Currently: August Edition

This week has not been my week. I started to come down with an RA flare on Saturday night and it was one of the most painful ones I've had in quite some time - plus it's my second one in the last 3 weeks. Today is the first day that I can type without pain. I worked from home on Monday because I was in too much pain to get ready and sit at a desk all day. Luckily 2 steroid injections into my impacted joints has me on the road to recovery. 

I'm in a frustrating place with my RA right now as I've had so many flares since changing my meds so that we can safely start a family.  But the bright side is that I have a very responsive and capable rheumatologist and I'm trusting that we'll figure out a better solution eventually. 

But it's not all doom and gloom in my world! Here's what's currently happening in my life, RA complaints aside...

Reading:  No One Can Pronounce My Name by Rakesh Satyal. It's my book club's September pick. I always enjoy reading stories about the immigrant experience and this one has been enjoyable so far. It's told from multiple points of view and the characters are loosely interrelated. It should make for an interesting discussion.

Loving:  all the fresh produce from my garden! We are a bit zucchini'd out. Luckily a woman in our community garden group has a donation bin that she takes to a local food shelf so I've been putting all of my zucchini in there recently. But my heirloom tomatoes are starting to ripen so I've been eating lots of sliced tomatoes with salt and pepper - YUM. I love tomatoes so so so much. I don't think I am going to have enough heirloom tomatoes to can marinara, but my tomatillos are growing like crazy so I am going to can lots and lots of salsa verde!

Feeling:  tired. I don't want to dwell on my RA flare but it really wipes me out when I get a flare. 

Thinking:  about the projects we need to do around our house to get it ready to list. Our goal is to get it ready to list in the next couple of months so we can put it on the market as soon as we find the right house. Granted, we might not find the right house until sometime in 2018 but we want to be able to move fast when we find the right place. 

Anticipating: our camping trip this weekend! We head north this morning!  Today is Phil's birthday and this is the perfect way to celebrate it as we both love the great outdoors! I can't wait to be out in nature and unplug for a few days. We did a trial run of setting up our tent last weekend (shout out to Kyria for getting it for us for our wedding!) and it went pretty smoothly.  I'm looking forward to getting lots of fresh air and eating s'mores (plus other yummy meals we have planned).

Watching:  Suits. I'm on Season 5 right now. I've watched more in the last couple of weeks than usual since I was pretty tired between my 2 RA flares. I didn't love Season 4 but Season 5 is off to a pretty good start so far.

Grateful:  for all the rain we've had lately!  June and July were so dry and our lawn looked so sad! I'm glad we've had more rain this month! I've barely had to water my garden!

Working: on launching a Women's Networking group at my company's Minneapolis location. We have a national chapter but they decided to establish a local chapter in Minneapolis and I'm the chapter chair. We have a lot of work to do to prepare for our kick-off events in September but it's a fun project to work on!

Listening:  to my body when it tells me to take it easy. I'm going to bed earlier than usual and resting more than usual. But after 4 years of having RA, I've learned that I can't ignore the signs my body is giving me. I sometimes feel lazy because my exercise these days has been really limited as I'm mostly just going for walks but I know it's what my body needs.

Wishing:  for a rain-free weekend of camping! The forecast looks great so hopefully it doesn't change!

What are you anticipating, loving and grateful for these days?

Looking Forward

So 2017 has been a pretty banner year for us with the wedding and all. And while I like to look back at pictures from that amazing day and our honeymoon, my sights are mostly set on the exciting things we have to look forward to in the final 5 months of the year (but seriously, how are there only 5 months left??). Here's what I'm looking forward to!

This month I am looking forward to our first camping trip! We registered for some camping equipment for our wedding and I can't wait to break it in on our first trip. We are going to a state park off the shores of Lake Superior. There are lots of beautiful hikes in the area so it will be an active vacation for us. We are going with our good friend Amber who is a veteran camper. It's nice to go with someone who knows what she's doing! We met last week to plan out the meals and what all we will do. It's going to be so much fun! Fingers crossed it does not rain!! This trip also coincides with Phil's birthday so it will be a fun way to celebrate his birthday!

In September I'm looking forward to the 9th annual Julia Child Night! It's kind of mind-boggling that we've kept this tradition alive for all these years. And if anything, it's grown and become an even bigger event through the years. This year Julia is going to Asia! I got together with my aunt and uncle last weekend and we tested 4 different recipes (spring rolls, Korean short ribs in a lettuce wrap, a zucchini salad and pork & shrimp fried rice). It's going to be such a fun event!

In October I am looking forward to our trip to Asheville! Phil has never been so I can't wait to show him an area that I absolutely adore. I traveled to a lot of beautiful places when I lived in Charlotte, but Asheville stands out as my favorite. Phil and I love to hike so it will be an active vacation for  us as there are so many great hikes in the area. Plus it should be a gorgeous time to visit as the leaves should be turning. I'm also excited about ALL THE FOOD!  I have so many favorite restaurants in Asheville. I am glad we'll have about 3 days to check them out! We'll also be spending a night in Charlotte at the end of the trip so I can see some of the friends I made when I lived in Charlotte for a year in 2013/2014.

This fall I'm looking forward to starting to look for our next home. While we love where we live, it's a bit small (~1,100 square feet). There is extremely low inventory in the area where we want to buy. We want to stay in the same area of the city and are very particular about which neighborhood we want to be in so we are going into this understanding that it could take over a year for us to a find a home. But I'm hopeful that the right house will come on the market within the next year or so. In the meantime, we'll be doing a couple of things around our house (some painting and replacing the carpet upstairs) so it's ready to put on the market as soon as we find a house we want to buy. Phil bought his house 3.5 years ago so it feels like 'his' place. He's definitely made me very welcome there and people comment on how different it looks now that I live there (like there are actually things on the walls!). But I'm looking forward to picking out something together that feels like "ours."

What are you looking forward to these days?

Canning Salsa Verde!

Since this is my second garden-related post of the week, you can tell what is on my mind and consuming my time these days! This year my heirloom tomato plants are not doing well. I think they got blight. :( So I likely won't be canning any marinara unless I buy some tomatoes in bulk. Womp womp. But fortunately, my tomatillos are doing great! I guess I must have beginners luck with gardening because my first year of growing heirloom tomatoes went great and now my first year of growing tomatillos has gone great.

Last week I picked all of these tomatillos plus a few more on Saturday.

I had about 4 pounds of them so needed to come up with something to make so they could be put to use! Since chips and salsa is practically a food group for me (seriously, is there a better snack?), I decided to make roasted tomatillo salsa. After googling around, I decided to make this recipe. Spoiler alert: this recipe calls for WAY too many serrano chiles - more on that later in this post.

I started off by roasting the tomatillos, garlic and serrano chiles under the broiler.

The start of awesome salsa verde

It took quite awhile to do this. But I was able to blend batches of roasted veggies while roasting the other veggies, so multi-tasking made feel like it went fairly fast.

Roasted goodness

When I got to the half way point, I tasted what I had blended so far, which was about 2 pounds of tomatillos, 4 serrano chiles, and 1/2 of the cilantro, onion and garlic. Thank God I tasted it before blending the rest of the  serranos because it was HOT HOT HOT. I thought the ratio of 1.5 pounds of tomatillos to 5 serrano chiles seemed a bit off - and I should have trusted that judgment! So I left out the other 6 serranos, added the rest of the tomatillos, onion, garlic, and cilantro and it tasted perfect. It still has a kick but an appropriate amount of kick.

So if you ever decide to make this recipe, unless you want a 5-alarm-burn-your-mouth salsa, halve the amount of serranos the recipe calls for!  I also added the juice of one lime to balance things out. I will also note that when I looked at other recipes, they called for about 1/2 of the amount of chiles that this recipe called for, so it's not just me thinking it was overkill to include 5 serranos.

~11 cups of salsa, ready to be canned!

Next it was time to can! I made 2 1.5 pint jars and 5 1/2 pint jars. A 1/2 pint (1 cup) of this is like a serving size for me (ha!) but I figure we can gift the smaller jars to friends this summer and fall.

I feel such a sense of pride when I can things I've grown. I feel like I am channeling the spirit of my maternal grandma Val. She did LOTS of canning. She passed that knowledge onto her daughter, my mom. And now I'm canning. It's pretty cool to keep a vintage skill like this alive!

There are lots more tomatillos that will be ready to be picked later this month so I am planning to make this recipe again!

Zucchini for Daaaaaays

I changed up what I planted in my garden a bit this year, and one vegetable I added was zucchini. I only planted one hill, but that hill is producing like CRAZY!!  I've lost count of how many zucchini I've picked, but it's a lot. I feel like I could sit by my garden and literally watch it grow! Luckily I was able to off-load some on my siblings and parents when I was at the lake, I gave another bag to a friend, and there is also a donation bin at our community garden that a member takes to a local food shelf (love this!).

While I've given quite a bit away, I've also used quite a bit of it. I thought I'd share some of the recipes I've made in case you or someone you know has a ton of zucchini and needs ideas about how to use it!

First up - sausage stuffed zucchini boats. This is one of my favorite dishes to make with zucchini. It's perfect for garden zucchini because you need a bigger zucchini to make these boats (the dinky ones they sell in the grocery store aren't big enough to stuff). The blog this recipe came from has a bunch of other ideas for stuffed zucchini but I've always stuck to this version because I love it so much!

Last Monday I made zucchini "meatballs" which I served on a bed of GF spaghetti. The recipe calls for bread crumbs but I was able to find some at the grocery store so it was easy to make a GF version of this. Next time I would either make them smaller or bake them for longer as they weren't quite as done in the middle as I would have liked. But they were still good!

I've made Creamy Parmesan Zucchini Rice twice this month when we've either hosted or went to another couple's house for dinner.  It's really yummy and a very easy recipe. I also think it would be kid friendly as the zucchini blends in really well and you mostly just taste the cheesy, creamy rice!

This past weekend I made a batch of Flourless Chocolate Chip Zucchini Banana Muffins. Since they are flourless, they are naturally GF. I didn't have almond flour so used peanut butter instead and they came out great.  If I made these again, I would use my food processor instead of a blender, though, as the batter is quite thick before you add in the banana and zucchini so it was a lot of work to get it out of my blender!

On Saturday night, we hosted my Julia Child aunt and uncle for a recipe testing night as Julia Child is just over a month away (we are having it early this year). This year, Julia Child is going to Southeast Asia. I wanted to make a salad or side that would use up some zucchini so I googled Asian zucchini salad, and found this recipe. We liked it so much that we decided to use it for the salad course for Julia Child Night! It's a really light, bright, delicious salad.

I've also made Gluten-Free Zucchini Coffee Cake and Zucchini Casserole (this uses 4 cups of zucchini so is a great recipe if you have lots of zucchini to use up!), but I don't have pictures of either. I've made the coffee cake recipe many times (it's soooo good!) and will make the casserole dish again.

Do you like zucchini? Do you have any favorite recipes to share?

July Reads

Instead of my usual monthly recap, I'm going to do an abbreviated recap and just focus on the books I read in July!

July was a pretty good reading month for me! I read 5 books, but one of them was over 700 pages so it felt like I read 6+ books! My favorite read was Eligible!  Here's what I read along with my thoughts about each book:

The Leavers by Lisa Ko - 2 stars - I had high hopes for this book as it was raved about on a couple of book podcasts I listen to. But it fell flat for me. The pace of the book was slow and I struggled to relate to or feel compassion for the characters as they were sort of unlikable.

Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld - 5 stars - I loved this book! It's a modern-day re-telling of Pride and Prejudice. It was a delightful read and is the perfect summer read in my opinion!

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara - 4 stars - I had heard how emotionally devastating this book is so had avoided reading it for the last couple of years but I decided to read it in July. It is not for the faint of heart. The writing is amazing and you really get to know the characters in the book. It is very much a character-driven story instead of being plot driven. I can't say I 'enjoyed it' because it is such a sad story, and I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to anyone because it's just so heartbreaking. The kind of heartbreaking where you wonder how the author came up with the atrocities she wrote about. But I am glad I read it.

The Dry by Jane Harper - 3 stars - This is my pick for my book club for the month of August. It's been raved about on Modern Mrs Darcy's blog. It was a fast-paced, engaging murder mystery but it probably won't make for the best book club discussion, aside from talking about whether anyone guessed who the murderer was. But we've read some heavier books lately so I thought it would be a good change of pass. Although, I do want to give a trigger warner as violence against a child is part of the plotline.

I See You by Clare Mackintosh - 4 stars - I loved this author's first book so was excited to check this out. It didn't quite live up to her first novel, which was a tough act to follow, but I still enjoyed it and read it in a matter of days.

What have you been reading lately?

Currently: July Edition

And just like that, it's the last week of July! Time seems to fly especially fast in the summer, even though the days are longer (at least in terms of # of hours of daylight). Here's what's currently up in my world!

Reading:  I See You by Clare Mackintosh. I loved her last book, I Let You Go, last summer and loved it, so I was excited to see she wrote a new book! The author used to work in the police force in the UK so her real-life experience lends more credibility to her stories. I Let You Go was so page turny and this one has been engaging so far!

Loving:  All the fresh produce I've been eating from my garden! I've been eating lots of zucchini, green beans, cucumbers, and cherry tomatoes. I can't wait for my big tomatoes to ripen! I'm planning to can marinara and salsa again this year but this time I am going to use the pressure cooker we got for our wedding so I'll be able to can any kind of salsa I want (with the hot water bath canning method, you are limited on what you can safely can as you have to make sure the acidity level is high enough to offset the risk of botulism!).

Feeling:  like I still have work to do in figuring out how to not over-schedule myself. I guess this is always going to be a work in progress. I've decided that I will not make any more plans in August besides what we have on the calendar as we need some open weekends to do whatever we feel like doing versus having set plans for each weekend. July has been fun but it's just been so scheduled!

Thinking:  about our fall vacation plans. We are tentatively planning to go to Asheville at the end of October. We haven't booked the trip yet as we both need to make sure we can get the time off. Asheville is one my favorite places to visit so I can't wait to show it to Phil! There's so much great hiking and great food in the area so I know he'll love it.

Anticipating: my getaway to the lake. I'm heading to the lake this morning for 4 days! Phil can't join me as he can't get the time off from work but it will still be a fun getaway. My Chicago brother and his family are there this week so I can't wait to get extra time with them - especially my nephew and niece who are 10 and almost-6!

Watching:  very little TV these days. I pretty much just watch a bit of the news in the morning and that's about it!

Grateful:  that the forecast looks wonderful for my lake getaway! Temps will be in the 80s so it's going to be a great week to be by the water!

Listening:  to all the podcasts as usual. I'm not excited to drive to and from the lake by myself as Phil is usually my chauffeur (lucky him!). But driving by myself has it's perks as I can listen to podcasts that wouldn't interesting him (like, the many book-related ones!).

Wishing:  for a nice long summer that stretches into fall!  I just love the sunshine and warm temps and would like them to stick around as long as possible! I know not every likes summer, but if you had winters like we do, you'd understand why us Midwesterners LOVE summer.

What are you reading, anticipating, and wishing for these days?

Our Wedding: Details

It's been just over 2 months since our wedding and I'm finally posting my last wedding recap post!  Phew, that took longer than I thought it would!  Thanks for hanging in there and reading along!

I wanted to do one final post showing some of the details of our wedding. I am TERRIBLE at crafting and DIY type of projects, but I knew I had to take on a lot of decor projects to keep the cost of the wedding within our budget (which we managed to do - woo hoo!). Luckily I had lots of help from friends and family!  Here's a summary of all that we did to carry out the book theme of the wedding!

As I mentioned before, Phil writes the humor section of his company's monthly research publication. Imagine my surprise in March when I opened it up to see a picture from our wedding website! He made a fake "go fund me" page for the wedding. It was hilarious!! I sent it around to a lot of friends and family. We decided to display it at the wedding to give people a sense of Phil's great sense of humor!

At the guest book table, we displayed our parents wedding day pictures.

My favorite detail was our seating card table. I found some old library card catalog drawers on eBay.  Thank goodness for pinterest - I never would have come up with this on my own!

Browse the card catalog to find your seat

The seating card for each guest looked like the card you would have used to find a book in the library back before libraries went digital. The color of your library card indicated your meal choice.

I also picked up some initials made from books for our guest book table off of Etsy (so much cheaper than ones I've seen at places like Anthropology, and you could pick from specific which fabric you wanted).  These now have a spot on our piano at home - it's nice to be able to use something from the wedding!

I got the seating card and guest book frames at Ikea (they were super cheap as they are plastic) and I spray painted them gold.

One of the most popular features at the reception was the book that the mom of one of the ushers gave us for my wedding shower. This is also at home on our piano.  My sister-in-law made the folded flowers in this photos.  They were sprinkled throughout the various tables at the wedding.

Now for the table decorations. Each table had a mirror with a combination of gold wine bottles, candles, and books.

The table numbers also came from Ikea and were spray painted gold. They were $1 each so very cheap!

Of all the crafts, the book-lined candle with punched out hearts was my favorite.

We asked our guests so help themselves to a book-lined candle and luckily many did so we didn't have too many leftover at the end.

Our wedding favors were bookmarks, which my sister-in-law made.

 

Our photographers did a good job of capturing all the details of our wedding day. I really like the picture of our rings below as 5-19 is our wedding date. Phil's ring has sentimental meaning behind it as it was his late father's wedding ring.

Now, for the dessert table! I may be biased but I think our spread was one of the best I've seen at a wedding!

The bunting behind the dessert table says "Just Married." My sister-in-law also made this!

We had an assortment of desserts:  French macarons (pistachio, salted caramel and raspberry), oatmeal peanut butter cookies, chocolate ganache-filled mini cupcakes, key lime shooters, butterscotch budino shooters, and fruit tarts.

 These are the "YUM" letters that I glittered when we had our crafting weekend back in March.

Besides the bunting over the dessert table, we also had a book page bunting above our chairs at our table.

And or course, since it was a book themed wedding, we had a book themed hashtag:  #segnersgetmarREAD

As you can tell from this post, my sister-in-law took on A LOT of projects.  She got a special thank you and round of applause during my speech! My wedding coordinator also did an amazing job setting everything up. I gave her some guidance but mostly just told her to run with it and do what she thought looked good. Having her was worth every penny (and she was really reasonably priced as she just does this as a side gig).

Luckily the daughter of a good friend that I used to work with is getting married next month and one of her wedding colors is gold so she took all of the gold decor off my hands. The mirrors and nearly all of the books were borrowed so once those went back to their owners, there was very little left in our basement which made my minimalist husband very happy!

And that's a wrap! Thanks for reading along and hearing all the details about our special day. As I've said before, it was a magical day but given the amount of time and money that went into planning it, I sure am happy that it's behind me and we can just enjoy being married (err, marREAD, ha).