Week Five - Artichoke and Sun-Dried Tomato Chicken

I love artichokes, in all their varieties. I like artichoke dip, fried artichokes, artichokes in my salad, marinated ones right from the jar. I even cooked my very own whole artichoke for the first time this year, so I did a little happy dance when I saw this recipe, even though I am totally incompetent at rolling things up in chicken and getting it to stay there.

Nevertheless, I made these last night and they turned out great, even if the stuffing leaked out the ends. My only caveat is that I would not want to make them on a week night again. We don't eat dinner until almost 10:00 p.m. because of J's work schedule, so this was just too much work for that late at night. However, my husband told me they were fantastic about four times during dinner and he ate two of them, so this one goes in the recipe box for sure.

End of Summer

You may not know this about me, but I love roller coasters. A lot. I love them so much that we went to Williamsburg on our honeymoon so that I could ride the coasters at Busch Gardens again.

You also may not know that I am the queen of the getting something for cheap, preferably free. I get reward points on my credit cards, gas points at the grocery, extra care bucks at CVS and my most favorite, Coke Rewards Points. We are single-handedly keeping the Coca-Cola company in business.

Earlier this year, the Coke rewards site had free tickets to Kings Dominion, so I promptly ordered one for me. Since they were one per person, I opened another account for Jim, trying to get a second free ticket. They showed up one more time, but I didn't have enough points, then they vanished from the site. No second free ticket for us.

Since I didn't want to let our one free ticket go to waste, I set out to get a deal on a second ticket. After much web searching, I found a discount code that would get us a ticket for $28.50 - that's half price.

On September 18th, I'll be riding this. I can't wait.

August Cooks Week 4

I will confess, this dinner absolutely terrified me and I have no one to blame but myself, because I am the one who posted it. I had grilled cheese and soup in the wings, just in case it was a culinary failure.

It started off great. I got a fantastic deal on the fish at B.J.’s warehouse. I got them for $4.49/pound when the grocery store had them on sale for $6.99/pound.

The stuffing came together beautifully and smelled delicious.

Then, I got ready to stuff them. And I got scared. They didn’t “open flat like a book” which flustered me. Then I tried to cut the tails off and they didn’t want to go and that made me more flustered. And they have bones. And I forgot the lemon juice. I eventually got them stuffed and into the oven.

Poke, poke. Is it done yet?

They actually came out pretty good, but I won’t be doing whole fish again for a very long time.

"New" Furniture

Look what I came home with from my trip to Georgia.

This is my grandmother's (great grandmother's? - help me out here, Mom) cherry dining room set. The table seats six and has two leaves that will expand it to hold ten. When I get a chance, I am going to reupholster the chairs to a less 80s fabric.

The sideboard has a crazy amount of storage. As a bonus, I also brought my Mom's good china and silver, which is in there along with my Lenox Christmas china.

It looks so good with the cherry cabinets in the kitchen and I don't care that it is really a tad too big for the room. I love, love, love it and am so happy to have it.

August Cooks

A year ago, as I was planning my wedding, I met a wonderful group of women on the internet. We have stayed in contact as we moved from The Knot to the The Nest and this week we started a new project, the August Cooks blog.

Each week on Thursday, one person posts a recipe for the group. Then everyone takes the recipe, changes it to their liking, makes it, photos it, eats it and blogs about it. This week's recipe was a peach creme brulee.

brulee in progress

Why don't you pop over and see how 17 different cooks make the same recipe and sign up to follow our blog if you like it.