Tuesday, January 22, 2013

TWD: Baking with Julia - French Apple Tart


It's the first food post of 2013!  It was a great recipe to try and I decided to try and make them in mini pie pans.  It turned out pretty well and I can say we had no problem eating them up!  I cheated a little bit with store bought pie crust, but I'll just blame the laziness on being 8 3/4 months pregnant!

First, Mikey worked on the filling for the tarts and I worked on the crusts and then after the apples were done cooking, I used the food processor to puree the filling and it seemed to work very well and seemed a lot easier than smashing them with a spoon.  We only made half the recipe for the filling, after making mini pies for Christmas we learned that a full recipe was way to much filling, and it seemed that half worked perfectly.  Then after I filled the empty pie crusts and we both arranged apples on two pies and sprinkled them with some sugar and cinnamon and got them to cooking.  We both like cinnamon, not sure if that would be alright with still calling it a French Apple Tart!  If you want to check out this week's host and the recipe head over to Laws of Kitchen.

Mikey covered his half with vanilla ice cream, and somehow we finished a whole mini pie in about three seconds!!







Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Happy New Year!!!

So now that we are pretty much caught up on our old posts, we figure we should shift some attention to the impending baby in our lives!  The last update we gave on the baby's room was that we were picking colors to paint it and deciding on just about everything else too.  Fortunately a lot of that process has been completed!

We decided on a nice color for the room, and we got a little bit fancy with it.  We had Julie's Mom come over and paint a tree on the wall then had Julie's friend Tameka come over and paint Calvin and Hobbes on the wall.  It turned out awesome!







You'll notice in the pictures that we also have furniture in the room now, woo-hoo!!  We also decided on a crib, a dresser and a rocking chair to use in the kid's room.  You may notice that it all came from Ikea!! Our kid is going to be so hip.  Julie's Mom made the baby a super cute blanket for Christmas, one of his first Christmas presents!!  



Speaking of Christmas, we had two lovely Christmases with my family and Julie's family and we hope that you had a great Christmas as well.  We can't believe that it is 2013, and this is the year that our son will be born, crazy.  Hope everyone has a Happy New Year and we can't want to show off our little kid in just 8 weeks.

Oh, and we got new pictures of the little fella, he is a little over 3 pounds at this point and growing like he should.  They said he was in the 50% percentile for size, so good job Julie!

He kinda looks like me

The last of the really old update... San Fransisco!

So, we didn't wanted to skip out on the San Fran update, so here is finally is!!  Even though it was last year!  Man, we are not good at blogging sometimes :(  We stayed with my Aunt and Uncle outside of San Fran for a few days before we ended our summer vacation.

We first got to meet up with them and see one of my cousin Claire's basketball games and then they took us to In and Out!  It was a first time both Mikey and I got to taste the wild side.  It was alright, I am sure we would need a few more experiences to know all about our likes and dislikes of the place.  Then after dinner we headed to their house to come up with our San Fran game plan.  We knew we wanted to see the Golden Gate Bridge, wander around the Fisherman's Wharf, maybe take a trolley ride and go see a Giants game.  We did all of that and more!

We drove into San Fran and hit up the Golden Gate Bridge, we even scored excellent parking amongst the millions of people.  It must have been the luck of the Mustang!   We looked around the gift shop and then decided to grab our jackets and walk a good ways on the bridge.  We walked a bit past halfway and decided it looked the same so we turned around after snapping a few pictures.






Then after the Golden Gate Bridge we met up with the relatives and had a great lunch at the The Cliff House.  With full stomach's we decided to go walk along the beach one last time, I think my cousin Katie missed playing in the ocean.  She got a little wet!  Here we are putting our shoes back on.  Then we drove through Chinatown and headed up to Coit Tower.  We then wandered our way around looking for some secret passageway that supposedly has parrots in the trees, but we couldn't find it and we were getting a little tired.  So, we just headed back to their house for the night!

Cleaning up after playing in the ocean

The next morning, we decided we would take the BART into San Fran instead of driving into town.  We decided we would go check how much tickets to the Giants game were and decided to watch the game!  It was kind of chilly, but we had a great time.



After the game, we walked to Fisherman's Wharf and got some tomato soup at Boudin's Sourdough shop.  It hit the spot after sitting around in the cold for a few hours.  Then we went a found the seal's, I don't think that there were as many as the last time I was in San Fran 20 years ago!  After that, we headed down the Wharf to the Ghiradelli factory and decided we deserved a snack, so we got a peanut butter sundae.  It was great, and there is no way I could have finished one, I am glad we split it.  So, with full bellies, we decided it was a great time to hit up a trolley ride to take us back to the BART.  We stood in line, and finally got our turn.  We did jump off a bit early so that we could walk around Chinatown some more and then headed down the hill to catch the BART.






It was a great stay in San Fran!  We will have to make it back again someday!