Recipes

Here are some of the requested recipes!

I got the guacamole salad recipe from Barefoot Contessa cookbook it's a great cookbook!
Guacamole Salad
1 pint grape tomatoes, halved (2 cups or 16 oz)
1 yellow bell pepper, seeded, and 1/2 diced
1 (15 oz.) can black beans, rinsed and drained
1/2 cup small-diced red onion
2 tablespoons minced jalapeno peppers, seeded (2 peppers) *I only added 1 pepper*
1/2 teaspoon freshly grated lime zest
1/4 cup freshly squeezed lime juice (2 limes)
1/4 cup good olive oil
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/2 teaspoon minced garlic
1/4 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper
2 ripe Hass avocados, seeded, peeled, and 1/2 inch diced

Place the tomatoes, yellow peppers, black beans, red onion, jalapeno peppers and lime zest in a large bowl. Whisk together the lime juice, olive oil, salt, black pepper, garlic, and cayenne pepper and pour over the vegetables. Toss well.
Just before you're ready to serve the salad, fold the avocados into the salad. Check the seasoning and serve at room temperature.

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

2 cups brown sugar

2 cups white sugar

1 lb butter (4 cubes)

4 eggs

1 tsp salt

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

2 tsp vanilla

4 cups flour

4 cups oatmeal
chocolate chips (any kind and as much as you like)

nuts (optional, also any kind and as much as you like)

Cream sugar and butter. Add eggs and beat well. Add salt, baking powder, soda, and vanilla. Pour flour in gradually while mixing. Grind oatmeal in blender (I usually don't do that part) add to mixture. Stir in Chocolate chips and nuts. Refrigerate for 2 hours (I usually don't do that either). Place on a greased cookie sheet, bake at 350 degrees for 8-10 minutes. Let cool on cookie sheet for a few minutes.

Chocolate and Caramel Cupcakes

This one was made up so I don't have a recipe. But, what I did was I got some recipe on line for a yummy chocolate cake. I think it was on Martha Stewart.com and tweaked it a little according to what ingredients I had on hand. I then filled the muffin tins half full then put a caramel in half of then and a Reisen candy in half of them. Then I filled them up the rest of the way with batter, and baked them. They turned out pretty yummy with a little surprise in the middle!

French Onion Soup

I don't have a recipe for this one either! I looked at a lot of different recipes and just kind of put a little from each recipe! I can't remember what I did for sure. Lots of onions. When the soup is done put a serving in a oven safe bowl and put a slice of french bread on top and load it with lots of cheese (fresh Parmesan, Swiss, Romano all of those are good) and broil it in the oven. The cheese is the best part anyway!

Jakes 1st grade concert

Jake was in a cute little Frog and Toad play. Here he is right before his big performance! He was a squirrel.
There he is in the middle, the little white dress girls arms are framing his head :)

Here is a clip for you to enjoy!

He performed so well. Good Job Jake!

We Did It!!

We read and we read and we read and we (Janie and kids and once in a while Dan) finally finished the Book of Mormon.

hungry?

Abby and I love taking pictures of food we make and eat. Here are some of our creations!

This is a chicken pot pie personalized for our family!

Cupcakes filled with carmel and chocolate.

French Onion soup--this was yummy!

Abby's display of grapes and raisins--beautiful!!

My first attempt at a Fondant cake.

This little guy sat on top of a cupcake.

Oatmeal Chocolate chip, our family favorite.

Cinnamon Rolls

Best Guacamole Salad ever!

These minty, filled yummy cookies are sooo good.

This is all Abby, what can I say she is an artist, even when it comes to her food!

Guess what this is?

Double Chocolate Pumpkin Cheesecake.

We made this for a cake auction. Then we made it again for us it was tasty!

Easter Fun!

Easter in Michigan.........Is always a little chilly, but this year instead of heading out to an Easter egg hunt. We headed out to shovel up 6 inches of snow. Abby got to work and shoveled the whole drive-way.

We colored eggs........Big kids are all at this end of the table....

And Estee all the way at the other end. Far away from the dye and strapped in so she couldn't escape! She loved the egg we gave her, even when she dropped (or threw) it on the ground and it cracked. I just peeled it and let her eat it!

Jake with his beauties!

Andy made his eggs little footballs that were yellow and blue based on his favorite team, guess who??

Cuties all dressed up for Church!

While we were at church the Easter Bunny stopped by our house so we came home and found

EASTER BASKETS!!

Estee thought the whole Easter basket thing was pretty sweet! Each of the kids got a Webkinz which are soooo cute! Estee got a pink pig.

Jake's cute little Cheetah was a favorite!

Abby scored some good loot and she got the adorable kitty.

Andy is pleased with his basket as well!

The sun came out and we enjoyed a little time outside. Estee got to play with the bubbles the Easter bunny brought her, when Jake and Abby weren't knocking her over to get the bubbles. They really tried to let her get them but it's just so tempting to chase a bubble and pop it!

Whose that stranger!? Oh wait, yeah, that's dad! He even got some playtime with us! Then we all rode with him to the hospital so we could spent time with dad and he wouldn't be alone in the car on Easter!

Dan found the following article on Forbes.com which made us so proud of our home town university! In case it's not super obvious, we love The University of Michigan especially when it comes to football. So this article just made us beam with pride and we had to share!

Here is the link to the original article or just read on!

Champion Factories

There is a school of thought that holds that champions like Super Bowl LXII quarterback and most valuable player Eli Manning are born, not made. How else to explain the fact that his older brother, Payton Manning, was the Super Bowl LXI quarterback and MVP? But the Manning brothers should thank their alma mater as much as their mater and pater. Eli's college days at the University of Mississippi and Payton's at Tennessee helped direct their natural talents and prepare them for the big leagues.
By their fruits ye shall know them: The National Collegiate Athletic Association's most consistently successful programs function as pipelines to the various professional sports leagues. To identify the top professional athlete-producing schools, Forbes.com's Kelly Nolan examined the current rosters of every team in the National Football League, Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League and Major League Soccer. She noted the college affiliation (if any) of each player, totaled them up and computed our Top 10 ranking.
The biggest champion factory is the University of Michigan, which produced 68 current roster professional athletes. (Michigan's archrival, Ohio State, placed second with 62.) Among Michigan's alumni are 21 hockey players, including Dallas Stars goaltender Marty Turco; three baseball players, including Chicago Cubs pitcher Rich Hill; three basketball players, including Dallas Mavericks power forward Juwan Howard; and 41 football players, including New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady.

Football powers dominate our list, for several reasons. First of all, football teams are significantly larger than those of most other sports, so any non-weighted aggregation of pro athletes will contain more football players than, say, basketball players. Also, the NFL operates no minor league system like that of Major League Baseball; nor does the NFL allow its teams to draft players directly out of high school. The college football teams effectively function as farm clubs for the pros. Case in point: Miami, which earned the No. 3 spot on our list largely on the strength of its gridiron program. (The Hurricanes currently boast 50 alums in the NFL, more than any other school.)
Other schools succeed with a more diversified approach: No. 4 UCLA scored well in four of our five sports categories. (The California-based Bruins are laggards in ice hockey.)
Unsurprisingly, no Ivy League team made the list. But many of our champion factories enjoy excellent academic reputations. (Achievement, perhaps, is contagious.) Only a few of them are private institutions--the majority are large state universities that compete in a wide variety of sports, but place a special emphasis on football.

That's certainly true of Michigan. The Wolverines have won more football games than any other program in NCAA history, including the first Rose Bowl game back in 1901. Among their many star players over the years was a future president, Gerald Ford. Their most prominent current alum is Brady, who may be on the brink of leading New England to an undefeated season.
Tom Brady may have missed bringing the Patriots to victory in 2008, but he does have three Super Bowl championships under his belt. He learned how it was done at Michigan, as Brian Griese's backup on the undefeated 1997 team that won the Big 10 title, the Rose Bowl and a share of the national championship. Besides Brady and Griese (who currently plays for the Chicago Bears), at least eight other members of that storied Wolverines team are still in the NFL, including Heisman Trophy winner Charles Woodson, who plays for the Green Bay Packers.
Still, Michigan would not have topped our overall list if it were just a football school. The Wolverines only rank fifth among all colleges for alums in the NFL, but they are No. 1 as a contributor to National Hockey League rosters. The Michigan teams that won the NCAA hockey tournament in 1996 and 1998 are still represented in the NHL by Turco and other alums.
Michigan's men's basketball program last won a national championship in 1989, but its famous Fab Five came awfully close in the early '90s. The Five, who comprised an all-freshmen starting line-up during the 1991-1992 season, made it to the Final Four before losing to Duke in the championship game. As sophomores, they returned to the championship games only to lose a heartbreaker to North Carolina. Then it was on to the NBA, where two of the Five (Juwon Howard of Dallas and Chris Webber of Golden State) are still pursuing championships.
As for Brady, he didn't win a championship during the two seasons he started for Michigan, but he won two bowl games. His last college game, the 2000 Orange Bowl, offered a forecast of what was in store for the NFL: He passed for 369 yards and four touchdowns while leading the Wolverines over Alabama in overtime.

Abby and A Beautiful Sunrise

A couple of mornings ago Jake looked out the window and said "mom look at the sky, it's purple". It was purple and pink and beautiful.

Abby, my artsy, inquiring child quickly ran to see the "purple" sky. She grabbed the camera and said don't worry mom I will get a picture. She ran outside at 7 am, which is totally a normal thing for her, and I didn't think another thing about it until I downloaded the pictures today.

I was looking at this one and wondered where did you take this one from Abby??
That's right from the roof! She climbed the tree and got on the roof to get a good shot!

She totally cracks me up!

Utah Trip (continued)

I can't believe I forgot to mention this. When we were heading onto the plane from SLC back home we were taking forever to get through security. Even longer than you would think it would take a family of six including one year-old in a stroller to get through. So finally one of the security guards comes over and asks if the back pack (which belongs to Jake) was ours. "Yes", we said. He said "who does it belong to", we looked at Jake (who is 7, and looks very innocent) and said "it's Jakes". The security guy then says "does he have a toy gun?" Then I remembered seeing the toy gun at grandma house and I felt really stupid and said something like "Oh, Jake did you bring that with you!" After a big ordeal, they had already called police, because "they

have to call police whenever a gun is involved" we were finally getting our things back. Except for the gun, they had to keep that. I am sure all the people behind us were so glad they picked our line :)

The culprit

The funniest part about the whole thing is the gun got there just fine going through security at the Detroit airport--no problem! It makes me think all those fun security checks are so worth it!

Other fun things I didn't mention in my first post about our Utah Trip. I was trying not to remember some of these things!
A cute little one year-old with a nasty little ear infection while flying (ear pressure makes them very unhappy) as if flying with a one year-old is not painful enough. A grumpy lady on the airplane right in front of us (I cannot for the life of me figure out why she would be unhappy about sitting in front of us?), but still she was a grump! ER visit (6 am) proceeding a night full of crying (at our friend's house, who just watched our child all day and all night) and no sleeping by me at all that night. Dan missing a lot of his conference because he went to the ER with me. We waited for 45 minutes for an ER doc to come and see us. Finally Dan just used there otoscope and looked in and diagnosed an ear infection. We walked out of the ER and thanked them for there equipment (still hadn't seen the ER doc, and we were the only ones there!) What really could he have told us that the otolaryngologist missed? Dan called a prescription in and we went and got some antibiotics.

While at Snowbird skiing I thought I had lost Abby and had ski patrol out looking for her. I ended up finding her (or rather she found me and flew by me and right into the little pit where you get onto the lift!). They stopped the lift helped her out and I said, "thanks you can call off ski patrol now I found her" . They looked all surprised and said "oh, this is her" I was glad I hadn't waited for them to find her! Right about this time it started snowing REALLY hard and the lift stopped working and the lift was the only way out of there. Dan was back with Andy waiting for us with the car because we had already taken so long finding Abby. I was so tired and we needed to hurry to make it down the canyon and to our dinner on time. So me and Abby and Jake started hiking out. After about 15 minutes and complaining and hiking halfway up the hill--the lift started working again! Great! So I said "should we keep hiking or go ride the lift up and ski back down". They said they wanted to keep hiking so we hiked about 5 more steps and they both said "let's go ride the lift". Well, Ok then I got my ski's back on after some work getting all the snow out of my boots (from hiking up the mountain). Then after another 10 minutes of helping Jake get his boots into his skis and Abby having made no progress to get her skis back on and me about ready to seriously lose it. I decided to ski down and ask the lift people to get me the heck out of there. They ended up snowmobiling us out one by one! It was pretty embarrassing but I was just happy to be getting out of there. Jake said that the snowmobile ride was his favorite part of the day!

Utah Trip

We had such a great trip to Utah. We enjoyed so many fun things from skiing to St. George!

We flew in to SLC and immediately met up with our great friends the Fisher's (except for Peter--we missed you) and went to dinner at the Mayan. That was the only time I pulled my camera out the whole trip. Actually it's probably a good thing because the pictures I took are seriously lacking.

Abby, Madeline, Mitch, Jake and the blurr is Tyler. Sorry about the bad picture, it was seriously the best one I got.

If you haven't been to The Mayan restaurant in SLC you should really check it out. These pictures do not give it justice, but it is really cool. This is the big pool of water that live divers jump into from big tall cliffs.

Here is one of the talking parrots at the Mayan. (Abby took this one she figured out how to focus the camera)

We stayed two nights with the Fisher's and Nicole was so sweet and watched Estee for us while we went skiing all day on Friday and then watched everyone while we went to a fancy dinner. We always have such a great time with the Fisher's and Nicole was on her own this time. I totally miss having long conversations with Nicole, but it was so fun to see her anyway. The kids all had a great time with her kids too.

Dan then went up to his conference at Snowbird and the kids and I headed to Logan to see family. It was a blast! Here a shot of me and two of my sisters Jill and Josie. Thanks to Josie for taking it!

Before leaving Logan I dropped all the kids off at my wonderful in-laws for a fun two days with grandma and grandpa. I headed for Salt Lake to get Dan and fly to St. George. It was 72 degrees. We loved it there. I sat in the pool OUTSIDE the first night and thought about my poor friends in Ann Arbor in the 10 degree weather. It was a fun and relaxing two days with no kids and warm weather.

We then flew back to SLC and had a FUN dinner with a great group of friends from med school. It was so much fun to see them all. We are all pretty much at the same stage in life and it was fun to hear about what everyone is doing. Sorry no pictures I forgot to get out the camera.

Then we had one day left in Logan and decided to spend it skiing at Beaver Mtn. and with family. It was probably the best day skiing ever! Perfect blue skies and perfect snow. We love Beaver Mtn. it is rarely crowded and prices are still pretty good and the snow and runs are good. Thanks to Grandma for watching Estee all day while we skied. Then we had one last family party dinner and it was so fun to see everyone! What an amazing fun time we had. I did not want to come home I was having way too much fun!

Love those Mountains! This is Snowbird from our day of skiing there.