Skiing Adventures

First, a shout out is in order. I wanted to say CONGRATULATIONS to the recently-engaged Lori, matchmaker extraordinaire, and Greg, our favorite fun-loving pianist. We love you both and wish you every happiness!

For those of you who didn't know, Lan and I went skiing last weekend in Keystone, CO with some of our friends from our Sunday School Class/Bible Study. It was super fun!

Lan and I both have similarly low amounts of athleticism, so we fell down a lot (my only saving grace was that I also water ski). Let me just say, it's a lot harder than it looks, but once you get the hang of it, it's not that bad.

We stuck to the easy runs (greens), only venturing out to harder runs (blues), when they were short and we were promised that they weren't very steep. We weren't interested in gaining lots of speed. We just liked taking it easy and enjoying being in God's oh so beautiful snow-filled creation.

As an added bonus, we got to spend some time with our Mississippi buddy Tray in Denver. We had a fun day with you, friend! Thanks for showing us around!

Will we go back? Sure, but it will be a while. Per our pre-marriage mountain vs. beach agreement, a beach trip comes next :)

Some cool pictures from our trip (a FB album is also on the horizon):

Those of you who are close to Lan will appreciate this one...

On the top of the mountain

Our group at the top of the mountain!

You should know that taking pictures with your skis on takes large amounts of skill (that we don't have)

Exhibit A. Kudos to Dallas and Ashlee who know how to "ski pose" graciously.

We took a short detour to take some snow pictures!

My favorite picture of us from the trip! This is Lake Dillon. Frozen. With snow on top.

We parked illegally on the side of the road for this one. So worth it.

I know what you're thinking. "Is that a sleigh made of ice?" Why yes. Yes, it is.

Us enjoying our fabulous steak dinner the last night.

At breakfast on our last morning in Colorado.

Us in Downtown Denver.

Lan and Tray in Downtown Denver.

AND a scenery picture for good measure.

The end!

Love from Houston,

J & L

Christmas - in 200 words or less

Well, I'm behind again. And tonight, Lan is having a boys night, so I'm writing TWO blog posts. That's right, TWO. Here it goes.

Christmas went as quickly as it came. It was basically a lightening fast blur of lights, driving, and family. I didn't really know what to expect out of this Christmas - lots of people to see, places to be, and not a lot of time to do it in. Despite the time crunch, Christmas was awesome. We got to see both of our immediate families, we got to see nearly all of Lan's extended family, and half of mine. Now that's what I call successful!

After Christmas, Lan got to go watch the Bulldogs dominate the Egg Bowl, and I got a visit from my college buddy Ashlyn (friends since bid day!). It was nice to have some girls time. We went shopping (lots of shopping), out to eat, on a tour of our area, AND to our church on Sunday. Plus, we viewed our very own fireworks show, courtesy of the (many) folks down the street! Thanks for visiting, friend!!

Okay. That's as condensed as I can make Christmas/New Years. Next up, Ski Trip!

Love ya'll!

J & L

Fried Catfish!

I'm confident in the kitchen, but not when it comes to fried food. It's pretty intimidating! The whole "I could burn my apartment down if this goes wrong" thing is pretty scary, BUT I've had some frying success since July. I've gotten pretty good at Pioneer Woman's fried chicken, and I just tried fried catfish, and boy was it good, so I wanted to share the recipe with you.

Not the greatest picture ever, but you get the idea- it's yummy! (Even if I did make ginormous hush puppies)

Daddy's Hush Puppies (a family favorite)

1 whole onion (finely chopped)

1/8 cup oil (just a dab)

3/4-1/2 cup Self Rising Flour

3/4-1/2 cup Corn Meal

(you want equal parts of flour and corn meal)

1 Egg

Salt and Pepper generously

Milk

1. Beat egg

2. Add dry ingredients (this includes onions)

3. Add milk until it reaches a thick pancake consistency (or cake batter consistency- it'll be

kind of thin)

4. Fry -- I don't have good instructions for this, but tonight I fried them with the oil at 375.

They don't take long, just let them fry until they are golden brown and flip them in between.

Fried Catfish (I adapted this from a recipe on Food Network.com)

3/4 cup Yellow Cornmeal

1/8 cup All-Purpose Flour

2 teaspoons Seasoned Salt

1/3 teaspoon Ground Red Pepper

1/2 teaspoon Garlic Powder

1/4 teaspoon Black Pepper

4 Catfish Filets

Oil for frying

1. Mix all the seasonings, cornmeal, and flour together.

2. The original recipe didn't call for this, but I seasoned the filets with seasoned salt and

pepper before dredging. I also cut the catfish into smaller pieces.

3. Dredge filets in the cornmeal mixture.

4. Fry -- with the oil at 375 degrees, I did about 2 minutes per side.

Another tip for frying-- I use my dutch oven for frying, and I don't go too crazy on the oil. I can't tell you the exact amount but I think it's probably around 3/4" or so. With the dutch oven, too, you can put the top on while your frying-- but beware, that makes it get a lot hotter in the pot, so you don't want it on high heat or anything when you do that. And I generally never put it on high heat when I'm frying- it just gets the oil too hot, I think (but this is a frying novice speaking, here). Be careful!

I hope ya'll enjoy these recipes :) We sure did!

Love from Houston,

J & L

Christmas at the Holloways!

I don't have a lot to say about our decorations, just that I am so excited to share my first Christmas with Lan. It's important to me that we have our own Christmas and start our own Christmas traditions. To me, this is part of establishing our family :)

To that end, we celebrated early (on the 11th). Little did I know that Lan planned it this way because of the nature of my presents-- most of them are Christmas oriented (yay for Christmas tree dishes!) and he wanted me to be able to use them this year (how sweet is that?). This was the Christmas extravaganza weekend - Bible Study party, Christmas, Symphony, Church Christmas Program, and Sunday School party. We were really tired after, but it was a great weekend! Fun was had by all.

On Wednesday, we go back to Mississippi to celebrate with our families. Can't wait! I'll have more to report on this next time.

So, here are some pictures of our Christmas decorations!

Christmas tree area :) We didn't have room for a big tree, so we have this little one. Notice all the MSU ornaments (Hail State!). The frame on the table says "Tis the Season to be Jolly."

Close up on the tree.

My favorite ornament--Lan's mom gave us this ornament and I wanted a close up of it, because it's so darn cute!!

I bought this platter last year at Stewart's Florist and just love it. It says "She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger... He was named Jesus" - Luke 2:7,21

We got this while we were in Clinton for Thanksgiving, and it's so cute! It's a glass platter.

These 2 shots are of a Christmas bowl I painted at my Bible Study Girl's night. I love it! I just wish it was a little bigger- our bananas don't really fit in it very well.

Low budget centerpiece (well, not the bowl part). We keep this bowl on our coffee table all year and I wanted to make it more "Christmasy" so I put these ornaments in it. They came from one of those massive packs of ornaments you can get at Wal Mart (they were leftover from last year, but are so cheap). When you get close, you can tell the ornaments aren't great quality, but from a distance, it looks pretty nice! I've gotten a couple of compliments on it!

Merry Christmas all!

L & J

Thanksgiving and Tales of my Canton Adventure

Thanksgiving was a couple of weeks ago, so I feel obligated to say a bit about it... We traveled back to Mississippi, which wasn't our original plan, seeing as how we only had 2 days of vacation. We left on Wednesday and came back on Sunday. It was a nice trip! Not very long at each house, but it was nice to see everyone. And, it's not that long until we go back for Christmas and get to see even more family!

We have decorated for Christmas (yay!), so be expecting an upcoming Christmas blog with apartment pics.

Ok, now to the main purpose of my post... Canton. I have discovered my new favorite thing about Texas--Canton. Canton is a town a little (under an hour, I think?) outside Dallas. The first weekend of every month, they hold a trade days. It's kind of a big deal.

Basically what happens is this. They have a massive trade days area (and I mean massive- we were there from 10:30 to about 4:30 and didn't see everything there was to see) and vendors come from all over and set up shop. You have some really nice areas, with nice antiques, things for the home, etc, and you have some outdoor areas that are more like a flea market (anything and everything). Oh, and everyone and their mother goes. Like I said, kind of a big deal.

Our friend Emily invited me to go this weekend with one of her other friends and some of her family. It was SO FUN. Emily's family had all been to Canton before, so I was happy to be with people that really knew what they were doing and where they were going! I had a great time, and will definitely be going back.

And, I got some cool things...

I guess you would call this a candle holder. It's silver and glass. The dots you see in the picture are flecks out of the silver lining in the glass container. You put a candle inside and the light shines through and it's really pretty!

Soup and dip mix vendors are pretty popular at events like this, and we visited a really good one while we were there! They had lots of yummy samples, so I selected a dip mix and a soup mix-- Cheesy Chicken Enchilada and Southland Spinach dip. Both were REALLY yummy. For my Chi Omega sisters, the cheesy chicken enchilada soup tasted a lot like the Chicken Enchilada soup at the Chi O house, so I am really exciting about the mix!

This is a sugar mold. They were really popular at Canton, and are really cool! It's a wooden block with 5 holes. Inside the holes are bronze tins. You can use it in a variety of ways. In the holes, you can put candles, flowers, or even silverware (for serving lines or the table). They had all these on display, and I really liked the way it looked. I am really excited about this one!!

So that's Canton... Coming up for us is our big Christmas weekend-- Friday night is our Bible Study Christmas Party, Saturday, we are celebrating Christmas and going to the symphony, and Sunday we have Celebration at Houston's First (their big Christmas production), and our Sunday School Christmas Party. We are going to be Christmas'ed out. And I am excited :)

Love from Houston!

J & L

It's Been a While

Boy oh boy, I have been a slacker. I guess we've been pretty busy and I've let blogging fall by the wayside. But, here's an update on our life.

We've fallen into a pretty steady routine. Sundays, we go to Newlywed Sunday School class and church at First Baptist. Mondays and Tuesdays we either enjoy a night at home or visit with friends (sometimes going places to meet them, sometimes inviting friends over for dinner). Wednesdays, we go to bible study in Katy -- Wednesday is one of our favorite nights a week, because we love spending time with our bible study friends! Thursdays are TV night (Greys, The Office, Outsourced, It's Always Sunny, Big Bang Theory, Community-- we watch lots of TV). And we usually fill our weekends with spending time with friends and running errands.

It's sad, but I can't really tell you specifically what we've been doing the past couple weeks, but I can tell you that we haven't had a lot of free nights at home! We stay busy.

I guess the biggest news in our life this week has been our decision to go to Colorado with some of our friends from bible study!! We are so excited. Neither of us have ever been to Colorado or been snow skiing, so this is a really exciting trip for us! We are going MLK Day weekend (though neither Lan nor I get MLK Day off). We are staying in a really nice looking condo and can't wait to try our hand at skiing (and tubing!) and play in the snow.

I would post a google picture of the place we're going, but I'm afraid of copyright laws. Just search Keystone, Colorado River Run. That's where we're going!

Up for us this week -- back to Mississippi for Thanksgiving (can you believe it's here already??) and shortly after, Harry Potter (wish you were here, Lindsay).

Happy Thanksgiving all!!!

What's New

Ok. After this blog, I will finally be caught up! Here's what we've been up to for the last couple of weeks...

Last weekend, we visited Lan's aunt and uncle in Beaumont, TX. The original purpose of this trip was to see Lan's cousin, Emory, play football. He had a game in Houston earlier this fall that we went to, but we barely got to see him play because he had an infection in his hand. So, we decided to try again. But, alas, he was injured again (this time with a foot injury). We've decided that we must be bad luck...

But, even though we didn't get to see Emory play, we had fun at the game and had a really great weekend! On Saturday, Lan's uncle took Lan and his other cousin, Ethan, hunting. I stayed with Lan's aunt and we went to a tailgate party at their church.

Oh, and we ate. Lots and lots of yummy, yummy food. Bean dip, sausage/blueberry breakfast casserole, grilled chicken.. the list goes on. In summary, the food was awesome.

On Sunday, we went to Lan's uncle's church and heard him preach, which was fun because I have never heard him preach in person before. So, overall, the trip was great, and we look forward to a trip back at some point!

This weekend, Lan returned to Mississippi to see MSU take down KY (7-2!!), and I stayed home. On Friday, our bible study had a Halloween party, which was really fun! Yesterday, I volunteered with my friend Anne Marie at our church's fall festival. We worked one of the many bounce houses. We had a good time. Other than that, my weekend has been pretty low key. Some shopping and lots of TV.

I don't think we have any big plans coming up in the next few weekends, which is actually really great. It's nice just to enjoy being at home!

In other news, I have a recipe I'd like to share. For my MSU Chi Omega sisters, this recipe reminds me of apple crisp (but better!), so you should try it! Some of you know that I was never a big fan of apple crisp. I tried, I really did, but most of the time, I would pass my apple crisp on to a deserving sister, like Laura Ficken. But, I tried this recipe and fell in love! It is SO YUMMY! I made it for our bible study last week, and everyone really liked it, so I think you would to.

The recipe is from the October issue of Southern living (check it out-- it has 5 stars!!):

Fresh Apple Cake Recipe

I made it with browned-butter icing.

Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures, but there's one on SL's website. I was a little concerned about making this because of all the "apple work." I've never been as good as my mom or grandma at slicing/peeling apples, so that part was pretty labor intensive, but oh, was it worth it. Try it. As soon as possible. You won't regret it.

Love from Houston!