A look back continued... February and March 2010

Just a quick review of February and March this past year. First of all, here is an awesome picture of one of our favorite meals... Salad Dressing Chicken. Basically I boil bite-size pieces of chicken in a mixture of water and salad dressing until the liquids all boiled away and the chicken gets a little crispy. Basically the salad dressing gets soaked into the chicken and the chicken tastes delicious! Our favorite salad dressing to use is Italian Dressing, but we have a few others we've tried and loved, such as Poppyseed and Raspberry Walnut Vinaigrette, which is pictured below. Tastes totally awesome and turned out basically red/pink. We made this for the first time a week or so before Valentines Day, but perhaps in the future this could be a fun Valentines Day meal for the family?


For our first Valentines Day married, we actually celebrated by ourselves before by going out to eat. And yes, because I'm lamely doing this post six months later, I don't remember what restaurant we went to. Sad. But we had lots of fun, especially Mark taking crazy pictures.

For the weekend of Valentines Day, we actually traveled down to Visalia and spent time with Brett, Becky, and their kids. We had such a blast! We've been so lucky to have them live pretty close and be willing to put up with us. We love them! Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures. Once again, lame.

Then came March. As part of our future traditions, we threw the Second Annual San Jose Abbott Academy Awards party! The Abbotts always throw an awesome Academy Award party and we definitely want to continue the tradition, mostly because Mark is really into movies and into the Academy Awards. We invited several couples over and had lots of food items that related to many of the nominated movies. Unfortunately, once again, no pictures until after the fact. Too much like my Mom who always forgets to bring and/or use her camera, except during the ugly times (i.e. Christmas morning). I'm getting slowly better at taking pictures though.

Mark and I filled out our guesses on who would win which awards. Mark definitely guessed more correctly than me, no surprise.

I wish I had taken a picture of all the food before we dug in, but at least you can see the aftermath of the crazy amounts of random food. It took a lot of cleaning, but was so worth it!

During our cleaning escapades, we somehow tried to put an entire cabbage (or at least a lot of it) into our garbage disposal, which for some reason didn't agree with it. It was actually pretty hilarious. The water started backing up and then Mark grabbed the plunger and went to work... only to find out that the metal part of the sink on the far top right corner of the sink is connected to the pipes and shot out a water and cabbage mixture all over the counter and the walls. Nothing quite like cleaning up gunky cabbage pieces from all over your kitchen. At least I took a picture of this shining moment. :) Eventually we realized the plunger wasn't helping and got the Drain-O. We now have a very sincere testimony of the power of Drain-O. Ten minutes later the sink worked perfectly.

During March, we had yet another first holiday after being married... St. Patrick's Day! I don't remember much about St. Patrick's Day growing up, but I think it can be fun dying food green and celebrating. So, I made pesto pasta with chicken (I think we had to use a bit of green food coloring to make it look that green), french bread with dyed green garlic butter (super yummy, even though that did look a little gross), and Sprite dyed green. Awesome first St. Patrick's Day.