We are Mr. and Mrs. Short. With a new little house,a dis-proportioned pup, and my self-proclaimed half-assed cooking/baking/crafting/DIYing, we are living it up, letting the chill down to our bones, and making it look like we've got it together. Life may be Short, but it's up to us to make it count!
In order to get the party started with making the house Short, we needed to start somewhere. My BFF, Lifelong Friend, and former Maid of Honor... let's call her Nikki...I've known her since I was 13 and we have been pretty much attached at the hip since then.
Anywho, Nikki and I decided to start with taking the wallpaper down in the kitchen, foyer, and bathroom. But first we had to go to brunch. So we put on our best going-to-brunch-pre-wallpaper-removal clothes and posed for a picture before dashing out.
Yeah, we were cuting it up. So we went and had brunch -- which turned out to be lunch because, as usual, Nikki and I were behind on our time. But we had mimosa's... and some funnel cake fries. And it was sensational.
And then we came back and got to work.
This was the wallpaper in the kitchen and foyer. While I'm sure the former owner of the house loved it, it's not very us. So down it was going to come.
Nikki and I were trying two different methods for the removal of said wall covering. The first was to use the chemical spray from the hardware store to detach it. Nikki heard something about using Downy fabric softener and very hot water.
We started by pulling off the decorative paper part, leaving behind the backing that was actually glued to the wall.
That stuff came down easy. And before long we had clean walls... and a bed for the dog?
He'll lay on anything...
After all the paper was down, we got to the messy part. I started on one wall and Nikki on the other, with the chemical and the Downy respectively.
The spray worked alright, but you need to spray a lot on and it is sticky and smelly and all around not fun. It took me almost half a bottle to do one wall, so I would say from a cost effective stand point it wasn't the most viable.
Surprisingly, the downy worked just as well if not better! You put some Downy in some very hot tap water, soaked it into the paper, and it just slid right off.
GREAT SUCCESS!!!!
It smelled a ton better, was less messy -- and what little mess it made was easy to clean -- it was a lot easier on our HANDS and we used maybe three or four cap-fulls in all three rooms.
You have the use the hottest water you can, when the water cooled down it stopped working as well. But that's not that hard because it goes pretty fast so you will keep up with the water.
With the kitchen and foyer done we moved upstairs to the bathroom. Here is the wallpaper up there:
In the same vein as downstairs.
The only thing was, it was vinyl wallpaper so it was a little bit harder to get down. Also, there are a lot of little places (ie, corners near cabinets, behind the mirror, behind the toilet) that will take a lot of work to get the rest out. We were tired and it was a lot more work in a small space. So there is still a little bit of stuff on the walls... but we will pull that off when we are getting ready to paint.
Even Mr. S got into the peeling.
He's a good helper lol. Nikki and I stood by and watched while he did a wallpaper removal/balancing act in the shower.
This girl does so much for me, she's the bomb diggity.
So, now the wallpaper's down (minus a few remnants) so now it's time to get painting. I've got big plans for this little place.
Nikki - Thank you so much for all your help, you're the hardest worker and the most inexhaustibly generous person I know! Wine and cheese for you next time, girlie ;)
Let's take a break from my over eager efforts in my new kitchen to back track to what we did the weekend after we moved.
Every year, my family participates in the Brain Tumor Society's Race for Hope DC. This year, my bestest best friend who always comes wasn't able to make it and my brother and sister-in-law got tangled up elsewhere. Next year everyone will be in. It's a great cause, and we do it annually in honor of my Uncle Eddy, my stepdad's older brother, who died after a long, hearty battle with brain cancer. Brain tumors strike people of all ages, so you see survivors and fighters from elderly to infant. And there is nothing I have better to do on any given Sunday but contribute an hour and three miles to awareness and research to find a cure.
So there we were in DC at early time thirty ready to put in 5k for a cure.
My parents getting ready. My stepdad runs every year and has to wait around for us while we come in at just under or over an hour walking.
Yay for smiles... OMG hubs makes me laugh in this picture... My mom is wearing a hat that we had made in honor of Uncle Eddy a couple of years back. It says "Fitz's Flyers."
The starting line approaches!! Look at all those people! We were in good company, that's for true!
The Capital building looks over our efforts.
The Washington Monument down on the other side of the Mall. We had a new route this year, it was good to see some new sites.
Me and the boy in front of the Capital. BF has lived here his whole life, and me for more than half of mine at this point, and DC is kind of just... there to us. It is pretty much a background to our lives, the monuments are just...there, where they've always been. I don't remember the last time I went into the District just to sight see... I took this opportunity to get a hubby/wifey piccy here. But I'm thinking there may be some old fashioned touring in our future. Something not involving hockey or art, my usual reasons for being in the District.
So there you have it, a nice break from all the craziness, a yearly tradition that we look forward to, and something good to come of it.
Besty (you know who you are) - I know you really wanted to go this year, but you had a good reason and I know you'll be there next year and the year after. We did miss you though, and I can't wait to get you and G & K back out to see the new route!! Loves!
For Cinqo de Mayo, our office decided to have a potluck. True to form, I volunteered for dessert. I found a recipe online for Mexican brownies. For some reason, it just wasn’t enough. I wanted some icing… something awesomey chocolatey and spicy. Cue the Mexican hot chocolate icing… Yuuum.
You can find this recipe for the Mexican Brownies where I did, here.
Ingredients!
1 box Betty Crocker fudge brownie mix (I'm sure you could use any one, but I used this and it rawked)
1/4 cup water
1/2 cup oil
2 eggs
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease mini muffin pans THOROUGHLY with no paper liners.
- Mix all ingredients together
*drool face*
- Bake mini brownies for about 10-13 minutes or until toothpick inserted into center has moist crumbs clinging to it.
There is a note on my recipe: don't wait for the toothpick to come out clean. If there is wet batter on the brownie, bake for another minute or two. If you overcook them you will get the dreaded brick brownie. And nobody wants that.
Just these brownies would have been enough. The cinnamon and almond added so much to the fudgie brownies. Oh. Em. Gee. So freakin tastey.
I let them cool forever. Mostly because I was trying to spread them out over a week night or two so I didn't overload myself after work, but also because I was planning on putting icing on them so they needed to be completely cool to avoid the whole melty icing thing.
I think I got the recipe for the icing at Epicurious, so I'm linking you to that. If this is your recipe, speak up. If not, hit the print button.
I always get my ingredients together before starting a recipe... especially when baking. For one, it makes me feel like I'm on a cooking show and I get to put pictures of them on my blog. On the other hand, it helps to make sure you don't over-measure into your batter while it's spinning. Saves time, too. You also know that you've got everything in there. To recap, 1, makes me feel special. 2, peace of mind. Moving on...
1 8oz package cream cheese, room temperature (do yourself a favor and remember to take this out before you go to make the icing. I always forget with cream cheese and butter. It really screws up your baking mojo)
1/2 (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature (see aside above)
1 teaspoon chili powder
1/2 teaspoon ground cinammon
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 cups confectioners' sugar, sifted
3 oz unsweetened chocolate, melted
Cream the cream cheese and butter together thoroughly. Add the chili powder and cinnamon and mix to incorporate.
Add the salt, vanilla, and confectioners' sugar.
So... yeah, sifted confectioners' sugar, right? Using a gift certificate from the wedding, I got myself a sifter because I didn't have anything except a freaking colander to sift flour and sugar. So, Ms. Martha came to the rescue:
So, I filled it and set myself down to press the thing over and over again and get a nice, fluffy snow-like pile of sweet stuff.
Except... THE DAMN THING DIDN'T WORK!
I think it was broken, I don't know if I can return it or not... but in the meantime I had a freaking BATTLE with my powdered sugar to get it out of this thing and into the stupid colander. And then tap it out. Sugary, powdery goodness everywhere! And one frustrated baker...
EVERY. WHERE. GAH!
Anyway, add the stupid sugar and stuff.
Then melt your chocolate. I prefer to do it in a double boiler (that's what she said)... I don't like to use to microwave unless I have to. And chocolate can be very fickle, I'd rather have control of my heat and my stirring.
And into the mixer this yummy, velvety melted chocolate goes.
This is where the recipe says that add more confectioner's sugar a little at a time if you need it thickened. I didn't. And there was also no FREAKIN WAY I WAS SIFTING ANYMORE DAMN SUGAR.
I did add more chocolate though, I felt that the cream cheese taste was overwhelming and there wasn't a really chocolate flavor.
But good... holy crap delicious.
Now to get my yum on my nom... to make yummy nommings... my weapon of choice:
Martha Stewart cookie gun! Can also be used to pipe icing and inject icing into things. Of this baby is gonna get a lot of use. I was a little skeptical on how it would work, being a gun instead of a piping bag. But it turned out to work perfectly... I never had very much luck with piping bags. I, obviously, need heavier artillery.
My victims:
And my first failure (if you don't count Battle Powdered Sugar):
OK... so... LOL... at first I didn't know what I was doing so i tried to just glob it on there. When I figured out how the icing came out of the gun and whatnot, I eventually got it down to single little swirl that looked pretty dang awesome if I do say so myself.
Couldn't be happier really with how they turned out. They tasted as good as they looked, and the crowd was as impressed as I was flabbergasted that I had actually created something that looked real.
And although they were freaking fantastic, I had some changes to the icing and only the icing. I love cream cheese icing as much as the next girl, but I wanted something much more... spicy and chocolatey and all that junk. Next time, I would cut back on the cream cheese and throw in some more chocolate and chili powder. We'll see how that goes. In order to remember things like this, I always make notes on my recipes so I remember.
Now this post would be over except it's not. This icing recipe made a TON. Way more than I needed for my little guys. So I decided to make a 2nd batch of cupcakes for Mother's Day dinner.
Except, they failed. For some god forsaken reason, the brownies refused to pop out of my mini cupcake tins. RE-Freaking-fused. No matter what I did... bake them longer, let them cool longer, tried greasing with both Crisco and Olive Oil... nothing worked and they just kept falling apart. I don't think I did anything different... the brownies tasted the same, just weren't holding together at all.
I almost ran out of time, so in a last act of desperation, I made one big brownie for my mother-in-law, injected it with the icing (yay cookie gun) and plopped some on top. For everyone else, I still had some of the other whole cupcakes so I got rid of them shared the goodness at my brother-in-law's house.
I took the crumbled brownies and remaining icing and put them in the fridge for another project. But that's another story to be told another time... Make these brownies, they're awesome. But watch the confectioners' sugar....
If you don’t get my Futurama reference, is the title still funny? You tell me.
Well, we made it. Actually we made it some ungodly number of weeks ago and I am just now getting to even loading the pictures (of which there are few of the whole moving part) off my camera. And this is the first of four drafts that have pictures but no words as of yet (remedying this as we speak).
Oh, bizzity-boy has it been crazy! We moved on April 22 and just now, May 12, it is starting to feel like a home instead of boxville. I’ve gotten used to cooking in a kitchen with some room and it is certainly nice to have enough space to even imagine entertaining. We’re still not completely moved in or settled, but we are living again. We’ve gotten to the point where not only can we figure out what we want to do with our house, but we can actually get started on some projects.
In the interest of getting this post up sometime this millennia sooner rather than later, I won’t get ahead of myself. Let’s backtrack to closing and moving.
Closing on the house was really, easy peasy. We were set to close on Friday and by the week before all our closing docs were straight with the bank. They told me they would let me know the amount I needed for closing costs so that I could go get a certified check from the bank.
When I hadn’t heard from them on Wednesday, I started to get a little worried. I had already taken a half-day on Friday and I wasn’t going to have time any day but Thursday at lunch to get the check. I emailed my loan officer and asked her if they knew. She emailed the closing department. And… we waited.
By about 5:00 Wednesday, my answer was: “Your documents are still with the closing department. They have not been released.”
Quoi? How does that help? And what does it mean?
By Thursday at noon, still nothing. My loan officer was emailing and emailing and still they kept telling us that our HUD form had still not been released. Close of business on Thursday and I still had no bank check.
My boss promised that she would let me go to the bank on Friday because she knew I had no choice. Thank goodness for small miracles.
I had the amount by around 9:00am on Friday and I rushed to the bank and rushed back.
And then my loan officer called me and told me they gave me the wrong amount. Seriously. No joke. What a cluster.
Luckily they let me write a personal check for the rest of the money. I say luckily for them because I was about to unload an entire box-filled-apartment’s worth of a whoop ass on them if they screwed up my closing.
So we got in, we signed a bunch, and we got out. Keys and all. And, actually, went back to the apartment because we still had stuff to get packed. We were still emptying stuff from the apartment until about a day before our lease was up, one complete week after closing.
Anywho, eventually Hubs and I grabbed a load of clothes and headed over for some bubbly and some breathing in the awesome time.
Hubbers, contemplating the awesome.
We have a banister!!
(Seriously, how cute is this guy? Playoff beard and all!)
My kitch! Oh how I love her!
Our clothes were the first things in. It was nice not to have to worry about them making the trip on Saturday and then getting them in before the work week. Foresight FTW!
Me on the stairs (duh)
You can see the china hutch that we bought with the house there I the corner.
BF took advantage of the open space (AND NO DOWNSTAIRS NEIGHBORS!!!) to do some impromptu skateboarding in our living room.
An awful picture of Jacob, our door knocker.
Can you guess where he got his name?
Remember, I’m super clever so this will be a hard one.
I told you there were few. The rest are of us at the apartment filled with boxes and I’m tired of looking at them. From here, we visit baking land, renovation land, and philanthropy. Lots more to come!
I need to update my profile now, since we are homeowners now and I have more space and inspiration and projects to do. So, say goodbye to the old stuff… the Shorts are moving up!
What an absolutely exhausting weekend. Saturday, mostly, but Sunday has been the whipped cream on top. With less than one week until closing and moving, we are scrambling to prepare ourselves (because winter is coming... Game of Thrones starts tonight... I'm excited...)
Also... please forgive any prattling or glaring grammatical errors, I am very much the tired blogger right now.
So, I woke up bright and early at 8am on Saturday morning to this:
A lovely day to say the least. But pupman had his annual vet appointment so we had to go.
On our way, the weather made our drive so very pleasant (and Bo smell like roses and daisies... if by roses and daisies you would mean wet dog). I can't tell if Bo is more excited about the car ride himself or if he is just abuzz with anticipation at where the car ride is taking him. He is pretty much unstoppable if he believes there is a car in his future. And once in the car, he is really only few clicks down on the doggy freak out scale. But we got there and had a good visit and got home without much incident.
This gave me enough time to grab something to eat and put my feet up before we headed back out on the town. This time, my colorful companion was the one and only boyface!
We started by stopping at our realtor's office and signing some final papers. Yay we are so ready for closing it hurts!
Then we went to Salvation Army to try to find a dresser. We just got a new Salvation Army in our town and it is magnificently and frighteningly HU-MUNG-OUS!
It just went on and on! And there was so much stuff! And so, so very many people. They had about a million buffet hutches and a ton of couches, but no dressers (sad panda) so we trolled around in the randomness for a few minutes before heading back out into the pristine weather for a ride to Harris Teeter.
Where we focused on very important things. In reality, I did need quite a few things because I am making my WORLD FAMOUS baked ziti with my WORLD FAMOUS pasta sauce.
Famous in my world anyways. We got all we needed including a visit from a mustached man who let us taste and buy some of his local Italian sausage and watched him give out mustaches to little girls. Ha. Giggle.
Whew... it's a lot less exhausting writing about this then it was to do it all. But it is all very exhausting to write all this. That's all for halftime, let's keep going.
This is the guy with the sausage (giggle giggle) and the mustache (giggle giggle giggle). If you live in the DC metro area you should check it out though, pretty tastey.
And this guy with his mustache! We're only to the third game of the first round of the playoffs! This guy is gonna get a lot furrier... Lol let me tell you how thrilled I am... :) I love my guy and you know it!
A quick trip to check out the new ABC Store (and buy liquor) and off we were back home to make pasta sauce and pack our brains out!!
The pasta sauce is something that my mom taught me how to make. We are from upstate New York and although we are not Italian... it was basically a huge part of our diet before moving down here and is something my mom has stuck with. Making large vats of pasta sauce and freezing is a monthly project and we eat pasta a lot.
So here it is, a step by step of the not so secret and incredibly simple but fairly time consuming method of pasta sauce making that we subsist on in our house. You will never go back to simple sauce again.
I start with onions, garlic, ground beef, and ground Italian sausage (I usually go with mild and I prefer ground. I feel like hot is just an overwhelming flavor and I feel that sliced sausage doesn't meld as well when you're eating it. You either get a mouthful of beef or a mouthful of sausage, not a full taste of the whole thing.)
So here is my giant vat of very hot meat (that's what she said?):
I used a little bit of olive oil to cook the onions and garlic before adding the meat this time... but it doesn't really matter. The fat in the meats gives you all the lube you need to caramelize the onions and garlic. But any oils, fats, or liquids will all be mixed together anyway. (See how specific this recipe is?)
Then we have our tomatoes:
(Can I show brand names? do I care?) My mom will sometimes boil and skin tomatoes, but I am both lazy and short-ish (ha) on time so I just got some diced canned. Tomato paste to thicken it up a little. I don't really have any brand loyalty when it comes to any of these things. I try to buy a pasta sauce that is just a basic traditional or classic flavor, and whatever is on sale. I have used a lot of different sauces but because you're adding so much to it, they all ending up tasting the same. This is where personal preference and personal taste will come into play.
So these all get dumped unceremoniously on top of the meat. So unceremoniously, in fact, that you don't even take a picture for your blog.
You move on to the next step, which is to add what BF refers to infamously as THE LEAF!
Bay leaves. Do not eat them, they taste awful. But they add flavor when cooked into things. Kind of like onions.
I put these in with the tomato stuff because the longer they cook the more flavor they will impart into the sauce. BF did not find out the whole "don't eat them" thing until after he started eating my cooking. He says he always gets the leaf. I make sure to always save one just for his plate :).
Then I round up the usual suspects.
Rosemary (this is actually rosemary my mom grew and dried for me. awesome) Basil. Oregano. Parsley. The parsley isn't necessary, it adds more color than flavor. But I had it so I threw it in. I would say the Basil and Oregano are the most important pieces, but the rosemary is worth it. These go in by the handful and by taste. Remember that the longer the sauce cooks, the more the flavors will meld and come out. So I usually put some in and then taste it a few hours later, then see if it needs more. It's also good to have some garlic powder on hand in case the five cloves of garlic you put in at the beginning have not made it suitably non-vampiric. (I heart garlic)
And then it sits like this, simmering, for as long as possible. All day if you can stand to be stuck at home with it. You could theoretically do it in a crock pot I guess, we just never have and mine is packed. Besides, unless you have a giant crockpot it's not going to hold this amount. That's where the awesomeness of the above stockpot comes in. (Martha who?)
I want to say that I got the pasta sauce all mixed in and simmering, it was about mmm... 4ish. I ended up letting it cook until after 8. Not as long as I would have wanted, but good enough.
At this point my master list looked about like this:
Fairly satisfactory. The things that didn't get crossed off can get done in time. I needed to pack so I popped myself a beer and got moving.
Pictures of packing aren't very interesting, and probably would have just messed up my motivation. So I only stopped to take a picture of this.
How cool right? I wanted to light them but Hubs said we should save them and light them in the new place. We will christen our new house but light things on fire inside of it. Sounds like a plan...
So I put them where I wouldn't lose them in the next week.
Baha.
Any who, after packing up several boxes, drinking a few drinks, and flinging pasta sauce on the ceiling
It was time to tupperware it and freeze it.
See why stockpot trumps crockpot? It's a simple volume issue (that's volume right? you know what I mean!). This is probably more than a months worth of sauce, now that I have the stockpot and can make a full batch. And we also haven't been in a huge pasta roll recently... but now that we have so much sauce available we might be.
And this is now our freezer. You can tell a lot about a family by the innards of certain storage areas. I think the freezer is definitely one of them. I, like my mother, freeze pretty much everything and make it last. Note: several bags of ice, I use this in the summer to make sweet iced tea. This, I believe, is the left overs from daiquiri night... Bagels (top right hand corner) brought back home from New York from my mom. It's a treat we don't get down here very often in Virginia. They are just made different back home.
There isn't actually that much stuff in this freezer, it just looks tight because of the bags of ice... and the fact that the entire top layer of our wedding cake is sitting their hogging up the back corner awaiting our first anniversary. And haunting me.
And yes, we keep liquor in our freezer. Nothing better than ice cold vodka. And the constant reminder that you have it every time you go for an ice cube...
So that's it. That was all Saturday. And then Sunday... Sunday mom and I moved a million boxes into her garage. It seemed like a million anyway. I'm so tired of boxes and moving. And there still seems to be SO MUCH STUFF!!
My more immediate concern is getting in some relax time and counting down the T minus 47 minutes until the Game of Thrones premier!! So, I leave you with this:
