Things we learned in September

Sister dates can still happen even when they are 2 hours apart: Holly took a vacation day to hang out in the Tri-State area with Kelly towards the end of the month. We spent the weekend watching Jeopardy, treating ourselves to coffee and donuts in the park, shopping until we (nearly) dropped, Cold Stone and pizza...oh, and a small little concert with Jonny Diaz and Chris August! :)

Shew- not too shabby for Kelly having a 15+ hour day and Holly working 8 hours + 2.5 hours of driving!

Even though we're April babies...HELLOOOOOOOOOOOO fall!!!!! 

Holly learned, in relation to giving blood that if you eat a Papa Burger approximately 40 minutes before hand and drink 96 (yes, 96) ounces of water from morning until your donation time, you will be good to go! 

Cooking for one is an adventure in and of itself: Yes to leftovers! How did we ever manage without them?

It's a shorty! What did you learn? (Better late than never, eh?) 

The meatless results (and a house update?)

H and K: It has been seven days since our last post, and if you remember, we took it upon ourselves to go one week without meat.  So...how did we do?

Honestly, we didn't find it too challenging.  Some days, it was hard walking up Main Street and catching a whiff of the cafe's burgers, or resisting devouring an entire order of chicken wings from Papaleno's.  We did have one "cheat" day, Saturday, in which we attended a cook-out sponsored by Kelly's work.  We didn't go too crazy, though, in the sense that we both had just one chicken wing. Fried rice became a good friend of ours. Our weight didn't really change either, which we kind of expected, but that's ok, considering that wasn't the end goal.  We were just curious...and a little bit broke.  So will we do it again? Probably.  We had to get pretty creative with some of our recipes, but overall we enjoyed incorporating more veggies into our diet. The drastically reduced cost of groceries for the week was a good incentive, too!

And this concludes our one week without meat.  We learned a lot, had a good time...but honestly, if anyone would care to drop off a couple of steaks or a rotisserie chicken, that would be pretty amazing.

Switching gears a little, and we're just going full disclosure here, because we can do that here.  In case some of you are a little behind, we are in the process of moving, this time into a house.  We do have a house lined up, although we've only seen it from the outside.  However, here's where the situation gets a little hairy: The family that is living in the house now is waiting on a closing date for a house they're buying.  Once they get their closing date, they will move out, and we will move in. We are not buying, we're renting (Just in case that wasn't clear).  We do not know when this closing date will be.  It's been two weeks since we first made contact with our eventual landlord.  When I called him last week, hoping to affirm my fear of him not giving the house away to someone else, he informed me that they still had not reached a closing date, but that he still had our contact information and would reach out to us when they closed.  That was a week ago.  We still have not heard anything.

Honestly...it's been hard.  Our many frustrations with our current living situation, for reasons we don't wish to discuss at this time, have nearly reached a tipping point.  Let's just say it's gone on too long. Period.  In addition, it's just the waiting...the waiting and waiting for a phone call.  My (Holly) hopes soar every time my phone rings, and plummet when it's someone else besides the phone call we're anxiously waiting for.  It's the doubt...the doubt of wondering, nearly agonizing ourselves, if this is ever going to happen at all.  It's discouraging- another day that passes with silence, with no news. But through all of this, we've learned a lot about grace, and we are thankful for that. I (Holly) read Proverbs 3:5-6 recently, and I've been heavily meditating on that, relying on that promise in God's word.  We've been praying.  We've been praying a lot.  And still waiting.

So that's where we are right now.  If you feel led to pray for us, please do so.  And pray for the family that is waiting on a closing date; it's probably just as frustrating for them, if not more so, than it is for us. But we KNOW that something better is coming, and we KNOW that God is faithful.  It's just that some days are easier than others, and we thank God that He can handle our joys and our frustrations as well.  Thanks for following along with us, as always.  We hope to hear something soon.

The H and K Food Experiment: 1 week of Meatless

Holly and Kelly: On the way home from grocery shopping, in which we grossed in approximately $56 for about a week's worth of food, we decided to partake in a wee experimentation of food challenges. The first one? One week with no meat. However, it's not entirely without meat; we currently have two meals planned, one with fish and the other with eggs in it. Other than that, no meat. Nothing. No chicken, no red meat, no bacon, nada. No. Meat. You might ask, why are ya'll doing this? Well, we've read numerous web studies and through word of mouth have heard that not eating meat supposedly makes you feel better, have more energy, and not to mention meat is expensive these days.

We're just not eating meat. We're not changing any other of our activities of daily living, which means Holly is still going to walk to work and we're still going to do ReFit on Monday nights. And we're going to a work potluck for Kelly's work and have decided to not eat meat there, which we are certain will be quite challenging. So there you have it. One week without meat. At the end of the week, we will report back and see how it went. How we felt, how tempted we were to sneak in a cheeseburger, that sort of thing. We're going to see if our weight changes as well. Wish us luck; the challenge begins tomorrow!

Excerpts from H and K's cookbook

Holly: Ok, let's just be honest here...they're mostly from Pinterest :)

In the spirit of holiday gorging ourselves, we thought it would be fun if we shared a few of our recipes that win us over every time! We hope you try some, and if you do, we hope you love them all as much as we do!

1. Coca-Cola Chocolate Cake

Kelly doesn't even LIKE chocolate cake, but she'll devour this one!  The secret: Coke! :) Added with cinnamon, milk, and cocoa powder, it makes for a surprisingly light cake.  I've never frosted it- it's perfect as is.  I may try it with Dr. Pepper or Coke Zero in the future.

Recipe here: http://mayflaum.com/2011/06/08/the-chocolate-cola-cake/

2. Pumpkin Muffins

You guys, these are the EASIEST muffins you will ever make.  2 ingredients, less than 30 minutes.  These muffins are SO moist!  I've made them with yellow cake, as the recipe calls for, but they're excellent with spice cake as well.  Bonus: They are WW friendly :)

Recipe here: http://sweet-verbena.blogspot.com/2011/08/pumpkin-muffins.html

3. Crockpot Cheesy Chicken and Rice

One of our go-to recipes.  Easy to put together and it makes a TON.  Great heated up the next day (and beyond!).

Recipe here: http://www.southernplate.com/2010/09/slow-cooker-cheesy-chicken-and-rice-the-downside-of-being-a-swan-princess.html

Kelly: 

1. The first recipe I am going to share I actually don't have a link for, but it's one of my favorites and it's so super easy! It's called my healthy chicken nuggets (I don't even remember where I found the recipe) But it's simple; grab 3-4 chicken breasts, thawed, and cut them up into bite-sized pieces. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. While the oven's preheating, mix together Parmesan cheese, olive oil, a tad bit of water, salt and pepper and bread crumbs in a bowl. Take the cut-up chicken pieces and swirl them around in the mixture listed above and place the chicken pieces on a greased cookie sheet. Bake for 10-12 minutes and voila! Nothing to it.

2. I make a MEAN wedding soup! Delicious and again, quite easy. Instead of ground beef though I use ground turkey. It makes a good bit too.

Recipe here: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/italian-wedding-soup-i/

3. The last one also doesn't have a link, but we got it from Pinterest. Though it isn't the healthiest of recipes, it sure is tasty! We call it our chicken and veggie of awesome, or CVA for short, NOT to be confused with the proper medical term for a stroke. Haha!!! Here it is: 3-4 chicken breasts, chopped up potatoes, any green vegetable (we've done green beans, brussel sprouts and broccoli), all together in a 9x13 baking dish, one stick of butter melted all over that, and packet of italian seasoning.  Cover and bake for one hour at 350 degrees. Delicious!!!!

So there you have it. Any recipes you have that you would like to share with us? Let us know!

30 Days of Writing: What you ate today

Kelly: Decided to break in my routine and go to BC&T for breakfast. Had a cinnamon roll along with my World Market coffee. It's caramel cream and it's yummy.

Got my water bottle to the side. Probably will drink 1.5-2 of those today.

Leftover BBQ chicken and mac and cheese for lunch. Yummy! Work supervisor also bought drinks for us all since it's 3000 degrees Fahrenheit up here. A sweet tea for me, please :D

Dinner: Not that hungry. Steak strips, stir fry veggies and brown rice. Ate one of sis's sour patch grapes. Ick.  Hello birthday chocolate!!

Holly: Had 2 cinnamon toast waffles and a cup of caramel cream coffee for breakfast.  Went on break at work at about 11:30 and ate leftovers from last night's dinner: BBQ chicken and mac and cheese.  Yum! Along with frozen grapes.  And water.  Chugging that water.  Went to my interview; was a bit early, got a Vanilla Chai blender from Hastings.  SUPER yum! :)  Din: stiry fry (steak strips, veggies, and brown rice).  And some sour patch grapes.  And vanilla ice cream!

You must have vanilla ice cream.

Need: observations from a SNAP office

Kelly: There's a lot of it. I was an observer of this very sad but true fact. Today Holly and I ventured to Richmond to ask for help. Government help. In one week we will be the owners of SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits. AKA Food stamps. This was a decision we did not make lightly that took months of planning and careful deciding. I am not ashamed of it though...asking for help.

Holly made a comment on her facebook earlier this morning about waiting at the food stamps office. I'll go into that later. Anyway, we walked into the office and the waiting area was full. It was 8:20 in the morning and the office opened at 8:00. And the waiting area was already full. Was I surprised? No, not really. The Berea/Richmond area is notoriously low-income in some areas. What I was surprised about was that the waiting area was full after the office had been open for 20 minutes. Anyway, the process itself was rather painless, but this brings me to another point. I mentioned that Holly made a comment on her facebook. There were some comments on there that really upset me to be quite honest. The comments were attacking the church I had been attending for almost four years while as a student. Holly deleted the comment and the post, but I was just upset by this. How could a former member put blame on my church family that these needs of ours were not taken care of? First off, the blame should go to us; Holly nor myself never mentioned any of our needs. And even if we did, I would not have a doubt in my mind that they would be taken care of and then some.

I guess I was just a bit shocked at this person's opinion of my church's lack of support. For me, my church has never been anything BUT supportive. Enough about that...my point is simple; there are needs. The people in the waiting area, as my roommate said, did not look like they were cheating the system. They looked desperate. A family was willing to wait for an hour and a half. Hard times, my friends. Extend a helping hand; don't slap it away.

Holly: My interview with the case worker took a total of 10 minutes and she got a phone call from the front desk saying that her 10:30 appointment had showed up.  It was 9 o clock.  She had nowhere else to go, so she said she was going to wait.  Tomorrow I have to take a paper from the office to work; essentially it's proof that I'm employed.  Which led me to wonder, out of how many people I saw in the PACKED office this morning, how many were employed?  I'm willing to bet not a lot.  Because of my job I'm not even sure if I'll receive benefits (which is totally fine, by the way).  Isn't that messed up?   No.  No...I guess it isn't.

As I just mentioned I won't be disappointed if I discover I'm ineligible, because, to me, it means that someone else needed the benefits more than me.  Contrary to what I can imagine to be an overwhelming majority of the people in the PACKED office, I know where my next meal is coming from.  I don't have to worry about supporting children.  I have a reliable source of transportation, a comfortable living situation, and a job that fits me to a T.  My roommate told me earlier this morning as we were leaving that she was a little wary about asking for government assistance, because there's always those out there that try to "cheat" the system.  Which is awful, by the way.  But as we left the office she said the people in there didn't look like they were trying to cheat anything: they looked desperate, like they didn't want to be there either, but they had no other choice.

It's just SAD!!!  Really, really, really sad.  It breaks my heart to see so much need in our community, but I'm grateful for the organizations and churches that do their best to try and minister to those needs.  I'm grateful that the process was painless, because it needs to be.  Yes, the comment about my church did upset me, but I'm not going to get into that because what I wanted to say was already said.  I'm definitely going to bed counting my blessings tonight, and I hope all of you do the same.

Just be aware and be a good steward.  Be grateful and thankful for what you have, even if it's "not a lot".  There's always someone out there who has it worse off than you do.