Sliders

The husband and I have been fans of sliders since our days in Charlotte. We lived close to The Counter, a burger place that made great sliders (and fried onion strings).

So this past weekend we decided to make some of our own.

Mom got us a grinder attachment for our stand mixer so we put that to good use. (I have an aversion to already packaged ground beef after reading some articles on the not-so-clean-processing of said meat and the higher chance of food born illnesses as a result).

I recommend grinding your own beef if you can - you can use a food processor too. The taste was far better than most hamburgers I've had at home with pre-ground beef. And the process is not time consuming. I think we used chuck and sirloin.

Our slider toppings were varied but tasty:

• Caramelized onions
• Arugula
• Garlic & Herb sharp cheddar
• Bacon
• Tomatoes
• Homemade pickled jalapenos
• Pimento cheese
• Homemade ketchup
• The normal stuff: mayo, mustard

We served the sliders with grilled corn and a grilled red potato and tomato salad. Yum.

She's a mutt

Even our vet was unsure what breeds combined to make our lovable, yet incredibly idiocentric Shadow.

And then our neighbor got a new dog.

A Belgian Malinois.

Images from here, here, and here.

You might notice some similarities between the Belgian Malinois and Shadow. She's definitely still a mutt - those ears surely don't belong to a Belgian Malinois. But its nice to know a little bit about her (maybe).

From the AKC site:


"One of the four types of Belgian sheepherding dogs, the Belgian Malinois is an alert, high-energy breed, popular as both a police and military working dog. Although sometimes mistaken for the German Shepherd Dog, the Malinois is more elegant in build and lighter-boned, but does not lack for strength, agility or herding ability.

Right Breed for You?
Intelligent and trainable, the Belgian Malinois possesses a strong desire to work and is happiest with regular activity and a job to do. A relatively easy keeper due to their medium size and short coat, this confident breed loves their families, but may be somewhat reserved with strangers. They are naturally protective of their owners without being overly aggressive."

All of that is so true for our little Shadow except for the confidence - she seems to have lost that before we adopted her.

Home improvement update

As you may have gathered from the decision making post, we want to make a good number of changes to the house. But, we are hoping to move back to NC in the next few years. With that in mind, we want to focus our home improving efforts on tasks that will help us sell our house quickly when it comes time. So we had our wonderful real estate agent swing by recently to give us some feedback.

There were 4 major projects we asked about.

1. Adding french doors to the living room to make it more of an office

The office

2. Master bath remodel

The master bath

3. Second bath remodel
4. Finishing the wall between the two back rooms to make them separate rooms

The real estate agents' verdicts:
1. She liked the idea of the french doors and recommended someone who does them at a really reasonable price. In fact it is so reasonable that we are considering having this done very soon.

Maybe something like this??

2. The master bath is the most important - PLUS if we do it sooner rather than later we can enjoy it too. I like her thinking! Here are some pictures to give you an idea of why we need to update the bathroom.

Shell sinks and gold faucets

More gold

Extremely crappy job done on the floor

More terrible floor finish

Gold everywhere!

Sorry this might gross you out - no matter what I try to clean it with, the shower glass simply will not clean.  I've tried 6 different methods of cleaning and nothing works.

Weirdo, dysfunctional bathroom lights that shine straight down.

At 5 am the lights resemble a spaceship landing and I resemble an alien after I putting on my makeup in this light!

Other than that, she said the newly remodeled master bath along with the size of our rooms should really make our house sell quickly (when the time comes). Good news all around.

Weather

Weather is a perfect metaphor for emotions. In fact, it was one of the first activities I learned in my counseling master's program.

Describe your mood as if it were today's weather forecast.

Hot, (you know, the kind of hot that is EXHAUSTING), with torrential downpours (you know, the kind that make you want to disappear into your bed).

Image from here

I take pride in my hopefulness. But right now my hope feels like it was just body slammed by a sumo wrestler. I'll get out of this funk soon but I thought I'd keep it real for you.

I hope your day is sunny, with a a light breeze, temps in the low 70's!

Cooking or whatever you might call it these days

We've changed our eating habits around our little house. So although we do a fair share of prep for meals over the weekend, we're usually prepping veggie based salads or sides and thawing out some frozen fish or chicken or whatever.

This summer I took up a few new health-related habits that included focusing a little more on a better everyday diet. NOT diet, as in eat nothing and lose weight, but diet as in our general eating habits.

Reasons for this:

1. I was eating WAY too many carbs and I align with the food people who say lots of white flour-based carbs are not good for you. So I wanted to change that.
2. Our garden was bountiful and I wanted more variety in what we did with that bounty.
3. I want to move toward eating a more natural diet - mostly plants with some meat, with a little bit of other stuff thrown in there so why not start now?

A typical meal for us looks somewhat like this. Some meat and some veggies. The husband will sometimes augment a meal with some extra food (read carbs) but generally we're satisfied with meals like this.

We needed to get rid of a few chicken thighs that were lost in the freezer. I found a skinless Asian-style baked chicken recipe and we mixed up a salad of edamame and red onion as the side.

The salad was much better day 2 and was loosely based on this recipe.

I find that as long as I eat enough protein, this type of meal is satisfying. I'll share more about our meals as we continue to make changes. And don't worry. Although eating less carbs is an ideal, I still like baking way too much to stop that! :)

Decision making

Making decisions and compromising are sometimes the hardest things to do in a marriage. The husband and I face our fair share of situations needing some sort of agreement. We tend to approach these differently depending on the type of situation.

For house items, we've devised an approach that I think works pretty well.

Step 1: We compile a list of to-do's - in this particular instance it is a list of improvements we would like to see by mid-November.

On the list: 
Paint office
Paint foyer
Paint dining room
Paint trim in all of the rooms in the house that need it
Paint ugly yellow-tinged doors
Repair dog-damaged bathroom doors
Repair dog-damaged laundry room door and trim
Finish project 1
Finish project 2
Paint back suite
Finish decorating several rooms
Paint front door
Planting around mailbox

Step 2: We go to our respective corners and prioritize the list based on our own preferences.

Step 3: We total our separate priorities.

Step 4: We prioritize based on the lowest total number.

This is the actual sheet where we worked out priorities for accomplishing these tasks.

Our process definitely works well for us! 

And if you can't read the husbands chicken scratch - our prioritized list is below.

Date night

It's restaurant weeks here in Houston. I did spell weeks correctly - I guess there was some name issue so although restaurant weeks is all of August, it is not named restaurant month. Strange.

We like to support good causes (Houston Food Bank), so we got all gussied up.

And went to dinner at Haven, a restaurant that supports locally as much as possible.  We were impressed by the number of dishes using ingredients from around Texas.

Picture from here

Picture from here

The husband tried the fried chicken livers appetizer - yummy.

Picture from here

Picture from here

And then the dish was featured on one of my favorite food blogs.

We might try to make these at home some day.

Back to reality

I'm back in the big state of Texas. I'm glad to be home with the husband and dogs and glad to be back to a somewhat normal schedule. Working while in NC kept me quite busy and trying to catch up with as many people as possible seemed to fill up most of the extra time. But it was great to see friends and family and to make some headway in my own professional goals.

I don't have much to share today so I thought I would leave you with these words. I love reading inspirational and funny quotes - these are some of my favorites from pinterest. Enjoy!

(All images via pinterest)