Tara's dress

We got Tara's dress last weekend. I'm so excited I feel like we stole it for $105. Plus its just a simple classy dress and in this dark brown color I know she can wear it again and it won't shrivel up in her closet.... Have I mentioned all of my girls are wearing different colors and styles... No two leaves are alike... Tara is wearing this Truffle color cuz i couldn't bear to put her in the burnt orange I had in mind originally not when my beautiful sis-in-law to be is a natural red head... Have I mentioned I love Tara... We clicked the moment we met. She will never replace Charel but its different Tara and I click we confide in eachother we're sisters and I love her so much! We email back and forth we talk about food... Tara is in some ways the sister to me that Charel isn't. Charel isn't lacking in anyway. Charel is my perfect sister that i have very little in common with but Tara is a sister i have everything in common with and I love them both so much! I'm thrilled I get to have both of them with me beside me on my special day. I'm so excited she'll be here for our wedding so excited to see her and smother my nephew with kisses... ok i'll admit the fact she's making me an Auntie on my wedding day gives her serious brownie points too! look at that kid how could you not love him!

Have I mentioned I cook?

One of my greatest joys in life is seeing a counter top covered with this... assorted bags, bottles, cans and boxes and don't forget the requisite pound of butter. Seeing this conglomeration means i have plans i'm up to something the wheels in my head are turning are plotting are working together to build the perfect strategy this is my mental mise en place... I carefully sort thru the pile pulling out when i need the dinner before me taking shape... Dessert first so it can bake and get the oven nice and hot for the main event and then while its baking i can dice and chop mince and grind everything i need to make my perfect birthday dinner...
This year I want turkey i want succulent moist flavorful juicy turkey... I want it dripping with gravy smeared with cranberry sauce and sprinkled with just enough salt that every bite zings around my mouth like a pin ball machine.... Turkey is a process some people would argue my grandmother for example who would open it up rinse it off toss it in the oven and cook it til it was done... Basque grandma's don't know much about American traditions but I sure loved my Basque grandma! My turkey is a 2 day process at least once its thawed it must spend at least 12 hours sitting in a briny bath of ice apple juice vegetable stock and above all SALT! This little soak seasons it inside and out makes every bite taste more like turkey and in some ways is like a marinade sometimes I can take a bite and just sense a little whisper of apple juice on my tongue... I fill my roasting pan with chunks of carrot quartered onions quartered apples and stalks of celery. I stuff the inside of that ugly turkeyling with a stick of cinnamon more onion more rosemary apples and and orange. Did i mention I give the whole pan a glass of wine to relax with while it makes its journey from briny deep to my dinner plate. I even give it a massage with butter finely minced shallot, garlic, parsley and thyme... ensuring there's a good layer of butter between the skin and the meat so all that flavorful goodness trickles down flavoring and moisturizing my perfect meal. My turkey is then drizzled with olive oil and salted to make a crisp tight crunchy skin everyone secretly covets.
Sometimes... I even surprise myself... I pulled this from the oven and it was like the turkey knew I was documenting its journey from raw dead bird and a pound of carrots to mouth watering treat that looks good enough for a food magazine... we also had some mashed potatoes (of which i'm pretty convinced I make the best) and Steve's favorite green bean casserole... there will be no cake for this birthday girl I want pie pumpkin warm spicy creamy hearty pumpkin pie... there's something so satisfying to me about pumpkin pie... but the turkey is my symphony of white and dark meat roasted to golden perfection. It is moist and tender every last bite so mouth watering it begs to be over eaten! haha This is my joy.... feeding people creating something memorable and delicious for people I love. My mom likes to take a picture of every turkey I roast... motherly pride i suppose she likes to see me happy she knows this makes me happy everyone I know everyone who knows me knows my heart is happiest when I am giving cooking and loving.... when i feed Steve a bite of food and he loves it so much he kisses me right after... This gives me joy this overwhelms me sharing my love sharing my heart sharing my hard work that doesn't even feel like work til i sit down at the end of the night and my feet hurt. I can't wait to share it with everyone...I will share it with everyone haha Did I mention I eat too??? :)

With this ring...

We bought Steve's wedding band and i'm happy to say its exactly what he wanted! :) I'm glad its done i'm glad he's as happy with his ring as i am with mine. Sometimes i look at my hand and am still 11 months later surprised to see it sparkling up at me... and i think about this ring on his hand and all that that means... I know when he wears this ring it means he is mine and I am his. We love that it has crosses on it to remind us of the gift we have in Our Lord the strength we have the purpose and promise. I can't wait to put this ring on his finger I can't wait to see it on his hand i can't wait to hold his hand and feel the little band of cool metal brush against my palm. Its a ring... its a symbol of all our love all our comittment and above all our faith that God is in control that God has brought us together and we can and do walk by faith and trust God... My greatest prayer lately is that when we're old and gray sitting in our rocking chairs looking back over our life and our marriage we can say It was fun it was hard but we trusted the Lord and he is good! We can say that even today amidst new cars and crummy work schedules. We have a florist bill we don't know when we can pay off and his family still hasn't booked their plane tickets... but we have and we do trust and know that God is working... God will bring everyone safely to Reno... God will make sure the cake is paid for... God will ensure that Deaira's wedding dress fits and God will be with us all the days of our lives... Praise the Lord give thanks to the Lord for He is good!

I scream You Scream.... ok maybe not...

Steve and I were driving around a few months ago and saw a sign outside a new empty bulding for a Sorbeterria. we looked at eachother eyebrows raised lips pursed "ooh Sorbet" we waited with great anticipation for this new place to open Steve especially cuz it would be a place with delicious fruity sorbet that he could eat and enjoy to his heart content. I hoped too... a place with delicious frozen treats Steve and i could go to and share... I'd been to such places places with delicious sorbet and gelatos. I remeber they were like frozen fluffy mounds of fruity goodness that melted on your tounge and made your taste bugs sing! Needless to say we both had high expectations of this place our expectations were so high i'm afraid they had nowhere to go but down... we didn't however expect them to crash and burn all around us in heaping piles of wreckage... When this alleged Sobeterria opened up and we wandered in full of hope and excitement we found not a single scoop of anything dairy-free that Steve could eat and not even a single scoop of ice cream Deaira couldn't go buy at the grocery store... Sure they had smoothies and fancy sundaes but they were all mixes and powders and someone elses formula that you can find at any sporting event or amusement park not one single original thing in the whole shop... We were so disgusted! I had hope hoped hoped for one of those little mom and pop places where everything i home made on site where fresh fruit is pureed down with just the right amount of sugar and maybe a touch of lemon juice to make the berries taste more like berries where a single bite tastes like the whole bushel! I could tell you stories about the most delicious gelato i ever ate it was grapfruit flavored!! So i've been thinking and steve and i have talked and thought there isn't a single place in this whole town where you can get real home made sorbet! a few places we've yet to discover may have 1 or 2 little flavors but no one has anything like it on a grand scale... What if i had a little shop... so many little shops i could open now... a tea shop a soup shop a gelato and sorbet shop... this one is different tho i dunno maybe cuz its closer to home... but it'd be fun a cool brightly colored shop filled with intensely flavored frozen treats edible by anyone.... i'd make sorbet and gelato pay special attention to people with dietary concerns no gluten no milk in the sorbet... gluten free ice cream cone sure thing! *sigh* who knows what is in store... but it'd sure be fun!

In with the new...

So our t-bird was happily enjoying his retirement creating works of art but we neeeded a new car to continue our adventures and take us into the next chapter of our life together.... So we shopped around we looked high and low we scrimped and saved... Finally we found it God stamped it with a little fish so we would know it was ours...
We have our very own new (to us) Dodge caravan... ready to pack us up and move us into our first home together... ready to take us on future adventures... We're so happy its really a lovely car its very comfortable obviously is roomy since there's 2 of us and room for 6. Its very exciting this new car thing. This next step into the future... We see Costco trips and camping trips in our future!

Here we are off onto our next adventure... its a 3 month trip to our wedding and we can't wait to see everyone there....

Out with the old...

A Journey through pictures... This was our car... Our sweet old thunder bird... This car brought Steve all the way from Michigan to Nevada.... After coming all the way from Michigan Steve met Me...

The tbird not only brought Steve all the way from Michigan it was the car we took on our first date where we shared our first kiss and our vehicle for adventure over the last 2 years and 3 months...Here we are happy and wonderfully in love planning for the future and our car was planning for the future too... a retirement spent doing street art...
Its medium was power steering fluid notice the unique patterns swirls splatters and drips... Our t-bird was well on his way to being the automobile equivalent to Jackson Pollock... and working so hard we could see the temperature gauge rise... the car would moan and groan when we tried to use the steering obviously distressed to see its art medium being used for anything besides street decoration. Steve of course was devastated about the cars ambition to leave us...

This posed a problem for us... We were spending so much money on power steering fluid for our poor car it was interfering with money we needed for the wedding and the poor tbird didn't want to take Steve and Deaira on adventures anymore it hardly wanted to take Steve to work. We wanted our wonderful t-bird to be as happy as we were so we decided it deserved to have a happy blissfully future like we're on our way to. So we sent our wonderful t-bird away to a junk yard where it can blissfully drip power steering fluid and any other kind of fluid and realize its dream of being an artiste! It even left us a sweet $175 wedding gift! Bye Bye t-bird We'll always remember you!

Time flies...

Less than 100 days... Wow part of me is so excited to see the countdown has flown away so fast and part of me is switching into panic mode... We still have so much to pay for and so much to get done i wonder if we'll get everything done, but as time draws closer we're bubbling over we're so excited we can't wait! We can't wait to see Steve's family we can't wait to eat cake haha we can't wait to be married!!! We're both off work tomorrow for th 4th of July and we're gonna crack the whip and start tying up these loose ends! still less than 100 days WOO HOO!!!!