Dinner Guests

Last Thursday night we had our first visitors at the new house! Trent and Jordie came over for dinner and they even brought their dog Buddi. We had a great night enjoying wine, a fabulous dinner thanks to Keith and Jordie and then some fun time on the couch chatting and playing games. Here are some photos from the night:

We hung out on the porch while Keith grilled.

Buddi enjoying guy time haha

Sweet Jordana

Buddi!

We were all playing the "Draw Something" game on our phones with each other

Jordie convincing Buddi to do tricks for us haha

Dinner Talk

Please excuse this drab photo, but there were a few recipes that I wanted to share with you about tonights taco night. We are pretty routine when it comes to tacos at home, but once I saw this recipe for crockpot beer chicken on pinterest I knew we needed to try it. Super easy, super quick, CRAZY tasty! We both agreed this may be a new staple. I also tried my hand at some homemade refried beans and was pretty happy to find that it was much more simple than I may have thought. Now I have enough beans for like the next month though haha

Anyone been cooking anything good lately? I'm always eager to try new things!

Grilling in the Dark

Keith's dream come true! A real grill that is all his own! Dan got Keith this wonderful gift last weekend and we finally got a chance to fire it up in the back yard last night. It took Keith a little bit longer to put together than planned so by the time we got to actually cooking the food it was unfortunately very dark out :( Never fear, we got some flashlights out and still managed to have a truly amazing tasting dinner (and we both smelled like camp fire for the rest of the night... Keith's favorite).

Keith's new toy

Our backyard as the sun went down

Fabulous veggie skewers! Potatoes, squash, tomatoes and red peppers! 

Firing up

Yum yum yum

Our faithful grill master (who promised that he will only grill 3 meals a week ;) haha)

A happy splurge

Keith and I have been on a sort of diet this past month. Nothing intense, we've just been watching what we eat more carefully, making sure we don't go overboard on calories everyday and exercising a lot more. So far so good, he's lost about 8 pounds and I've lost about 5. We both feel really great, which is really all that matters. We've been pretty strict about watching our food and watching how much money we spend and I think it was making us both a little crazy so Keith decided since he was off yesterday that we should go on a dinner date. When he mentioned going out for food all I could think about was how much I wanted a monster turkey burger and greasy fries with a coke to top it off so we made the easy decision to head back to Sketch and make sure we weren't exaggerating its awesomeness haha Turns out everything was just as great as it was the first time we visited, and I can't WAIT to head back when my favorite aunt visits next month :)

Since we knew that we were going to be in the part of town that our friend Molly lives, we gave her a call to see if she wanted to join. I hadn't seen her since classes ended and it was great to catch up; I did feel a little bad though because I didn't warn her that Keith and I hadn't eaten junk food in a month and we were definitely tearing our food up like mad dogs haha

Here's Molly. She tried to be healthier than us by choosing fruit soda instead of Coke.. but turns out she mistakenly grabbed grapefruit flavor... grosssssssssss


They make all their own sauces at Sketch, and our favorite by far (and only one we've really tried) is the aioli. Between the fries, burgers, and fries we stole from Molly, we polished off like 6 of these sauce cups. We're sauce people :)

Also! The picture I drew when we were there on Keith's birthday was hanging up! (he couldn't find the one he drew.. mine's better, no big deal haha)

We dropped off Molly at her apartment and I insisted that Keith meet her very... voluptuous cat Hedy. She's just a LITTLE bigger than Theo ;)

In the spirit of splurging I just had to have a chipwich for dessert. Simple pleasures. Yummmm!

Birthday Boy!

Happy Birthday to the coolest guy I know :) I honor of Keith's birth we had Dan and Aly over last night for dinner and some drinks

I slaved away in the kitchen all afternoon to make a glorious feast for everyone.

On the menu was:
- Kathleen's yummy salad with strawberries, almonds and craisens (we forgot the feta... oops)
- Homemade lasagna... with ground turkey and broccoli
- Cupcakes! Yellow cake with chocolate icing. Mmm I found the only Betty Crocker box that called for an entire stick of butter... of course that paid off.

Keith felt that he was too old for candles and singing, but he was a pretty good sport when I insisted.


Thanks Dan and Aly for coming over!

After we sufficiently stuffed ourselves, we all walked down to a bar on main street to have a few more beers. The boys got a chance to catch up on some baseball and Aly and I bitched about school haha Our guests had work early in the morning so we packed it in relatively early.

This morning I woke up and made Keith some bacon and eggs and now we're just relaxing in our fancy new bed watching The Price is Right. I unfortunately have to go to class but afterwards we're going to go out to dinner for a little bit of further celebration. Love you Keith, have a happy day!

Dinner

Tonight I put my excellete fiace cooking skills to the test and made lasagna for dinner. I don't cook very often mostly because Keith enjoys cooking for us, so I took the opportunity and ran. It turned out great and even Keith admitted it was better than he thought it would be haha Now we just have lots of leftovers. Come over and have some!

A day at the museum

Today was SUCH a beautiful day! The Northeast finally decided to shower me with sun, and it was much appreciated. After a morning of sleeping in and catching up on some tv shows (Jim & Pam have a baby! Soooooo crazy, love the Office) I went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and met up with my friend Molly. It was nice to just get out and enjoy the city again because it seems like forever since I've spent a decent amount of time away from school or home.

Here are a few photos from the day:

The museum has one of my favorite views of the skyline :)

There was a guy standing out in front of the Rocky statue today that was offering to take peoples photos for them and even had boxing gloves for them to wear? For awhile we thought that he was with this one group of people but it turns out that he was working for tips but we couldn't pass up the chance to get some legit photos haha

Obligatory tourist photo with the LOVE statue for Molly:

City Hall! That's where Keith proposed!

Also in Love park, there were soooo many skater boys! They were all lined up on the ledge to do crazy trick jumps over that bench? Most of them just fell or risked the lives of people that were standing around trying to take pictures haha

After spending some time wandering around center city Molly and I finally found somewhere to have dinner. We settled on Marathon grill because we both knew that we wanted some sort of adult beverage with dinner and it turned out to be really really yummy. I was apparently camera happy today and even took a picture of our food, but I throughly enjoyed my turkey burger (yes those fries were as awesome as they look).

All and all it was a great day to be outside, thank you Philadelphia for the beautiful weather... keep it up please!