Excited for Dinner!

It's amazing that I'm saying this, but I am excited to make dinner tonight! I found this awesome website, http://favfamilyrecipes.blogspot.com/, with great ideas for dinner and kids meals. Anyway, I love the Sweet Pork Salad from Cafe Rio! Well I found a recipe for the whole meal on this website. We'll have to see if I can replicate it, I'm not the worlds best cook (that would be my brother).

Speaking of my brother, Adam Vickers the amazing chef in Salt Lake, had the opportunity to cook for the stars at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. The event, Chefdance, went for 5 nights and featured a new "celebrity"chef each night. It's really weird to think of your brother as a "celebrity." He and his friend, Franck Peissel, cooked on Monday, January 19th. Their dish consisted of Pomme frites fried in duck fat, pan-seared Opakapaka "Hawaiian Pink Snapper" with a white chocolate wasabi sauce and Kobe beef short ribs with shaved black truffles. What a mouth full, I wouldn't even begin to know how to cook something like that. One magazine reported "Chef Vickers said it took him five hours just to brown off the shortribs; then he deboned them and cook them for seven hours in a very slow oven while the sauce reduced for hours." Wwwooooowww! And I complain about a dinner that takes 30 minutes to make! Patton Oswalt, the voice of Remy from Ratatouille, was one of the celebrity guests there the night my brother cooked. He raves about the ($500 a plate) dinner on his website and says how next time he is SLC he will defiantly be going to Tuscany with a feed bag attached to him (so he can eat more than his stomach can hold). What a complement!

Your amazing big bro and I love you tons!

And they lived Happily Ever After...in the cold!

McKenzie has been wanting to make a snowprincess ever since the first snow flake hit the ground. I've been putting it off until yesterday, we finally made one. However, a princess was not enough this year, she informed me that the princess would get lonely out there all by herself. So of course, she had to have a prince to keep her company out in the cold. They are suppose to be princess Ariel and prince Eric! Aren't they spiting image of the real thing? I had to convince McKenzie that we could make a few changes and work with what we had (those snowman & snowwoman kits). She finally agreed that Eric could just wear a snowman hat instead of giving him black hair. Thank goodness because I wasn't sure how I was going to make black without it looking like something left over from an animal. We had to improvise on the arms,but we had a great time! McKenzie's favorite part was giving them some color!


This was Princess Belle from last year!

Christmas, finally!

Wow, it has been so long since I have blogged. It just seems like I have one thing after the other. I haven't even blogged about Christmas yet, so here we go. It was wonderful! We stayed home for Christmas, which is always nice to wake up in your own bed Christmas morning. We had to waking the girls up that morning because they stayed up too late at Grandmas the night before. I was relieved when the girls were done opening presents that they still had big smiles, because Santa wasn't able to bring the "big" present that they asked for. Santa's elves got an earful from me for not making enough Barbie and the Diamond Castle play set before Christmas. I looked everywhere for that thing! However, Santa pulled through and took care of everything. He left the girls a letter explaining everything and how sorry he was about not being able to bring one for Christmas morning. He said the elves were making more, and he even left money us to buy it when we saw it at the store. They didn't really care that they didn't get it that morning, which was so nice. Thanks to all those who helped look for the castle, I really appreciated the extra help. We did finally find it down in Ogden when we went down to Fred's parents after Christmas. McKenzie & Emma play with it every single day! Which always makes a parent happy when you send a lot of money on a toy and your kids actually play with it for more than a day like some of their other toys!

The day after Christmas we went down to Ogden to spend time with Fred's family, the trip took us a good extra hour because of the wonderful road conditions. It was worth it though because we stayed for a week. We saw my siblings and my dad, we went to a few Aggie basketball games, went sledding , the girls played with their cousins a lot, and got spoiled rotten by grandma and grandpa. And it seemed like I got a week off of being a parent because my girls would run to grandma whenever they needed something. It was a great week for all, thank you!