2012 Christmas Wonderfulness

Christmas this year was great. Christmas Eve we all bonded over something silly - Ugly Christmas Attire. We either crafted our own, or like Uncle Matt - Sprung for the best sweater ever worn by Dale in Stepbrothers. I had fun with my new Canon and took a ton of photos. Christmas was a little more chaotic and my family wasn't too friendly when it came to me taking photos. There is nothing that kills making memories more than a room full of people questioning your intent on taking photos then telling you to stop. Honestly it stings a little, I know the family shutterbug may annoy the crap out of you, but I think you will be more sorry that these images get missed. 

Anyway, here are my favorites from the two days:

Steev showing off his sweater

Watching Step Brothers 

Bogey!

We Skyped in Mallory & her new Husband Keith with Steev's iPad. She is in the Airforce and he is in the Marines, their leave did not allow them to be home for the holidays :( but we got to see them which was great!

Poppop wrapped two small giraffe statues for Aunt Pat in several large boxes, all wrapped and inside of each other. And yes, Aunt Pat dresses as an Elf!

Awkward Family Photos for the win!

Steev & His Poppop 

My Brother & Sisters-in-law all clad in Ugly Christmas Attire and putting up with my constant photo taking. I love these shots. 

Steev & I changed into matching shirts. Merry Christmas Ya Filthy Animal!

Probably the best series of photos I will ever take. Steev, his sister Katie, my Father-in-Law and I chipped in to get my Mother-in-law an iPad. The first photo is her upset because she was instructed that she couldn't open her pile of presents. Then, opening, then confused because she had no idea what it was, and then totally insanely happy. 

Ok, if you look closely, to the left of my Father-in-law is my Brother-in-law Seb holding his Groucho statue he just opened. It is hysterical. 

Steev, my Sister-in-law Katie and I chipped in to get my Father-in-Law an Eli & Peyton Manning signed poster. 

Steev's favorite song is Julie London's Cry Me A River, he got it on a 78 for his new Senora Phonograph. 

Now begins the sparse photo taking at my family's on Christmas Day

My parent's cat, Chaos, hates my guts. 

My younger cousin Alex playing with Chaos. 

My brother Tom. 

My Mother & Cousin Dan. 

My Uncle Bill has the same Birthday as Jesus. 

My Ceil and Poppop

My Parents. 

At the end of it all, we came home to our glowing Christmas Tree. Steev's back is still hurting so today we are going for another MRI. I will be working on my top 100 of 2012 post to post on New Year's Eve. I hope everyone had a great holiday!

Music Monday: The Christmas Edition

Merry Christmas Eve Friends!

My Husband and I are extremely lucky in that his family celebrates Christmas Eve and my family celebrates Christmas Day. We are never torn during Christmas and get to celebrate in full capacity. Tonight we all made Ugly Christmas Sweaters and equipped with my new camera I will capture the festivities and am so excited! I have a ham and some scalloped potatoes that need my attention so I will get to the Music Monday part of this post!

During the reign of Mmmmmmbop I was a Spice Up Your Life kind of girl. While I did enjoy Hanson I LOVED the Spice Girls. But, in all honesty I can say that Hanson's Snowed In is in my top choices for best Christmas Albums. The kids have skills and continue to make folky poppy music with better haircuts post puberty for us to appreciate on a greater scale as adults. But, before the better haircuts was Snowed In. The renditions of the classics are really wonderful and this one is probably my favorite since I listen to it non stop all day!

Have a Very Merry Christmas Everyone!

New Camera!

Merry Christmas to Stephanie! Steev got me a Canon Rebel T3i for Christmas and today I got to open and charge it up so I can use it for Christmas Eve tomorrow. I am so excited to learn and better my photography skills with a professional grade camera. I have always used a point and shoot and now I have something a little more. Before shooting up a storm tomorrow I wanted to play and shoot today, so here is a preview featuring my Christmas Decorations :) 

Merry Christmas Everyone! Stay Tuned for more Photos!

And So It Goes

It took me a while to get to this post, a lot has happened over the past two months to set me into some sort of tailspin that for the first time made me bedridden for a few days. The problem is I was not sick, my depression was kicked into overdrive and I let it consume me to the point that my head felt like a lead balloon and my body felt like engine sludge. I was at a point so low I barely can describe what I was even thinking about. 

My Director of Marketing gig ended, under circumstances that I’d rather not display, but circumstances that put me in a place I have never been before. There I lay, unemployed, and for the first time having no plan. I had no plan, nowhere to even look, and looking at myself hurt. I failed myself. There are so many details that daunted me, and I was drained, dormant and dumbfounded that after 4 years of college I had no clue what I wanted to do with myself. 

Upon further examination, I looked into my past aspirations. I sent an e-mail to myself from 'dear future me' a year after I graduated from college from a week before graduation. I told myself that the reason why I wasn't a teacher was because there was so much I wanted to experience, so many places I wanted to work and see and maybe make something of myself out of something totally unexpected. I told myself not to be afraid, and that it will work itself out - and even if I was working a crappy job to keep writing, keep creating, keep being. I broke down. I totally turned my back on myself all because of a series of unfortunate events that led me to a place I saw as a big break, only to find out it would be a big break-up. 

You see, with me, my heart is broken by life more than it is by love. My husband has been by my side for 10 years, and for the first time he did not even know how to be there for me. No matter what life threw at me I'd find a silver lining, keep going, and shake it out. This one flattened me like nothing ever had before. The Titanic sunk, Jack was dead, Rose was heartbroken and I was to blame for not anticipating the iceberg fully. 

After a week I started to stretch every morning, since my neck stopped turning and I had enough of myself. I starting pacing, hooping, staring, still nothing productive. 

Blank. Vacant. Bare. Vapid. 

It was an even plain. Nothing to see, just streamlined space as far as I could see. No breeze, no sign of life or productivity. I was stuck. 

I do not know when this will end. At every turn, I have something else to beat myself up over - like the fact I haven’t taken nearly the amount of weight I wanted to take off this year. Or the fact I did not read as much as I wanted, and I never finished a single damn short story in my series of Moleskins. The more I thought about this year the more devastated I became. The route I always took to get myself out before isn’t working. I can’t get out of bed before 10am. I start a Zumba tape and stop halfway through because I get so angry with myself. These self inflicted injuries are piling up and I don’t even recognize myself in the mirror. 

I guess writing this is my first step to moving on. I guess it is also coincidence that the new year is approaching. 2013 has to be different for me. I don’t always have the best look on odd years, but on odd years I turn an even number - and maybe that will be a great thing. Come March I will be 24 and it will be my last year of my ‘early twenties’. Is this the first time I reveled my true age? Not just ‘twenty something’? Is every twenty something in this same haze of ‘What on Earth Am I Doing With Myself’? Or am I just the only fuck up? 

I am sorry this entry isn’t going anywhere - it represents how I feel about where I am and what is going on for me. It seriously is a crossroads in my life, and thank you to everyone who is reading this - I have been brainstorming for you bloggy blog and honestly I think it may be time for me to become more of a regular writer on here. I seriously enjoyed writing about Jack White and my Aunt Mary. I will be purchasing photoshop in the near future and this Christmas I am getting a new camera and I will start exploring, sharing and becoming more confident on the ground my feet are standing upon. I think 2013 may be the first year that I will be completely open to the new things presented to me - because well, I don’t have much to stand in my way. 

Music Monday: Trampled by Turtles

I do not have a playlist for you today because I have actually been obsessed with a certain album in particular. Trampled by Turtles has an album called Palomino that was released in 2010. 

This album has been on a constant loop, the music and the vocals just match the changing fall leaves and brings a smile to my face. It also broke me out of my Jack White-around-the-clock week. 

Please enjoy. 

My first Gluten Free Baking Adventure: Banana Oat Muffins

As per my 4 simple goals before 2013, I have really looked into going Gluten Free. While I may not be ready to 100% commit I make sure that 75% of my diet is gluten free. 

I posted a Facebook status about having a GF recipe swap and my Sister-in-law's friend Mindy directed me to Amy Green's website and I immediately bought her cookbook. You can check her out at Simply Sugar & Gluten Free for the cookbook and some of her recipes. 

Well, I decided that the best place to start for me was breakfast, because I make better choices when I start with a good breakfast! Luckily Amy Green has a ton of amazing muffin recipes that seem simple enough. So as my first Gluten & Sugar Free Project I chose the Banana Oat Muffins. 

Before I go into the recipe, I will share Amy's 'basic flour blend' which shows up for most of the 

Gluten Free Baking. 

To substitute white flour, the Basic Flour Blend is: 

4 cups garbanzo-flava bean flour 

4 cups sorghum flour 

2 cups potato starch 

1 1/3 cups tapioca starch 

Mix well, store in an airtight container in the refrigerator. 

(you will find out most of these ingredients & leftovers will have to be refrigerated, so clean out the fridge before going forward). A lot of these can be found at the local health food and specialty stores as well as the supermarket. I did discover VitaCost which has a lot of these specialty ingredients at a discounted price - which is super helpful!

Now: Banana Oat Muffins 

Ingredients for 12 Muffins:

3/4 cups low fat milk

1 cup gluten-free rolled oats

1 large ripe banana 

1/2 cup agave nectar 

2 large eggs (lightly beaten)

1 teaspoon vanilla extract 

1 1/4 cups basic flour blend 

2 teaspoons gluten-free baking powder 

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon 

1/2 teaspoon xanthan gum 

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt 

1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg 

1/4 cup unsalted butter, melted, or canola oil 

(it is not all there, but I have limited counter space)

So, turn on that oven to 400 degrees while you set up the counter to make it nice and warm for you. The best part of baking in the fall is your kitchen gets nice and toasty! I chose to line my muffin tin with pretty cupcake liners and I got started. 

Place the oats into a medium size bowl and mix in the milk. 

In a smaller bowl mash your banana with a fork and leave some chunks. 

Whisk the Agave, eggs & vanilla into the mashed banana 

and then combine with the oats and set aside to soak 

In a large bowel whisk together all of the dry ingredients (this will be the bowl everything gets combined, so if you have a Kitchen Aid like me, use the Kitchen Aid bowl) 

Add the butter or oil to the wet ingredients and put the soaking oats into the dry ingredients 

Mix on low for about a minuet until just blended 

You will know it is combined when this is the texture: 

Then, evenly distribute the batter into your muffin tin 

Then bake for 12-15 minuets 

If you are like me there is a huge mess in your path, like while making these one of my glass contained spices fell from the cabinet shattering leaving me to clean it up while the oats were soaking. I cannot tell you if this was a good thing, but the muffins are super moist so I would suggest letting them soak for 5 minuets. I actually cleaned the whole counter, unloaded and loaded the dishwasher all in the time this was baking, and they were just about ready when I was finished setting up the cooling rack lined with paper towels. 

When you can insert a toothpick and it comes out clean into any of the muffins, they are finished! Mine took 13 minuets. Let cool in the tin for 5 minuets before moving them to the cooling rack

What made me happy was the muffins smelt like my famous Hummingbird cake. The Hummingbird cake is a heavy, flavorful cake that I love to make. But is is dreadfully not gluten or sugar free, and when the batter (yes I tasted!) and the aroma mirrored the cake I got extremely excited. 

After cooled, enjoy!

I made these muffins for breakfast purposed, so to store them, I wrapped each individual one and put them in the freezer, I have breakfast for the whole week!

My husband and I really enjoyed them, you do not really miss the sugar and the oats make the muffins very filling. Our dog Annie also really loved them, she took our wrappers out of the garbage right in front of us! I think I will make Amy Green's Blueberry Muffins next - I will let you know how that goes!

-Stephanie