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!

Once I receive my paperwork, I’ll drive back to Toronto (to return the rental car) and then fly home. As I cross the border, I’ll use my paperwork to register as a Permanent Resident; I’ll then receive my greencard and Social Security Number by mail within a few weeks.

As with any bureaucratic process, I spent most of the time waiting; I passed the time chatting with two couples going through the same application and sharing similar personal circumstances – sadly, I forgot to exchange contact info with them before we all went our separate ways. I even exchanged a few jokes with my interviewer – the interview started well when I congratulated him for correctly pronouncing my name over the intercom and it turned out he’s Polish/Ukranian and has a son named Luka.

Anyway, at the end of the day I’m just relieved that everything is approved and anxious to receive my documents and return home to my family!

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!

PEGGY’S COVE

Our flight landed around 7am on Friday, and by 8am we were in the rental and well on our way to our first destination: the famous Peggy’s Cove. There are two routes to the cove, so we came in from the north and made our way back to Halifax from the south. The scenery of each route was quite different, yet equally incredible – both peppered with tiny fishing or industrial villages.

In the cove itself, there is a small information centre, a museum, a few small trinket/treat shops, and of course the lighthouse. Pretty much any time throughout the trip that we found ourselves on a shoreline, we could be heard taking in deep breaths, sighing happily, and seen smiling, but no other part of the trip brought us quite as much peace as sitting and staring out at the ocean from the large rock formation that the lighthouse is built on.

HALIFAX

After about an hour, we tore ourselves away from the view, stopping at the lighthouse giftshop long enough to send some postcards, and made our way to Halifax. We had lunch at the Red Stag Tavern, attached to the Alexander Keith’s brewery, while enjoying the view of the harbour from their rooftop patio (the food here was amazing – it essentially ruined all other fish-n-chips for me). After lunch, we wandered around the harbour area, checking out the local shops and attractions. We spent the night at the Best Western on Chocolate Lake, where we were greeted by a very friendly chocolate lab, and slept like… well, like people who had barely slept on their inbound red-eye flight and spent all day exploring, I guess.

LOUISB(O)URG

We got up early on Saturday morning and drove roughly 5 hours to Louisb(o)urg (we’re not really sure how to spell it, and neither does anyone who lives there, apparently – we saw two signs within a few hundred feet of each other with different spellings). Along the way we passed about a dozen McDonald’s signs advertising McLobster, but we didn’t feel brave enough to stop and try it. The drive was mostly inland, but boy was it worth it. Lesley had found us a great bed & breakfast with their own private beach: Point of View. We were too late to tour the Louisb(o)urg Fort, so we spent most of the evening relaxing on our balcony, knitting, enjoying the view, and drinking twice as much wine and champagne as was really necessary. There is nothing quite as soothing as falling asleep to the sound of ocean waves just a few hundred feet away.

THE LOBSTER EXPERIENCE

While we were in Louisb(o)urg, we had dinner at a small shack on a pier, called The Lobster Kettle, and of course ordered the lobster dinner special! We’ve both had lobster before, but usually in some kind of processed state or, at best, a relatively fresh tail to accompany our steaks. We were not 100% prepared for the experience when the food arrived. It wasn’t until I was tearing open the lobster’s mid-section that it occurred to me that this lobster had been alive just a few minutes ago, and that the dark green guacamole-looking substance¹ now facing me was likely the remains of its last meal.

¹ photos available on request

LOBSTER BENNY?

We both love eggs benny, and we really enjoyed our lobster the night before, so we decided to see if we could find lobster benny for breakfast the next morning. A little googling led us to the Delta in Sydney, whose menu claimed to accept any and all substitutions and modifications to the menu. I asked how much extra it would cost, “to get some lobster on our eggs benedict?”

“$7,” comes the reponse. That seems a bit expensive for some lobster meat to replace the ham in my eggs benny, but I figure what the hell – we’re on vacation! Sadly, we did not have the camera with us – when the eggs benny arrived we understood the price: they had cooked a whole fresh lobster, half for each of us, and simply dropped it on our plates. It was a little more work than we’d expected, digging out our own lobster meat to add to our eggs benny, but it was worth it for the laughs alone – and the lobster benny was pretty good.

THE CABOT TRAIL

After breakfast we hit out on the Cabot Trail, which is easily the greenest and prettiest scenic drive I’ve ever been on. Unfortunately, it rained almost the entire time, so we mostly kept to the car and the occasional roadside giftshop or attraction; hiking and whale-watching are on our to-do list next time around. But, after three long years of fruitless scanning during roadtrips, Lesley’s dream came true and we spotted a moose!

We stopped for dinner in the largest Acadian village of Cape Breton: Chéticamp. After two consecutive meals involving fresh lobster, we opted for something a little tamer, and dined at Le Gabriel. By the time we had finished, the restaurant had filled with locals for the dinner rush, all speaking French – I think Lesley found this moment almost as peaceful as Peggy’s Cove.