Our Very First Thanksgiving!

Hello all!

This week we had our very first Thanksgiving as a married couple! Since a lot of family was out of town, and since both Christian and I had friends who didn't have anywhere to go, we made our own Thanksgiving dinner and invited our friends! It was an adventure. We made (almost) all the required fixin's: turkey, stuffing, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes and gravy, sweet potato balls, pumpkin pie, Bavarian strawberry dessert, and more. Christian was disgusted by the thought of giblets in his gravy, and both of us think cranberry sauce is revolting, so we went without those. I made the sweet potato balls, the strawberry dessert, and some of the green bean casserole, but Christian and his friend Chris made everything else. Chris slept over at our place the night before to help make pies and other stuff. Pretty much everything turned out great! Thanskgiving morning we went to Chris's apartment (much bigger than ours and a lot more room to cook in) to cook our turkey. We followed a recipe on Allrecipes.com for our turkey. Here's a picture of it cooking in the oven after we took off the foil.

Christian got to make the first slice in the turkey. :) My hero. Here's the picture to document it:

Sadly, when we started carving the turkey, we discovered that it was all done to perfection except the legs, which were still bloody. Which was weird, considering that the meat thermometer had been in the leg and it got up to 180 degrees. We tried to nuke it in the microwave, but the only microwave we had access to was probably made around the time of the Vietnam War, so the nuking didn't work out too well. We just threw them away and dealt with only having white meat. I think we took off the foil too late, and that's why the legs didn't get cooked and it didn't all get very browned. Oh well.

This is the amazing pumpkin pie that Christian and Chris made all by themselves at 5:00 am the day of Thanksgiving! It was delicious to the taste, and very desirable. :D And yes, it's homemade (except the crust, which was too daunting of a task for us to try our hand at). I'm proud of them.

After dinner, we all played games. Guesstures was especially amusing. Here's a video of Chris trying to convey the word "flirt" to Sarah (my roommate who came for dinner). Sorry it's so dark; I don't know how to fix it. And sadly, my little point-and-shoot digital camera doesn't record sound. So all we have is the video.

We have lots more pictures from the day, too. Most of them will be on my Facebook, since we don't want to fill up our entire post with pictures. Feel free to go look and comment. http://www.facebook.com/bfroggy326?ref=profile The day was great :)

On Saturday, while Christian was at the BYU/Utah football game, I went with Mary (my sister) and Derek (her fiance) and my aunt Laura to do a live session at the Salt Lake temple. It was fun to be able to spend time with them. I can't believe they're getting married in less than a month!!! Wow.

I will now let Christian write about how BYU OWNED UTAH at the football game on Saturday:

ZOMG it was such a great game! Utah brought out a quick lead with two field goals in the first quarter, and shut us down until we came back in the second quarter with a field goal of our own, and to everyone's love and adoration a touchdown. Then 4 seconds before halftime, we scored another field goal bringing it to 1 3-6 at the half. The bands then took the field and we each performed separately, and then following a 30-some-odd year tradition the bands shared the field to create the Red, White, and Blue band, and performed a patriotic song with a huge American flag that was unfurled in the middle of the song. It was awesome. The third quarter was slow, but BYU scored another touchdown bringing it to 20-6. In the fourth quarter I guess we got a little cocky, because we let two field goals and touchdown with a 2-pt conversion go through, bring it to 20-20. OVERTIME!!!!! Oh the crowd was going SO crazy. It was intense. On the first overtime, the Utes went first, and were able to crack out a field goal, much to our pleasure. All we needed was to score somehow to win, or tie it up again. So our quarterback, on the final down, passes it right up the middle to the tight end. Two Utes dive for him, and nab him. We're about to get ready for the next down, when he BREAKS THE TACKLE and all that's left is a clear field ahead of him. TOUCHDOWN COUGARS!!!!! As soon as he passed the goal line, the fans started clearing the stands. An almost literal sea of blue covered the field. The fans were picking up the players and started crowd-surfing them. At the peak there were probably 20k people on the field just crowding everywhere! It was so intense and the roar was so loud! It took probably 30 minutes to clear enough field so that they could do some senior recognition thing at the end. The band didn't really like that, because we had to perform as everyone was leaving after that 30 minutes. But oh well. Totally worth it to see such an awesome game. Vegas here we come! ~CM

The new joy of our life: a space heater! Aunt Laura gave us a spare one she had and it's been SOOOO AWESOME. We don't have to wear sweatshirts around the house anymore!!! It's AWESOME. WE LOVE IT.

Sorry, no recipe this week; we haven't really tried anything new. We were Thanksgiving-ed out. We are trying a new "Lasagna Roll-Ups" recipe in a few days, so look forward to that in our next exciting installment! Same Bat time, same Bat channel. :D

"I meant the first two, but the second one I didn't mean."

Yo, word up dawg. This be C-dizzle fo rizzle. How ya bizzle? lol ANYWAY. I'm done. The quote for the title was by me. We were reading for our Marriage and Family class, and it was talking about how I should say to Brittany "I love you" "You're beautiful" and "I'm sorry." So I said them. All in a row. It made her laugh because it seemed random. Anywho, I came back with my quote about how i meant the first two, but the second one I didn't mean (yet). Kinda confusing no? Whatever, my brain was hurting. Yay homework.

So the 13th, and last Tuesday BYU had our first Men's basketball games. I'm in the pep band, so I got the opportunity to go and cheer on the cougars! It was lots of fun and we won both of those games. I haven't paid any attention to away games, so I don't know their record, but apparently we've always done really well each year. We'll see how well they do this year! Hopefully we'll get a nice long trip for NCAA playoffs.

We played Air Force in football yesterday. It was a brutal beginning as BYU totally dominated, but later on there were some horrible calls and Air Force got some points on the board. But we won. The Air Force Drum and Bugle Corp came and performed at the game as well. It was fun to see them perform, as we don't really get the chance to watch any other bands perform ever. They played Brazil by Frank Sinatra (I think. They had some trouble playing over the percussion, as there was a small front ensemble consisting of an electric bass, electric drum set, and a couple of other electric drums.) Good game.

Friday, we went and helped a family move out of their house into a new apartment that's still in the ward. We have been trying to do service each week and this was our opportunity this week. As we were helping them load up their stuff, we realized how much stuff it's possible to live without. They had tons of just random chairs, sports equipment (including snowboards, golf clubs, lacrosse rackets (or whatever you call them), etc etc), tv, a California king bed with head and foot boards, a ginormous couch, lots and lots of lamps, a treadmill, a ping pong table. We are very very grateful for how easy we've been able to forget about so many luxuries that we could have. We have a tiny apartment with not a whole lot of stuff in it, but we are extremely happy and we always can find things to do together that don't cost money, and don't need much room for.

Tonight, we got invited over by our home teachers for dinner, along with the other couple they home taught. We had burritos/nachos. It was very delicious and lots of fun to hang out with some families from the ward. For our lesson this month we watched "From the Mouth of Babes"; a movie asking questions to kids about the gospel. Our favorite quote from it was "Q: Where do good people go? A: Heaven Q: What happens to bad people? A: They get spanked!" lol such a cute movie with so many cute little kids.

We got a package from Mama M this week full of stuff to prepare for our first homemade Thanksgiving feast this Thursday! She even included ingredients for gumdrop turkeys (of which Brittany ate one before she knew what they were for, but that's ok!). It's my favorite time of year from now til December because of so many family traditions that I remember. I look forward to creating new ones, and combining old ones with Brittany and discovering what our family enjoys. So many new things to look forward to being married.

Today was the second rehearsal of the BYU 93rd Ward Choir under the direction of yours truly. This week went much better, as we actually had a piece that was written for SATB. The women appreciated that. Still working on getting people out to sing, but I'm planning on emailing the ward. There's also rumors of callings going out to folks to be in the choir. I think I'm starting to feel more comfortable as I get to know the capabilities of those in the ward. For our Christmas program we'll be singing While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks arranged by Sally DeFord, and The First Noel/Jesus Once of Humble Birth arranged by David A. Zabriskie. I wanted to sing a quartet that I sang years ago in Stake Youth Fireside called "Mary's Joseph" but apparently that sacrament meeting is going to be full of other people singing and talking. Apparently though, we go do service at an old folk's home that they said we could sing at, but there's no piano there. We'll see how everything works out.

Anyway, life's good. 'SGood. Recipe from this week is homemade chicken nuggets. We got this recipe out of Mary's gift to Brittany. We really enjoyed it, and it was super easy. Love yall

~Chris and Brittany

5 chicken breasts, boned and skinned

2 cu dry bread crumbs (we used Italian flavored)

1 1/2 tsp paprika (we used seasoning salt)

1/4 tsp salt

1 egg

1/2 cu milk

2 tsp butter or oil (really, just enough to fry the chicken in)

Cut up the chicken breasts into bite size pieces. Mix the dry ingredients in a ziploc and set aside. Beat the egg in another bowl and add the milk to it. Dip the chicken into the egg, and then put it in the ziploc and cover with the breading. Heat the oil in the frying pan and fry the chicken until it's done.

The chicken came out really juicy. We used only 3 chicken breasts, and that along with some steamed broccoli filled the two of us up, though I ate a little too much. lol It was really good!

kbye

"You're fun to go shopping with. I LOVE hazelnuts!"

This quote is by me, while Christian and I were driving to the store. Yes, these two sentences did come immediately following each other. Sometimes I say things that seem relevant to the conversation according to me, and then later from the confused looks on people's faces, realize that they seemed completely irrelevant to everyone else. This was one of those times. I promise it seemed relevant at the time.

The weather was SOOO nice this week (up until the weekend). It averaged about 65 degrees, and we had a slight breeze. There were very entertaining crisp autumn leaves all over the sidewalks all over town. I decided autumn is my second-favorite season (spring is my favorite). Simply because I have a thing about leaves. It's so incredibly satisfying to see an especially big, crisp, crunchy one ahead of you on the sidewalk, then step on it and hear it crack and crumble underneath your foot. It makes me happy. Or, even better, a huge PILE of the crisp crackly leaves that you can trudge through and kick.

This weekend, though, we got our first real snow of the season! We didn't get much more than icicles on the car and a little bit of snow on the ground in Provo, but in American Fork where I was working that afternoon, they got about an inch! It was really exciting! We were going to drive up to where there was snow and take pictures, but we didn't get around to it... so if it snows later this week we'll try our hardest to take pictures. :) Late on Sunday night temperature dropped to I think the lowest it's been all year (at least that we've been out in): 25 degrees. It was crazy!

On Saturday I went to take my second midterm exam for Statistics for Psychology- deemed to be the hardest exam of the year. I was pretty confident, but I came out and saw a 96 next to my number on the Testing Center screen! 96!!!!! I hadn't been THAT confident! I was super proud of myself.

Sunday we had stake conference in the Provo Tabernacle: a welcome opportunity, because it started at 10 and we usually have church at 8. Christian and I are in the stake choir, and we performed two beautiful pieces at stake conference. It was really cool to sing in the Provo Tabernacle because we got to sit up on the second story choir seats and look down on the congregation. We were also the only ones in the congregation who got padded chairs; hooray for being in choir!

This week we received our 4 tickets that we'd ordered for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas concert on December 11! We're super excited and looking for another couple who'd like to go with us on a double date to it. It should be really fun!

A Christmasy song to amuse you this week: "You Will Behave Like Gentlemen", to the tune of "God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen". It's about a mom and dad and their two little sons who are going to Grandma's house for the holidays, and the dad is lecturing them about how they should behave at Grandma's house. Christian and I heard this song on the radio last year around Christmastime and thought it was hilarious, but haven't been able to find it until now! Go to this link http://kxoj.com/morningblog/?p=1946&cpage=3 and click on "You Will Behave Like Gentlemen".

Recipe for this week: Herbed Potato Soup. We tried this because it had so many great raving reviews, and we decided we're definitely adding it to our family cookbook. It's delicious!

Herbed Potato Soup

Ingredients

2 medium potatoes, peeled and diced

2 cups water

1 large onion, chopped

1/4 cup butter, cubed

1/4 cup all-purpose flour

1 tsp salt

1/2 tsp dried thyme

1/4 tsp dried rosemary, crushed

1/4 tsp pepper

1 1/2 cups milk

Directions

1. Place potatoes and water in a large saucepan; cook over medium heat until tender.

2. Meanwhile, in another saucepan, saute onion in butter until tender.

3. Stir in the flour, salt, thyme, rosemary, and pepper.

4. Gradually add milk. Bring to a boil; cook and stir for 2 minutes.

5. Add potatoes with cooking liquid; heat through.

Serves 2 very hungry adults (recipe originally said it served 6... I guess that's how much we can eat).

Notes

We put in 1/2 tsp oregano instead of thyme, and it turned out delicious! Christian also sprinkled his soup with cheddar cheese and said it tasted great, like a baked potato. I liked mine just the way it was. It's super easy and relatively quick, and delicious!

We hope everyone is doing well! Love you all!

"I'll run in and yell like an elephant, but I might do a duck"

The quote from this week is from Who's Line is it Anyway? How are these girls even alive? I mean really!?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSs7NCWp6kA

Sorry mom! It's all my fault, AGAIN, that it's so late this week. Epic failure. *sigh* Anyway, this week was pretty busy. Lots of fun things went on. I registered for my winter classes on Sunday night. I even got into all the classes I had planned because Brittany had registered for some to save a spot for me. I'm so lucky to have her :). So I got registered for the 10 classes that I'm taking. Total of 15.5 credits. Isn't it awesome being a music major? Hopefully it won't be too much of an overload. I look forward to next semester, because after that I'll be able to apply for the actual music ed program instead of being a "pre-music" major. Woot!

I've finally picked out a piece for my juries (it's like a final in private lesson class). If anyone cares to know it's Villanelle by Paul Dukas. Here's a youtube link if you want to listen to it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8jmxtUGBw0. The performer is Steve Park, the professor at Utah State. Brittany has agreed to play piano for me, the sweet woman that she is. It's hard for her to find practice time, but she's so awesome in being willing to put in the effort. We'll see how things turn out.

Friday, Brittany and I went to the Bean Museum on campus for a biology assignment for me, and biology extra credit for Brittany. There was a show on invertebrates. It was kinda cool. They showed off all kinds of bugs and mollusks and other such things. They had this huge hairy tarantula that freaked out a bunch of people there, and a Madagascar hissing cockroach (you know, the ones that they made the people eat all the time on Fear Factor), and millipedes and centipedes. After that, the presenter decided that the bugs weren't cool enough, so she brought out a California king snake that she showed off. I got to hold it and Brittany touched it at least lol. There was a girl there that was absolutely terrified of all of the specimens. Thanks Brittany for not being like that girl.

Saturday, I went to St. George with the band. We were invited to perform in the high school Bands of America super-regional competition as the exhibition band. Imagine, nine hours on a bus for an eight minute performance. lol It was lots of fun though. The band performed phenomenally, and the crowd was way into it. It made things so much better. Brittany was home all day long by herself, unfortunately. I'll let her blog about what she did then. (Insert Brittany's stuff here when she gets home from work)

Sunday Brittany and I performed "Peace I Leave With You" by Rob Gardner in sacrament meeting. We performed this in Brittany's parents' ward about a year ago, and our bishop mentioned that he didn't want to do an intermediate hymn ever again because there was so much talent in the ward for special musical numbers. It went really well and we both got lots of compliments. I really enjoy performing with Brittany. It always seems to be better when it's with her.

I also had my first rehearsal as ward choir director. What a fiasco! For one, no one seemed to want to come to it. I was told we had lots of singers in the ward, so I'll be making some calls and "inviting" people to come sing. Also, the music that I was trying to work on was voiced, originally, for four-part mens. I had tried to re-voice it, but didn't have time to get it into Finale. So I tried to get the altos to sing bass clef and octave higher, but nothing seemed to work out. Then, I found out that our rehearsal had to be cut short because the next ward's choir was supposed to rehearse. *sigh* oh well, we'll see how it all works out.

Anyway, I have to get to band practice. We are having a concert tonight. This week's recipe is what we call Fried Zucchini Casserole. The original name is Zucchini Rice Casserole, but we decided to name it differently because it reminded us of fried zucchini. Hope you enjoy! Love yall

Christian and Brittany

Fried Zucchini Casserole

Ingredients:

2 lbs zucchini

¼ cup butter

¼ cup vegetable oil

1 ¼ cup white rice, cooked

1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese

2 eggs, beaten

1 cup bread crumbs (we used Italian bread crumbs, and it was yummy)

2 Tbs butter, melted

grated Parmesan cheese (optional)

Directions:

Preheat oven to broil setting. Grease a 9x13 baking dish and set aside. Cut ends from zucchini and steam until tender. Dice. Combine butter and vegetable oil in a cooking pot and heat until butter is melted. Add cooked rice and zucchini and sauté until golden, stirring frequently. Stir in the cheese until it is melted. Quickly stir in the eggs, and before they’ve had time to cook in the pot, pour the mixture into the prepared baking dish. Sprinkle generously with bread crumbs, and drizzle with the melted butter. Broil on the top rack of the oven for about 5-10 minutes, or until golden brown and bubbly. Sprinkle each serving with Parmesan cheese, if desired.

Notes:

*We changed the original recipe a lot even before we typed it up for you. The recipe was also originally intended for use with a Dutch oven instead of a cooking pot. We altered it to work with a stove. These are the directions we gave you.

*If you have a rice cooker that has a steaming basket, you could cook the rice and steam the zucchini at the same time. We chopped the zucchini first, then steamed it (so we’d have room in the steaming basket for it). Also, we were impatient for the rice and zucchini to sauté to the “golden” stage (it was taking a surprisingly long time), so we just continued with the recipe before it was golden. It was just fine.

*Interesting tidbit: the original recipe was named “Zucchini Rice Casserole”, but when we tried the casserole Christian exclaimed how much it tasted like fried zucchini. I agreed, so we officially re-named it.

I jus' wanna let you know, the backa yo' head is ridikkulus!

The title comes from this MadTV excerpt: "Can I Have Your Number?" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRbkkqZikx4 It's awesomely funny. DISCLAIMER: There are maybe 4 or 5 milder swear words interspersed in here, but the rest of the video is so funny that it makes up for it.

Last week we forgot to relate to you an exciting story: the story of our very first burnt dinner as a married couple!!! *cue the awwwww's* I know!!! Christian was taking a nap, so I was in charge of dinner. I was making Chicken Parmigiana again (see the recipe from a few posts ago). I got everything ready, put the chicken in the oven, set the oven's timer for ten minutes (which was when I was supposed to turn over the chicken), and then went and laid down on the bed. BAD idea. Two hours later, I awoke to a curious smell permeating the apartment. In my groggy, just-awoken state, it took me a minute to figure out what the smell was. It dawned on me. I gasped and jumped up from the bed, and opened the oven to reveal a baking dish full of black, charred, shriveled, very smelly Chicken Parmigiana. I stared open-mouthed at it for a minute, then went and woke up Christian so he could see. We both started laughing. We went out to eat that night. We had to resort to the hard-core baking soda method of cleaning the burned-on stuff off of our baking dish. And our apartment smelled faintly like burnt chicken for at least a week or so afterwards. Not an exceptionally pleasant smell to come home to. So did all of our clothes, since our bedroom is so close to the kitchen. We had to wash them all.

Tragic story of the week: On Friday I had a 5-page research paper due for biology on the benefits of stem cell research. I stayed up until 4 AM Thursday night (well, technically Friday morning) doing it. By the time I was done, I was SUPER tired, but I finally finished it and emailed it to myself so I could print it off at a school computer the next day before class. I closed the paper. Then I clicked on the link that I'd emailed myself, and to my horror I discovered that I had sent myself just my rough draft (just some bullet points of things I was planning to talk about). My real, finished paper was DELETED. GONE. I woke Christian up and he very kindly - even though he was very tired - helped me search my entire computer including temp files and everything. But it was completely GONE. And it was 4:00 AM and I had to get up in two hours (at 6:00) to go to class. After a giant pity party and a few "Why???? WHY???? I didn't do anything!!!"'s, I eventually regained enough composure to write a pleading email to my professor about it. He felt sorry for me. And so in class Friday, he extended the deadline for the papers until Monday!!!!! Hooray!!!!!! I still had to re-type the entire paper, but at least this time I knew in general what I was going to write about, and which sources I was going to use. So it was a little easier the second time around. I turned it in this morning. And it was beautiful.

On Friday we had our ward Halloween party. All right, all right, I know you've all been dying to know what we dressed up as. We went as.......*drumroll* ......Steve and Blue, from Blue's Clues!!! (ba-bow!!!) Obviously, Christian was Steve, and I was Blue. We picked up some clothes from D.I. to make our costumes with. You can't see it in the pictures, but my spots were cut out from an old blue t-shirt and taped on with packing tape (I didn't want to ruin my good blue t-shirt by sewing things onto it). We had to get kind of creative with the ears too. For Christian, we couldn't find a shirt at D.I. that looked exactly like Steve's. So we got one that could give the general effect, and he wore a nametag that said "Hello, my name is STEVE", so that people could tell who he was. Unfortunately, we didn't think about the fact that most people in our ward don't know us yet, and so they might think his name was actually Steve.... oh well. Here are the pictures: one that we took with the Halloween party backdrop (that may or may not complement our costumes), and two that we took of each other at our apartment.

There were SO MANY CUTE BABIES there, dressed as WAY CUTE THINGS!!!! There were little tigers with eyeliner noses, and little pumpkins.... and one little baby was dressed as a dragon, and his mom was a damsel in distress and his dad was a knight.... awwwww!!!! Christian says I go baby-crazy every time we go to church. I guess I do. They're all just so darn cute!!! There was one baby blessed just this week named Apollo, and he's SO TINY and SOOO CUTE! They dressed him in this darling little knit white outfit that looked like a little snow suit.... it was ADORABLE..... ahem. Anyway.

Our last piece of news is that Christian was just yesterday given a second calling in the ward..... along with the Redeeming the Dead Committee Chairman, he is now also....... the ward choir director!!! I laughed out loud (literally) when the bishop told him. We'd been going back and forth about who we thought was going to be the new choir director. I guess it was him. Haha. But he's way excited about it, and I think he'll be amazing. He's already started looking up new pieces so that we can start having choir practice asap. This should be really fun for him, and he'll do really well.

I am still without a calling. However, the bishop knows (I reminded him) and says he is going down his list looking for people without callings, and calling them as things. I hope someone gets called to be the ward program printer person. We have no sacrament meeting programs currently...

And the most recent news of all (as of today): a couple weeks ago, there were auditions for the band that plays at the basketball games. There are 8 positions, and about 10-12 horns auditioned. Christian was the first to audition - like a week before everyone else - and he didn't really think much about it until today, when he was reminded that audition results are out today. So he went down and looked, and was surprised to find out that he got first chair in the band that plays at the mens' home basketball games! This comes along with a little more scholarship, which will make next semester even more financially feasible as far as funding goes. The first game is on November 13, and he is pumped!

Anyhow, here is the recipe for this week. And yes, it does say 1/2 CUP of basil. We tried it but with a few alterations that we think made it worse. Instead of fresh basil, we used the kind in the spice jar, since we didn't have fresh. We didn't have enough basil to make half a cup, so we also put in some oregano. And our shredded zucchini that we'd frozen beforehand didn't end up thawing very well - it ended up being mush, basically. I guess you're supposed to use fresh zucchini. Anyway, ours ended up being pretty much noodles with zucchini pesto sauce. It looks bizarre and green, with flecks in the sauce, and has a strong basil-y taste, so don't feed it to picky children if you're planning on them actually eating it. Perhaps it will be better if you use fresh basil, and zucchini that's not mush. I did actually like the taste of it somewhat. Try it out and see what you think. Maybe if you do it actually correctly it will be better. :D

Zucchini Alfredo

Ingredients

12 oz package uncooked noodles (egg noodles, linguine, fettucine, whatever)

3 Tbs vegetable oil

2 cloves garlic, minced

4 cups shredded zucchini

1/2 cup milk

4 oz cream cheese, cubed

1/2 cup chopped fresh basil

salt and pepper to taste

grated Parmesan cheese (optional)

Directions

1. Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil. Add noodles and cook for 8 to 10 minutes or until al dente; drain.

2. Heat the oil in a skillet over medium heat. Stir in garlic, and cook 2 minutes. Mix in zucchini, and cook 10 minutes, until some of the moisture has evaporated.

3. Pour the milk into the skillet, and stir in cream cheese until melted. Mix in basil. Season with salt and pepper, and sprinkle with Parmesan cheese. Serve over the cooked pasta.

Anywho. Adios, amigos!

Brittany and Christian