French Dip Sandwiches

Another delicious recipe that Jordan rated 5 Stars!

Shredded French Dip

1 3-lb. boneless beef roast
1 10.5 oz can condensed French onion soup, undiluted
1 10.5 oz can condensed beef consomme, undiluted
1 10.5 oz can beef broth, undiluted
1 tsp. beef bouillon granules
Mushrooms, sliced (optional)
Onions, sliced (optional)
8 - 10 French or Italian rolls, split
Gruyere cheese, sliced (optional)

Trim fat from meat.  Place the roast in a crockpot.  Combine soups and bouillon granules; pour over roast.  Add mushrooms and onions, if desired.  Cover and cook on low heat for 6 - 8 hours or until meat is tender.  Remove meat and shred with two forks.  Serve on rolls, with gruyere cheese if desired.  Skim fat from juices, strain, and serve as a dipping sauce.

Plastic Chef

It's Jordan. My mom told me yesterday that I needed to blog. I told her Melyn already did a post this week, but then she clarified that she wanted me to blog. So here's me blogging in 5 minutes. Last night Melyn had to work. When she works the Saturday evening shift (which is every other week), she calls a substitute to play the organ the next morning so she can just go to bed when she gets home. However, today she went to sacrament meeting herself so she didn't have to call a substitute. This meant she would be going to bed later, around 11 a.m. Keep in mind that she's been up since 9 a.m. the previous day. I don't know how she did it, but she did.

What this all means is when she finally did go to bed, she wouldn't be getting up until 7 p.m. The responsibility of cooking dinner tonight fell on me. I can cook, but really only things that don't require more than three ingredients. We had a southwestern chicken dish scheduled for tonight, and it definitely went way above my three ingredient rule. It reminded how cooking real meals is really hard. Too much multi-tasking. Among other things, I spilled lime juice in our silverware drawer, got taco powder stains on our white dish towel (Melyn hopes they'll come out), and used way more cooking utensils than I needed too. But the chicken dish turned out ok (if we got sick, I guess we'll find out in a couple of hours). Melyn even rated the meal 5 stars. Well, she really likes the recipe, though I can guarantee my rendition of it needs work. Maybe in the future I'll get more practice on how to cut cilantro, but right now I'm very content with Melyn being in charge of cooking duty. She is so much better at it anyways.

Happy Halloween!!

It may come as a surprise, but I am obsessed with Halloween!  I began thinking about my costume in March, when I cut my hair.  I decided I would be the perfect Tinkerbell!  So sure enough, on Friday I got the cutest Tinkerbell dress at Goodwill, got some nude colored leggings at Target, and enough craft supplies to complete the costume from Michael's.  :)

Don't you see the resemblance?  Haha!

Our ward Trunk-or-Treat and chili cook-off was on Saturday and was so much fun.  I made some yummy southwestern chili and passed out loads of chocolate to all the little kids in the ward. 

 

Now that it's actually Halloween, we get real trick-or-treaters!  As I write this, we have had over 20!  Yay! Last year, we had the grand total of ONE trick-or-treater.  And we didn't even answer the door, bahaha!

Billions of Pictures

Be prepared for the billions and billions (ok, maybe not that many) of pictures!

 My delicious 100 Grand birthday cake!

Matthew and Lindsey's wedding!  Her dress was GORGEOUS.

Hurricane Irene's damage

This is our church on the left hand side

Making homemade scones, Conference Weekend

My Halloween craftiness - this is puff paint that you use on fabric!  Super duper easy.

This wreath was super simple too.  I made the fabric flowers (you can find tutorials anywhere on the internet) and hot-glued them to a vine wreath.  Took about 10 minutes.

Love my hair-stylist!  I was asking her how to do a faux-hawk and she did it for me :)

Huge spider web in our kitchen window...and HUGE HUGE HUGE spider outside our front door!  

Our Apartment Complex

Fun park across the street from us.  It has little fitness stations!

Our apartment

It's kindof hard to tell from these pictures, but this is the crazy rain we got from Hurricane Irene.  Pounding on the windows!

Again, hard to tell from the pictures, but there are some big and deep puddles outside our back door from the amount of rain we got.

Damage in our neighborhood - thankfully, none of it near us.

They didn't cover the pool up during the hurricane, and it's almost overflowing!

This was the worst damage in our neighborhood - this is the huge branch that broke off and snapped loudly in the middle of the night.