Party like it's 2013!

2013 is here, and I have made no progress on my new year’s resolutions. I’ve had no time for new TV shows or angry birds. The dog doesn’t have any new outfits. I’ve actually moved backwards on resolution #2 and purposefully made new friends. Typical, make all these lofty resolutions and push them aside in less than a week.

I have been keeping busy and doing some really fun stuff. Baby Brother came up after Christmas and I hopefully kept him happy and entertained while he visited. We went ice skating, checked out some local record stores, took him up to the slopes for the first time and spent a night out on the town in Seattle.

He is now officially a snowboard addict and did so great on his first day up.

 

Roommate and I also rang in the New Year in style, and had a ton of fun meeting new people in the last hours of 2012 and the first of 2013.

 

I’ve spent a lot of time this week cooking, I’ve made chicken tortilla soup, chili, and apple cinnamon cupcakes with cinnamon cream cheese frosting. In the next week I’m planning on making beef enchiladas and chicken noodle soup, as well as a lemon blueberry baked oatmeal.

 

I’ve never made baked oatmeal before, but I came across the recipe and it looked too delicious not to try. I had never really made soup before, but after this week I think I’ll be making a lot more. It’s so simple and cheap and easily adaptable to whatever you have on hand and so delicious.

 

For the chicken tortilla soup, I used a Pioneer Woman recipe that my cousin made on Christmas Eve. Here’s a link to Ree’s recipe on her amazing blog that everyone should read.

http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2011/01/chicken-tortilla-soup/

 This soup is so easy. You basically just bake and then shred some chicken breasts then simmer the chicken and veggies in chicken stock for 45 minutes, adding in various spices, tomato paste, and black beans as you go along.

 I thought the absolute best part of this soup was the toppings. Here is mine with cheese, avocado, sour cream, salsa and corn tortillas.

 

The only change I made to this recipe was to bake the corn tortillas instead of frying them; equally delicious, less fattening. Roommate would tell you to eat the soup with Fritos. At first I didn’t get it then, I thought about it, corn tortillas, corn chips, not that far of a stretch.

This weekend we went out dancing with some super amazing people on Saturday then went and watched the Seahawks game with Twinsie, and her roommate on Sunday. Twinsie, is a really good friend of ours that is pretty much the same person as I am. She’s blonde, also loves giraffes, also understands how scary/evil birds are. She gets me J

 

This next week I’m really excited for my volleyball team’s end of the season tournament, and to go cheer the Seahawks on to another victory next weekend with Roommate, Twinsie and twinsies roommate, and whoever else ends up joining.

 

Go Hawks!