Paper, Pizza and Blood

We forgot to show you guys what a mess our storage room was when we moved in.  We took all the paper out of the boxes to break them down, and this what it looked like when we finally got everything out.

After our awesomely failed attempt at pizza a few weeks ago, Dave and I finally decided to give it another go.  Dave left me to the pizza dough, and this time it rose so quickly we couldn't get it in the fridge fast enough!!  The pizza ended up being absolutely magnificent and it is one of our now-favorite meals.  (Chicken barbecue, ya?)  We also had oranges with our pizza, but Dave got a little terrified of a few mold fuzzies growing in the orange navels so he chopped off all the sides.  What resulted was what looked like an orange Rubik's cube.

Today at work, I had the really cool opportunity to test my own blood type.  I've never known what blood type I was, despite the fact that you're supposedly tested at birth and I've donated blood and plasma multiple times.  I was in the lab doing blood draws and I spent some time in the blood bank, so one of the lab personnel offered to draw my blood so I could test it myself.  Tourniquet, stick, done, and we dropped the tube in the centrifuge and got down to testing the sample.  Seeing your own blood agglutinate in the test solutions is actually very interesting, and I got to do it all myself!  Turns out I'm A-positive.  Thanks mom for the genes, truly--I'd rather have a common blood type than be called every month to donate! :)  I'll bug my NTP coordinator for the pictures later--she happened to stop by at that time with a camera and snapped some pictures of me doing so.

Recent Meals at the Doeschers'

Sarah, this one is for you:  We recently had your chicken tortillas, and they were awesome.

It was also the first time our china graced our table.

The next day we decided on playing around with our California Pizza Kitchen book (courtesy of Jamie and Chris Recio), and landed on a BLT pizza recipe.  Several fails on this one--the yeast wasn't mixed in with the water, the dough wasn't mixed long enough, and then poor Dave tried to make the pizzas on a cookie sheet before putting them on the pizza stone (which had been preheating in the oven).  Well....they stuck to the cookie sheet, and by the time we got the pizzas into the oven and on the stone they had become very messy calzones, and they took forever to cook because we didn't discover the oven had turned off until ten minutes later.  So, what it was SUPPOSED to look like:

What it REALLY looked like on our table:

I think we need to work on our cooking skills.

Painting & Our First (Experimental) Meal

Before the movers came on 29 June, were painting the entire house. We had a great time fixing up the place--lots of sweat (and blood and tears? ;) Just kidding!). Here's Dave washing up the walls before we painted the master bedroom.

Dave and I decided to stay our first night in the house on Monday. Unfortunately, we didn't think it through, and by the time we checked out of the hotel we realized we had no bedding to sleep on. Thus, our makeshift mattress with dirty clothes and a mattress pad was born.

Our first official meal with our actual kitchen equipment was spaghetti, but we didn't get pictures of that. However, we DID get pictures of our first "fancy" meal attempted. We wanted to make roasted chicken with honey mustard glaze and garlic & olive oil vermicelli, but we made a couple crucial mistakes.

Mistake #1: We forgot to buy honey.

Mistake #2: We left the chicken in the freezer....and proceeded to put it in the frying pan frozen.

Mistake #3: We put too much water in the pot for the sauce to thicken for the vermicelli pasta.

Solution #1: Forget the glaze. Make a breaded crust for the chicken and fry in olive oil & orange juice squeezed fresh from our kitchen.

Solution #2: Bake the chicken.

Solution #3: Add a little flour to thicken the sauce and make a soup when that doesn't work, either!

It turned out to be a great meal anyway--fried orange chicken and American "ramen". ;)