Pretzels & Crafts

Welcome to March!  Today it briefly snowed and hailed and it has been cold and windy all day.  So much for spring!

But we have been making the best of it all.  Zak has been doing well in school; midterms are next week and spring break is the following week.  I have been doing my best to keep busy and have been pretty successful this week.  I created a new weights routine and have done it the past few days.  It takes about an hour to do it all, but I put on a few episodes on Netflix and it flies by.  I find myself even enjoying it!  I don't even mind waking up sore!

On Monday night, we both had the hankerin' for soft pretzels.  But it was about 8 at night and we weren't feeling up to going outside, so I looked for a good recipe online to make our own.  It actually was a pretty fun experiment, and we will probably make them again.  I got the dough ready, and Zak formed them into their pretzel shape.  It was pretty cute to watch him, he had some good moves!  Together it went really smoothly and we devoured the pretzels once they came out of the oven.  They were so yummy and we have been brainstorming ways to make different varieties of pretzels.  Here is the recipe entry on it: http://rachelrecipelover.blogspot.com/2012/02/homemade-soft-pretzels.html

look at the beautiful pretzels Zak formed!

you knew this picture was coming, right?

delicious, perfect pretzels

My latest accomplishment has been planning our entire month's meals.  With our new car payments factored into our budget, I decided I needed to take some time to really budget our finances.  I don't mind, it's actually kind of fun for me, which is weird.  Once I picked about a dozen recipes I wanted to try or make again, I wrote down all the ingredients needed for the recipes and figured out what I'd need to buy and what we already have.  Today I went and bought all the ingredients we need for the month and came in under budget!  The second half of my accomplishment was to make a 'meal calendar'.  I've been doing some art stuff with paint chip samples I've scored from Wal-mart (once they're all done, pictures and a blog entry will go up), and had some leftover.  I've seen some cute ideas online and just went for it today.  I am actually really pleased with the result, but I need to invest in a good, fine-tipped dry erase marker.

my calendar!

with flash

yes, two calendars but: 1 is for work & school

That's all of the news for this week!