Scandinavian Blondies

No, that's not the corps of nannies we will hire when we have kids (though Markus would love that...)! These are some bar cookies I made last week and they're delicious! I tend to bake when I'm stressed out, so on Sunday I was in the mood to bake. I perused my King Arthur's Flour Baking Companion (or it might have been their cookie cookbook) and knew I would find something wonderful. I highly recommend these two cookbooks for anyone who likes to bake. They have the standard cookie recipes (chocolate chip, peanut butter, oatmeal, etc) and then variations on each (do you like yours crunchy or soft and chewy?). The Baking Companion has more varied dessert recipes, so you could find an number of yummy desserts depending on what you're in the mood to bake.

Anyway, the blondies are these plain (just your standard butter, sugar, flour, and eggs) bar cookies with almond extract - they went perfectly with vanilla ice cream. Yes, it was an indulgent weekend (on Saturday, we indulged at my cousin's graduation party), but we did get Edy's Slow Churned Light (1/3 the calories and 1/2 the fat!). I even packed a few of the cookies in a baggie and brought them along to Indianapolis with me! I'm excited to get back home and dive more deeply into these cookbooks; this was the first recipe I made and am inspired, though I will be looking for volunteers to eat my baked goods (I can't eat them all!).

So last week I was at home and made chilled soups (I think my favorite was chilled orange pepper soup with cilantro/pea puree - YUM) and healthy dinners every night of the week except one when we met our old neighbors and friends, Brian and Gretchen, for dinner. Markus had his last midterm on Monday, then I departed for Indy. In just a few hours, I have to pick him up at the bus station - he went to Chicago on business and took a bus here so we could spend a weekend doing fun stuff in Indianapolis. We're staying downtown (thanks to the Marriott points I accrue each time I'm here!) and I'm looking forward to seeing more of the city.

All is pretty quiet on the house front, because we've been trying to enjoy what remains of the summer when Markus doesn't have schoolwork he needs to focus on. I have to say, though, Markus was like a firecracker or super taskmaster last Friday. He has summer hours now and he gets done at lunchtime on Fridays. So, he gets home and in an hour and a half, has hung bike holders on the wall and hung the bikes up, re-hung the blinds on our windows, cleaned the ground floor up, hooked up the dehumidifier drainage hose, and started staining our kitchen windows. I can't wait until he has no school distractions - he'll be doing 18 projects each weekend!!! That's why I love this man! :-)

The other exciting thing is that our courtyard trees were just pruned and the decaying tree on our patio was removed. We get so much more natural light now!! At some point, we'll get the stump removed and we're going to extend our patio so we'll have a little more room. Up on the roof deck, the plants are growing just fine, but the darned critters are eating my tomatoes!!! ARGH! I started with six good-sized tomatoes, then five, then four, and now THREE are left. I think it's the courtyard squirrel that's eating them. I probably won't have any left by the time I get back next Wednesday. One of the other plants in my pot has started blooming, so I have some baby tomatoes just starting out but it'll probably eat those, too. I'll be so happy if I can harvest (he he, I'm such a city farmer, huh?) one lousy tomato. Ah well, at least I'm helping the squirrel survive, right?

And now, I'm signing off from the land of Nascar...two back-to-back episodes of Grey's Anatomy are on!

Oh, by the way, I don't know who this "Anonymous" person who's been adding the comments, but don't click on their links. They're just some crappy online casino type site and they'll spam your email.

Feel the Ocean Breeze

That's what Markus' mom always says when we're in Ocean City, and that's where we were last weekend! And yes, there was a nice ocean breeze. Now that our bathroom is more or less finished, we've finally been able to enjoy our summer weekends (to some extent, though Markus still has homework every weekend.).

Luke and Amanda and Markus and I spent the weekend in the OC, as I like to call it, and Markus and I finally have some color on our skins. We no longer look like scary pale white people! The weather was lovely, and of course the company was wonderful. One funny coincidence was that on Friday night, we headed to the boardwalk and while we were waiting outside a store, we heard someone say "Hey!". I looked over and there were my parents, my uncle and his wife, and grandparents! Seems like everyone was in the OC this weekend. While the weather was nice, the water was COLD!! We were brave enough to go in and enjoy the waves, though.

To catch up on what else has been happening, well, not much. My parents came down last weekend so we could go out to dinner for their anniversary. We tried an Italian place in the heart of the Italian market. The food was good, but we had to wait about an hour for a table. Luckily, we had lots of catching up to do so the time went by pretty quickly (though I was starving by the time we were seated!). I ordered shrimp scampi, and it was the butteriest scampi I've ever had. I was glad I ordered a side of pasta to go under the scampi so the butter could drip off. Now, that's not to say that the scampi was bad, but my belly sure isn't used to so much butter.

Markus and I have been trying to eat a healthier diet lately. Since I finally have a week at home, I've been cooking lots of good meals that are good for us. Something I love in the summertime is chilled soup, so I've been making one or two new recipes for some kind of cold soup each week I'm home. This week is Beet-Fennel-Ginger soup and Yellow Pepper (though I had to buy orange because they were out of yellow at Iovine's at Reading Terminal...) something or other. One of my recent favorites is a cold Zucchini-Avocado soup - it's kinda wild in that it's green, but it tastes much better than it sounds. You cook the zucchini and some onions in broth and then puree it with the avocado - delicious! If you haven't ever tried cold soup, give it a whirl in this hot weather. Others on my list to try: carrot-sage soup and a chilled blueberry soup. The cold fruit soups can be served as an appetizer or dessert - how can you go wrong??

Related to our health kick, I've tried to be more consistent with exercise. I think I mentioned that I enlisted the help of a personal trainer. One of the things she's had me working on is jumping rope. I forgot about it, but boy is it a good cardio workout! It's low impact, and you burn as many calories as you do during a run. Oh, and even better, I can pack it in my suitcase when I travel (now I really have no excuse for not exercising, even if the hotel gym isn't great). I pack my handy dandy heart rate monitor, which keeps me honest and tells me how many calories I really did burn, and my jump rope and I'm all set. I'm not great yet, but I'm getting better (275 revolutions without stumbling is my best so far), and it makes me SWEAT! So, if you're looking for a new kind of exercise that you can do anywhere, don't forget about the jump rope. My trainer went so far as to say I could whip it out in the airport when I have a delay...I think I'll spare the other passengers that sight!

This weekend we get to stay in the area, which will be a nice break. After a few more weekends, we'll post some summer fun pictures since there's not much in the way of house projects going on (which is nice!). I did, however, stop at an appliance store today to get pricing on a new wall oven and microwave, cooktop, and range hood. Decisions, decisions - new appliances or master bath remodel? Our counter microwave appears to be dying, so I'm thinking we may get the appliances first. We have a wall microwave, which doesn't work, so we have to use a regular microwave on our counter. If that dies, though, we might as well move forward with the kitchen first. Stay tuned for that. Right now, we're thinking about Bosch appliances; the previous owners had installed a Bosch dishwasher, which we've been pleased with (and love the German engineering!), and their other appliances have gotten good reviews from what I read. I don't think we'll do anything just yet, but if we decide to do an appliance upgrade, you better believe you'll read all about it here!

The bathroom is done!

That's right, folks. The third floor bathroom is finally finished, with the exception of two small pieces of trim. We finished in a nick of time, too - Markus put the finishing touches on just before we left to pick up our friends Sean and Brook from the airport.

They spent the holiday weekend with us and we had a great time. We did lots of walking, drank wine and beer, ate at a few new restaurants, shopped, and went to the Wyeth exhibit at the art museum. The weather was nice most of the weekend except for Saturday night, which coincidentally was the night we decided to grill our dinner. The guys were good sports, though, and made some awesome steaks despite the pouring down rain outside. Brook and I got tickets to the Wyeth exhibit on Sunday afternoon and both of us agreed that it was an excellent show. It only took us about an hour to walk through, which was good timing for me as I tend to get sensory overload after 1-2 hours in an art museum. The emotion and detail in the paintings affected me, and I wanted to buy a print of one of the two that spoke to me the most, but they were sold out. Oh well...

Markus jumped right back in to summer session two on Wednesday night - the final course in his Master's program! Neither of us can believe that the end is almost here after three years and are trying to figure out what exactly Markus will do when he has all of his evenings free and no homework assignments to complete on the weekends.

In the end, our bathroom project was challenging but we're pleased with the results. While there are some imperfections (we are only amateur home remodelers, after all), it does look nice. For our next two projects, though, I think we're 99.9% sure we're hiring the experts. We want to redo our master bathroom (rip down walls, install a new tub, retile the shower, modify the plumbing) and it's a pretty major project, one that's just too much for us. And, at a minimum we need some new kitchen appliances and might throw in a new countertop, possibly an island, and hey, if we hit the lottery, some new cabinets, too. These would be late fall (or early Christmas gift) projects, but we have to start thinking and budgeting for them now. We have the names of contractors who will do estimates for us, so I'll be curious to see what the costs will be since I really don't know.

Markus and I both commented on how nice it was this weekend and yesterday to just sit down at night and not have to tile or grout or paint. We're both so glad the bathroom is done! I'll load our pictures this weekend into an album so you all can see our progress. Stay tuned...as for us, we're going to enjoy having no projects to work on for the next few weeks!