Spinach Dip (or “The Way to Get Everyone to Think You’re an Amazing Cook with Minimal Effort”)

Every time I make this for something, everyone asks me for the recipe.  And as I promised Rachel I’d get it to her before she goes off to the wilds of Honduras, here we go!

10 oz frozen chopped spinach, thawed and squeezed dry

16 oz sour cream

1 cup mayonnaise

1 package Knorr Vegetable recipe mix

(You can also add 8 oz of water chestnuts and 3 chopped green onions, but I never do.)

So, you mix it all together (they recommend chilling for 2 hours) and serve.

Most of the time I get home from work, hurriedly thaw the spinach in a bowl of hot water, throw it all together, and run to whatever activity/party I'm going to that evening.  Also, I serve it with Sheepherder's Bread.  I can always find it in the Smith's (Fred Meyer) bakery section.  It's a big (like 8-10") loaf of this soft white bread.  It has a softer crust than most French Bread but that same chewy inside.  I LOVE that bread. I could eat an entire loaf myself.  Anyway, I cut up the bread into cubes (usually while that darn spinach is thawing) and then everyone goes to town.

The hardest part of this recipe? Finding the Knorr Vegetable mix.  That stuff is nearly impossible to find.  I can find it at the SLC Walmart, but not at the Centerville Walmart.  I've never found it at any Smith's, but I did find it at the Centerville Target, but not the SLC Target.  It's weird.  I did end up buying about 3 packages that are now permanently in my cupboard, just in case I ever want to make it and don't have time to run all over town trying to find the stuff.

The best part? This recipe is from the back of the Knorr package, if you can't remember how much of everything, all you need is a package of that mix and you'll be set.  So, that's it, the best Spinach Dip you'll ever make!

(just for reference)

A Month Without Sugar: Day 16

What a difference a day (or 12 days) makes.  It’s funny how much less I want sugar right now.  I know just less than two weeks ago I was seriously jonesing for some sort of dessert (or 10) but today…meh.  I will admit, I cheated this weekend.  I was doing perfectly, and then my Visiting Teacher brought over peanut butter cookies that she’d made for me and it seemed so rude to just throw them away, so I ate them.  And you know what? They were alright.  They weren’t fabulous, I liked them, they were warm and chewy and sugary, but I could have not eaten them and been just fine.

I have found this whole experiment makes me look for things that I can eat.  As opposed to looking for recipes of this that are sugary I end up looking for dinner recipes so I can make something new to drool over. Like the stuffed shells I made Sunday for lunch.  (Or was it dinner? Is 4 p.m. lunch or dinner? Anyway…)  I’ve also got a soup and pizza planned for this week.  Both of which I’m looking forward to.

I’ll also admit, usually about Wednesday or Thursday I really start craving chocolate.  Like kill someone to get a piece of cake craving.  But I power on through and on the weekends I really don’t want anything.  Which is weird.  You would think that hanging out in my apartment on a Friday or Saturday night would be a prime time for me to give in and make brownies, but oddly enough I’m good.  I eat my piece of dark chocolate and that’s it.

Julia introduced me to Whole Food’s candy section last week.  That’s a dangerous place.  They have massive amount of super dark chocolate.  When you go to a normal grocery store they have maybe 2 or 3 choices for 75% or higher chocolate.  You go to Whole Foods and they have about 10 brands each with at least 5 different flavors.  It was heaven.  I got a mint bar that I haven’t even broken into yet.

Okay, that’s enough rambling.  Later this week I’ll finally get my act together and post my Spinach Dip recipe.  For now, I decided to share the recipe I found here, for Stuffed Shells.  I only made half of it and it made two really big servings.  But it’s delicious so I totally recommend it.   

Simple Stuffed Shells

10-12 jumbo pasta shells

1 cup ground beef

2 cups cottage cheese

1/2 cup + 1 cup mozzarella cheese

1 egg

1 tsp italian seasoning

1 tsp garlic powder

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp black pepper

2 cups Pasta sauce

Cook pasta shells in boiling water according to package directions, and brown ground beef in a pan until no longer pink.

In a bowl, mix together cottage cheese, 1/2 cup of the mozzarella, egg, ground beef and seasonings.

Spoon the mixture into the cooled shells and place them facing up in a baking dish. Cover with pasta sauce and the remaining 1 cup of cheese. Cover with aluminum foil and bake at 375 for 20 minutes. remove the foil, and bake for an additional 10 minutes.

A Month Without Sugar: Day 4

Right now, quite honestly, I would sell my mother for a piece of chocolate cheesecake.

I think if I weren’t eating fruit and my once-a-day piece of REALLY dark chocolate (75%, whew!) I’d actually be taking out people from the top of my apartment building with a rifle. Or at least I’d be eating dessert. But, the plus side is I haven’t had an afternoon headache this week (yet) and I’m managing this.

Let’s go back to the beginning and why I’m doing this, considering I LOVE chocolate (and dessert, and pastries, and this that contain sugar). I started noticing that all too often I’d get a headache in the afternoon, and that my blood sugar level was way out of whack. I’m talking about being normal, eating, having a total sugar high (and this was after eating something normal like baked chicken and a salad), then crashing about an hour later. Every day. A couple times a day. Then add in the headaches. They weren’t often, but they were often enough that it was obnoxious. I’d eat lunch then as the afternoon wore on my head would start to ache. Then it would get steadily worse until I’d go to bed by about 8:30. At which point it would keep me up until around 10.

So I started thinking about what to do about this. Then last weekend happened. I ate two pints of gelato in three days. It was delicious too and I’m not going to say I regret it, but I will say that something needed to change. I started to wonder if I really could give up sugar. Just go cold turkey and not eat any. So Monday I did a little research and found the people who cut out all sugar (natural or refined), decided they were crazy and that would kill me, and then found the people who still ate fruit and the occasional piece of very dark chocolate and kept the sugar in any processed food below 5 grams and I realized I might just be able to do that. So I stocked back up on fruit, check the food I eat on a regular basis, and bought my almost totally unsweetened dark chocolate. (Can I just say that stuff is delicious? Because it is.)

And then I added in the snacks. I’ve tried for a few years to be a person who just eats three solid meals a day. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. But I’m starving by the time lunch and dinner come around. So I thought that it may not be helping my blood sugar to go from breakfast to a low to a really big influx (lunch!) to a really low low to another big high (dinner!). This might be part of my problem with the whole headache thing. And the wanting to take a big nap every afternoon. So I started packing snacks this week. Fruit for the mornings, and usually something crunchy for the afternoon (pita chips and hummus, wheat thins and cheese, etc.).

So today is day 4 and I’m feeling pretty good. Aside from the withdrawal of course. I’ll evaluate next week and see what needs to change, but so far I’m liking this. Aside from the withdrawal. And the obsession with sugar right now. I’m serious, I think about it constantly. I’m working and my brain is thinking “Okay claim 2 depends on…mmmm chocolate…wait, claim 2 depends on claim 1. And claims 3, I can eat ice cream on June 8, that’s not so far away, crap, claim 3 depends on…” Which is why I’m writing this right now because otherwise I’m going to start thinking about how Smith’s is just down the street and I could run over and get chocolate and come back and no one would know. That’s why I’m writing this instead of proof-reading a response is because I cannot go more than 5 minutes without thinking about chocolate. And brownies. And cake. And cookies. And Grasshopper cookies. But right now it really is brownies. And white cake with that chocolate frosting Mom makes. Mom, I’ve been daydreaming about that frosting. Seriously.

Anyway, this has been ramble-ie and probably more than any of you ever wanted to know about me, but it was good for me. And it’ll explain if I go out to eat with any of you and look longingly at the dessert menu and then say “no” very sadly.

Maddie

This is Maddie.

This is Maddie on things.

(no I did not get a dog. are you crazy!?)

I have three things to say about the following pictures.

1. This dog has AMAZING balance.

2. This dog is adorable. And incredibly patient.

(this one isn’t impressive, but I LOVE the light!)

3. How the heck do they get her up there!?

Seriously, go check out the site.  I wish I could post all the pictures…but I won’t.

It’s stuff like this that almost makes me want a dog.  Then I remember that I don’t…

I can’t decide which is my favorite.  This one:

or this one:

Totally made my day, either way.

(found on A Cup of Jo)

Feet First

Remember this post?  Tom Robinson is kinda my photographic hero.  Anyway, when I posted before I talked about his “I’m Going to be a Dad” project and his “Feet First” project, where he takes pictures of his and his girlfriend/wife’s feet in different places around the world.  Well, in April their daughter, Matilda, was born, so now they’ve got another (adorable) set of feet for his pictures. 

Mexico 2012

Sad day, we had to come home after cruising to Mexico for a week. Regardless, it’s nice to be back in my bed, with my laptop, and be making money at work instead of just spending. (And we’re already planning the next trip!)

To give you a rundown of the trip, Sunday morning I flew down to LAX,

(that weird building that’s always in pictures of LAX)

where I met up with my parents

(Dad’s always so photogenic)

and we caught a shuttle to  the port at Long Beach. On our last cruise, check-in seemed to take forever. We waited in one long line after another. This time, I think it took us an hour from start to finish. We handed our bags off, got in the check-in line, hopped over to security, then stood in a couple of fairly quick lines to get our ship cards, take a picture we will choose to never see, and then finally board the ship. We headed up to the Lido Deck (aka the buffet and lounge chair deck). We grabbed some chairs, lunch, and soaked up some sun before heading back to our room to unpack. Okay, really we hung out in the room

waiting for our suitcases only to have the parents’ suitcases show up, they unpacked, we got ready for dinner, ran down to the help desk to find out where my suitcase was, discovered it had ended up in lost luggage land due to ALL of the tags getting ripped off (how does a sturdy plastic tag, secured with a zip tie get ripped off?), ran back to the room where I unpacked, and THEN we headed to dinner. This trip we were seated with two other families of three, one was a couple with his mother, the other a couple with their teenage son (who made friends and disappeared  towards the end of the trip). We rolled back to our room and climbed into bed to watch a movie (I made it about 5 minutes, Ryan Reynolds hadn’t even turned into the Green Lantern yet before I gave up and passed out).

Day 2: Mom woke up with a migraine, so Dad and I went to breakfast, then grabbed a couple chairs on the Adults-Only deck and settled in for a day of reading. And in my case, sleeping. We changed sides of the ship one time to get away from shadows, and then went in to get ready for dinner. While we were getting ready Dad turned the tv to the channel which showed the bow of the ship and we found out that we had sailed right into a fog bank. It was super thick out,

(See? Pea Soup)

but by the time dinner was done we’d sailed out again. Honestly, the entire day was blissful.

Day 3: Mom didn’t wake up with a migraine, which was great because it was our first day in Cabo San Lucas!

Cabo is right on the tip of the Baja Peninsula and the port is so small that the cruise ships have to anchor out in the bay and then you take a tender (either a life boat or, in our case, a smallish taxi from the shore).

We caught a tender and went to wander around the flea markets.

We grabbed lunch at the Hard Rock Café

and then hauled our tired feet back to the ship. We headed up to grab some lounge chairs and some sun (I took another nap) before dinner.

(the sunset over the bay that evening)

After dinner we caught a comedian (eh) and then headed over to the catch the hypnotist, who was hilarious.

Day 4: Our second day in Cabo

was much more eventful. We’d booked an excursion (which was originally on Day 3, but had been rescheduled to Day 4), so we caught the first tender over,

(the view from the tender as we came in)

checked in, then hung out until they called our group. We all (maybe 25 people?) tromped over to the boat,

(le boat)

settled in (soda first thing in the morning? It wasn’t even 10 yet)

(we stopped by the arch on the way out)

and they took us about 45 minutes away to Chilean Bay

where we kayaked for about half an hour, then went snorkeling (a first for me and mom) for a little while. It was freezing! We weren’t the first people out of the water, but when we couldn’t stop shaking after a while we headed in. The fish were gorgeous and it was a ton of fun, but the water was not nearly as warm as it was when we went swimming in Grand Turk last year. Back on the boat we dried off and had some freshly-made guacamole and salsa (amazing!)

then very happily made our way back to the port.

(a whale’s tail on our way back into port)

Once there, we hit up one of the flea markets in order to get a few final things, then we headed back to the ship to lay out for a while (in my case, take a nap) until it was dinner time. I want to say this was the afternoon Dad and I headed over to the water slide to try it out. Nearly twice as long as last year, it was pretty fun. Obviously nothing like Seven Peaks, but it was fun to go down a couple times. I also think this might have been the night we grabbed a deck of cards and played rummy for a while before bed.

Check out this giant yacht that was out in the bay.  It has a helicopter on!  We saw some pretty nice boats on this trip, but this was, perhaps, the nicest.

Our ship, Carnival Splendor, anchored out in the bay.

It’s funny to see a boat that would not look out of place in Seward, docked in Cabo.

Day 5: Our day in Puerto Vallarta started early. We docked at around 8 and headed down to meet our excursion for the day. They took us over to the marina where we boarded a sailboat

and we headed out for an hour and a half over to Banderas Bay. Sadly, there wasn’t enough wind to sail out, but we did get to see a bunch of whales (we started referring to it as “stalking” the whales)

and we took a bunch of pictures of us just hanging out on the boat,

(okay, I love this photo of Dad, but then I criticize it because the focus is not on the subject, but is instead on the sail behind him, then I always think that I like it like that, but then I come back to how it’s not “perfect.”  I still really like it though.)

 

it was super relaxing and the crew was super attentive to anything we needed.  At Banderas Bay we swam to shore, gathered sand and shells, then swam back out to the boat. 

They fed us lunch and then we sailed back to PV.

This is where things got bad, on the way back in we realized we were all really red.  Like, REALLY RED.  Apparently our blatant disregard of sunblock was backfiring badly.  Mom and my feet were burned and starting to get puffy.  Regardless of this, we caught a taxi who took us to a flea market in Old Town

(this is probably one of the times I was shutting my eyes in terror. Those drivers are insane!)

We got everything we wanted, then made our way back to the ship.

(the port in PV)

After slathering ourselves in aloe, we had dinner and I’m sure we did something afterwards but the specifics escape me.  (Mom-do you remember?)

Days 6 & 7: These two days we spent “at sea.” They actually resemble each other quite strongly, so I’m grouping them together.  We wore comfy clothes, stayed mainly in the shade, put on lots of aloe, read a ton, played some Phase 10, ate chocolate on Day 7, and relaxed.  It was glorious.

Day 7 was also the day we ran around taking pictures of the ship, because it had the strangest decor we’d ever scene.  It looked like Liberace and Vegas had a love-child.

 

Notice the crazy light fixtures in the dining room.

The insane chair in outside the club (also notice that most of my red face is not lighting, but is in fact my spectacular sunburn)

(the utterly pink lobby area)

 

This ship was decorated by a man.  You don’t believe me, do you?  It was though.

This one took me a while to notice.  The handrail (all the handrails in fact) was pink, the tiles were black, and the grout was neon green.  The dining room had weird fried egg-like things on the ceiling, there were more pink tiger stripes than I would like to recall, and most the paintings looked like they were done by in a high school art class.  By the non-artistic kids.  It was really weird.

Sadly, this was the last sunset.  We got up on Sunday, had breakfast, played a little rummy until disembarkation, then made our way to the airport.  It all kinda still feels like a dream.

Things I loved about this trip:

- Being the person in the group who always turns the right direction out of the elevators and knew which decks went the length of the ship (aside from getting confused about which end of the ship the Serenity Deck was on, every darn time!)

- Having a great group of people to eat dinner with every night

- The wonderful dining staff, headed up by Role who always knew our names, knew what we ate for dinner the night before, never blinked when you said you wanted two appetizers, and thought I had cut my hair in Cabo (I’d pinned it up)

- Laughing with Mom constantly (about anything), with Dad looking at us like we were crazy as we laughed hysterically on our beds, or on our lounge chairs, or clutched the walls in the hallways for support, or the railings in the elevator, or the railings on the deck, or the table (what we were laughing about I can’t remember…)

- Spending time on the balcony with Dad looking for whales, or sea lions, or flying fish, or whatever we could possibly spot with the binoculars

- Taking a nap every afternoon and still being able to fall right to sleep at night

- Eating dessert every evening and not even thinking twice about it

- Having time to just read…for hours

- Laughing out loud at commercials on tv and having Mom turn to me and say, “I forget you don’t have real tv.” (Just a dvd player and laptop)

Okay, that’s it.  My incredibly long, drawn-out, picture laden travelogue.