Potato Lovers-Great cold weather recipe

So I've been CRAVING potato soup for weeks now and last night we made a late night trip to Walmart and decided to get some ingredients to make this stuff!! SOOOOO GOOD!!!!!!!

The recipe seems pretty popular because you don't use heavy whipping cream. Apparently a lot of other potato soup recipes use heavy whipping cream. Here is the recipe we used and a few things we changed:

Crock Pot Potato Soup Recipe:

5 lbs of red potatoes NOT peeled diced into 1/2 inch cubes(We used red potatoes) 
1 large yellow onion
10 cloves of garlic, whole
8 cups of chicken stock
16 oz. of cream cheese (We used 8 oz of regular and 8 oz of lowfat)
1 tbs of all purpose seasoning. We used Nature's Seasoning.

Optional garnishes:
Crumbled bacon
Shredded cheese
Green onions

Directions:

Add potatoes, onion, garlic, seasoning and chicken stock to crock pot. 


Cook on high for 6 hours or on low for 10 hours. We cooked it on low for 10 hours. We put it on about 3 a.m. in the morning and it was ready by the time we got home from church. Perfect Sunday meal! We love walking in to something yummy cooking!! : )


Remove and puree (We used our Ninja blender) the garlic cloves along with 1/2 of the soup and then reintroduce it to the remainder in the crock pot. If you would rather have more chunky potatoes than pureed soup, take out less of the soup to puree or vice versa. 


Stir in the cream cheese and allow to melt (You can even put all of the cream cheese in the blender with the 1/2 cup of soup you removed. Then your soup will be ready quicker). Stir every 10-15 minutes until soup is well blended. 

Top your soup with your choice of garnishes and serve! 

This stuff was SOOOOO good and easy! Hope you try it out. It really is the perfect cold weather recipe. Too bad it's 80 degrees here in Texas, but we're staying hopeful! 


          ~Nat

REESE'S FAN??

It was my dad's birthday on Tuesday November 8th, so Spence and I made him a cake the night before. The decision was easy. His favorite candy is Reese's  peanut butter cups so what would be better than a heavenly Reese's cake coated with a light peanut butter icing?!!? Let me tell you, this thing is to die for. No, literally. After one piece of this baby you really feel like you are going to die. Strangely enough that won't stop you from eating a second or a third . ; ) Are you ready for this??? Check out the recipe below:


For the cake part I just used a box of this stuff (I'm glad I chose dark chocolate fudge instead of just devils food. I think the dark chocolate was WAY better with the peanut butter.) :

For the icing I made 3X as much as the recipe called for because I wanted to do layers in the cake and put icing between each layer.

THE Peanut Butter deliciousness: (one batch)
1 cup of powdered sugar
1 cup of creamy peanut butter
5 tablespoons of unsalted butter (room temperature)
3/4 teaspoon of vanilla extract
1/3 teaspoon of salt
1/3 cup of whipping cream

Mix powered sugar, peanut butter, unsalted butter, vanilla extract, and salt. Mix it on low until it is smooth (probably a good 2 minutes or so). Once texture is creamy and has an even consistency add the whipping cream and beat until light a fluffy. SO EASY!

This peanut butter icing is so addicting it should be illegal! I will FOREVER avoid trying to figure out the amount of calories that is in one spoonful of this heavenly mess.


After I finished the icing I layered the cake (3 layers) with icing between each layer. Then I iced the entire cake. 

Then Spence cut miniature Reese's peanut butter cups in half to decorate the outside of the cake. I chopped some up to sprinkle on the top.

Here's the finished product!!

Spence and I found these HUGE (SIZE 20!!!!) shoes at Ross. We laughed at them for a good 10 minutes. They were marked down to $5 so we HAD to buy them! The laugh was definitely worth the $5! My dad actually wore them around the house for the next hour. haha.

Testing his shoes out...

haha....this is his size 12 shoe next to the size 20.

Checking out his new watch!

Happy birthday Dad!! Thanks for everything you do!!! Love you!!

SO YUMMMYYYYYYY!!

Thanks for following!!

          ~Nat

Halloween!!!!!!

On Saturday before Halloween Spence and I went to our ward Halloween party (what we made the worms from the previous post for). We dressed up and got there late (Our life story, or should I say mine. Sorry Spence.) but wanted to get pictures with our little nursery kids from church. Before we left we had to take pictures of ourselves. Like my roommates and I had done for the last 4 years up at Texas A&M, it was only right that Spence and I carried out that tradition. Here are some pics:

WARNING: If you are in a public area where you shouldn't make lots of noise, I advise you NOT to view the following pictures. May cause lots of laughter.

This is what Spence has been wanting to do for the last year or so. He bought paint and tried it out last year but we ended up being a matching pirate couple instead. So this year, his dreams came true. ENJOY.

I just wore my bee costume I wore a few years back. It was cute and easy.

I swear he looks like Michael Jackson (before surgery) here. Everybody loved Spencer's costume. The only way people would recognize him was if he was standing next to me. : )

Then after a few car issues we made it to the Halloween party and got pictures with some of our kids! We didn't get pictures with all of them but here are some of those cuties!! Cute Snow White !!I think the kids were kind of scared of Spencer. haha

This was on the table where they were serving dinner. Kinda grossed me out.

More pics with our kids:

This is one of our 3 year old nursery kids. He will move to Primary in January with the big kids. He told us about his Spiderman costume for Halloween on Sunday, so we had to find him and get a picture.

This little girl's parents were mine and Spencer's seminary teachers freshman year in High School. She's one cute Cinderella!

Iron Man!! His brother made his helmet out of card board. Pretty impressive!

We hunt them down to get a picture. Cutest ice cream cones I've EVER seen!! She bought Hope's little costume and made her own! Pretty ridiculous!

After the party we went home and changed. Spencer showered because the paint on his face was making him crazzzyyyy! Then we went over to my parents for pumpkin carving and watched the old school Halloween movie on AMC. Those are pretty freaky, and also SO unrealistic. 

We had a great Halloween!! On Monday (Halloween day) we celebrated by a day at work. Then instead of trick-or-treating and getting candy, we went to the gym and worked out. That's how you do it people!! I love the holidays. I can't wait for Thanksgiving!!!! 

          ~Nat

Creeppyy

Saturday, October 29th we had our ward Halloween party. We were excited to go see all of our little nursery kids dressed in their costumes. We were in charge of bringing a dessert. Below is the recipe and steps to creating the perfect cReEpY, CrAWLy Halloween dessert. Enjoy! 

Here are the ingredients you will need:

     2 packs of raspberry jello (3oz.)                3/4 cups of whipping cream

     3 cups of boiling water                             15 drops of green food coloring

     100 flexible straws                                   Tall container to hold your straws tight

Combine jello and boiling water in a bowl.

Let it cool until it's lukewarm and add the whipping cream and green food coloring.

Gather your straws. Make sure you flex them all out. Then put them in your tall container and make sure it's a tight fit. If your container is too big you can tie a rubber band around the straws to make them tight.

Add jello mixture to straws and let it sit until firm. We put ours in the refrigerator so it would speed up the process.

In the meantime we made chocolate pudding (mud) and crushed oreos (dirt) in our Ninja blender. Spencer is pretty proud of our Ninja. I'm not going to lie, it has been a pretty awesome investment. We have been impressed with it for the 5 months we have owned it. 

A couple of hours later we got the straws out of the refrigerator. We tried a couple of ways of getting the "worms" out without crushing or tearing them. We found that the best way to get them out was to squeeze them out into the pre-made cups of mud and dirt.

Here they are on the table at the ward party!!! Aren't they kinda creepy? We kept one in the refrigerator for us and we ended up throwing it out yesterday because it was grossing us out. haha...Mission accomplished! : )

You'll have to try them next year! Thanks for following.

        ~Nat