that was sitting in a chair at their table), she arrives with the daily special of "breaded calamari" that we had ordered. Three words: STALE RUBBER BANDS. As Drew appropriately stated, he would have expected about the same fare from the batch of "fried calamari" that the bowling alley buys in bulk from Sam's Club.

The next disappointment was when our "entrees" were delivered. Plastic shallow baskets, wax paper too small to really fit the basket, and small, pathetic sandwiches accompanied by stale potato chips. Drew's "Cuban" was an insult to the communist country that bears it's name, and my "wrap" was stuffed with lettuce that was, conveniently, not listed on the menu. Did I mention that the chips were STALE?!

The waitress didn't even bother to make any kind of effort to earn a tip - she clearly couldn't have cared less about being there or about having us as customers. Sucks for her, because we are usually very generous tippers (having been a waitress at several restaurants in a past life, I know how hard the work is and how bad the pay can be!). All told, our horrible meal cost us $30.52. In an effort to escape (and hope to avoid getting my credit card # stolen), I paid in cash: $31.00. Drew said that I was overly generous in my tip, but I was simply too lazy to count out exact change from my wallet.

So, the new score: Birthday Gods 3, Shauna 1.

We did have a high point immediately following: In an effort to rapidly remove the taste of the food from our mouths, we stopped at an ice cream shop down the street. It's run by the Middleburg Humane Society, and it was terrific! The ice cream was delicious, the shop was cute and quaint, and the server was very friendly. Super awesome points for the ice cream shop for being a major bright spot in our day!!

Final score (thus far today - it's only 3:30p): Birthday Gods 3, Shauna 2.

I'm hopeful that tonight will greatly improve so that at least I can break even on the score. I think wine and chess with the hubby might do the trick! :)

A little chip of heaven

Sometimes, we all have to cave in to the demands of a 5-yr-old. You know what I'm talking about: You take him to the store, he's a good helper and can point out all the important vegetables ("Look, Mom - carrots! Spinach! Asparagus!!"). So when he looks up at you with those big brown eyes and bats those long eyelashes and asks if we can make chocolate chip cookies while he's presenting you with a bag of your favorite 60% cacao Ghiradelli chocolate chips, how on earth are you supposed to say no??

You can't, so you cave in.

 

This is what happens when you cave in - a couple of hours later, you somehow find yourself halfway through a batch of chocolate chip cookies.

 

These are not just any chocolate chip cookies, mind you. These are cookies straight from Williams-Sonoma's Essentials of Baking. You know the one - the recipe titled "Triple Chocolate Chip Cookies" on page 32. The one you modified with triple the amount of your favorite 60% cacao Ghiradelli chocolate chip cookies, because you don't have any milk chocolate chips and you don't like white chocolate. The kids don't like white chocolate either, so it's okay, right?

Don't worry - the cookies still love you. See that adorable little mound of cookie dough right there? The one shaped like a heart? Yeah, that's proof that the cookies still love you.

 

An hour later, you're looking at these. Can you resist? No, you can't. Good thing the cookies can't put up much of a fight, especially with that glass of milk just waiting to wash it all down.

 

Life is good.