Author: kyle

Our first venture into Thai food this past year was a big success. Sara really liked the pineapple added in, while I threw in some Thai chile’s to try and get it heating up. It”s hard to go wrong with this solid set of ingredients. 4 servings 35 minutes (15 mins prep) Recipe located at: http://www.recipezaar.com/recipe/getrecipe.zsp?id=81916\n\nScoping the scene before hand, you”d come across a “who’s who” of Thai cooking: The lemongrass floating in a sea of good flavor: Now we”re doing some cooking folks: The final product, hot off the stove: Our weary critics await: It was a cold December night, but it was hot hot hot inside our mouths: My only warning on this one is to watch your measurements, especially with the curry paste and brown sugar. Too much of a good thing can come back to bite you after a third or fourth mouthful. This meal was one in about ten minutes though, so it’s definitely worth taking a shot at. Pretty easy to make, and sure to satisfy even the most discriminating feline.

This is a pretty simple recipe that has a big time taste. There are quite a few ingredients required, but it is worth the extra trip to the store. Recipe Summary Difficulty: Easy Prep Time: 10 minutes Cook Time: 20 minutes Yield: 4 servings User Rating: 5 Stars Recipe located at: http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/cda/recipe_print/0,1946,FOOD_9936_28244_PRINT-RECIPE-FULL-PAGE,00.html\n\nBefore the battle: Preparing the ground chicken and spices: Adding the corn: “Layering” the dish (3 layers in total): Before going in the oven (we added the jalapenos for some heat):\n\n Coming out of the oven it was smelling incredible: The final messy plating: Again, this worked out great for us. We”ve since made it a couple more times, although in each of these cases we were missing one or more ingredients and it wasn’t quite as intense on the flavor. We would thus highly recommend not skimping on this one, but instead treating yourself to a complete feast.

Well, I’m all done with year 1 of 2 of graduate school. The exams this time seemed to be much easier, but I’m still nonetheless glad to be finished. This week we are trying to get everything in order before our trip. That means preparing everything with our move to Beaverton and getting work issues under wraps. Today we went up and looked at our new apartment and selected a garden plot at one of the community gardens. We are planning to do most of our vegetables up there and have only a small garden in our front yard here in Salem. We got most of this put in over the weekend before the rains came, and hopefully it will grow into a nice looking landscape.

You can see how far our plants have come in the past few weeks:

We’ve been doing quite a bit of Thai cooking lately, here is one dish:

Finally, Lizzie is always excited whenever there is a mess around the house (it means she has a new place to sleep):

We leave for Baton Rouge on Saturday. Should be a fun visit with nicer weather than we are having here. Hope everyone is doing well, talk to you soon.

Hi, I’m finishing up studying for my first final tomorrow. I’m not too worried about them this time around, but would just like to have them over. We’ve got lots of work to do on our garden and getting ready to move some of our stuff up to Beaverton. So hopefully the next three days will go quickly. We just recently passed the 1-year mark for our return back to the U.S. It’s amazing how much this year flew by in comparison. I wouldn’t say we were having fun all the time, but there’s something to be said for being in a comfortable place. Well, back now to studying about how to manage organizations. After that, an international business final and then an Econ final. Oh- I won an award last week for giving an oral argument on a Harvard case study about BMG Entertainment. With all of the students having seen Napster coming of age first hand, I think most of the professors were out of their league on this one. Nonetheless, I think I was a benefactor of low expectations based upon how some people ln our class tend to prepare. I’ll find out at a receptionon Thursday. Thursday night Sara has a dinner with her cohort at PSU so we’ll be going up there also. Bye for now.

Hi, we are still here just very busy finishing up the last few weeks of the school year. I’ll be done the week after next and Sara will be done a couple of weeks into June. The exciting news is that we’ve purchased tickets to go to Baton Rouge May 21-29, so we’ll get to have a nice vacation back there. We’ve also got big plans for a vegetable garden this year. We’ve planted almost 100 indoor starter plants– everything from pepper and tomatoes to lettuce and herbs. We’re trying to find the best place to put in a garden in our backyard and it’s hard to find a place with constant sunilght. We’re hoping we’ll get some good stuff though. We have decided to rent out a second apartment in Beaverton for the summer, so we’ll have to come down on the weekends and take care of everything. Here are some pictures from our trip to Seattle. Check out the full album by going to the Photo Albums section.

Talk to you soon. Thanks. Kyle

This was our first venture into real cooking and resulted from watching the 30 Minute Meals program on the Food Network. It came out absolutely fantastic and has inspired us to try all kinds of recipes since then. It’s actually two recipes (one for the chicken and one for the potatoes). Here’s they both are: Garlic Roast Chicken with Rosemary and Lemon Recipe Summary Difficulty: Easy Prep Time: 5 minutes Cook Time: 25 minutes Yield: 4 servings User Rating: 4 Stars Recipe located at: http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/cda/recipe_print/0,1946,FOOD_9936_28396_PRINT-RECIPE-FULL-PAGE,00.html\n\n\nPesto Mashed Potatoes Recipe Summary Difficulty: Easy Prep Time: 5 minutes Cook Time: 15 minutes Yield: 4 servings User Rating: 4 Stars Recipe located at: http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/cda/recipe_print/0,1946,FOOD_9936_28397_PRINT-RECIPE-FULL-PAGE,00.html\n\n\nHere are the ingredients we purchased: Sara preparing the garlic and rosemary: \n\nBoiling the red potatoes: Adding in the pesto to the potatoes: Baking the chicken:\n\n\n\nFinished potatoes: \n\nFinished chicken: Final Plating: Again, we highly recommend this recipe. It was really easy and tasted incredible with the lemon/garlic/rosemary/pesto flavors.

Hi. We are up in Seattle for a few days taking some time off for spring break. We’ve had a nice chance to relax and see some of the sites. Tonight we’re going to a Sonics game which should be fun. Tomorrow we head back to visit some of our family around the state, so we”re looking forward to that also. We”ll put up some pictures soon.

It’s been a full year now since we started writing this ‘blog’. I wish we could update it more frequently, as it’s really kind of cool to have a documented history of what’s been going on in our lives (you can check out the Archives on the lefthand side of this page). I’m going to try to make a point of doing this.

Hi everyone. We have had some good happenings this month. I found out last week that I got hired on with TEK in Beaverton this summer to work in a strategic finance position. It’s a great chance to work at a billion dollar technology company, and the pay and long-term possibilities are also exciting. This also means that Sara won’t have to work this summer and can concentrate on her school at Portland State where she just applied. She had to go up for an interview and she should find out soon if she can enroll in the part-time program. She’d be going full-time in the summer though, so we’re going to have to figure out whether we want to get a second apartment up there or commute every day (insert bad memories of the Paris metro system here). Spring break is next week and we both sure need it. Way too much work to get done between now and them. We are going to Seattle for a few days and then to see our families toward the end of the week. After that, I only have a month of school left. I actually can’t wait to get out and start working at this point. Talk to everyone soon.