Chicken pocket pies

Today, boyfriend and I made one of our freezer meals while watching the Huskers. Miniature chicken pot pies. It took a little bit of work, but I think it will totally be worth it. I know the one week I had IRB documents due, we depended heavily on our homemade freezer meals.

The filling I made

Nate was much better at rolling out the dough and filling the pies than I was 

End result :)

Mustache Friends

Well, it's Sunday evening and the football games are winding down. As we await tonight's episode of The Amazing Race, I thought I would share a little bit about our weekend. It was eventful, relaxing, fun, tiring, and memorable. First of all, we got our new iPhones :-) they're the new 4s version. they're super cool, but the fact that we have Sprint out in the middle of nowhere means that we won't be able to use all the features all the time. AKA, our cell service sucks here. Here's Kathryn's, she got white, I got black.

So that's cool. But most notably for the weekend, our wonderful friends Katie D and Jason T came to visit us from Omaha. It was so nice having the familiar faces around. While our time thus far in Grand Island has been nice, it was a real treat to have a little bit of "home" around for a while. K&J came in on Friday evening and we took them to one of our new favorites in GI, the Wave Pizza Company. They make all kinds of specialty pizzas and sandwiches.

Then we went home and played some games. We called it a night kind of early. This was for two reasons:
1) We're getting kind of old.
2) We had an early morning of fun adventures planned.

At 7:30 am Saturday, we met up with Megan and Susan (co-residents at the VA) and the 6 of us headed to Kearney. We were participating in an event called HeartChase, held on the UNK campus. HeartChase is an event sponsored by the American Heart Association and is designed to raise money and awareness for cardiovascular health and research. Below is a video explaining a little bit about it.

HeartChase – Get Your Game On! from Non-profit LBM on Vimeo.

Our team was "The 'StachePack", and we set our selves apart by wearing some very stylish mustaches throughout the event.

The day consisted of running (literally) around campus looking for hidden point-cards and completing group and individual challenges. The organizers describe it as a cross between The Amazing Race and Minute to Win It. We had to use our smartphones to follow the map and find the different stations. We also had to use or phones to scan the point-cards. Our new iPhones came in quite handy :-).

We had a lot of fun, but we did not win :-( Oh well. After a quick stop at the Kearney Target, it was time to head home and relax in front of the Husker game. In the evening, our visiting chef, Jason, was busy in the kitchen cooking us a wonderful dinner of cherry and red wine glazed pork chops, asparagus, and smashed garlic new potatoes. It was a long process, but delicious and definitely worth the wait.
On Sunday, I (Nate) was busy in the kitchen making pancakes, baking sugar cookies and grilling hamburgers. Kathryn and Katie went for a walk at our favorite local lake/park, while Jason and I stayed home and talked fantasy football strategy.

Well our friends have headed back to Omaha, and The Amazing Race has just started, so I'm going to say goodbye. I think Cheddar is glad that all the activity is dying down. She, and We, will sleep well tonight.

GI Happenings

Well, I decided to take a break from writing about our honeymoon to let ya'll know what we've been up to out here in GI. We have been having great weather these last few days and I have been trying to soak it all up before it's freezing cold. So one day last week Nate and I went out to a nearby lake (or pond) to do some geocaching.

Nate looking for a geocache

Found it!

We also bought a bird feeder for the cat this weekend. Yup that's right, the purpose isn't to feed the birds, though that will occur as well, but to occupy Cheddar. We're trying to keep the kitty entertained while we are at work all day. I thought she might be getting bored since it's a smaller house to roam and less people to keep track of. Therefore, she gets a bird feeder, with hopes of having birds to watch. :)

One of our gifts I received at my bridal shower was a tool to make beer chicken. Since the weather was nice this weekend, we decided to try it out. So I googled a recipe and we gave it a shot. It turned out pretty well, but I think we need to turn the grill down a bit next time as the skin got quite crispy. :)

This weekend I also made my meal for freezer group. The other residents and I created a group where we each make a meal and then freeze it and exchange meals. I made mini meatloaves. They look nasty in the picture, but they sure smelled good!!! Hopefully they'll be edible, because this whole freezing thing is new to me.

Mini-meatloaves

All ready for the freezer

Nate decided he needed to make a peg board in the garage for all his tools. Of course, he had to go buy more tools to make this peg board to hold his tools :). See how that works everyone? But it was a good project and now everything is organized. I think he's sad the project is over.

Getting started on the peg board

Finished product

Up at the Crack of Dawn (actually before dawn)

Sunday morning we did an excursion that Nate was super excited about and what ended up being one of his favorite things that we did. We got up at 2am, that's right, 2 am, to be down in the lobby by 2:25 am. We decided to take a trip up to Mount Haleakala to watch the sunrise and then bike down the mountain. At 2:30 am the tour company picked us up in a van and we headed to their office area (back in the town where the airport is). On this excursion we met a nice couple from Denver who stayed at the same resort as us. They were a lot of fun and we enjoyed talked with them. Anyways, at the office area we ate muffins for breakfast and they hitched up a trailer with our bikes. They took us just below the summit - which is the best place to watch the sunrise.

It was very cold up there - about 32 degrees F

Luckily, we knew to bring sweats, a blanket from the resort,
and some sweat wind  suits from the biking company.

Below is an endangered plant that only grows on this volcano. Pretty cool! It has very shallow roots, so you're not allowed to walk around it. In this picture I am still on the path - so no worries. But we did see one tourist stepping around the plan, off the trail, and one of our tour guys went over to tell her to get off. The plant will bloom once (the big tall thing), and then it dies.

Before high-tech satellites, this place was the 2nd best place in the world for astronomical observation. At this point, we were at the peak of Haleakala (after watching the sunrise we piled back into the van and they took us to the summit).

After walking around on the summit for a while, we drove back down to about 6,000 feet to start our bike ride. If you're riding solo, you can start up on top, but it's very dangerous and people have died before. We wore some awesome, heavy-duty helmets.

We stopped to take some pictures along the way, and the tour guys instructed us how to pose and took our pictures :). Very nice of them.

Waiting for others to take their pictures

We stopped for lunch part of the way down - beautiful weather by this point

Susan, our friend from Denver, holding a chameleon

We were back to our resort by 1:00 pm, so we took a nap and chilled at the pool the rest of the day. For dinner we walked across the street to a place called Java & Jazz; it's a coffee shop by day and a restaurant at night.