Happy Easter!

Happy Easter, everyone!

After church we had a nice, quiet day at home. I meant to color eggs, but somehow never got around to it. But since D likes hardboiled eggs, anyway, there's nothing that says that I can't make them any time, right? :) To be fair, I only hatched (pardon the bad pun) the idea that I might like to color eggs last night after seeing Allison Kreft's post and pinboard.

Lucy at Craftberry Bush posted an image this morning that so beautifully captures the meaning of Easter.

And as for the awe and wonder of it all...well, this time-lapse video of Earth as seen from the ISS is at least a start at capturing that (thanks to Darren for passing it along!).


How great is our God.

i just geeked straight out

Two of my favorite YouTube channels are not, in fact, related to scrapbooking. They're actually music channels, one belonging to fab violinist Lindsey Stirling and the other featuring the cello-and-piano stylings of The Piano Guys.

I've been a bit behind on both lately, so when I discovered that last month the two collaborated on a video...yeah, I was giddy!

little culinary adventures

Lately both Darren and I have had wacky schedules that have made cooking and eating at home a bit of a...challenge. D is in the last semester of a graduate program in molecular microbiology (I know, right?!?) and is working lots and lots of hours in the lab to finish his thesis, and I've been, as I mentioned in my last post, traveling a lot for work.

We try not to eat out much, both because of the expense and because we can cook healthier meals at home, so our slow cooker has really been getting a workout lately. Our favorite recipe at the moment is Crock Pot Chicken Tacos because it's soooo easy, tasty, and good for you! The only problem is that I'm always forgetting to pick up a packet of taco seasoning when I'm at the grocery store, and I was kind of getting tired of needing those packets all the time, anyway!

Enter this recipe for homemade taco seasoning, along with a whole host of basic spices that I'm very happy to have on hand in bulk now, thanks to a trip to Sam's Club over the weekend. I already had several of the spices needed for the recipe, but some were in small quantities, and I knew that this was one recipe I needed to make en masse!

The original recipe stated that it was for 10 servings, but I'm not sure what they were calling a serving since it only really made a small amount of seasoning. I bumped that number up to 100 servings, which sounds insane but was really only 10x the original and made enough for a small bowl full.

It's all mixed up now, and whenever I make a slow cooker full of chicken tacos I just add three tablespoons of this lovely concoction. It's soooo yummy!

Another of our favorite slow cooker recipes is Crock Pot Red Beans and Rice, and over the weekend we chopped up enough veggies, garlic, and sausage to make four batches of it. We dumped those ingredients, along with some creole seasoning, into four gallon-size freezer bags, and now all we have to do to cook one up is pull it out of the freezer and add the contents + water + a bag of dried beans to the slow cooker and turn it on low. Easy, easy, easy! And easy is just what we need these days.

a trip to the aquarium

Last Saturday we took a trip to the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, and last Sunday I sat down and went through all the photos because I was tired of this blog being empty! I've been so caught up in work travel that getting my personal photos edited and blogged has kind of fallen by the wayside, but now that I'm home for a while I'm enjoying both getting out to do some fun stuff and the chance to enjoy those photos later. Though the doing stuff always comes first- I'd rather live life and be behind on photos rather than be caught up on photos and have nothing new to experience! Which explains why my Christmas photos are still unblogged. :) They're coming, though!

So, the aquarium. We've had a membership here on and off since we were in college and try to go several times a year when we do. This particular time our trip was spurred by a Groupon I purchased a few months ago to one of our favorite places to eat- Cheeburger Cheeburger- that's just a short walk from the aquarium's entrance. We took a leisurely morning at home working on a few projects and then left in time to arrive in Chattanooga just in time for lunch.

Mmmm, lunch! This was Darren's burger, with Caribbean Jerk seasoning and banana peppers.

And a basket of mixed fries/onion rings to share. So yummy!

For some reason the aquarium was packed on this particular Saturday. We're used to Saturdays being a little busy there, but with this being a non-holiday and non-event weekend, even the aquarium's staff was puzzled by the sheer volume of people! It made it a little hard to take photos with so many others around, but we got our cameras in where we could (yes, D brought his along this time, too!).