february photo a day faves

Did you do the February photo a day challenge?

Here are my favorites from this month:

inside my closet

drink

 green

 hearts

money

something new

phone

 shoes

I missed a couple along the way, but this was a fun challenge to take more photos. 

I'm playing along for March, too! 

Febru (wait for it) ary

February is one of my favorite months. It's my Gail's birthday, Russ' birthday, Valentines Day, AND presidents day.

It's been pretty great so far. We celebrated Russ' birthday with a series of rich and artery clogging meals and fun with friends. We started with Mellow Mushroom on Thursday, Mi Cocina on Friday, chai pancakes for brunch and Babes Chicken on Saturday. Not to mention 4 kinds of cake over the course of the weekend!

We celebrated Valentines with a post work pre class In-n-out burger.

We planned to celebrate another night and keep it casual on the 14th... But then I came home after class to an apartment full of candles and some brand new cherry red Hunters! That man... He gets it.

It was a glorious week, full of sweet time with Mr. Russ, celebrating his life and my most favorite greeting card holiday!

HAP-py birthday!

Today my favorite person turns 25!

I'm not great at waxing meaningful sentiments, but I will do my best. Russ, your birthday means so much to me, because without it we wouldn't be us (duh). You are my favorite person in the world, and my greatest treasure. I love the life we have together and being your wife. I hope this coming year is the best yet, and I can't wait to celebrate many more with you. Love you, babe!

(Also, thanks for catching up with me on age so I don't look like such a cougar. Rawr :)

february photo-a-day challenge

Lots of people participated in a January photo-a-day challenge, and I was jealous because I was late to that party and it was mid-January before I found out about it. Oops.

I'm only one day late this time, and I'm totally doing it. February is turning into a crazy month and I am both super excited and super nervous every time I look at my planner. Hopefully taking a little photo here and there will help me remember the life and times of February 2012. Let's do this! I'll be throwing mine up on instagram (ekp1007) and twitter. 

Ready set go!

parsley dreams

Hallo! Let's make Tabbouleh.

Are you familiar with tabbouleh? Also known as tabouli. No? You say it "tah-boo-lee."

Still no?

It looks like this:




And it tastes like parsley dreams. And it's healthy x 1000.


Tabbouleh and I go way back. My dad's BFF (what, dad's have BFFs) is Lebanese, and introduced us to tabbouleh and all kind of other middle eastern/mediterranean delights when I was just a wee tot. I was totally the girl with the weird lunch.

So, let's make some!

here's what you need:

3 (yep) bunches of curly parsley
2 bunches of green onions
9 lemons (or enough lemons to yield 1 cup of juice. this meant nine lemons for me)
6 firm roma tomatoes
1 cup of fine (also called light) bulgar wheat
extra virgin olive oil (rachael ray style)
and salt.

You also need a good chef's knife, because here's the bad news: you're going to hand chop most of this yourself. This took me about an hour last night, start to finish, but it's my lunch for the entire week, got me caught up on Parenthood, and was weirdly therapeutic. A win win win. Anyway, you need that knife to be nice and sharp so your chopping is more therapeutic and less frustrating.

 (This is a Shun knife, and it doesn't mess around. )

First, rinse all that glorious produce under cold water in a large strainer. Now it's time to squeeze your lemons of their juices. If you're using bottled lemon juice right now, I don't want to know about it. Once your juice is all ready to go and free of seeds, microwave it for about 45 seconds, and pour it over the cup of bulgar wheat you have in a large bowl. Put a kitchen towel over the bowl and let it hang out.

Then take your first bunch of parsley (or about half of it) and hold it with the leaves facing downward into a salad spinner. Then take your knife and gently cut it away from the large stems. Do this until all of your parsley is off those big crazy stems.

Then spin spin spin in the salad spinner to get the parsley good and dry. At this point, you could garnish about 1000 plates at a restaurant, or you could keep going and make tabbouleh. Do the tabbouleh.

Working in batches, start chopping the parsley! You want it relatively fine, but not parsley mush. If we wanted that, we would just use a food processor and call it a day. If you had any big stems hiding in here, now would be the time to pick them out before you get chopping. You will be so glad you did this by hand (I hope).

About 30 minutes later, you will have a big bowl o' chopped parsley. The hard part is over.

Now it's time for green onions! Chop off the nasty walrus looking bottoms, and chop all the green and white parts until they're about the same size as your parsley. Throw 'em in with the parsley.

Now it's tomato time. Cut off the very top (weird brown umbilical cord to the vine) of the tomato, and halve that baby top to bottom. Good? Now cut each half in long strips, and then cross wise to have a dice. If these tomatoes are super seedy/juicey, you could omit some of the juice and seeds, but if not, don't worry about it. Do this until all the tomatoes are dicey and let them join the parsley green onion party. It's like Christmas in there!

Now, remember that bulgar that you have soaking in a hot tub of lemon juice? Have a peak at it and a little taste. It should be soft to al dente. Perfect. Pour it into the Christmas party and get your stir on. Stir stir stir. Now add olive oil - a little at a time. And kosher salt. I probably added 1 - 2 tablespoons of salt total.

it should look like this when it's done!

If you're like me, you want a bowl now because you can hardly handle the suspense. That's fine. Give in to temptation. But it's MUCH better if you let all of those flavors fall in love and get married for a few hours or overnight. I've had a big scoop of tabbouleh with lunch every day this week and it just keeps getting bettah. I think you could probably keep it about 5 days in the fridge. YUM!

January. What?

So... I fell into a black hole over Christmas.

Oops. 

Here’s a little catch up of what happened the last 2 weeks of 2011 and into 2012:

• We MOVED! We said goodbye to our first home together (many tears shed by me, even though I didn’t particularly love our side of town. I did love our apartment though. and you know, memories. Waaaah). We seriously love our new place though. We moved downtown and feel like we’re 5 minutes from everything. It’s grand.

• We celebrated our first year of marriage! After moving all weekend long, this was particularly sweet. We saw a movie in the middle of the day (A Monday. Crazy cats, we are), got couples massages, dined at Reata (they catered our wedding!) and stayed at the Omni, my favorite Fort Worth Hotel. Totally lovely. We’ll take a trip sometime this year to commemorate the first year. 

• I got almost 2 weeks off of work which was GLORIOUS. I can’t tell you how badly I needed the break. 

• SOMEONE ELSE either cooked or bought us dinner every night for about 10 days straight. This was so magical. So magical that our refrigerator is still empty and I’ve lost the will to grocery shop. 

• We had Thanksgiving Dinner with Maisey on Christmas Eve Eve since she couldn’t come home for the real deal this year. Yummy.

• We spent Christmas Eve with Russ’s family and Christmas Day with my family. Family time is just the greatest. 
• We learned a new game, the Game of Things - my new favorite!

• Saw Les Miserables at the AT&T Performing Arts Center. Les Mis is probably my favorite musical of all time, and this tour did not disappoint! I cried and cried, per usual. My father in law also got a sweet hook up that allowed us to tour the backstage after the show which was legendary. 

• Had a glorious Cox Family dinner at the Mercury. Yum. Wow.

• We watched a LOT of How I Met Your Mother and Mad Men.

• We both marveled at Ryan Gosling’s abs in Crazy Stupid Love. 

“Did you like that movie, babe?”

“Yeah it was funny. I liked it.” 

“Probably not as much as I like it though because it’s just so fun to look at Ryan Gosling. Sorry. You’re hot, too.”

“No, it’s fine. His abs are ridiculous.”

Love him.

• I spent a day out with just my parents, and it was the best time. They are just hilarious, wonderful, generous people and I love them to pieces. A highlight of this shopping trip was discovering that my Dad used to think “All The Single Ladies” had no lyrics, it was just jibberish. Bless his heart. 

• New Years Eve was low key and perfect. We used to dress up and have a fancy dinner out every New Years, but since December has become laden with celebrations and rich meals, we’ve changed our tune a little bit. This year we went out for our favorite  pizza and split the night with dear friends, Catch Phrase, and Wits and Wagers. The only thing missing was Dick Clark’s New Years Rockin’ Eve. It was missing from Dallas Broadcasting, and I’m pretty sure that the only people who care about Big D NYE are the people who are there. Correct me if I’m wrong.

• We whipped our apartment into shape and had a few friends over for New Years Day games. 

• The Bachelor started! I’m hoping that Ben F. finds “love” in one of these crazies, but who can be sure after that first episode? I’m also currently losing my fantasy league (you heard me), but there’s still time. Kacie B. all the way!

Now I’m back to work and trying to settle back into routine and combat the post-holiday puffiness that occurs when you eat  a lot of bagels, chicken and dumplings, short ribs, wedding cake, Garrett’s popcorn, and other delights. 

I’ve resolved to have monthly goals this year instead of New Year’s Resolutions so I’m less likely to fall off the wagon. More on those later. Hope your holidays were happy!