Steve and Britt also live in the west valley, and they picked me up on Friday night for a e-session date.  We headed to the Scottsdale Civic Center Mall, where even if it’s August, and hot and smoldering outside – the greenery is still lush and vibrant.  We had a great time and the photos are all so wonderful.  They will have a hard time choosing their favorites.

This recipe comes from Elise at Simply Recipes.  Actually, it’s her dad’s recipe.  As with most things I cook, I have to scale it down to feed only two people.  I love bell peppers the next day for lunch, so I make three.  Here’s the recipe as I have adapted it:

• 3 bell peppers, any color
• Salt
• 5 Tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
• 1/2 medium yellow onion, peeled and chopped
• 1 clove of garlic, peeled and chopped
• 1/2 lb of lean ground beef
• 3/4 cup of cooked rice
• 1 can chopped tomatoes
• 1 tbsp chopped fresh oregano or 1 teaspoon of dried oregano
• Fresh ground pepper
• Pinch of cayenne
• 1/2 cup ketchup
• 1/2 tsp of Worcestershire Sauce
• Dash of Tabasco sauce

Bring a large pot of water to a boil over high heat. Meanwhile, cut top off peppers 1 inch from the stem end, and remove seeds. Add several generous pinches of salt to boiling water, then add peppers and boil, using a spoon to keep peppers completely submerged, until brilliant green (or red if red peppers) and their flesh slightly softened, about 3-5 minutes. Drain, set aside to cool.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Heat 4 tbsp of the oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add onions and cook, stirring often, until soft and translucent, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic and meat and cook till meat is browned.  Remove from heat and add rice, tomatoes, cayenne, and oregano, and season generously with salt and pepper. Mix well.

Drizzle remaining 1 tablespoon of olive oil inside the peppers. Arrange the cut side of the peppers up in a baking dish, then stuff peppers with filling. Combine ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco sauce, and 1/4 cup of water in a small bowl, then spoon over filling. Add 1/4 cup of water to the baking dish. Place in oven and bake for 40-50 minutes (or longer, depending on how big the peppers are that you are stuffing), until the internal temperature of the stuffed peppers is 150-160°F.

I always add too much rice.  I will just stir it in and then any extra filling I’ll stick around the base of the peppers and serve it on top after they are cooked.

It’s been rumored that I enjoy cooking.  The truth – I love baking above all else.  The mixing of delicate egg whites with flours to produce something that springs up fluffy and tasty in less than 15 minutes is pure bliss!

I have many of my new brides ask me about cooking for two.  I’ve been remiss in not sharing some of the delicacies I know how to make.  In an effort to keep you all coming back more often to read my blog, I’ve decided to cook and blog a recipe or two each week.  And there will be pictures of the tastiness, pictures galore.  Mike might get mad that I delay dinner by 5-10 minutes to artfully prepare each dish and photograph it, but my favorite saying fits well here: “He who doesn’t cook, can’t complain”.

Cooking for two is one of the hardest things ever!  I came from a family of four, and Mike came from a family of five.  Even meshing the two radically different opinions of what makes a “dinner” is difficult!  Mike grew up with salads at every meal, protein, and usually a small amount of grains(I can only speak for him so much until he nags that I’m putting words in his mouth).  I grew up in the midwest where meat and grains were KING.  Every fall we would split a cow between my family, my paternal grandparents, and Aunt Karen (dad’s sister).  We had deep freezers in our basements that could hold massive amounts of meat.  PS – they also could hide the sump pump behind them, and the Christmas gifts were always hidden back there too!  It took us 30+ years to get mom to divulge this info, but I have succeeded!  My mom would send me down to the deep freezer to grab some bag of meaty mysteriousness most days.  Our family never got the joys of the lesser known parts of beef, those went to Grandma and Grandpa!  Then she would turn to her most trusted recipe book and make a dinner, relying on the meat to be the centerpiece of the table.  She added bread or rice, and yes, usually a vegetable.  Most of them came from cans in the winter, but were fresh when the seasons allow.

Needless to say, Mike and I grew up eating dinner differently, which is usual for most couples.  The one thing I’ve learned from him is to find out how he likes to eat and try and add that to my repertoire.  It’s been a struggle for me as I love anything with carbs.  I could live on bread alone for the rest of my life, and Mike could live on meat alone.

Hopefully some of my recipes will help you out.  And even if you’ve been married for years or are single and loving life, maybe I’ll give you some great ideas too!

Madelines. A spell checkers’ worst nightmare.  Fluffy, delicate cookies perfect for a baby shower.  Or for a Tuesday afternoon.  In college I dated a guy whose mother was from France.  She moved here in college and has been here ever since.  I am always regretful I don’t keep in touch with her, as she was an amazing cook.  I imagine it’s like being Julia Child, but backwards (being born in France and moving to the US).  She lived in Santa Monica in the most adorable house with a fantastic garden, and made the most wonderful madelines.  She also made brussel sprouts to die for (I never ate one before her, and probably won’t ever eat another) and fed us cheese and baguettes with wine.  If we were still in touch I would ask for her recipe, but I found my own after she left my life.

First thing you will need to make these scrumptious cookies is a special madeline pan.  Mine is identical to this one.  Expensive, but always releases my cookies with only using non-stick cooking spray.  I admit my madelines don’t look like the ones Simone made, but they are close, and they taste identical.

Good thing Mike doesn’t like sweets, I can have them all to myself and languish that I never kept in touch with Simone.  And I’ll post the dinner I’m making tonight on the blog tomorrow!

Madeline Recipe – source unknown

1/2 cup sugar

2 large eggs

4 ounces butter, melted

3/4 teaspoon baking powder

3/4 cup all purpose flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

Preheat over to 375.  Beat sugar and eggs together until thoroughly blended.  Add melted butter and mix to blend.  Sift together dry ingredients and add all at once to egg mixture.  Stir just until blended.  Allow mix to sit at room temperature for 10 minutes.  While mix is resting load your dishwasher and also spray madeline pan with non-stick cooking spray.  Spoon mix into molds, filling approximately 3/4 full.  Bake for 15 minutes, or until edges are golden brown.  Turn over onto a wire cooling rack.  Wipe out mold, re-spray and fill again until all the mix has been used.  Eat slightly warm or store in an airtight container.

Ceremony:  Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Reception:  Little America

Flowers:  Splendid Things

Cake:  Bamboo Bakery

Photography:  Kate Wall Photography

DJ:  It’s Your Party Entertainment

Ceremony: Merry Go Round, Sedona
Officiant: Heart of Sedona Weddings
Photography: Kate Wall Photography

On Friday June 4th it was a sweltering 112 in Phoenix.  In Las Vegas, it was 105.  Randy and Tiffany had traveled to Vegas to have the wedding of their dreams.  I met Tiffany at the bridal show in January.  She had told me that I was the most personable photographer there and I was the only person she called!  The wedding and reception was held at Canyon Gate Country Club, which was wonderful.

I love this photo of Tiffany and Randy:

I had a wedding in Vegas last Friday and had the chance to drive across the Hoover Dam on the way.  My mom came with me on the trip, so we stopped and went on the dam tour.  This is the new dam bypass bridge they are building.  It will be completed in September with the first traffic driving across it in November.  Building this must have been scary with that 800 foot drop to the river below!  This was on the first stop along the tour inside the dam.  This is the main pen stock tunnel on the Nevada side of the dam.  You could feel the water rushing under your feet while in this room.

It was also a fallout shelter.  They thought of everything while building the hoover dam.

And if the water pen stocks break and flood the room, the door starts to close to give people inside time to run out screaming.

Security has improved since 9/11 and much of the dam is closed to tourists.  They had to install gates everywhere.  My dad went on the tour in the 80′s when out here for work, so he actually got to see a lot more of the dam than we did, even though we went on the “same” tour.  He got the actual Clark Griswald tour.

Subway tile is 30′s art deco, and is everywhere inside the dam.

The built the dam with tourists in mind and had terrazo granite installed throughout the entire work area of the dam!  They said back then it only cost .48 per square foot which was $53,000.  Today it would cost more than $20 per square foot.  It was a huge deal to have such nice floors and designs:

This had to be my favorite part of the tour.  We got to walk down this tunnel (which we had to hunch over in because it was only 5 feet tall), over a metal grate 4 feet long with a drop of, oh, all the way to the bottom of the dam, and look out the metal grate!  It was so neat!

All the corridors are curved, just like the dam:

The way they measure seismic activity in the dam is through these cement sections.  A starts on the Arizona side, and Z ends on the Nevada side.  Each section was something like 30 feet long.  The metal points in the wall were measured to see how much the dam moves, and they still do this everyday!  This part of the dam had the most movement.  The original P and Q were above the current P and Q.  They had moved up 9 inches and apart 2 inches.  They secured the gap with a steel bar.  Makes you feel safe?

Back before we had computers the engineers would write on the walls to document how much the dam was moving.  You could see their arithmetic everywhere!

The reason they check the dam for movement everyday:

In the end, this extended tour was worth the money, but I wish I could have seen more.  Or have gotten to climb on this staircase more:

This staircase goes from the top of the dam on the Arizona side and continues all the way to the bottom at the Nevada side!  They call it the stairway to heaven, but really, the stairway to NOWHERE.  They workers would have to descend the stairs backwards since they are so steep!  If you ever get the chance to tour the Hoover Dam, I would!  It was neat seeing how the dam was built and how smart the engineers and architects were in the 1920′s!

I found this beauty at Goodwill last Friday!  It was in terrible condition as far as paint, scratches, dings, and grime.  It was even missing 3 out of 6 handles.  They had the drawers tied up with garbage bags so you could open them.  Here is the before photo:

You can see it has classic lines that are beautiful, but it wasn’t much to look at.  I knew I could sand the dresser down to the original wood and refinish it.  I was originally looking for a dresser to become a vanity in our guest bathroom, but after discussing the project with my dad, he talked me out of it.  So I knew I’d end up selling this dresser once I was done.

I finished today by putting on the knobs I decided to go with.  Of course it couldn’t be easy, I had to drill the holes to be slightly larger than they were.  I’m debating on antiquing the edges on the drawers, where the gold was before.  But I can’t decide.

I’m having a hard time parting with it after putting so much love into it!  But I know it will fetch more than I paid for it, and the dresser will be “just” what someone else is looking for.  But still, why can’t it stay right here in my kitchen?  It makes the perfect place to display the lead crystal decanter I adore.

I decided this year to try and grow a few veggies on my back porch in containers.  I have a basil pant that grows insanely fast and as already had to be pruned twice!  I froze the first batch and the second batch is waiting for dinner – basil vinaigrette!  The other plants only look so-so and hopefully survive my first attempt at gardening!  I planted 8 tiny yellow squash plants a few weeks ago, and they’ve been looking terrible!  But this morning I woke up to find a flower on one:

They must be much healthier than I thought.  Maybe the leaves start to die back as the plant flowers?  Either way, I’m happy to see they are at least flowering.  I’ll need to read up on hand pollination since I don’t know if they’ll be large enough to self pollinate.

The other surprise I had this spring were snap dragons!  I had planted a few last year in the spring, and they went to seed before I could  remove them.  Then this spring, there are flowers all over the side of my yard!  I think I am going to let them all go to seed again so I can continue the lovely cycle.  I just need to remember next spring that all the “weeds” aren’t weeds, they are flowers.  I pulled them all up in March, thinking they were weeds.  Thankfully we had enough rain that they came back large enough so I knew they were flowers.  The colors seems to have combined on me, and I have all sorts of new colors that weren’t on the original plants last year.  I love this one, and hope I get more like it:

Enjoy your long weekend!

On May 1st, Jeremy and Nikki and their entire families headed to Sedona.  The day started out at The Hilton salon for Nikki where she had her hair and makeup done.  She was so giddy she could barely sit still.  Then after heading to the Sedona Golf Resort across the street, Nikki had her veil put on by her mom.  This was the same veil that her mother wore when she got married, and I love how Nikki is sticking out her tongue and grinning:

Nikki’s dad walked her down the aisle, and I caught this shot with all the men guests photographing her as she walked in:

This little guy stole the show on cuteness for me:

Throughout the entire ceremony, which was performed by Rev. Andrew, Nikki bounced and smiled.  I knew she couldn’t wait for it to be over:

Afterwards we had some portrait time with just the three of us:

Nikki had to show off her converse:

So I made them play with the umbrellas:

This backdrop is always so awe-inspiring!

Normally I have pretty tame grooms who never smoosh the cake into their bride’s face.  But not this time!  Nikki is calmly picking up her cake and is intently focused on it, and Jeremy, well the look on his face says it all:

Poor Nikki:

But she recovered nicely and planted her piece of cake into his face:

I always love shooting in Sedona, and this wedding was exceptionally fun!  Best of luck to Nikki and Jeremy!