13 Week Update

Hello! Pregnancy has brought back the almost sort of frequent blogging!

13 weeks.jpg

Sorry about the weird shadow. I’m not sure what the problem was.

So not too much different from 12 weeks though I feel bigger. I took this idea below from another blog that I read and I’m going to try to include it in the weekly(ish) posts.

How far along? 13 weeks, 4 days
Total weight gain: 3 lbs as of 12 weeks, 6 days
Maternity clothes? Not yet but I wore the belly band one time
Sleep: very good
Miss Anything? not worrying about falling down stairs
Movement: zero yet
Food cravings: barbecue sauce, meat, milk, shrimp curry from Taste of India
Food aversions: hummus, salsa, Mexican food
Gender: No idea but will find out March 5th!
Symptoms: Not too much, pants getting tight, hungry a lot
Looking forward to: Finding out the sex

On Sunday I tried out another chocolate chip cookie recipe for potluck Sunday at church. I’m trying to find my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe so every time I make them, I’ve been trying a new recipe. I used this recipe from Brown Eyed Baker (who is a big time Pittsburgh blogger) which is originally from America’s Test Kitchen.

I liked this recipe. The cookies didn’t come out too flat which is my issue with a lot of cookies like the Nestle recipe. I like that you use melted butter so no need to remember to let the butter get to room temperature. I also liked that it required no unusual ingredients and did not call for nuts. I did not like that you are supposed to let the cookies cool on the cookie sheets. This resulted in me dirtying every single cookie sheet I have and required me waiting around one or two times for a cookie sheet to cool. I doubled the recipe so I had A LOT of dough to make into cookies.

The cookies did turn out very soft and chewy but I thought they were a bit too sweet. Maybe a tiny bit more salt would help or use bittersweet chips rather than semi-sweet. I’m not sure. I used Trader Joe’s semi-sweet chips for these. My doubled batch made about 55 cookies. I didn’t make them quite as large as the recipe suggests.

And another new recipe that I tried out last week was a pork chop recipe. That was the first time I ever made pork chops. They were good! I used this recipe for Pork Chops with Country Gravy from My Recipes. I followed the recipe exactly except used Trader Joe’s 21 Seasoning Salute in place of the poultry seasoning.

Lastly, Aaron got his diploma in the mail this week! Exciting! Here are some pictures of it.

Yay!

Hopefully Perfect Roast Chicken

Jun14

Good Evening!

It’s 7:50 pm right now. It’s Aaron’s third to last class for the Summer! He picked me up after work so that I could have the car today so I have to pick him up a little later.

In the meantime, here is what I wore today. Exciting!

- green cow neck shirt (Target)

- grey, wool pants (J.Crew)

- pink shoes which I’m pointing at in the picture (Gap from a few years ago)

Here’s another picture with the ever present paint samples in the background.

My big Nikon DSLR battery died yesterday so we took these pictures with my Canon Powershot. When I uploaded the pictures today, I realized Aaron had taken a bunch of pictures of me while I was painting the dining room, in all my sweaty, adidas short glory.

Painting the trim here:

Not sure what’s going on in this one… but I have paint all over my legs.

After dropping off Aaron in Oakland today after work, I headed out to Trader Joe’s, grocery shopped for the week and then made Ina Garten’s Perfect Roast Chicken. Here’s the recipe that I followed. The only thing I changed was I used potatoes instead of carrots and fennel in the roasting pan. Otherwise, I followed the recipe to a T.

Here it is prior to going in the oven. I have two tiny issues with this recipe. (1) Not everyone has kitchen string which can be off putting for people and (2) Ina never says which way the chicken is supposed to go in the pan. She says tie the legs together and tuck the wings under the body, but that’s it.

I flipped it over a few times trying to figure out which way made more sense when tucking the wings under… It ended up like this picture below so we’ll see what happens…

Alright time for me to relax a bit before I have to go get Aaron. Chicken has about 30 minutes to go!

Banking Attire & Pizza for Dinner

Jun8

Hello!

It’s a million degrees in my house right now. MILLION! I have the laptop sitting on a pillow on my lap because the bottom of the laptop is too hot for me. I had the excellent idea of making pizza for dinner in this heat. 450 degree oven. Bad plan.

Anyway, I thought I would jump on the blog bandwagon and post a few pictures of myself in what I wear to work. I work the investment department of a bank so it’s a pretty conservative environment.

Here I am, pushing the envelope, with blue shoes.

I handed Aaron the camera this morning and asked him to take a picture of me. He didn’t even question it.

- black and white dress (Marshalls about 3 years ago I think)

(I’m also wearing it backwards because there is a small stain on the other side)

- black cardigan that couldn’t be taken off all day because of the stain (Gap, this year)

- blue shoes (Gap 2ish years ago)

I’m not sure if you’ll find these pictures interesting at all but it’s kind of fun for me so there you go.

I bussed home from work today because it was too ridiculously hot to walk and then made pizza for Aaron’s dinner later.

I had frozen dough that I made last week that I defrosted in the microwave Recipe Here from Eating well. I double the 1 pound recipe and freeze half. All we had for cheese was cheddar so I decided on barbecue turkey meatball pizza…

I mixed up some barbecue sauce using this recipe then took a few Trader Joe’s turkey meatballs out of the freezer and mixed it with the sauce. I stretched out the dough, spread the sauce, added pineapple chunks, onion and cheese and baked for about 17 minutes.

This recipe is pretty quick and it’ll be easy to package up for Aaron to reheat when he gets home from class and for lunch tomorrow.

Alright I’m going to go put clothes in the dryer and then hang out in the air conditioned bedroom. Can’t take it out here anymore!

This weekend/maybe tomorrow, I’m going to sew curtains for the dining room! I have 5 yards of linen fabric! YAY!

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