perks.

After two weeks we are fully moved out. It feels sooo good. Conference today was so wonderful. I love conference, it's like a holiday for me. I'm sad it's already over. cannot wait till October conference. We've been at the Ryttings for two weeks now and we've been having lots of fun :) There are some major perks with living where we do. We got to enjoy two of them last weekend:

This lovely is basically our backyard. we are so grateful. so much fun. We spent some time here Sunday afternoon, playing frisbee and lounging around. boy do we love the few blessed days of sun we've had so far! I wish they would come back.

perk number two. we now have access to a barbecue, something I'm really excited about. the extent of my grilling knowledge goes as far as an indoor grill pan, so it will be fun to use a real, outdoor grill. Last Saturday we grilled steaks and artichokes. mckay actually did the grilling and they turned out great for our first try :) it's a learning process. we also roasted sweet potato fries and made a salad. we cannot wait to keep grilling and enjoying the warm weather. hopefully sooner rather than later!

Happy Easter! We hope everyone had a great Easter and Conference Weekend!

Food for Thought

I am taking a little break from the current and crushing stress of a group project for my senior seminar to write a little post and relish in the fact that we are almost completely moved out!!! I say almost because there is a little bit left to be done, but...we have never been closer. I'm sitting here in the library reflecting back on the last two weeks and all its craziness and just thinking about how weird life is...it's weird to me that we can be so settled in our lovely apartment, then pick up everything we own and move, and within a short time so much is different, but life still continues, and then really I guess, a lot is still the same. Like Mckay's mustache, still the same. still there. maybe a little worse than last week but still there. I thought I would let it last through March, you know, "Mustache March", something I'm sure Mckay made up himself. But with April 1st just around the corner I'm not so sure I want to see it go, maybe I find his ugly mustache calming, and endearing, a source of stability in the midst of all this chaos. wow I'm tired. What a day. Can you tell I've been at the library for the last 3 hours?

ANYWAYS...on to the real reason I'm writing this post...this packing/moving/cleaning process has spanned the last two weeks and we have found ourselves back and forth between Provo and Orem almost daily. I'm not sure really why but dishes and silverware were one of the first things to get packed so we've often found ourselves in Provo, starving and with no way of eating. I cannot even guess how many Betos sausage breakfast burritos we have consumed but let me tell you its been A.LOT. Nothing like a burrito the size of your forearm and a pepsi to fill you up. We also took the opportunity to try a couple of restaurants in downtown Provo we haven't been to yet. 2 really. Diego's Taco Shop and Sammy's. so here's our review:

Diegos: (45 West 300 North)

Tasty. They have refried black beans, which we had never sampled, or knew existed, but felt good eating them, cuz somehow we feel refried black beans are healthier than normal refried beans. I got a Chile Relleno, which had raisins and olives in it, I never expected that but was pleasantly surprised at how good it was. I'm picky about my enchilada sauce, like really picky, and theirs made me happy. Mckay had some burrito with green sauce, which was also delicious. The inside of the restaurant was fun, there's a whole wall of flat screen tv's so we got to witness the horrors of dog fighting courtesy of Animal Planet, something I wouldnt want to watch ever, let alone while eating Mexican. Besides that fact we really enjoyed it!

Sammy's: (27 North 100 West)

oh boy did I love this place. Not only was it a perfect warm sunny day but the food was really good! I admit me and Mr. Rytting do enjoy a good burger and this place did not dissappoint. I cant remember what burger we got, but the main thing is they had sweet potato fries. Those did us in. And they have shakes, lots and lots of shakes, we were too full to try one but they have "pie shakes", we will definitely be going back for one of those. They even have HAPPY HOUR, where shakes are half off. Not a bad idea.

**photo's courtesy of the iphone.

We love finding and trying new places to eat, and it was fun trying one's so close to our home. We're always on the lookout for some place new to try so if anyone has recommendations please fill us in :)

On tHe MoVE

OUR life is in a current state of TRANSITION. or so Mckay calls it. I call it chaos. The Rytting's have moved, or are moving.... was moving earlier today, not so much right this second. I'm tired. Saturday we started the move out of our sweet and much beloved apartment in Provo where we have spent the last 2 years and have moved up to North Orem to live with Mckay's family. At this exact second our material lives are spread between Provo, our storage unit, and our new home. Like I said, Chaos. There was a time I couldn't find my deoderant... Anyways we don't have to be moved out until the 4th of April and with work and school we knew we would have to space it out over a couple of days, maybe weeks but wow would I love for this to be over already! There's nothing like moving to realize how much crap two people can accumulate. I think we've filled at least 6 bags designated for the DI.


So why the sudden move? There's a mountain of reasons most of which involve $$$.

Reason 1:

Ol' reliable Debbie is not so reliable anymore. Despite her pretty looks our sweet car has been a serious financial troublemaker. I've stopped looking at her as our getaway car for so many fun trips and now see her as a bottomless black pit that we keep throwing money into. We have spent literally THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS of dollars over the last few years trying to maintain her, so needless to say we need a new car. Now money that was spent on rent will go towards a new car.

Reason #2: School. We are finally seeing the light at the end of a very long tunnel that is the Chemical Engineering Degree. This major is so intense poor husband hardly has anytime to work, now he has to worry about publishing and research on top of school work and later this summer he will be applying to grad schools. So now there's less financial stress and we can start saving for grad school..... being an adult is hard sometimes.

So thats whats new in Ryttingland. We are so grateful to be able to stay with family, its going to help out so much. Hopefully it lasts....we moved in with Mckay's family the first year we were married and I only lasted 2 1/2 months, I just love having our own little place to take care of.

Other than the move the only new bit of news is Mckay's mustache, which I really should get a picture of. That too might not last. I'm tempted to shave it off while he sleeps...

March so far...

The morning after Adam came home we woke up to find this outside:

inches and inches of snow that was so unbelievably pretty but my goodness am I sick of this stuff! We Ryttings are getting so antsy for Spring.

With the family all together, except brother in Australia, we made our way up last weekend to Pei Wei, where we definitely did some damage. I think we ordered about 12 dishes and I'm proud to say we cleared each one of them.

After Pei Wei we headed up to the Jazz game....

Last minute tickets meant we watched the game from here:

Which is fine, but I'll be honest we were so high I was getting dizzy. Nothing some banana split dip n' dots couldn't fix. :) by the way what are dip n'dots? I hadn't had them in years and they are such a curious thing. strange but kind of tasty.

This Friday our sweet brother Chrissy turned 18. To celebrate we headed up to a family favorite in Midway.

If you love Mexican food you have to try this place it's authentic and oh so tasty. We've come here so many times and I have never had anything I didn't like. They have a salsa bar, a major perk. If you ever decide to give it a try feel free to invite us along :)

Happy Birthday Chris! (we missed you Mairin!)

I made some minor changes to our blog in celebration of the upcoming holiday. basically just changed the color scheme. but Happy St. Patty's Day :)

brother.

brother is home from the Netherlands. We are so excited.

shhhh.....it's a qUiEt BooK...

I've been crafting lately. I'm currently on a self imposed break because the laundry wasnt getting put away, dishes weren't being unloaded, ect. etc. I started this project 110% aware of the fact that we currently don't have kids to even play with it when it's done. And even if we did have a kid it would still be a while until they could start to understand the activities in the book. But regardless of this I have been working on this quiet book almost daily. I don't know what it its, maybe it's that I spend all my Sundays in Nursery-land, and lots of time towards running our little ward nursery, but all I seem to want to do lately are kids crafts. I was seeing ideas for Quiet Books all over the craft-blog world so in December I finally attempted one of my own. I'm justifying my kid crafting while currently "kid-less" by knowing that I'm sure I would never be able to find time to start, let alone finish this when we eventually do have children. And anyways its fun. It's something to do while we're watching a movie or Mckay's playing the boring Nintendo :)

There are a million different kinds of quiet books to make, and I plan on making more but for this one I'm optimistically planning on an alphabet book, each letter has a page with some sort of activity to go along with it. Here's how far I've gotten:

A: Apples- the apples will eventually be buttoned to the tree, this will help our kids to learn the basic motor skill of unbuttoning. so...unbutton the apples, put them in the basket.

B-Balloons, each balloon has a double that is sewn to the page, the balloons velcro on , so the kids will learn to match colors.

C-Catepillar, the individual circles are velcroed to the page, this will help them learn to count. take all the circles off and have them put them back in order. basic basic.
D-Dominos. I had a hard time deciding what to do for D but finally decided to do dominos because Mckay played with them when he was little. This will help with learning numbers and colors when they have to match the ends of the dominos, these are also velcro-ed to the page.
E-elephant. This was unfinished when i took the picture. just imagine a big box that says "elephant food" in the right hand corner filled with hand sewn peanuts and heads of lettuce. This is another page to help with counting...."feed the elephant 3 peanuts and 2 salads..." easy

F-farm. This page is quite possibly my favorite so far. My mom is over achievement days and she was talking to me one day about wanting to make finger puppets. I found a shop on etsy where she makes felt finger puppets. $5 dollars for each... no thanks, so I made some myself, very far from perfect but still so fun to make :)

eventually the pages will have letters on them. I don't know much about sewing, so I've just been hand stitching everything and sort of making things up as I go. 6 pages down....20 to go... hopefully it gets finished :)

some tasty chicken

I have to save this recipe, it was so good. I have a habit of losing recipes in the random piles of papers around our house. If I blog it, I know I can find it.

This recipe came together kind of randomly. I was looking through the cupboard for something to make for dinner and realized we have like 4 different containers of macadamia nuts. I'm not sure where they all came from exactly but I think it was a combination of Hawaii and Christmas. My mom gives us nuts in our stockings....Anyways, I know they'll never get eaten unless I make something out of them, hence:

Macadamia Nut Chicken with Mango-Pineapple Relish (like brother Chris said this sounds exotic but its actually really simple)
~adapted from Coastal Living via Noble Pig

1/2 Cup soy sauce
1 1/2 Tablepoons brown Sugar
1 Tablespoon Mirin (Japanese rice wine,) ~ we didnt use this
1 teaspoon minced ginger
1 garlic clove, minced
5 Tablespoons olive oil, divided
4 skinless, boneless chicken breasts - I cut each one in half for 8 pieces
salt and pepper
1 cup macadamia nuts, finely chopped
3/4 cup panko (Japanese bread crumbs) ~ we just used normal bread crumbs but panko is so good
2/3 cup flour
3 large eggs, lightly beaten
2 Tablesppons butter

Relish:
1 cup mango or papaya, diced
1 cup fresh pineapple, diced
1/3 cup sugar

Whisk together soy sauce, brown sugar, ginger, garlic and 1 Tablespoon olive oil. Sprinkle chicken with salt and pepper and place in a large heavy duty zip lock bag. pour marinade over chicken, seal and let marinate for at least an hour.

Meanwhile combine mango, pineapple and sugar in a medium heavy saucepan. bring to a boil, stirring constantly; reduce heat and simmer, uncovered 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Combine macadamia nuts and panko in a shallow dish. place flour in a seperate shallow dish; place eggs in another shallow dish.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. remove chicken from marinade. dredge chicken in flour, and dip in eggs, shaking off excess. dredge in crumb mixture.

heat 2 Tablespoons oil and 1 Tablespoon butter in a large skillet over medium heat until butter melts. cook the chicken breasts over medium heat for 2 minutes; turn and cook 3 minutes or until golden. transfer the chicken to a lightly greased cookie sheet.

Bake at 400 degrees for 17 minutes (our chicken were in smaller pieces so they didnt take that long, i just had to check when they were done). serve with mango-pineapple relish.

This dish was really good, at least Im guessing it was since brother Chrissy ate 5 pieces, leaving me with only one :) it tasted like Chicken teriyaki. The macadamia nuts make it really crunchy and the fruit relish made it taste kinda tropical. it was a really fun meal to have when the weather was so gross.

A long time comin'

I have been wanting to go to the Melting Pot for Forever. We've been talking about going ever since we were engaged. And for my birthday Mckay surprised me and we finally got to go! We had so much fun and everything was sooo tasty! After every course I would be so full and swear I couldnt eat anymore, but I would somehow manage to keep eating, and eating, and eating. I dont think I've ever been so full in my life. It seriously filled me up for like a week, which is a good thing because this dinner cost about that much in groceries.
photos courtesy of Mckays phone:

playing with rocks

Mckay got some climbing gear for his birthday and its been such a fun new hobby for him. He hasn't been able to go much with school and work but he's been able to fit in a couple of trips. Last weekend I tagged along with him and Janson on a little climbing adventure. I say adventure because other than a short climbing trip last fall I havent really been climbing since High School, and lets be honest I know I'm a sissy and I wasn't too excited to make it known to everyone in the gym. We bouldered for a little while and I followed the boys around with the camera.

Then it was my turn. After the first wall my arms felt like jelly, but I'm proud to say I went on to climb three more walls.

We had sooo much fun! It reminded me how addicting climbing can be. And although I walked away with Gumby arms, covered in chalk and smelling like feet I cannot wait to go again :)