Potsicker and Wonton Date Night

Eating out has been a go-to date night for Karl and me for some time now. It is nice not having to worry about getting food at the store and cleaning dishes, but we were wanting to do something new. We were at the store the other day, just poking around and found some wonton wrappers. I suggested that we do a potsticker date night and put Karl in charge of getting a recipe. We invited Brandon and Leah because, did you know, Leah LOVES potsitckers?

She recently told me that she was thinking of getting a Costco membership just so that she could have access to the frozen ones there. (Mom you did the right thing making all those potstickers for their wedding.)

Karl found a recipe on FoodNetwork.com from Alton Brown, our trusted food aficionado. Pork, bell peppers, and a special way of cooking them.

Branny was having a great time.

We all sat at the table folding up potstickers and in less than 30 minutes we were done.

ahhhhah.

Half way through the project we realized that we had tons of extra wrappers so we decided to try out some cheese wontons. I found another Food Network filling recipe, and whipped it right up. here comes my double chin!

We folded them like at the Chinese restaurants we go to.

Cute, huh?

By the time we were done folding these Karl was all but done pan frying the potstickers. As they were done he would hand us each a few and we ate them in one bite! We made this really good dipping sauce with rice vinegar, sesame oil and soy sauce, it was delicious!

Leah wasn't the only one who was in heaven.

We decided to deep fry the wontons, and in 10 minutes flat we were done.
I put Branny in charge of the fryer, and he did a great job.

I think I especially liked these, if only we had some sweet and sour sauce...they turned out great even so. Branny wanted to make some extra special ones with cheddar cheese in them. He also stuffed a couple with Swiss spread...they were inedible. Really the only failure of the night. Love you Bans.

Brithday Girls

Karl and I love to celebrate! Nothing is better than a birthday though. Birthday season has started and the past couple of weeks have been all about birthdays. Last Saturday we went out to Bountiful to celebrate my dear friend Devonie's birthday. We had a great time. We went to this crazy steak house our in there and had a really fun time. Then Grandma Denny's Birthday on Thursday. Then Leah's birthday on Friday.

I couldn't make it out to Sandy on Thursday, and Brandon and Leah were going to be out of town on Friday, so the celebrations were rearranged.
Leah's mom gave her a gift certificate for Olive Garden for her Birthday so we all headed over to have some delicious Italian.

Here are Brandon, Leah and Karl, getting pumped for the meal!
Krysta, Zac, and Karen came too. We all had a great time. I just love Leah she is the best!

Then we headed over to our place to have cake. Branny ran to go and get it while I painted Leah's nails. Check em' out as she takes a bite for Branny's delicious Rainbow chip cake.

That's right, Brandon made the cake. It was delicious, even though it was a little sunken in the middle and he forgot to grease the pan. I love you Branny!

Then on Friday after work I drove out to my Grandma's house. I brought over Johnny Carino's and Chocolate cupcakes. It was really fun!

Just look at my cute Grandma! We had a really great time. It is rare that she and I can just sit and chat, so it was a special treat for me. We talked about how everybody in the family was doing, just enjoyed hanging out together. She reminisced about her parents and life growing up in Nevada. The time went too fast!

February starts tomorrow and we have tons of Birthdays coming up. Papa Hite, Cameron, Jared, Patrick, Jamie, Mama Hite, and Caitlin...Yikes! We had better start early on the birthday cards! Happy Birthday to you all!

Sledding at Rock Canyon Park

There is this really awesome park in Provo. It's called Rock Canyon Park. It sits at the base of the opening of rock canyon, and I think that it is built as some kind of drainage flood protector for the canyon. There are movies in the park there during the summer and it is the best sledding in the city during the winter. Here's Krysta in standing on top of the rim of the "bowl." It is like a huge bowl with steep sides and a 12 foot rim for people to gather on. It is really cool.

The park was crowded, but it is so big it wasn't a problem. There was supposed to be a ward activity there but we couldn't find people from the ward. So we just found some nice powdery snow. The boys were just really excited to take the ski bike out again.

If you could hear Karl he would be saying, "weeeee!" :)

Zac, here, taking a moment before take off...

A quick look at what it looked like...for Karl and Zac.

Karl made it! The worst part of sledding was climbing up the hill.

Karl wanted to get a faster ride so he went down the other side.

He got soaked! There was a puddle at the bottom...

One of the funnest parts of the day was watching Krysta and Karen. They were so cute! Krysta is such a great mom. I love to watch her with Karen, she is most happy when she is having fun with Karen. You can see it in her face.

I love you guys!

At one point Zac went to see if he could find the group. Karl found a jump, and well, you will see.

Karl's face plant was really funny. You can barely see it in the video. Karl had snow all over he face, you can see the water in his hair.

Yeah, we were having a good time.

Oh, and Krysta finally got a chance to take the bike down.

Woo Hoo!

She was OK, she loved it. It was quite the rush!

Don't worry. I had some fun too!

Zac found the ward and we had chili and hot chocolate for lunch, well Karl had some chips and cheese.

They were set up on the very far end of the park, on the steepest part of the hill. This sign was posted:

Karl was really excited for the...um, drop.

This is Karl at the bottom, me at the top. Yikes.

Just something to leave you with.

Karl holding a baby. She is so cute, she looks like a dolly. ahhh.

Skiing, My First Time!

A couple of things to begin with. You might have noticed the first one...I am really out of shape. The next is that, I have never been skiing before, so when Karl signed up for a skiing class, I was really jealous. Today I had to take some time off to avoid overtime so Karl suggested that I ride up on the ski bus with him. So I did. The ride up was really fun. We played mancala on the Ipod touch and I got to know Karl's friend from school, Gabe. Third, I really suck at skiing.

(This is our before picture)

This is Gabe. He and Karl have had a lot of actuarial classes together over the past couple of years. I call their friendship a bro-mance. He is a really fun guy. In fact we work in the temple together on Tuesday nights. Smart, fun, and single...any one? Just kidding Gabe.

About a half hour later we made it to Sundance Ski Resort. We were all suited up and ready to go. Check Karl out!

We played "ski-sies" while we waited to go up the lift. (Like footsies...)

I don't know if you can see it on my face, but I was REALLY nervous.

I had luckily gotten on a ski lift this summer with my mom and Karl so I didn't totally freak out getting on. Karl was really excited.

His and Hers.

It had been snowing all morning but by the time we got there just before noon, the skis began to clear up and it was beautiful.

AHHH.

It was Gabe's first day skiing too. He was really excited and it turned out much better than me. We got off at our stop, and about 30 falls on my face, bum, hip and back later, I realized that my camera was gone...I was devastated, exhausted and totally frustrated. I really sucked at skiing! The skiing instructor was really worried about me, and all the attention she showed to me slowed down the whole class! Everyone was waiting for me. I suck, I was so embarrassed. There was one point where Karl went off to find the camera, and I fell, and was unable to get up because I got a terrible cramp in my hip! I could have died. I sat at the bottom of of the slope, and cried while Karl and Gabe went on with out me.

Meanwhile, this nice girl below, or I guess someone she was with found our camera, and took a picture with it.

Flash forward and hour. Karl persuaded me to go and try again. We hiked up to the beginners run and I started to feel more confident. We went to get on to the lift one last time...the people on the lift had found our camera, I had some confidence, and I was ready to go...

The second run down was 3x as fast. I still wasn't great, but Karl was a great teacher. He coached me down the slope and although I fell and couldn't get up for 10 minutes, it was really fun. ( I fell on a steep slope, so it was really hard to get up, okay! I fell once, and one of my skis fell off. It took me forever to get it back on. I finally got up, and 2 seconds later I fell again, and the other ski fell off. It was really frustrating.)

We made it to the bottom of the slope just in time to get to the ski bus. We didn't even take off our snow boots.

(this is our after picture.)

Yikes. We were really tired and sweaty. Yuck.

I think that I will try it again. Skiing that is. My dad days that the first day is the worst, the second day is much better. At least I lived to ski another day.

We got off the bus, turned in our rentals at the Wilkinson Center and ran into...

My mini me! Allison Smith Lindsay! Isn't she so cute! Just the way I wanted to meet up with an old friend...stinky, sweaty and just gross. It's okay.

Dinner with Grandma and Grandpa

First of all, I have to say, I love my grandparents. They are so wonderful. I think that as a gift for mothers day, or maybe their anniversary I gave them an "I owe you " for a dinner on us. It's been a long time, and we finally made good on our gift. We thought that it would be really fun to make some Albanian food.
Here's Karl making some Greek flat bread for suflace's.

Here's dinner set. Suflace's and Pastice...yum!

Karl was really excited about it. He loves Suflaces.

Grandma really liked them too! I don't have to say what Grandpa thought, his face says it all...
Grandma and Grandpa provided the desert...

Balaclava...ahhh

After dinner we sat around and talked about life. Grandpa told us about his adventures in southern Utah, and I talked about Albania.

Karl and I goofed around while grandpa looked for pictures of the Mars station.

Karl was shocked when he saw how much went on out there.

We had a great time. One of the blessings of moving to Utah: building a stronger relationship with my wonderful grandparents. I love you guys!

The Ski Bike

Once upon a time, Karl and Zac had an idea:

A ski bike. Which basically constituted a bike with ski's on it.

Here is the bike.

Here is a ski.

5 hours later:

SKI BIKE!!!

We went to find a place to test it out. We found some snow across the street from this building.

The boys were so excited, I was really nervous. I brought the insurance cards just in case.

Here's Karl on the maiden voyage...

Right off the bat there were problems... the spokes you put your feet on came right off.

While they worked on it Krysta, Karen, and I sledded down the hill. We ended up in front to the Marriott center.

It was cold but Karl was so happy.

Whitmore family photo! It took four tries, and it was worth it!

It was really hard to take good action shots because it was so dark!

Zac.

Karl.

Me. It was really fun and much safer than I thought. No need for the insurance card.

Yeah! Karl and Karen about to go down the hill.

Karl and Allie.

People must have thought that we were nuts with this thing stuck on to the back of our car...

Post Christmas Gift Card Extravaganza!

It was our last Saturday before school started. First Saturday after vacation so we needed it badly. What ever would we do to get ready for the time of stress? Use all the gift cards we got from Christmas. We slept in until 11am, and probably could have slept longer, but got up and got started.

We started with breakfast.

Karl's mom re-gifted me a Starbucks gift card.

Oh, yeah I forgot to take pictures until the end of the day, but I thought just writing about it would be boring, so I inserted pictures... from the Internet, enjoy. The cool thing about breakfast, was that we ended up seeing our friend Randall there. Karl got a Dulce cinnamon hot chocolate with a plain bagel. He had a blueberry crumb muffin for dessert. As for me, I had a caramel steamer and a cheese bagel. I had a maple pecan scone for dessert. Plus we had 5 dollars left on the gift card after that. Thanks mom!

After breakfast we went over to Lowes to use the Visa gift car grandma Regina gave us.

Not unlike this one, except Grandma Regina was more generous, as always.
We ended up buy a corded dremel, for all of our craft cutting needs. Very exciting. Grandma Regina, thanks!

My mom and dad gave Karl a Sees Candy gift card for 1 pound of chocolate in his stocking.

A lady not unlike the one above us met us at the door and we took our time picking out an assortment of delicious chocolates.

I mean Mom, look at Karl's eager face. He is in heaven. So was I. We of course got tons of Bordeaux, our favorite. Thanks mom and dad.

By this time it was neatly 5, so we were ready for some dinner. We headed over to Carino's one of our absolute favorite places, for dinner of Grandma Denny.

When Karl and I were first dating he worked at Johnny Carino's. I still think of him in his all black uniform and apron. I remember meeting him there for lunch all the time. He switch his schedule around there so we could be together at night more. The day before we got married we got a free dinner there from White the manager at the time. It is a part of our past, and we just love going there.

Anyway... we did it right. We got drinks, calamari (a dish that I had never tried until I met Karl and he introduced it to me at Carino's, now one of my favorite things) and for dinner,

Well what else? The Penne Gorgonzola, only the best thing on the menu. I also like the Baked Tortellini. Still, no matter what I order, and no matter how good it is, I always wished I had bought the Penne Gorg.

Ahhh...

Here we are:

We went home, our belly's full and had See's Candy for dessert and finished a project for Karl's calling with the dremel. I randomly checked the mail, and found the last gift of Christmas in the mail:
It was from my only niece Gaby. Isn't it totally awesome?!
It's call Sephora Favorites. It is this really cool box set of 7 deluxe mini bottles of perfume.
It includes: Doir; Addicted Shine, Juicy Couture; Juicy, DKNY; Be Delicious, Givenchy; Very Irresistible Givenchy, Ralph Lauren; Romance, Stell Mc Cartney; Stell, and Marc Jacobs; Daisy. But it doesn't end there. When you decided which one you like the best, there is a certificate inside for a free full sided bottle of the perfume of your choice! This was such an awesome gift. Thanks Gabi!

Thanks to all again for the fab Christmas, and the great day we were able to spend together. We love all of you!