Mozzarella Cheese Dip

I’m so excited… we got this camera project off and running.  I sent the camera’s out yesterday notified all participants where it’s coming from and where it’s going to.  Woohooo I’m so excited!  I had enough participants that there are 2 moving about the country :).  One will be traveling up the East Coast and the other hits the Midwest, out west and finishes up in the Southwest.  It’ll be like traveling and never leaving home :).  I can’t tell you how excited I am… can you tell… LOL

Moving on….

So I mentioned that we got home from our weekend excursion and went to Sunday night dinner.  Well luckily I planned a little ahead and had all the ingredients for this great dip to take to Sunday night dinner with us already in the house.  This dip is so good and so super easy and fast to make.  In fact I got requests to bring this to every Sunday night dinner.

So here is the recipe.  It is in my handwriting, I sure hope you can read what I wrote!!

Then after I started throwing it all together I used my iPhone to take photos… 🙂

At this point you have the Mozzarella Cheese, Parmesan Cheese, Mayo (not Miracle Whip), & sour cream.

And then throwing in the onion flakes.

Now in the recipe it says Accent Seasoning and in parenthesis it says (salt, pepper, garlic, sugar to taste).  Well I got this recipe from a co-worker and she actually didn’t know that there was such thing as “Accent Seasoning” so she figured those seasonings.  So I went to the store one day and bought her a bottle of Accent Seasoning so she’d always have some 🙂

Once you add that and your parsley mix it all together!!

And then of course, eat it!  That’s the best part!!!

So Now that I remember that it is in deed Thursday and I don’t have Zumba clothes with me, I’m going to go and have a good cry… LOL

Mozzarella Cheese Dip

by Nicole
Keywords: appetizer snack accent seasoning cheese mayonnaise sour cream American
Ingredients
  • 16 oz Shredded Mozzarella Cheese
  • 2 tbsp Parmesan Cheese
  • 2 Cups Mayo (not Miracle Whip)
  • 1 Cup Sour Cream
  • 2 tbsp onion flakes
  • 2 tbsp parsley
  • 1 tsp Accent Seasoning
Instructions
Mix all ingredients together.
Serve with tortilla chips (or dipper of your choice)
Powered by Recipage

Road Trip!!!

My aunt called us up a few weeks ago and said that PC and I needed to head their direction.  She wanted me to go sit with her at work and the hubs could “babysit” my uncle (haha my words not hers :))  Besides, she left some dishes at our house at Christmas time that needed to be delivered and my uncle bought some “train” horns for his truck so we saved him shipping on those too :), so we picked a weekend that we could and we loaded up and headed for their house.

This just happened to be the weekend we had free so Friday we left after work and made the trek to their house.  We made record time too and I set my cruise to the speed limit… no speeding for me.  Actually we stopped in Tulsa for dinner so I’m not sure exactly how many hours it took us to get there but still, we made good time for running the speed limit.  Why speed, it uses more fuel and my favorite thing is when people pass me flying and then I catch up to them driving the speed limit.  I think that’s flippin hilarious!  Sometime’s Karma is a b***h!!

Welcome to Oklahoma!

I didn’t get a whole lot of chances for photos on the drive down because I drove (by choice).  Then Saturday I spent the day with my aunt and hubby went with my uncle and his help to a horse show.  We didn’t know they were going to a horse show so hubby didn’t have a long sleeved button down shirt and cowboy hat so he had to sit in the bleachers all day.  But then Sunday morning he and my uncle got up at 6:30am (no thank you) and went to EE Ranches to get my uncle’s mare tested to see when she’d be ready to breed.

I woke up around 8 and chatted with my aunt waiting on the boys to get back.  They got back around 8:30 and I got dressed and hubs and I headed for home.

I’ve always heard people talk about Bricktown in Oklahoma City so we decided to swing in there, look around and grab a bite to eat before hitting the highway.  Being Sunday, that may have had something to do with it, but I wasn’t totally impressed.  I do think that we’d have better luck if we had more time to gander, but we didn’t.

OKC was hidden in the clouds (fog)

 

We finally decided to eat at Toby Keith’s I Love This Bar & Grill.  Dang try figuring out how to get into this parking lot.  It was nuts!

 

I thought this was awesome!  They should have had it for Veterans too though, they were soldiers at one time!!

 

I’m getting the evil eye….

 

See there’s that Karma again!

 

Look at the Disco Saddle!  There were 2 in the restaurant that we found.

 

Have to wait, sit on a truck tail gate!!

 

This was standing in Toby Keith’s Parking lot

 

But we had to get home for Sunday dinner (with our friends) so we headed out!!
And we crossed over the Oklahoma River.
Here was the dam.  One side was full, and this side, notsomuch!
Then we got into Tulsa and crossed the Arkansas River.

 

It was fairly low too, but they keep it that way usually.

 

About this time we were sick of being in the car.  We got stuck in road construction with no movement going through Tulsa.

 

Downstream Casino… it’s right in the corner, parts of it are in Oklahoma, Kansas & Missouri.  See I told you it was right in the corner!

 

ah Missouri, you never looked so…. gray, sad, cold, pretty

We finally made it home in time to start a fire (it was chilly!) and throw together a dip to take to Sunday night dinner and we were out the door again.

Oh well, isn’t that what SHORT road trips are all about?

Let Me Tell You About My Saturday!!!

First off… This is what I woke up to this morning….

Really, Snow????

Oh well… I can deal with this… It’s pretty and the roads are clear.  Now that’s my kind of snow :).

By watching weather.com last night on my iPhone App it said we were in for rain.  When we got home last night we got pelted with sleet but still I never expected to wake up to this 🙂  Today’s high though is 57 degrees so it’ll be gone soon.  But it does make for some pretty backgrounds!

Anyway moving on 🙂

How many people do you know that would be willing to give up an entire Saturday to go sit in the ER?

Well I did… so you know of one :).

No, I wasn’t with a family member or a friend, well unless you want to count my aunt, but she’s one of the doctors.

Have I peaked your interest yet?

She had me come down and spend some time with her in the ER and talk to the nurses.  Wow I have to admit, some things I always thought aren’t true, that’s for sure.  Plus they kept calling me a “White Cloud”.  I wasn’t sure what that meant but eventually they told me.  They (as in all the nurses and the doctors) said that Saturday was a very unusual day in the ER.  Usually they are running running running from one thing to another.  Our Saturday, we had down time… we actually had down time.  Sounds like if you needed to visit the ER that would have been the day!!!

So anyway I “worked” an eleven hour shift with my aunt.  When we first got there she had me talking to Robyn.  Her first patient came in with a nose bleed and chest pain.  She looked at me and said… Go figure, he’s testing positive for Cocaine.  Bad deal!  The doctor went in and spoke with him and then he was released.  Then there were your typical cases the flu, chest pains, leg swelling, etc.  There was a cute little ol’ 95 year old man who came in that had leg swelling.

Then the trauma hit!

After a couple hours of tagging along with Robyn I got to go sit with Misty.  Now Misty, she’s flippin hilarious, but I also sometimes think in that line of work you have to have a sense of humor.  She told me how her life was and how she changed it around to suit her and her kids life the best.  Wow, she’s one impressive gal!!!  She came from a “Dope” family (as she put it).  She had 4 kids and no “baby daddies” and she decided she wanted a better life for her and her kids.  She went to school, got a nursing degree and has plans to retire at 45.  WOW!  She extremely impressed me!!!  And she was fun to talk to… she offered one guy Coke minus the crown…. LOL

But back to the trauma…  I had only been around Misty for about 15 minutes when a guy in transport from one hospital to ours Red Lined and was immediately brought into the ER.  Right before he was brought in, some of the other nurses had started talking to me as well, and then he came in.  Since I’m not even a nursing student I didn’t figure I should go into the rooms or anything but when all the nurses went running to this patient Michelle grabbed my arm and drug me into the room.  I of course stayed off to the side out of the way but I got to experience it all.  They actually got his heart ticking again and then I got to help them move him up to the ICU.

In the mean time between getting him back going and moving him to the ICU another man came over and they had to do some resuscitation on him as well.  They actually needed help so I got to hold his arm for one of the nurses and the tech’s so they could try to draw blood samples on him.  We got him back going and moved him on to the ICU as well.

I also got to get more tubes for some of the nurses, put an arm band on a patient, find some arm restraints for one patient so they’d quit moving (they were out of it and didn’t know they were moving), told some patients that the nurse would be right with them but she was detained (to which they replied ok momma made it.  The nurse and I neither one knew what that meant…) and then they were going to let me help do a Foley (catheter for female, I was just holding a leg while the nurse did the actual work…) but that didn’t end so well.  Sometimes things catch you off guard, especially when you aren’t used to them or never seen it done… yeah I wound up in with my aunt and the other doctor with my head between my legs.  I decided I should sit before I passed out.  LOL.

All the nurses then would stick their head in to check on me and of course my aunt got tickled at me… but it was all good.  Both the nurses and the doctors told me about their fainting or almost fainting stories or just the really hot feeling while your head is swimming (that was me), but by the end of the day they did a Foley on another lady and I was just fine.  The initial shock had worn off and I was fine.

My aunts shift was over at 8pm.  Unfortunately my day ended by watching them call TOD (time of death) on a woman at 7:59pm.  Later they were looking at her lab results.  She walked herself into Triage and the doctors are unsure how.  Her Creatinine (Normal levels of creatinine in the blood are approximately 0.6 to 1.2 milligrams (mg) per deciliter (dl) in adult males and 0.5 to 1.1 milligrams per deciliter in adult females.) levels were astronaumical (the doctors had never seen such high numbers) and her potassium levels (The normal potassium level is 3.5-5.0 mEq/L (mEq/L stand for milliequivalents per liter of blood and this is a measure used to evaluate the level)), one doctor said the highest he’d ever seen was an 8, this lady was a 9.7.  They have no idea how she was walking and talking.

Where I got my biggest shock (and it really wasn’t but still) was the fact if you watch Grey’s Anatomy, or ER or any of those doctor shows it seems like the doctors do all the work, yet what I saw this weekend was the nurses do it all.  My aunt told me the doctor’s job is to asses the situation and call out orders to correct it and the nurses do the work.  Very interesting!

But I got to talk to so many different nurses with so many different backgrounds.  This was one heck of an interestingly awesome Saturday!  Ok I’ll shut up now, I just never wanted to forget this so I had to share 🙂

Crazy Idea…. Interested??

Happy Friday morning to you!

I really think that the time change has been affecting me this week.  You know 2 weeks after it changed.  This must also be the week for changes.  Since most of the schools around are on Spring Break this week, the dance studio where we do Zumba was also closed for Spring Break… Grrr! 🙂 so a friend here at work loaned me her Zumba workout DVD and I did it one night at home in my living room.  Not nearly as fun as doing it in a class where there are tons of people!  Doesn’t mean I won’t do it at the house some too.

So then yesterday I woke up on the wrong side of the bed.  I was grouchy and grumpy!  And to top it off Sonic has on their billboard that Large drinks are 99cents until 11am but they charged me $1.79 for my Large drink.  Um… HELLO!

Yeah so Moving on :)… Last night I went home and I was still in a halfway grouchy mood (sorry hunny!).  But we loaded up the girls (our dogs) and went to my parents house for dinner.  When we got there Mom wasn’t home yet and I needed to take something to my grandma (she lives about a mile down the road) so I took off walking.  God gave me legs, I decided to use them 🙂  get my exercise.  Coming home I did something really crazy… Like majorly crazy… like something I don’t do crazy… I ran over halfway home.  Yup, I went for a run.  Funniest part, I was in boots and jeans.  It didn’t slow me down!

I had on my Ariat Fat Baby’s.  They are so dadgum comfortable!  They look similar to these, except mine don’t have the stones and the tops are green and mine are probably 4-6 years old.  Nice and broke in!

Oddly enough, I was surprised,  I wasn’t completely winded!  How crazy is that??  The air was chilly so my lungs burned a little due to that but for the actual running itself… I didn’t do half bad!  I’m blaming the Zumba… it’s getting me in shape… hahahaha!

So anyway moving on.  Here’s my crazy idea.  Do you guys remember this thing?

I was reading something yesterday that gave me this crazy idea but I’m not sure if anyone would be interested.  What I thought though was that I’d buy a disposable camera and mail it to you (you as in someone who is interested…) then you’d take X number of pictures (depends on how many people are interested to how many photos are allotted for each person) then they mail it on to you (the next interested person) you take your photos and so on and so forth….  Then once all photos were taken the last person mail it back to me, I’ll develop them and we could do a blog post about the photos…  Maybe include a short story or something about what you took your photo of.  Like I said, it’s a crazy idea, and maybe no one would be interested, but if you are interested please leave me a comment saying, I’d be willing to do it 🙂 and your email address so I can email you.

Anyway I hope you all have a great weekend!  We’re supposed to have rain most of the weekend and cooler weather 🙁  But here’s to the weekend!!!

Not your Momma's Macaroni Salad

You know how they say your tastes change every 7 years.  I swear that’s true!  Used to I wouldn’t touch Macaroni Salad.  Now… I’ll eat some :).  Potato salad was the same way, but that’s another story for another day.

But when it comes to noodles… I’ll eat them plain as long as they’re cooked.  And Whole Wheat noodles are just as good as white noodles.  In fact lately we’ve been using nothing but whole wheat noodles and once they are cooked I can’t stay out of them. Ha!

Anyway back to the Macaroni Salad… this isn’t your typical Macaroni Salad with mayo, mustard & hard boiled eggs… Nope… This is WWWWAAAAAYYYYYY better 🙂 IMO (in my opinion PC, not information management officer….)

 Not Your Momma’s Macaroni Salad!
And this is very easy to make more or less of!
(Please forgive the picture quality, I took with my iPhone)

Ingredients:
Macaroni Noodles, cooked (I used a whole box)
Tomatoes (I used a can, I was lazy that day)
Ham (I used a small package)
Cucumber (I used one)
Olives (I used one small can that was already sliced up)
Shredded Cheese (I used one package)
Ranch Dressing (I used as much as I wanted b/c I love Ranch dressing!)

Directions: 
Mix all together. (easy enough huh?)

Dump the can of olives & tomatoes in the bottom of the bowl.

Dice up your ham

Then sprinkle ham into the mixture

Once you’ve cooked and drained your pasta, add to the mixture.

Don’t forget to add in your cheese

And get your lovely assistant to dice your cucumber for you.  Then place in the bowl

Add in your desired amount of Ranch Dressing

And Mix it all up!

It’s that easy!!! 

Thought this might be a great Spring/Summer Outing recipe to share 🙂

I MUST be sick!!!

Let me state for the record… because I always feel I must… I hate Fish.  I don’t like live ones, dead ones, eating them, fishing for them… NOTHING to do with fish.  The live ones in fish tanks drive me nuts because they won’t hold still… I know most of them can’t… that’s how they survive but still…

To add to that I don’t eat anything that lives in water.  I’ve tried crab, not my fave… lobster, yuck!  Shrimp… well up until lately the answer was YUCK!

But then the Japanese steak house came to our town and the shrimp don’t taste fishy.  The ones that do, I’ll pass off instantly!!  But anyway… Friday night I ate shrimp.  Then I turned around last night and I ate shrimp again.

I’m not pregnant (I’m 99.9% sure), this isn’t something weird like that… But again, the hubs made it so it didn’t taste fishy.

With my 101 list I have to make 64 recipes… you know all of them from the Pioneer Woman’s cookbook.  Well one of them was Penne alla Betsy and it contained shrimp.  I wasn’t sure how I would manage but I did.  And it wasn’t bad.

It contains penne pasta, shrimp in a tomato cream sauce.  It’s all good though because I did Zumba before hand.  I ate back all the calories I burned.

Now one of my biggest questions… they say fish is good for your brain… does shrimp count in that?

Stat's Update

It cracks me up how people manage to get to my blog sometimes.  In fact, I went and googled the key phrases and my blog didn’t come up on the first page of search results for quite a few of the phrases… not sure about the second… I didn’t go that far.

But I thought I’d share the stats with you again because some are impressive, some are funny 🙂

The Top 10 Posts of All Time:

  1. Our Church, Our Decorations
  2. I did something a little crazy last night………….
  3. Show Me Your Bra’s
  4. For a Spanking Good Time
  5. Woohoooo I got another one!
  6. Unexpected Surprises
  7. Chicago – Monday – Part II
  8. The List……
  9. Cinnamon Rolls, Yum!
  10. What day is it?

The Top 10 Posts of the Month:

  1. Engagement Photo Re-Do
  2. Let’s Talk about Sex, Baby…
  3. Show Me Your Bra’s
  4. Total Randomness & a Recipe
  5. For a Spanking Good Time
  6. WILW: Sometimes it’s fun to play along!!
  7. Evil Step Mom
  8. A List
  9. PW’s Red Velvet Cake + How to make buttermilk
  10. How do you eat an Oreo?

 The Pages listed in order of views All Time:

  1. Cast of Characters
  2. Cook with Me
  3. Day Zero Project
  4. The Bucket List
  5. Weekly Photo Challenge

The pages in order Month:

  1. Cast of Characters
  2. Cook with Me
  3. The Bucket List
  4. Weekly Photo Challenge
  5. Day Zero Project

Wow, the page order really didn’t change between all time and monthly… just the number of views.

Referring URL’s All Time:

  1. Gizzard’s & Calf Fries
  2. Blogger
  3. A Farm Wife’s Life
  4. Blogger Profile
  5. Cowboy Coping Cowgirl
  6. Farm Chick’s Kitchen
  7. Down on the Farm
  8. One Old Cowgirl’s View
  9. Google Reader
  10. Blogger

Referring URL’s Month:

  1. Gizzard’s & Calf Fries
  2. The Pioneer Woman Tasty Kitchen
  3. A Farm Wife’s Life
  4. Google Search
  5. Chasers of Kaysers
  6. Chasers of Kaysers (specific post)
  7. Farm Chicks Kitchen
  8. This Kind of Love
  9. Ashley’s Antics
  10. The Bowers

Thanks for the Love guys!!!  Now I want to share love with these people… Go visit them! And let them know you came from me 🙂

This Month my readers have come from:

  1. United States
  2. Canada
  3. Taiwan
  4. China
  5. Australia
  6. United Kingdom
  7. Russia
  8. Netherlands
  9. Slovenia
  10. India

Shout out to everyone who stops by!  Thank you so much.  You make my day by reading and commenting!!!

This Month’s Pageviewers are:

  1. Internet Explorer
  2. Firefox (that’s what I use!!)
  3. Safari (my iPhone uses that)
  4. Chrome
  5. Opera
  6. Search Toolbar (never heard of it)
  7. (FlipboardProxy… huh?
  8. Flock ??
  9. Mobile

And this month’s Operating systems:

  1. Window’s
  2. Mac
  3. iPhone
  4. Other Unix
  5. Windows NT 6.1
  6. Linux
  7. BlackBerry
  8. ZTE
  9. Playstation 3
  10. iPad

And now one of my all time favorites… the Google Search Phrases:

  1. show me your bra – Yes we did a Relay 4 Life fundraiser, If that’s what you are looking for I can help 🙂
  2. groundhog day storm 2011 – And boy was it a storm, for around here anyway!
  3. hair chop
  4. november 25, 1978 – Wow, my parents anniversary is famous 🙂
  5. tnicolej.blogspot.com – Hmmm I must be famous… people are looking for me…
  6. my love for you is endless – Well I would have been referring to my husband although I think this is also song lyrics… But my husband actually wrote a post about me titled this too 🙂
  7. women that hate scrubbing floors – I’m not sure what you’re looking for here… So here’s the Good Housewife’s Guide 🙂
  8. how to make cake flour – It’s a cinch!
  9. +”forever21″+japan+11:59+time zone – How cool was that last Friday people!
  10. blogspot.com faily pictures – Um… I’m at a loss here…
I hope you enjoyed this round of Stat’s update!

This weekend

I have learned through my years of living on the farm to be “flexible”.  You can’t make hard, concrete, in stone plans… life just doesn’t work that way.  You have to be flexible.  Heck, planning my wedding, I HATED having to plan a date that would affect me and a lot of other people so far in advance and our date was only 7 months.  I’m not sure how people do it 2+ years in advance.  Maybe that’s the difference of living on a farm versus growing up in the city, I really don’t know.  I don’t have any experience in the latter of that statement.

I do try to pride myself on being organized though, but a planner, I make tentative plans and NEVER get myself into a bind I can’t get out of because with that also comes some give and take.  Again, I suck at making decisions.  I don’t like to decide where I’m going to eat, little lone a decision of where 5 people will eat, because what if they aren’t feeling what I’m feeling.

But anyway I digress and that’s not where I was going with this post at all.

My plans for this weekend changed so many times and there were so many variable factors that if this happens then we’ll do this but if that doesn’t happen then we’ll try it this way and then better yet neither happens and we’ll move to plan C.  Ugh!  So see, I DON’T MAKE PLANS!

So my Friday night plans changed so much.  You just have to learn to be a fly by your seat kinda gal…

Headed to town

In the end, I wound up fed and we picked up the {step}daughter after her fun with her cheerleading squad.

Saturday morning we got up and met my dad at his house.  Part of the “up in the air plans” was to attend the Buffalo Sale.  If he sold the current buffalo he had, then we were headed to the sale, if not, then well who knows.  See… try to make plans with that info!

Well he did indeed sell his current buffalo and we headed to Passaic, MO.  Every year we’ve gone to the Buffalo sale it has been cold and either rainy or snowy… Last year we drove in snow up there… this year it was just rain.  But inside the sale barn, it was warm.  Tbug and I both got a well needed, well deserved nap 🙂

 This was after my nap 🙂 Hubby’s leg was bothering him.  I was just relaxed 🙂
 Now this Bad Boy was a Beauty!

 Sale Barn

I think we have a photo similar to this from last year
Please don’t knock these photos… their from my phone!

We didn’t buy any this year… I say we loosely because I really mean my dad didn’t.  They had doubled in price since last year… last year’s average was about $400… give or take (can’t remember exactly).  This year’s average was probably $1,100.  Looks like that’s the business to be in if you’re already in it.  If not… you’re going to pay a pretty penny to get started 🙂

Then we headed home (my parents house) and then the 3 of us (husband, daughter and me) ran some errands in town.  We got home around 8 and boy were we hungry :).  We made Pioneer Woman’s Sour Cream Noodle Bake.  Oh My Gosh, if you haven’t made this, RUN, don’t walk, Even better Drive Fast to the store to get the ingredients.  SUPER good!  Tbug even helped make it but better yet, she liked it!  Woohoooo! 🙂

Sunday we went to my parents house to pick up my dad’s log splitter.

 My baby almost takes up all the room in the floor board and she’s 11 weeks old!
 Audrey moved so she blurred but I loved this photo! (taken with the iPhone… what do you expect?)

Then Tbug got to ride horses

 Waiting patiently while they loaded up the bull and hauled him to my gpas.
Tbug & Aloha

 Audrey & the bottle lamb

Later we went to my mother in law’s for lunch (she likes me, she made me Mac & cheese) and then home to work on tilling the garden.  You know how when you want to do something something always comes up… yeah the tiller kept shutting down on us.  Oh well… that’ll teach us 🙂

 We’re behind on the garden, that’s ok 🙂

 They were on the hunt for cool!
 It broke twice… oh well, we’ll get it fixed!

Then it was time to run our daughter back to her mother and head to some friends house for Sunday night dinner.  This week’s theme was Pot Luck Italian.  YUM!

My {step} daughter was full of it this weekend… here were some great sayings by her….:

You can’t ride a horse in the city or you’ll go to jail for life— I’d so love to know where she got her info!

She kept referring to Minnesota as a city, not a state.

My dad & my uncle swapped bulls and as the bull got out of the trailer she said, “That bull has a big udder.”  I told her bulls don’t have udders, only cows.   She’s like “Oh ok well his man parts then.

We have a railroad track out by my house that a train comes through a lot.  It’s extremely bumpy, I think it might actually cause a big 4×4 to bottom out (ok not but it’s really bumpy if you hit it going any speed at all) so I always stop look and creep over the tracks.  She proceeded to tell me you never have to look over that train track.  No trains go through there.  I said, um, yes they do, all the time in fact.  I told her you have to check for trains crossing at all train tracks.  (yes there are exceptions but I wasn’t going in to that)  Not more than 30 minutes after that we were at the house and heard the train whistle.

Anyway now it’s Monday and I’m using my Monday to recoup.  Call me tomorrow if you haven’t heard anything out of me 😉