The kittys' 1st Christmas

We adopted kitties this year since the passing of both of our cats (Eona and Harley) in the last 2 years. The first kitty we adopted was scheduled to be put down at the animal hospital. Someone actually PAID to get rid of her! But the hospital knew we were looking for a female kitty so they called us. She was approximately 8 weeks old when we took her home. Kevin ended up calling her Cammy (named after an over-head Cam)...LOL.

Cammy:

We adopted my kitty a couple weeks later from a very nice lady, Terri Morris, in Ashland, NE. She breeds, raises and shows Maine Coones. You can check out her website here if you're interested. When I picked up my new kitty he was 12 weeks old. We thought it was cool because now we'd have a boy and a girl cat and they'd be about the same age. We were a little worried about their mixed backgrounds but after a day or two, they were best buds :)

When I adopted him, his name was Del Monte Banana (Monte for short). I was going to change the name originally but I ended up just liking it too much. The whole banana bit seemed a little "girly" for a boy so I changed it to Monte Burns...yes, from the Simpsons!

Here's Monte:

I hope everyone has a great holiday and new year's weekend!

~Jess

Christmas Cards

For anyone that didn't get our Christmas cards this year, check them out:

Our Homemade Christmas Food Gifts

I would have posted this earlier but just in case anyone seen it before we actually gave them the gifts, we thought we'd wait until after Christmas...

We made homemade gifts for a lot of our family members this year because we had so many to give to. We started by making some homemade caramel popcorn for our 7 nieces out of this Jell-O Brand Recipe for Jell-O® Rainbow Popcorn. You can use any flavor but we chose lime and wild strawberry since they resemble Christmas.

Next, we made some homemade pepper oil for the family members who like to cook. We like to grow peppers during the summer so we have a lot of them already on hand.

We started with a bottle of peanut oil and 10 dried chili pods in a large saucepan (olive oil or canola would work too). We heated the oil to approximately 150º and then let it sit for about half an hour. Now the chili pods can be strained out of the oil (be careful as it may still be hot). In your glass bottles of choice equally distribute 3 tsp. of black or white peppercorns, 3 tsp. cumin seeds, 3 tsp. red pepper flakes and 1 1/2 tsp. salt (we had some old Patron bottles and another that had corks). Now you can use funnels to pour in the liquid and they're pretty much done. We threw in a couple more dried chili pods for decorative purposes. See below:

We also made a couple other cool gifts. We made a cool trail mix based on this Asian Party Mix Recipe by myrecipes.com. Instead of using rice crackers and wasabi peas, we used a combination of cashews, pecans, macadamia nuts, soy nuts and sunflower seeds. We also found a great Hot Cocoa Mix on Food.com. The plus is that it's sugar free and fat free so it's a great gift for anyone diabetic or dieting. We also made some pepper jelly (secret recipe), a hot and sweet spice rub and a hot pepper spice blend. The Hot and Sweet Spice Rub was found on Whole Foods website. The hot pepper spice blend was just our own mixture of dried peppers ground up with a mortar and pestle. The packaging was just some labels I designed and printed out on my computer (glued on with a glue stick). I also had some cool yarn, stickers and ribbon so that pretty much did it.

I hope this inspires some of you to create some homemade gifts for Christmas next year. Everyone likes them and it's more meaningful. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Wedding Shadow Box

My mom was nice enough to freeze dry my wedding bouquet and get me one final wedding gift. She took the bouquet to http://www.memoriesbi-design.com/ and had it preserved. Then they had me pick out which display box I wanted and give them a couple other additional items to include inside. Here's the finished product (click on each image to enlarge):

It turned out great and I LOVE it! Thanks mom!

The Christmas Tree

We put up the Christmas tree the other night and the cats are going insane! It's so nice having a tree up though and feeling the Christmas cheer! I LOVE December!

Tofu Tacos

We made tofu tacos the other night with a couple adjustments to this recipe. They were amazing! They even made really good leftovers (which I was surprised at)!