Sunday, March 1, 2009

Our Little Italy



Our family has been spending a lot of time in the kitchen lately. Here are some of our latest exploits:
Jonah loves making smoothies with Mike. Let's be honest, it's probably the drinking part that he enjoys the most. He still hasn't quite figured out how to drink out of a big boy cup, but the mess it part of the fun too:


My friend Allison and I are both huge fans of Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. This sounds completely lame, but it changed my life. We decided to make mozzarella cheese just like her. So, we bought kits online and made mozzarella together.


There were a few scary moments when we thought we had ruined the whole thing, but all in all, I'd consider our first try a success. Here's our final product:

Fresh balls of Mozzarella!! Next time, we'll use our cheese cloths so we can end up with a little more cheese. Oops. I'm excited to try the recipe with nonfat dry milk powder from my food storage. That night we got together to make pizza with our mozzarella. It was yummy.
Tonight for dinner, Mike and I were craving calzones. Having never made them before, we kind of winged it. Mike was so impressed with how HUGE they turned out that he wanted to take a picture and have me post them here.



The kitchen aside, we are doing great. Mike got accepted to Texas A&M's Ph.D. program and we are still waiting to hear from IU.

The more we hear about College Station and the Aggies the more excited we get. But, it makes us sad to think about leaving Bloomington so IU is definitely still in the running. We'll let you know about our final decision.