Chicken Bacon Ranch Pasta

With Halloween almost upon us, Boyfriend and I decided to host a party on Saturday night.  As this party would be including alcohol, we figured a heavier dinner, full of yummy carbohydrates, was probably necessary.

Enter the recipe below.

Chicken Bacon Ranch Pasta

The link for this can be found here and the ingredients and directions are copied below:

Ingredients:

8 ounces penne pasta
1 Tablespoon butter
1 Tbsp flour
2 Tbsp dry ranch dressing seasoning mix
2 cups milk
1 cup shredded cheddar cheese
1/3 cup cooked, chopped bacon
2 cups cooked chopped chicken 

Directions:

In a large pot, cook pasta according to package directions. Drain and set aside.

In same pot melt butter. Add flour and stir. Cook flour for 1 minute. Slowly whisk in milk. Continue cooking until sauce thickens. Stir in ranch dressing mix and cheese. Stir until cheese melts. Add chicken, bacon and pasta. Stir to coat.

Notes:

8 oz of Penne pasta was about 1/2 of a regular box.

2 tbsp of the ranch dressing seasoning mix was 1 envelope of the hidden valley ranch mix - it's no where on the box how much mix is in each envelope and I felt rather silly opening the envelope into a bowl to then measure it out so hopefully this will save someone that step.

1/3 cup bacon is 6 slices according to a Google search - timing for this dinner couldn't have worked out better for me - I'd already planned a larger breakfast for Saturday of pancakes, eggs and bacon.  I just fried up the extra slices and tossed them in the refrigerator until later.

2 cups cooked chicken is about 1 lbs again according to a Google search - the original blog talks about how she used a rotisserie chicken.  I boiled up a whole package of boneless skinless chicken (a bit more than a lb (more like 1.3) because I've never seen a package of chicken in the food store that was 1 lb even or close to it) and chopped it and the bacon up while the pasta was boiling.

This recipe came with an important reminder: read the comments before starting the recipe or tutorial.  I recently had a similar problem when I started to crochet a hat from a youtube video tutorial (more on that if I ever actually finish the stinking hat) and I thought I learned that lesson.  Clearly not though.

One of the steps above talks about cooking until the sauce thickens.  I'm not the biggest cook and most of the things I make are really simple meals.  As such, I've never had to thicken milk before.  After quite a while my milk was still real soupy.  Another Google search told me it should only take a few minutes for milk to thicken so I moved on - thinking maybe I was overestimating how thick a sauce like this should guess.

Later on, I read through the comments on the original recipe to see if anyone else had any improvements or suggestions.  Several people noted that when they used Skim milk (which I had used), the sauce wouldn't thicken and offered suggestions - one person put part skim, part half and half; another added more flour - either way, I wish I had seen this before dinner and I would've tried something like that.

Oh well.  Hopefully the reminder sticks this time.

And even with the soupier sauce - both Boyfriend and I enjoyed the pasta a whole lot.  The recipe says it serves 4 - for us it served 2 large helpings for him, 2 smaller helpings for me, and a decent enough portion to bring to work for lunch. I think this is definitely a recipe to repeat.

Let's Go to the Mall Everybody!

Now, if you're anything like me, you didn't just read the title - but sung it in a pop-y Canadian accent.

If you're not like me and don't watch way too much TV, you might not recognize it.  But that is the title of the Robin Sparkles hit single "Let's Go to the Mall" as song by Robin Scherbatsky (as played by Cobie Smulders), one of the lead characters in the CBS tv show- How I Met Your Mother.

Come on Jessica, Come on Tory! Let's go to the mall, you won't be sorry!

So why am I posting about going to the mall you may ask?

Well - Boyfriend decided he wanted to be one of the other lead characters from How I Met Your Mother for Halloween - Barney Stinson as played by Neil Patrick Harris - so obviously I figured I should be Robin. And why be present day Robin when it would be so much more fun to bedazzle a jean jacket and walk around singing 1980's music (or well 1993 in Canada)?

So I went to grab my jelly bracelets and my cool graffiti coat but well - that's where this story gets going.

I'm a big fan of pinterest and the internet as a whole so I figured - hey - no way I'm not going to find a tutorial online about how to make a Robin Sparkles look-alike jacket, right?

RIGHT?

Wrong.

Yeah - hours of searching wasn't giving much by way of inspiration.  But I bought the jacket and committed to the idea, so dammit I'm gonna be Robin Sparkles!  I'm not the craftiest of people and would've really rather had someone else's work to follow as a guideline on what products to use and the like.  But sometimes you just gotta work with what you got.

And here's what I got:

Levi's Denim Jacket - Purchased for $7 from the Goodwill

Puffy Paint in just about every color - I was in a Greek Organization in college so I know my way around some puffy paint and had all of this on hand.

Iron-on Rhinestones and Studs - $2 each from AC Moore

Spray On Fabric Glitter - $8 from AC Moore

Brush Set - $5 from AC Moore (I wasn't sure if I had any craft brushes at home and these were nothing special)

Fabric Paint - I forget but <$2/each from AC Moore

Black Marker - It's hard to see in the picture, but this little marker as saved my ass a few times in different things.  It's double sided - 1 broad, 1 fine - and is pretty much always helpful.

Now the fun part - what to do with all this stuff?

Step 1I used my magical marker to attempt to draw the Robin Sparkles logo on the jacket. Using the logo below found by a quick Google search for "Robin Sparkles logo".

Step 2

Where I drew with the marker, I went over with pink puffy paint.

If you look carefully, you can see places where my marker differs slightly from where I ended up painting.  As it was, I started running out of room at the end of the "Sparkles" and tried to combat that a bit.

I don't have the neatest handwriting on the best of days but I've gotta say - I'm pretty happy with how that part of it came out.

Step 3

Fill in the bubble letters using the blue fabric paint using one of the thinner brushes - to help stay in the lines.

Not as neat as it could be but could've been worse.

Step 4

Robin's jacket has a shadowing effect behind the lettering.  Using a wider, flatter brush- I tried to recreate this with the pink fabric paint as my shadowing color.  With the brush pretty much vertically against the jacket, I dabbed bits of paint right along where it had been previously puffy painted. Then using the flatter part of the brush, I attempted to pull the paint away from the outline.

This kind of gave the effect I was going for.

Step 5

Bedazzle the hell out of the jacket.

So as you can see above, I bought some iron on rhinestones and studs for the jacket.  Well fun story - after some research I learned if you iron puffy paint, you can set the jacket (and possibly the apartment) on fire.  That's not the result I wanted.  So I used blobs of puffy paint to press them on instead.  I went mainly with the studs instead of the rhinestones - the rhinestones were too tiny to really make an impact in all the puffy paint.  

Also I added some more than just what's shown in the above picture.  Figured I could always use more.

With some studs I also added the little swirls with silver puffy paint.  Felt it would look snazzy.  Although the bottom one definitely came out good - I was disappointed in the swirls above the "i" in Robin.  Oh well.

Step 6

Spray the jacket all over with the glitter spray.  Because why the heck not?

Step 7

Gather there rest of your Robin Sparkles look and have a fabulous time at a costume party.

 Cobie Smulders as Robin Sparkles in the Slap Bet episode of How I Met Your Mother

Me as Robin Sparkles the morning after my Halloween Party.

So I know mine is hardly a direct replica of the Robin Sparkles jacket from the Let's Go to the Mall video.  When I find my camera cord (which has decided to be MIA), I'll grab the pictures in full costume and that also wasn't exactly the same as her outfit.  Overall, rather than being a direct replica of Robin - I kinda tried to channel my inner teen idol in 1990s Canada.  I figure if Robin Sparkles was touring a country for a year - she's gonna have more than one bedazzled graffitied jacket. Close enough though, eh?

Mariner's Cove

In case you haven't gotten it yet from the recent set of reviews, I really enjoy reading. Nothing beats the feeling of a book in my hands, waiting to be read.  As such, I held off on getting an e-reader for as long as I could.  But nearly 2 years ago, I broke down and bought a Nook for one simple reason - my mom did.  Mom would buy books, read them, and then pass them along to me; unfortunately, I can't really support this habit without that right now.  So when she got a Nook for Christmas, set up her account and gave me the password to read what she downloaded - I decided my Christmas money was going to have to go to a Nook Simple Touch.  

Why am I giving you this whole bit about a Nook? Well - this book I just read is one that I wouldn't have picked out on my own.  But since it was there and I had no strong feelings on what else to read, I figured might as well give it a go. After just finishing The Forgotten Garden - which was long and intense- and then The Great Gatsby - which while short was still pretty intense, classic and all that- I figured I could go for something a bit more mindless.

And Mariner's Cove by E. Ayers was just that - mindless.

Three years after her husband dies in the line of duty as a police officer, Nikki travels to the town of Mariner's Cove for a vacation away from her children and the parents she's lived with since her husband's passing.  There she meets her landlord - Archer Brooklyn IV.  I'm sure I don't need to post SPOILER ALERT before this because I'm sure anyone would assume the result - they fall in love and live happily ever after.

Like I said - mindless.

But mindless isn't always a bad thing.  A cheap cheesy romance novel can be just what the doctor ordered sometimes.  But this was.... more creepy than cheesy.

Most cheap romances seem to have a gimmick-y kind of thing. Maybe she's a princess and he's a poor beggar.  Maybe she's a werewolf and he's a vampire.   A little some-something to make the couple a little different from the hundreds (thousands? more zeros than that?) of romance novels in the world.  Something to propel the story and give it a little bit of plot more than meet, fall in love, live happily ever after, the end.

Oh there's a gimmick here - she thinks he's gay.  She mentally refers to herself as "his beard" (a cover-up giving a homosexual person the appearance of being heterosexual).  It's not until weeks into their "relationship" (I guess you could call it?) that she says this out loud and finds out he's straight.

Maybe he didn't realize she thought he's gay? Oh no - he knows.  When the story's in his perspective, it is quite clear that he realizes she thinks he's gay but doesn't see fit to clarify this for her.  She's the one making assumptions and why should he correct her if she doesn't ask?

She makes assumptions and as such, invites him into the bathroom when she's taking a bath to discuss their business opportunity (he's a lawyer opening a new practice and she just graduated from a paralegal program - because that's the way things work in these kind of novels).  From her point of view, she thinks she would not have invited him in if he wasn't gay and from his point of view, he thinks she would not have invited him in if she didn't think he was gay.  But he's not gay - he's just a creepy creepy guy.

He later says he didn't want to hurt their friendship by admitting the truth - but watching a woman bathe because she thinks you're not attracted to women is royally screwed up and how does that not interfere a friendship?

I wasn't loving the book before the bath scene and pretty much wrote it off there.  I finished reading it because it's really hard for me to leave a book unfinished once I get far enough into it (and the bath scene in Chapter 4 was far enough I guess).  The rest of the book was pretty typical from there.  He's rich and gives her plenty of perks to be his paralegal, she meets his kid, her family moves there, he meets her kids, the children are all pretty surly but come around, she finds out he's not gay, there's a (rather awkward) sex scene, he proposes, they all live her happily ever after, the end.

I guess anyone can get their happily ever after, even creepy not-gay guys who mislead women into letting him see her naked.

The Great Gatsby

It seems to be that whichever I do first - read the book or watch the movie - is which medium I like better. If I read the book then watch the movie, I like the book better but usually can still appreciate the movie for what it is (depending on the adaptation of course). However, if I see the movie then read the book, I end up hating the book.  So if I see a commercial for a movie I want to see that I know is based off of a book, I try the book first.

So more than a year ago now, when I first saw a commercial for the Baz Luhrmann adaptation of The Great Gatsby, I knew I was going to have to find a copy of the book.  While just about everyone I know seems to have read it back in High School English classes, I went to a Catholic High School and we did not follow the standardized curriculum everyone else did. So that's how I, at 24, ended up reading The Great Gatsby for the first time. After a few false starts, I picked The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald up yesterday and finished it today.

If you have been living under a rock (or like me - in a plaid kilt and logo embroidered polo shirt), here's a brief summary: Nick Carroway moves to Long Island in the summer of 1922, living next to the lavish mansion owned by Jay Gatsby.  Gatsby holds extravagant parties at this mansion but Nick learns most of the guests had never even met the host and no one knows what he does or how he came to have such wealth.  I'm hesitant to say anything else regarding the plot. My copy is 154 pages so to reference something in the third chapter or beyond would be a third of the way through the book.

I initially started this figuring maybe I'd have something to say by the time I finished the summary and let it all absorb a bit more...but well.. I've got nothing.

I have the 75th anniversary edition and as such there are numerous prefaces and articles and such.  All discuss the masterpiece of the novel and one says that it "is a classic - a novel that is read spontaneously by pleasure-seekers and under duress by students" (Matthew J. Bruccoli - University of South Carolina, 1992).  Well - I am definitely the first category - I'm no longer a student and there isn't a teacher guiding me towards seeing the symbols and understanding them. And as someone reading for enjoyment, I was underwhelmed by the story. I feel like I must be missing something. I read through some articles to get some clarity regarding the symbols - lord knows I am far from a literary expert when it comes to these things, but even with that, I still feel like I am not seeing or comprehending something here.

Maybe it's just me.

It's probably just me.

Either way, still gonna find Baz Luhrmann's adaptation asap.

Reese's Peanut Butter Cup Freezer Pie 2.0

So back in February, I posted about my Not Quite Valentine's Day Dinner where I made a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup Freezer Pie (this post right here).

I made it again for a friend, gosh nearly 2 weeks ago (like I said in the The Forgotten Garden post- I know, I've been failing).  Figured I'd post some additional thoughts here again.

Since the previous post includes the link to the original recipe and copied directions, I won't bore anyone with that here as well. But here have a picture:

I intended on taking a picture after it was compiled but I ate it all instead :)

As I said previously, this is just oh so good.  It's essentially just pudding by with chunks of Reese's in it - how could anyone say no to that?

Originally, I said that while quite tasty, I thought there'd be cheaper ways for the chocolatey peanut buttery goodness.  Yeah - forget that.  When a friend came over for dinner, I looked up a bunch of other recipes to consider for dinner.  This one seemed the easiest by pretty far.  So yeah, maybe I could've saved a few dollars, but is that worth the extra effort? I said no. And goodness it was worth it. Deliciousness.

The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton

I know I have been neglecting to update this like I promised I would. Again.  I actually took detailed notes and pictures when cooking for my friend Cate when she was over last week - I've just been feeling too lazy to actually upload the pictures.  I'll get there.

But in the meantime, I just finished rereading The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton.  She is phenomenal and quite possibly my favorite author - I have to add qualifiers like "quite possibly" when I say that because somewhere inside of me, the younger version of myself is appalled by the idea that I could contemplate liking any author better than J.K. Rowling but no really - I adore her writing.  I've read all four of her novels and have enjoyed them all thoroughly.

The Forgotten Garden is a story about a young girl who was abandoned on a ship from England to Australia, was taken in by strangers and raised as their own, that is until her 21st birthday when she was told the truth.  This revelation shattered "Nell"'s sense of identity and throughout the remainder of the story, it's a mystery to find out where she came from, who her parents are and why she was abandoned.

If you're unfamiliar with Kate Morton's work, the novels I've read have a similar common theme - a family secret to be discovered. The wondrous thing is that she interweaves the stories from different time periods, generations and characters together. In the case of The Forgotten Garden, we have the story line of Nell's search for her past, her parents' timeline of how the characters in that generation ended up there, and Nell's granddaughter Cassandra's picking up the pieces of the puzzle following Nell's death.   It's like we are all rushing throughout the reading to get to the finish line, all from vastly different eras.  

I decided to reread this one though because of the four, it was the one I enjoyed the least and I enjoyed it noticeably less so than others.  I thought I might have been in a strange mindset at the time because it didn't grip me the way The House at Riverton (which I read before this book) or The Distant Hours and The Secret Keeper (which I read after) did.  And I'm sticking with "strange mindset" for the first read because this time I was considerably more enthralled- staying up far part my bedtime on a work night to keep reading.

And enthralled is the word for it - Kate Morton's books capture me so completely that they stay with me for such a long time afterwards.  That is why I've decided to write this now - Morton has woven a spell on me and I'm not ready to leave it's clutches yet.

On the very last page of the book (my copy anyway) are some "Suggested Discussion Points".  I've been thinking a lot about them and will be answering them below.  While I tried to keep everything mostly spoiler free above this point - I make no promises that there won't be significant spoilers below.

You have been warned.