Congrats!

Congratulations to my master, the pack leader, the alpha dog, my best friend...You're 2/12 aka 1/6 the way through grad school today. I hope I can be half the man you are someday. I think the new duds are a good start. Hurry home so we can celebrate!

Love,
Malloy

Best Mac and Cheese

Jimmy had to study all weekend, so it was pretty much just me the last couple days. I enjoyed some much needed rest and relaxation on the beach and otherwise took it pretty easy all weekend. Saturday night I made a green curry dish for dinner (I had so much lemongrass, kaffir leaves, etc left over from the first time). This morning I made edamame hummus and then whipped up a yummy veggie sandwich for myself. I've read a couple times on Peanut Butter Runner about Great Harvest Bread Company and come to find out I drive by our local Great Harvest Bread Company everyday on my way to work and had never really taken notice. I'll definitely be a frequent customer from here on out...

For dinner tonight, it was a side dish that was the star of the show. My brother sent me two mac and cheese recipes that he thought looked good and I pulled my favorites from each to make what I swear is the best mac and cheese I've ever had. Thanks for the recommendations, Colin! Initially caveat, this recipe is not for the faint of heart or the health conscious. Once you commit to making it, you've just got to go for it!

Combination of Lucky 7 Mac and Cheese and Homestyle Mac and Cheese Recipes

3 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons flour
1 cup heavy cream
1 cup sharp cheddar
1/2 cup bleu cheese
1/2 cup colby
1/2 cup swiss
1/2 cup monterey jack
1/2 cup cream cheese
1 lb elbow pasta
1 tablespoon dijon mustard
Salt and pepper to taste

1. Preheat oven to 350
2. Cook pasta per directions (minimum length)
3. Meanwhile, add butter and flour to saucepan to create roux. Next add the heavy cream, all the cheeses, dijon mustard and salt and pepper and stir until melted and combined. 
4. Combine the elbow pasta the cheese sauce. Put in a greased 9x13 baking dish. 
5. I choose to top mine with panko crumbs that I tossed in a little melted butter. 
6. Bake for 20 mins

Note that you can use any combination of cheeses, as long as you end up with 3.5 cups. So bad but so good...

TS Colin is good to us

Time to head to campus and hit the books...tropical storm colin brought chest-head high waves this am! Perfect conditions, zero wind and glassy!

Blueprints - Built-in Bookshelves

This is the first in a post series I'm going to call Blueprints. Blueprints is my way of cataloging aspects of house design that catch my eye. While I love, love, love my house and feel very fortunate every day for our slice of Heaven by the beach, I also have a natural wanderlust for things 700 S. 5th Street just didn't come with. I figure if Jimmy and I ever remodel a room in a house or build a house someday, I'll always have my Blueprints, my inspirations, big and small, to refer back to. I hope I don't bore you too terribly. So here we go...

Hi, I'm Kaylie and I'm a book hoarder. I love getting books as gifts, buying my own books and being loaned a book. I don't like book-for-book exchanges or, God forbid, just flat out loaning someone a book - what if they don't give it back?!?! I don't like libraries because then you have to return the book. And my Kindle, as cool as it is, definitely goes against the grain of my obsession. All this babble aside, it's always been a dream of mine to have big built-in, best case scenario, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. I especially love when they straddle doorways and windows like pictured below. We already have my hoarded loot, so now all we need is a wall and a little wood, right?

Another First

Not much to report from these parts. Jimmy is busy studying for exams and I'm just consumed with feeding him! We had a single NY strip in the freezer from a bachelor meal never made (I was in Charlotte with my favorite girls when he bought it), so I sliced that really thin and did a beef, broccoli and mushroom stirfry. It was very yummy. Of course, I was too hungry to pause to take pics.

For lunch (BOOORRRING, I know), we're doing our own rendition of these buffalo chicken wraps and this watermelon feta salad. I can't tell you how many times I have seen watermelon, feta and mint salads in magazines, cookbooks, etc lately and I've yet to try one until now, well tomorrow at lunch really. Looking forward to it. Hopefully I have something non-food related to talk about soon. It's a Heintzelman thing. I think with food if that makes any sense. Happy Hump Day tomorrow!

Kitchen Time

This afternoon I spent some time in the kitchen making some things for our  lunches this week and dinner tonight and I thought I'd share the recipes...

First up, lunch on Monday and Tuesday of this week will be "grown-up" turkey sloppy joes on wheat buns and cream & vinegar cucumbers.

"Grown-Up" Turkey Sloppy Joes

1. Saute 1 chopped onion with a little vegetable oil
2. When onions are translucent, add 1 lb ground turkey and cook until turkey is no longer pink
3. Drain turkey and onions, then return to pan
4. Add 1 cup ketchup, couple dashes of garlic powder, couple dashes of worcestershire, couple dashes of red pepper flakes, 2 tbsp. brown sugar, 1 tbsp soy sauce, pinch of salt and pepper
5. Mix and let simmer for a couple minutes
6. Serve hot on wheat buns

Cream & Vinegar Cucumbers

My mom made these growing up and I always loved them. Very refreshing side dish for the Summer!

1. Peel 4 cucumbers and slice into thin rounds
2. Combine the cucumbers with 1 cup cream (sour cream, half and half or heavy cream will work), 1 cup vinegar (red wine or apple cider), 1 cup white sugar, pinch of salt and 2 tsp. dill
3. You can eat immediately, but they're far better when left to sit. 

I had a hard time menu planning this morning for dinners this week.  For some reason, I wasn't feeling anything. I was looking through the refridgerater and saw that I had about a half pack of corn tortillas left over from the other weekend and suddenly it came to me - that Mexican chicken casserole thing my mom used to make with tortillas. I called my mom and she gave me the recipe, which happened to actually be a recipe she got years ago from my Grandma Heintzelman. I'll call it...

Mexican Chicken Tortilla Casserole

1. Combine 4 cups shredded cooked chicken, 8 oz. sour cream, 9 oz. diced green chiles (I doubled the original recipe because I love green chiles), 1 can low-fat cream of chicken soup and 1 can low-fat cream of mushroom soup
2. Add to this bitesize pieces of tortillas. My grandma's recipe says to use 12 flour tortillas, but I had the little corn ones, I think I used maybe 15 of them?!?
3. I also opted to add to this mixture about a tsp. of cumin and a tsp. of Emeril's Southwest Essence
4. Add chicken and tortilla mixture to a greased 9x13 baking dish and top with 1 cup of low-fat milk and 1 cup shredded cheddar cheese
5. Bake uncovered at 325 degrees for 1 hour

Bel Far Niente

"Bel far niente" means the beauty of doing nothing in Italian. I learned it from a book I'm reading and I thought it was an appropriate title for my Sunday AM post...

There was a lot of beer drinking going on in Carolina Beach yesterday... just not by me and Jimmy. Jimmy had class so it was just me during the day. I did a quick P90X workout in the AM and then decided to head down to the beach. Every Saturday, Carolina Beach has a Farmer's Market at the lake that I had yet to go to, so I took the long way to the beach to swing by and see what it was all about. It was just okay. I can admit though that I'm completely biased since I have the Santa Monica Farmer's Market as my benchmark. Oh well, it was definitely worth checking out...

Here's me on the beach with my Carolina Beach Kindle cover - a ziplock freezer bag. What?!? It works. I just finished reading The Help, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and now I'm reading Eat Pray Love. I never really had any interest in reading Eat Pray Love and then I saw previews for the movie with Julia Roberts and it kind of sparked something in me. So far, so good. 

Saturday afternoon Jimmy came home pretty tired from class so we opted not to attend the first annual Carolina Beach beerfest. We could, however, hear the bands and all the action from our porch and it sounded pretty fun. We decided instead to just go out for dinner and take it easy, so we rode our bikes to Michael's, a good seafood place on the island. We had 4 small appetizers for dinner instead of entrees, ahi tuna & buffalo shrimp (not pictured - too hungry) and crab dip & a black and bleu crab pizza. Yummy!

Here's me trying to take a picture of Malloy when we got home. I didn't zoom. That's just how close he gets to the camera every time I try to photograph him. He totally doesn't get the concept of just sitting there and acting natural...

Today it's a little grocery shopping, laundry and cooking. Happy Sunday!