Rigatoni with Swiss Chard

Well I tried a new Martha recipe last night and we really liked it! Mike was a little disappointed there wasn't any meat in it, but oh well :)
Here are some pictures as well as the recipe!

Recipe:

Coarse salt and freshly ground pepper

1 pound rigatoni or other tubular pasta

2 T. unsalted butter

3 T extra-virgin olive oil

2 garlic cloves, thinly sliced (or minced)

2 medium shallots, finely chopped

1 1/2 lbs. Swiss chard, leaves cut into 1/2-inch strips and stems cut into 1/2-inch pieces

2 T. finely grated lemon zest (about 2 lemons) (try lemon juice instead if you don't like zest)

1/2 cup dry white wine

1/2 t. red pepper flakes (i would use less next time!! :)

1/3 c. fresh ricotta cheese

1/3 c. pine nuts, toasted

Freshly grated Parmesan cheese, for sprinkling

1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Add 2 T. salt and the pasta; cook 3 minutes less than package indicates. Drain.
2. Heat butter and oil in a large Dutch oven over medium heat about 1 minute. Add garlic and shallots; cook, stirring, until fragrant, about 2 minutes. Stir in chard, lemon zest, wine, 1 t. salt, and the red pepper flakes; season with pepper. Cook, covered, stirring occasionally, until chard has just wilted, 2 to 3 minutes.
3. Stir in pasta, ricotta, and pine nuts. Cook, stirring occasionally, until pasta is al dente, 3 to 4 minutes. Divide among 4 serving dishes. Serve sprinkled with Parmesan.

We had this with fresh bread and olive oil (with spices of course!) Yummm!!

Saturday's Festivities

So on Saturday we had a very relaxing day. Mike had breakfast with Chris Bopp (that has got to be the strangest yet coolest last name ever) and in the afternoon we just went to Starbucks and read. I finished my book, Rise to Rebellion by Jeff Shaara and Mike read LOTR. I got a Peppermint White Chocolate Mocha, and I will not be doing that again. They overdid it on the peppermint, so it tasted like I was drinking straight Menthol. They made me another one :)
Afterwards we went over the Smiths' and went out for Chinese for dinner. Afterwards we came home and baked Molasses Crinkle Cookies. Except ours did not crinkle. They tasted good anyways! They have raisins in them, and we decided to soak them in rum :) Here are some pictures from that.

Me and Mikes
Shan and Meagan being silly

Mitten fight.

Sean making his famous hot chocolate.

Meagan scooping out the dough.

Me and Megs baking the cookies.

Sean pouring the milk. I will add here that this whole baking endeavour was undertaken by Sean. He is a very good cook.

All the chocolate we chopped for the hot chocolate. It took a while.

So, it was a fun day!

Oh and good post by Mikes the other day. Although, he wanted to know where his eprops would show up ;)

Navigating Christmas as a New Husband

Well the missus has asked me to stop being a lazy blog bum and write something, so here I go. Prepare to be amazed at my introspective profundity.

This is my first Christmas as a married man, so naturally it is bound to be very different from what I grew up with. For starters, actually figuring out how to pay for everything with a newlywed budget is a very new experience for me. When I was younger I usually didn't give presents at all; either I didn't feel like coming up with gift ideas or I had no money. It recently dawned on me that, now that I am married, this tactic will not work if I wish to continue sleeping in a bed. The strangest part is telling Sarah how much money she can spend on my gifts, and I'm not particularly fond of that. It sounds like I'm saying "You need to get me this many dollars' worth of presents." I don't much like the sound of that.

A similarly strange task is telling her how much she can spend on my birthday, which is soon after Christmas. As a kid I was always suspicious that I would get ripped off on my birthday presents since it was so close to Christmas. Now that I'm in effect paying for my own birthday, splitting the gifts between Christmas and my birthday seems like a pretty good bargain. I'd rather sacrifice the extra presents than not be able to eat for a week. But Sarah wants to give me a "real" birthday so I gave her a dollar amount she could spend. That is also risky because what if the present she was planning to get cost way less than I told her she could spend? So I had to clarify that she CAN spend up to a certain amount, but doesn't HAVE to spend it all if she doesn't need it. I am finding all of this somewhat complicated.

So the financial part of Christmas took a while to nail down, but I think we've got it under control. I guess this is what Christmas is like for adults. The really FUN part of Christmas as newlyweds is we get to begin our own traditions. We don't have anything really ground-breaking (or door-breaking) yet, other than getting a tree that dominates half of our living room. But we will be implementing some of our favorite family traditions from growing up and making them our own, such as getting our tree on Black Friday (one of Sarah's favorites), watching A Christmas Carol on Christmas Eve (one I've always liked). Plus, since this is our first married Christmas, pretty much anything we do this month will become one of our "traditions" if we do it again next year.

All that to say, the next few weeks should be much fun. Also, If Sarah hates this post you might not be hearing from me so much anymore.

Christmas Tree and Forgotten 1 Month Anniversary

So. I forgot to put up pictures from our one-month-iversary, and it has now been more than 2 months, but I have pictures from 1-month, so I'm going to write about that instead :)
On November 4th, Mike took me into Philly and we dined at El Vez. It's a Mexican-American Steven Star Restaurant, and they have incredible guacamole and mojitos :)
We took the train in because it is way more fun, and way less expensive :) Here is Mike sitting on the bench waiting for our train...


And here we are bored and waiting....there was a lady in the background who was on her phone for a while yelling about something :)

Here is my boy's silly face....we always give him a hard time because his smiles don't always look "natural" haha

I love this picture of him :)

Ok, so now to the Christmas Tree part. The day after Thanksgiving, Mike and I went out to Pyle's, a place in Avondale, and got this humongous tree for only $16.99!! As Alyce puts it, "it has taken over our apartment" haha. But we love it. We have named it Douglas....cousin of Jeremy and Angela's tree....FIRdinand ;)

Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of us picking out the tree. It was a stressful morning. And picture-taking got pushed by the wayside. But here is our tree all decorated!

Mikes hugging the tree....for why...we do not know.

This is our Christmas smooch :)

Us with our tree!

I just put a santa hat on top of the tree this morning, because we have no angel or star, and it actually looks really good!! I may keep the tradition :)

Ok - up next - Mike has promised to post some sort of ponderance of his. I like this idea of getting the husbands to post :)

Merry Christmas!!!!

Thanksgiving!

So it has been a while :) Until I come up with something more interesting to post about, here are pictures from Thanksgiving! We went to see my Grandma Sharp in Salisbury, Maryland. It was a lot of fun! Mom cooked EVERYTHING and brought it down for us to enjoy. We had a feast!
After dinner (and after we fell over from eating so much) andrew, rosie, mike and i went for a walk to clear our heads and help metabolize all the food we just ate :)

Here we are with Grandma.

And here is Mike and Me being super silly :)

Crashing after feasting.

Us with dearest Rosie!

The girls.

Andrew completely collapsed after dinner :)

Mike and Me on a walk

Up next - our first Christmas Tree as a married couple!! It is rather big :)