The idea is that each week we’ll type up a post to share what recipes we used for that Sunday’s menu. Not only will this allow us to share great recipes with the whole two of you that read our blog, but it will also help US keep track of all of the food we make (with notes about what worked, what didn’t, what we liked and didn’t like, things we omitted or changed or substituted, etc.) so that we can access recipes easily later on, or share things with our family and friends a lot more concisely. Like a lot of aspects of our life, it’s all about sharing. :)

Another great benefit to documenting our culinary experiences with this new tradition is that we’ll be able to keep track of the new dishes we discover and start eliminating the food boredom that has overcome us recently. Our meals have been too predictable and repetitive. This ensures we can always look forward to something new and exciting. The best part? We’ll be doing it together. What a great side effect!

And if nothing else, it’ll give us a reason to update the family blog at least once a week, right? Ha!

As this is week 2 of our tradition, I’m just going to share what we created the last two Sundays really quickly. What I’d like to do for these Sunday posts going forward, though, is to describe the dishes in better detail in their own post and include picture(s). We’ll also make any notes about changes we made and our thoughts on the food in general and how it did (or didn’t) turn out. Maybe there will be a mistake or we don’t like the way something turns out. We’ll document that, too, and hopefully it’ll help us learn so that we won’t make the same mistakes in the future.

OH! And we have signed up for an AllRecipes.com account to keep a virtual recipe box of things we try or things we want to potentially try so feel free to look over there. It’s fun to sort through user-submitted recipes for inspiration, and is usually our go-to place when we begin planning our Sunday menu.

Here’s what we cooked up the past two Sundays:

Sunday July 18, 2010
Jalapeño Cream Cheese Stuffed Chicken Breasts
This. was. amazing. I forgot to include the thyme and dill in the actual cream cheese/jalapeno mixture before adding it to the chicken breasts, so instead I lightly sprinkled them on top of everything just before it went into the oven. These turned out absolutely amazing. Delicious! I was seriously in love with the resulting creamy cream cheese jalapeno “gravy” after baking.

The Best Steamed Asparagus
Followed this recipe for the most part – based on user comments, we only did about an 1/8th cup of white wine with the butter. We steamed these according to the instructions (2-3 mins on high) on the Ziploc Zip ‘n Steam bag we used for steaming in the microwave.

Zesty Steamed Red Potatoes
We actually modified the recipe “Zesty Potatoes with Sour Cream & Chives” over on the Ziploc website because we used the Ziploc Zip ‘n Steam bags to steam our potatoes in the microwave. We used small new potatoes (the red ones) and omitted the chives and sour cream. These steamed perfectly in the baggie and were full of flavor! They were a *tad* spicy with all the chili powder so some might consider this possibly *too* spicy when paired with the jalapeno of the chicken main dish? Not too much spice for us, but just be aware.

Sunday, July 25, 2010
Tangy Sirloin Strips
These were good. We overcooked the beef a bit (hard to find just the right amount of time to get the beef not TOO done but the bacon fully cooked) but the flavor and the sauce especially, were really tasty! I think they would’ve been a bit better for us personally had we been able to find sirloin and had a grill. We used the countertop griddle because we didn’t have access to a normal grill/barbecue.  Still delicious, though. LOVED the sauce. We didn’t have molasses and it wasn’t available at our closest grocery store when we picked up fresh ingredients, but not sure it really took away from the final result of the sauce anyway.

We were a bit “boring” today and fell back on the delicious steamed asparagus we had last week and a new version of seasoned steamed potatoes. We did the small red potatoes again, but this time around we steamed them in a mixture of lemon juice and butter with rosemary and basil seasoning. We stuck with the familiar on the sides because we were testing out our ability to microwave steam without the Ziploc Zip ‘n Steam bags. I think I liked the result better with the steam bags so we’ll keep that in mind when we steam things in the future.

Hopefully next week we’ll have all new sides to go with our new main dish AND we’ll start having photos to share, too! Hope you enjoy experiencing culinary adventures with us. :) You can follow us on Twitter, too, if you’re so inclined and want another feed to follow. A food feed. Ha! See what I did there? See you next week!

We planned the trip to Vancouver over our wedding anniversary so that we could keep up with our tradition: spending our anniversary at a bed & breakfast on the ocean. Last year we stayed in a fantastic little B&B off the coast of Nova Scota in Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island. It was heaven. This year we’re staying in a honeymoon suite of a great little  B&B off of Victoria Island. We’ll spend two days there and explore Victoria before heading over to the mainland. I am seriously pumped! It’ll be great to see family and friends and grab a few of the Canadian things to bring back with us that we miss. Like more Tim Horton’s coffee & some Cadbury 100 cal bars. There are also a few restaurants I want to be sure to hit before we come back, too. I’ve been craving a calamari salad from Moxies and can’t wait to have eggs benny from Shades on Main when we’re in Penticton. Yum!

We’re not the best at keeping up the family blog, which is too bad because we’ve had SO much happen in the past few months and a bunch of stuff coming up! Let me see if I can recap it all briefly:

1. Lucas got a formal job offer and is officially employed! (He just posted about it on our blog here.) He was offered a sweet full-time web development position with Southpoint Media. They’re based in Georgia, so that obviously means Lucas gets to work from home, which is awesome.  So he and the boys code websites for clients all day. I suspect that Oliver and Winston do more sleeping than coding, but they’re all enjoying it very much. :)

2. I started making and selling handmade geeky soap on the internet at http://www.geeksoap.net – it has been a huge hit and is keeping me very busy! Small business and handmade FTW!

3. A good friend and I (and our husbands) recently starting putting together an online geeky crafting community called G33Kmade! It’s going to be a hugely fun project, and together we’re going to be selling at an Exhibitor’s Booth at the biggest 4 days in gaming… Gen Con Indianapolis in August. Lots of geeky handmade goodness (including GEEKSOAP!) will be available from us… stop by and see us on Entrepreneur’s Avenue at booth #2732!

4. The 2009-2010 school year is almost over. Like, we have less than a week left now. I’ve been teaching the computer class at the middle school and it has been fantastic. My position for next year/which building I’ll be in is still up in the air with budget cuts looming, but part of the fun is not knowing what I’ll be teaching next year, right? ;) So the summer is almost here, and I’ll be relaxing and spending it prepping for Gen Con, making lots of geeky soap, trying to stay out of Lucas’ hair since we’ll both be working from home for a few months, and getting ready for vacation time in Canada. Oh, and Michelle is coming to visit us all the way from Calgary! Yay! Cannot WAIT to see her!

Whew! Did I cover it all? Some good things going for the Karpiuks in 2010, and even more good stuff on the horizon. :) Be sure to check our gallery for all of the photos when we return. Take care!

To kick off 2010, we’ve given our blog a major facelift, as you’ve probably noticed. Not only do we have a new layout, but we’ve got a whole new domain as well. The old gallery system has been replaced by a slick Flickr account integration; you can see the most recent uploads in a photostream off to the right there, and clicking the “gallery” link above will take you to all of our photos (most recent sets at the top) and photo collections. Everything from the old Look At Us Go gallery has been moved over and old links on Look At Us Go will now redirect here to thekarpiuks.com. (While we feel like we’ve caught them all, if you find any faulty links just let us know!) Our email addresses have also changed accordingly. You can email us both by using us [at] thekarpiuks.com or individually with our name [at] thekarpiuks.com. With all of the immigration dust nearly settled, family is hopefully on the horizon; a fresh start with our family blog in a fresh new year seemed to be the way to go!

Speaking of immigration, we took a quick road trip to Toronto earlier this week for Lucas’ medical appointment. All went well and he flies back in to pick up the results for his final interview appointment in Montreal on January 5 to get his green card.  We’re really excited about the final piece falling into place so that we can move on. While in Toronto we enjoyed good sushi and good company and were sure to get our fill of Tim Hortons and other Canadian goodies that we’ve been missing. Special thanks to Ronald and family for their amazing hospitality!

2009 went out with a bang.  We treated my parents to dinner and their first live hockey game: the Indiana Ice vs. the Chicago Steel at Conseco Fieldhouse. It was a great time and afterwards we went back to their place and played Wii Fit until the ball dropped. Pictures can be found in a set on our gallery page. Lucas was of course my first kiss of the new year, with Oliver and Winston a close second and third ;) I sure am lucky to have such a great family. I can’t wait to see what’s in store for us in 2010.

May 2010 bring you a fresh start, new excitement, and good health! Cheers.

Firstly, our Christmas cards went out last week and most have been received. They feature our 2009 Karpiuk family photo, and they turned out really cute, if I do say so myself.

I updated our Family Life 2009 Scrapbook to feature a few new pages to cover September – early December. Ten pages have been added all total, with some featuring (of course) our new nephew, William, Thanksgiving photos, new family photos, and the boys with our Christmas tree. There will be a few more after Christmas to add before I close that scrapbook and begin work on the 2010 album.

2010 already looks promising in the way of immigration; Lucas received his immigration interview letter recently (FINALLY!) and his appointment is in Montreal on January 5. We’re taking a quickie road trip (9 hours) up to Toronto to complete his medical so that he has the results to take with him for the interview. If all goes well, which it should, he may very well have his green card within a few business days of the interview. Happy day! That’ll be a great start to a new year.

Here’s to 2010 and exciting new promises on the horizon. Merry Christmas from our family to yours, and Happy New Year!

1. We spent a fantastic belated honeymoon/anniversary trip in Nova Scotia in June. (See our last post.) It was wonderful!
2. We moved back to the states (Indiana) at the end of July/first of August.
3. I started teaching Computer Applications at the middle school, and love it.
4. We moved into our own place at the end of October.
5. My brother and sister-in-law had their first child — we’re now an aunt and uncle to one adorable William Herman.
6. We had our first (U.S.) Thanksgiving with Indiana family in three years.

That pretty much sums up the last few months! It’s been an exciting adjustment period getting all settled in back in Indiana. This weekend we put up our Christmas tree and today we got our first central Indiana snow… about a quarter inch in fact, which helped get me into the Christmas-y mood. (After living in Canada for three years, I’m not used to NOT having snow by now so I was having a hard time believing the holiday season was actually here.) It was hilarious driving to work this morning because it felt like everyone was driving SO SLOW over such a minuscule amount of snow. Dare I say I adjusted to driving in Calgary snow?

Our Christmas cards will be going out shortly, and I’ll post one up here closer to Christmas to share with the rest of the world. It’s a pretty cute one, if I do say so myself. Not because I made it, (I’ve got too many knitted gifts to finish this year, so we opted for a Walgreens photo Christmas card instead of my usual handmade) but because the new family photo is darling. Hope you have a wonderful holiday season!

A mama goose built a nest in one of the most unlikely places (though common downtown so I’m told) on a ledge of a tower of the office building I’m working at for the summer. Lucas comes over and we meet up for our lunch hour each day, and today we checked out the fuss over the baby geese that hatched from the nest on the ledge. The area near the window had some caution tape to keep us pesky humans at bay, but you are able to be close enough to see the little miracles. It’s like a little mini zoo off the side of my building. First there were just eggs. Now there are four little ones. They’re growing rather quickly, considering they were just hatched this week and it’s only Wednesday.  Mom and dad are always with them, keeping a watchful eye out. If you don’t see them sitting on the ledge with the babies, don’t get too comfortable… they’re definitely not far away. Today mom was down below, coaxing her little ones to go over the ledge. What seems like a deadly fall to me is apparently no big deal to birds… however, these guys aren’t quite big enough to get over the lip of the ledge to attempt flying (read: falling) yet. I took several (non-flash) photos today because while this has been really neat to witness, people came today in attempts to relocate the geese and I’m not sure if they’ll still be there tomorrow.

Want to see more photos? Of course you do. Be warned: they will make your heart melt. Especially the one where cute little yellow fuzzball has his tiny little eyes squeezed shut. Totally adorable. To see the full gallery of fuzzy cuteness, click HERE. OH! And I made a little video of the window ledge action for you, too. Don’t mind the round hole/opening on the ledge that one of the babies falls into in the beginning — it’s a shallow (but stable) drain thing (like my technical terminology?) and the other two little ones are down in there. They’re just not quite tall enough to hop back out once they fall in, lol. But I promise they’re safe and sound in there. Enjoy!

Today was our neighborhood parade of garage sales; a lot of the houses in the neighborhood registered together and set up their yards and driveways with wares from 8am to 3pm. We’ve been excited about it for awhile, because lately Lucas and I have made rollerblading our pastime. Any evening we get the chance and the weather is playing nice, we’re out doing a good 40 minute circuit through the neighborhood on wheels. I’m getting a lot more confident! Today was the perfect excuse to pull the rollerblades on and explore every inch of the neighborhood in search of good deals. And boy did we ever score some fun stuff!

First of related importance was a new set of rollerblades. While tooling through the back streets we ran into someone selling a nearly-new pair that had been worn once… by the seller’s wife, who took a nasty spill the first time she used them and from that point on swore off rollerblades. Too bad for her, but great for me! They were being sold ridiculously cheap ($15!) and even though it was a bit more expensive than the $6 we spent on the current pair of rollerblades I had been using, these new ones were in better shape and didn’t have a broken clasp on the right boot like my old ones. Score!

Another great score was a crepe maker; we actually had purchased some ingredients needed to make crepes this past week in preparation to make them this weekend. Crazy coincidence, eh? I think it was fate. It was $1, and in perfect shape. And even better… the seller had a 7 week old bichon/shih-tzu puppy hanging out with her. SO cute! I cooed over him while Lucas made the purchase. We also got a new DVD player to replace our crappy $20 Wal-Mart DVD player that stops working if you look at it funny. Somewhere in there we also got some great martini shot glasses. We really lucked out with our finds.

Nearly 3 hours later we returned home exhausted and starving. Good thing we picked up some amazing steaks fresh last night on the way home for just such an occasion. We fired up the barbecue for the first time this season and threw the steaks on. They were HUGE! The boys manned the barbecue while I whipped up some pineapple smoothies in the kitchen; a little fat free vanilla frozen yogurt, milk, and crushed pineapple blended together. Delish! Hopefully the weather will continue to stay this way so we can continue to enjoy it! Maybe tomorrow we can tote our rollerblades to McKenzie Towne and do a little tour of the area and stop for gelato. Mmmm… gelato. Hope you had a great weekend and enjoy the pleasant weather :)