Cyclone

Leave my kids alone for about a minute and this is what happens:


I had to watch my step while I put their clothes away.

Pitty and Patisserie

We had Jersey "fixed" this week. It is so sad to see her in this huge cone. It is also very annoying. She is more in the way now than without it. We are constantly running into her cone and she "rests" it on my leg while I'm cooking. She runs into Spencer's leg with it and it really irritates him. Although, I really can't blame him, it is big for our little pup, but it has to reach past her nose so she doesn't tear open her incision. She looks pitiful doesn't she!?


It was really sad when the vet brought her out to me. She was scared stiff, literally. She wouldn't budge and every time she bumped the cone on the floor or a shelf or something, she would stop dead in her tracks and not move for a while.

This quarter I have a class called Patisserie. We learn how to do celebration cakes and plated desserts. Here are a couple of desserts that we have made so far.

The first one is in a style that is trendy right now. They deconstruct a classic dessert and make it more modern. This is a version of a Black Forest Cake:

In case you don't know, Black Forest Cake is like a cherry chocolate cake. We have flourless chocolate cake, pastry cream, chocolate sorbet, Kirsh pana cotta (cherry liquor flavored vanilla custard), cherries, and a little gold for accent.

This next one is actually a buffet type setup. I don't know if you have noticed, but the latest trend in restaraunts today is something they call a Verrine. A Verrine is a small sampling, or "shot", of dessert.

From left to right: chocolate brandy stuff (didn't try it), a lime custard (awesome), a raspberry-rose something (sinfull), and tirimisu (didn't try it since it had coffee in it, but this was the one that my table made). Then it just repeats.

This next picture is of the first dessert that we made this quarter. It was absolutely delicious. It is lemon sherbet with raspberry sorbet in the cone with a chocolate "cigarette", blackberry pate de fruit (blackberry gummie squares, but not so gummie like gummie bears), blown sugar ball, and a chocolate band with fresh fruit placed in it.

I have really enjoyed this class so far. I am really anxious to get into the cake decorating part of the class. Soon.

Happy Birthday Spencer!!

Well, today is the official day. Spencer is now 30. I wanted to make it as special as I could so I mail ordered ribs from Kansas City. When Spencer was working in Salt Lake, the company he worked for would send him to Kansas every now and then. When he was there, he ate at this place called "Jack Stacks". He raved about their ribs , how good they were, how tender. Now, almost every time we are out and about, he mentions Jack Stack ribs and how they are only 8 hours away and that we should go. I went online and found out that they mail their ribs, so I ordered him some ribs:
He was really excited when he found out. He hardly ate anything for lunch today so that he would have enough room. In school today, we made biscuits and savory scones, so I brought those home to have with dinner. I also ordered Jack Stacks sausage (the best sausage I have EVER had), along with 2 full racks of ribs, I made cole slaw, baked beans from scratch, and I had originally planned on Rhodes Rolls because I was at school all day today. We had a lot of food and Spencer was ready:

The girls really loved the ribs, although they said it was turkey. They insisted on eating the ribs off the bone:

Avary even licked the bone at one point. This was their first experience with ribs, and they loved them.

Spencer enjoyed himself too:

By the end of the meal, we were all stuffed:

But not too stuffed for Gingerbread:

Happy birthday sweetie, we love you!! Thanks to the Schumanns for helping me with the ribs. They were GREAT!!!

Birthday Party

Yesterday we had Rachel and Anthony and their family come over for a little cake and ice cream party for Spencer's birthday. His birthday isn't until Tuesday, but Tuesdays are a little hard for me to do a party since I am at school all day. It was such a relief to get the cake done. It was like pulling teeth to get him to decide on a flavor. I told my mom that I would rather get my teeth drilled with out anesthesia than to go through that again.

He finally decided on a banana cake with French vanilla pudding filling and chocolate icing. I tried to make the cake masculine, he thought it looked cool.

The top of the cake is dusting powder that I shaped with a stencil. It was really easy and I liked the look it gave the cake.

This is Spencer doing a "jig" while we sang to him. There was a lot of heat coming off of those candles, it was amazing. Then he blew them out:

And we almost set the fire alarm off. We had to open the sliding door and fan the smoke away so that it wouldn't. It was a fun evening. At the end, Rachel and I sat down to play a game called "Blink". She had never played it before, so naturally I wasted her, but I am fairly confident that after she gets the hang of it, she will waste me. She is super fast at games. I swear at times you can't even see her play she is so fast.

Anyway, this kicks off the beginning of the festivities for Spencer's 30th birthday. I will post more when they unravel.

Fist Week of School

It is only two days into my first week of school, and I am BEAT and already have something to blog about. I have a pretty tiring schedule this quarter. I have classes all day Mondays and Tuesdays and then a morning class on Thursdays. The all day classes mean that I wake up at 5:00 am and don't get home until around 7:00 pm. I am so tired, I can barely eat with my eyes open. I love being back with my friends from school, but it seems to be more difficult leaving my family at home this time around. I feel like the girls and I really bonded over the break, I miss them something fierce.

I have a friend, Bonnie, in my pastry classes that has a pretty strong personality but I love her for it. You never want to tick her off or get on her bad side. There is this other girl, Amy, who is the same except she "pretends" that she is your friend and then stabs you in the back. Amy is known for spreading rumors, a LOT of rumors at school. Anyway, the first day of school, I walked in and saw Amy sitting there in the lab and I immediately knew that this was going to be a very "interesting" quarter with both her and Bonnie in the same room. Nerves were touched the first day and it sort of escalated from there. It shouldn't have been a surprise that they broke out into a fight last night in class. It wasn't physical, just LOUD! So loud in fact that the cute little deaf girl in the class could hear yelling. It really started when Amy took advantage of a situation where the Chef had left the room. As soon as he left, she shut the door and started to yell at the class that frustrations about the class being vented was going to stop and it was going to stop then and there and what she says goes. The class was a mess yesterday as far as organization goes. We were all really frustrated and were venting to each other to help us get the frustration out. Well, Amy started to gather little pieces of information and was twisting them into rumors that we wanted to get a lynch mob together and try to fire the Chef, which was TOTALLY NOT true. Well, when Amy started to twist things around while she was yelling at us, Bonnie stood up for the class and they both got into it pretty heavy and REALLY fast. I wanted to stop it, but it escalated too fast for me to do anything and I just left it alone. Pretty soon Jill, the student adviser for culinary students, came in and stopped it. She is this little petite thing that I personally would never want to mess with. I knew that this blow up was going to happen, I just didn't think it was going to happen this soon or in class. Anyway, Jill let the class out last night and demanded that all of us fill out incident reports. This was all on the second day of class after our winter break. The week isn't over yet and I have 10 more weeks left of these classes. How excited am I.

I am really enjoying my classes regardless of the frustration that comes with having a Chef teach a course he has never taught before but definitely has the experience to do so. I am sad that these are my last lab classes I have with Chef Winter. He is the Senior Pastry Chef in the school and knows his stuff. I wish I had more classes with him, but I am looking forward to working with him on a volunteer basis to learn more. I hope my class tomorrow is something that I can understand and grasp fast because I am WAY too tired to concentrate right now.

CO Scare

Well, yesterday, when we got home from grocery shopping, I went downstairs and noticed that it seemed a little too "humid". My first thought was the water heater so I checked the carpet and it was alright, so I didn't think anything more about it. I just figured that it was our kettle because I was boiling water at the time. Well, this morning Spencer went downstairs to get some cereal for the girls for breakfast and he thought the same thing. When he opened the door to the pantry he was blasted in the face with exhaust from our heater. He immediately went to the crawl space and discovered that the exhaust line from the heater had come apart. He rushed upstairs, pail as a ghost, and started to panic. I remained calm while he was in hysterics about carbon monoxide poisoning. We opened our windows all through out the house and called 911. The fire truck came, I wish I had gotten pictures but oh well, while we were all in the car keeping warm and they went through our house testing for carbon monoxide. The test actually came back zero, but we had had our windows open for a while before they got here. We were really lucky to have woken up this morning. Spencer didn't think I was taking any of it seriously, but I reassured him that I was serious, just calm because he wasn't. He felt better after that.

After the firemen left, we called our service people and I went and got four CO detectors for our house. The guy gave us an estimate and I thought that it was reasonable for what it sounded like he was going to do. I thought he was going to be here for a while fixing things, but he wasn't. He was here a whole of, at most , ten minutes. He added a band on the exhaust pipe shown here:
And then he screwed in some screws to keep what had come apart from coming apart again, shown here:

He charged us $200 for this and I didn't think that was right. We had a scary and busy morning and I wasn't about to go to bed tonight feeling like we were robbed, so I gave them a call. I asked if they would accept a kidney as payment and they laughed, but in the end I talked them down a little, to the point that we were happy with the price. The guy gave me some shpeel about running and keeping a business and I came back with how we are trying to stay in our home. The economy affects us too.

We are very lucky that nothing bad happened. We are all OK and are feeling fine. I'm glad that it is fixed, that we have our CO detectors and that it is behind us. I've had enough scares to last me the rest of my life, I hope this is the end.

The girls were really cute with the firemen. One of them just lives a few houses away from us, that was neat. They were really helpful and I'm glad that we called them.

Milestones

Well, this year starts anew and things are changing entirely too fast for me. CJ is now in CTR 6 and Avary started Sunbeams. She was so excited to go to primary with CJ. CJ didn't do real well at first, but then warmed up. She wanted to sit with Avary in Sharing Time. Our little Sunbeam:

After church she said the cutest thing to my mom. My mom has been her nursery leader for six months now and when we were walking out to the car Avary said, "Geewah!!! There you are! I thought you were hiding!" She did real well in her class and at the end of the day, CJ did too. CJ got the coolest thing. I guess they are starting it this year, but she got a CTR ring AND a CTR wrist band. I like that idea a lot. The rings turn your finger green.

Another milestone that has happened this year, so far, is that CJ can now tie her own shoes. It took two lessons and she had it down:

She does this weird thing with her tongue when she ties her shoes:

He teacher was so happy that she learned over the break, she calls her "Shoe Tie-ger". She really loves to tie her own shoes now:

For Christmas the girls got some new books. They are simple enough that CJ can learn how to read them. The first day back at school she came home with a book to practice. To make a long story short, CJ is reading now and is doing really well.

She really enjoys reading. She does really well, and we are so proud of her.

Avary and CJ, mostly Avary, have been saying the funniest things lately and I am going to start keeping a little "Kids say the Darndest things" tab on our blog. I will probably update it everyday, Avary is on a roll, but remember to stop by and see what kind of crazy things my girls come up with.

Elefun!

I meant to post this last year, but just didn't get around to it... Here's a video of CJ and Avary playing the Elefun game they got for Christmas. Warning: you may want to turn down or mute the volume!