Happy 2014!

Happy New Year! The year 2013 was a very busy year for us, seeing as much as we could in Italy and then moving to Bahrain. Let's take a look at our year.

January

We took a trip to Sicily with friends Glenn and Jody.

In Cefalu

 

 

February

We visited Krakow and Auschwitz in Poland.

Auschwitz

March

The Leaning Tower of Pizza reached the ceiling!

Success!

April

We realized we were leaving in a couple months, so we started focusing on the ol' bucket list. We took a weekend trip to the Gargano Peninsula in Southern Italy.

A lake on the left, the sea on the right.

May

This month was really busy, mostly because we were trying to pack everything in! Meagan came to visit, we went hiking twice, and we went to the Montecassino Abbey and Ninfa Gardens. Whew!

Hiking in the mountains

 

Marina di Crappola

 

Friends!

 

Ninfa Gardens

 

June

In June, Tim did the Volo dell'Angelo, or the Flight of the Angels. We also went to a festival for the purpose of buying olive oil (it's really good olive oil!). After moving out of our house in the middle of the month, we did a last hurrah of Lake Como, Switzerland, and Mont Blanc, France, before heading out to sandy, hot Bahrain.

At the festival of truffles and cheese

 

Lake Como

 

The cheese house in Gimmelwald, Switzerland

 

The super moon over Mont Blanc

July

After moving to Bahrain, I took a trip home, the first in 3 years!

In Twin Falls

 

August

In August, we moved into our house, and I got a job teaching 3rd grade.

Disaster area

 September

Fail! In September we didn't take any pictures! We basically spent the month settling into our house and new jobs.

October

In October, it finally became cool enough to start taking evening walks over the Hidd Bridge.

Bahrain at night

November

A trip to Dubai, United Arab Emirates- camels, tall buildings, and sand dunes, oh my!

On a desert safari, sand as far as the eye can see.

 

Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building.

December

We went home for Christmas for the first time in 4 years! We had a great time catching up with family and friends, snowboarding, and shopping (Oh, Target, how I have missed you!).

Snowboarding!

What's next?

The day after Christmas, we found out that Tim got accepted for a transfer to the Foreign Area Officer community. We can't wait to see what new adventures 2014 brings for us!



Things I want to try

I often find stuff around the internet or in magazines that look so simply amazing that I just want to make them. I'm kind of a sucker for a pretty picture. But then I have excuses: no time, we wouldn't eat it fast enough, ingredients are too expensive... the list goes on and on. But I figure, if I tell you what these yummy things are, somebody might try them and tell me how it came out. Fair enough? So here goes!

(Just a note, when I say ingredients are expensive, it's probably only at my grocery store, where a small bag of shredded cheese is $7 and Yoplait yogurt is $2.39 a cup... you get the point.)

I really really want to make these. And I will make a version of them when there are enough people around to eat them.
http://cookiesandcups.com/holy-heck-brownies/


This makes me happy because fewer dishes makes for a happier me. And it looks tasty. And the simplicity of it makes it Italian.
http://www.lottieanddoof.com/2013/06/one-pan-pasta/

This s'mores cheesecake looks absolutely amazing.
http://cookiesandcups.com/smores-cheesecake/

I'm very into sauces at the moment, and we have been known to eat an entire bottle of tzatziki in a couple days. Sounds like a great excuse.
http://www.browneyedbaker.com/2013/09/23/tzatziki-sauce-recipe/

I've made a honey beer bread, but with cheese? And then the apple butter and hard cider? Yum!http://www.howsweeteats.com/2013/09/white-cheddar-beer-bread/

These I did make... so good!
http://www.howsweeteats.com/2013/08/double-chocolate-cheesecake-cookies/

What can I say, I love cheese.
http://www.bakedbyrachel.com/2013/10/taco-mac-and-cheese-recipe/

I love peanut butter and honey sandwiches, so the cookies must be amazing. (These are for Lindsay and Hailey... they are Roomie Cookies!)
http://www.browneyedbaker.com/2013/10/08/honey-peanut-butter-cookies/#more-27722

So tell me, which one did you try?

Garlic Hummus

Yep, I did it. I made hummus. And it was good. I used a recipe I found on Brown Eyed Baker and added extra garlic, as I was making it for a fantasy football draft.  So yummy and flavorful!

Ingredients:
3 Tbs lemon juice
1/4 C water
6 Tbs tahini
2 Tbs olive oil
1 can chick peas
2 cloves garlic (feel free to use more garlic, it just gets better)
1/2 tsp kosher salt
1/4 tsp cumin

*Note: tahini is a paste made from ground sesame seeds. It can be found in most grocery stores. Don't ask me where, though. When I buy it here, it's in the bottles with only Arabic.

1) Mix lemon juice and water.

2) Mix tahini and olive oil.

3)  Rinse and drain chickpeas. Process in a food processor with the garlic, salt, and cumin.

4) Add lemon juice and process.

5) Then add tahini and process one minute, until smooth.

 

6) Pour into a bowl and let it sit for at least half an hour before serving. That lets it get super flavorful.

Buon appetito!

 

By the way, I read the most amazing article about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches here. It reminds me of the peanut butter-honey-marshmallow crème sandwiches my roommate used to make. Sometimes I wish I was still in college so I could eat ridiculous things like that again and not look silly.

Rainbows and sprinkles

I am trying to be more creative in the kitchen. The thing is, I hate washing dishes. And I don't have my kitchen aid mixer. But when it comes to the end of the year, I figure I should do something nice for the kids at school. So I decided to make rainbow cupcakes.

It was quite a bit easier than I expected and came out so cute!

Here's how to do it. I used a cake mix because I don't put forth that much effort for a bunch of 10-year-olds, but you could use your favorite white cake recipe if you wanted.

First, mix the batter like usual. Then split it evenly into six containers. Add food coloring to make the desired colors. Mix well.

Line a cupcake tray with paper cups and begin by adding a small spoonful of each color. The cake batter is thick enough that it won't combine.

Once you have used all the colors, bake.

Cool and decorate. I put a lot of frosting on so they wouldn't see until the bit into them. And because we were moving in two days and I didn't want extra frosting in the fridge.

 

Welcome to Bahrain!

Now that we're in Bahrain and are getting familiar with the place, it's time to introduce you!

I will preface this post by saying I don't really have any pictures of Bahrain yet. Only this one I took out the window of our hotel. But that's pretty much what it looks like: brown and sandy. And it's hot. Really really reallyreally hot.

I did take a picture of the Great Mosque, but we were driving and it was nighttime, so it looks more like smears with towers. I'll save your eyes.

But if you like food variety, this is the place! More than once in Italy we longed for something that wasn't Italian. See, even though we love Italian food, we also love variety. So that's why Bahrain is so great. We've only been here about a month, and so far we've had French, Persian, Thai, Papa John's (all you can eat for Ramadan!), DQ, Lebanese, Chinese, and some really good frozen yogurt. We kind of have to eat out, since our kitchen facilities look like this:

Yay hotels!

The Friday before I left for my visit home, we went to brunch. Brunch is something the hotels do, kind of like Sunday afternoon brunch. You pay a lot of money and get unlimited food and drinks for about 4 hours. It was almost too much food. So overwhelming!

We went to Lulu's (a huge grocery store) the other day and it made me start itching to cook again. We're getting into our house in a few days, and I'm excited to try new foods like hummus and things with instructions written only in Arabic.

So anyway, welcome to Bahrain!

Neopolitan Pizza

Having lived in Naples for 3 years, the birthplace of pizza, you'd think we'd had it all.

According to the pizza tower, we have.

I'm not sure if it's sad or awesome that it's hit the ceiling. What was truly sad is that we had to take it all to the recycling before moving out. We pretty much filled a bin, not to mention the back of the truck.

 

 And no, we did not match on purpose.

But I digress (and am getting kind of sad we don't live in Italy anymore), so on to the pizzas.

This spring, we ate the pizza known as "Re Umberto", or King Umberto (Humphry?).  Tell me, who is this genius who came up with a double-decker pizza?

The bottom layer was ricotta and salame, the top layer was the 4 Stagione (4 seasons). Sausage and friarelli, ham and mushroom, eggplant, and artichoke.

Fabulous. Totally worth the 16 euro.

On the Italian bucket list was to eat the hot-dog-and-French-fry pizza. It was pretty much disgusting. I mean, who puts hot dogs and French fries on a pizza?

 



I went to lunch at a famous pizzeria called Da Michele with a friend. It's the one in the book/movie Eat, Pray, Love. They only serve 2 kinds of pizza: Marinara (just tomato sauce and garlic, no cheese) and Margherita (with cheese). The restaurant is pretty small and the line is crazy long, so you take a number and wait. An hour and a half later... But the price (and the excellent quality of the pizza) made it worth it: two pizzas and two beers, 13 euro.

 

I mean, come on! It's literally hanging off the plate.

 

And finally, it was time to leave. But not before hitting Gennaro 2 twice our last weekend. After great discussions sounding like "What should our LAST pizza be? The D.O.C.? The frittatura? Marinara?", we settled for the frittatura, or the fried calzone. Delicious!

 

 

Sigh, I miss Italy. Though being American, I'm still happy to eat at Papa John's.

White chocolate no-bake cookies

In my crazy, thematic teacher mind, I've been plotting to make white chocolate no-bake cookies for some time now. I was going to make them for St. Patrick's Day and dye them green, but I bought mint oreos instead.

But what better time is there than Easter? With some pastel m&m's, they're perfect. The white chocolate ones even look kind of like bird nests with colorful eggs. The white chocolate ones aren't so overpoweringly sweet, so you can eat more of them at once. Score.

I made regular chocolate ones, too, just in case the white ones didn't, you know... turn out right.

I was on a quest to make something different. Usually, Italian/European kids will do anything for a cake-mix cupcake, but this class is weird. Only about half of the kids will eat cupcakes, so I needed to try something else.

After a poll of students from 5 countries, the white chocolate cookies are the best. There was serious gushing going on. From 5th graders. And drooling. Win.

White Chocolate Peanut Butter No-Bake Cookies

1 1/2 C sugar
1 C white chocolate chips
1/2 C butter
1/2 C milk
1/2 C peanut butter
1 tsp. vanilla
3 C minute oats

Melt sugar, chocolate chips, and butter in a saucepan, adding the milk when everything is almost melted. Cook and stir until boiling, boil 1 minute. Remove from heat and stir in peanut butter and vanilla. Stir in oats until combined. Drop by spoonfuls on a cookie sheet covered with waxed paper and allow to harden.

Buon appetito!