A Day of Celebration

IT IS FINISHED!  THE BATTLE IS OVER!!!!!!

Today, I graduated from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill!!!!

I could not be more excited!  After 4 long years of papers, exams, and more readings than I knew what to do with, I am finally finished.  In that time, I have lived in 4 different homes, 3 different cities, gone to 2 different universities, and walked away with 1 Bachelor's degree in Global Studies (and a minor in Arabic).  It was certainly a challenge, and I certainly enjoyed a lot of it, but I am very happy to finally finish that chapter of life.  I'm not sure where the future will take us, but I look forward to seeing what God has in store for us!  I also look forward to a lot more reading for pleasure, no more exams, learning for the fun of it...

Since I was not in Chapel Hill for graduation, we had a little graduation ceremony of our own here in Texas.  My in-laws all came to celebrate, and my nieces and nephews all got to be my classmates - they walked, received their diplomas, turned their tassels, and threw their caps!  On Saturday, I made construction paper caps for the kids, and a cardstock cap for myself.  They had yarn tassels, and the kids decorated the caps with stickers.  I also made little diplomas for each of them.  Jeff's brother-in-law also made this great Italian Cream Cake with blue icing - it was four layers of rich deliciousness!  Perfect with a cuppa tea :)

Before the ceremony this afternoon, we had a special lunch with diploma sandwiches (turkey and cheese rolled in a tortilla), and lots of fruits and veggies.  Then it was time for the ceremony!  We played "Pomp and Circumstance" (of course!) while my father-in-law (the acting Dean of Students) called out each name and presented each person with their diploma.  After we all got our diplomas, we turned our tassels and threw our caps in a fit of glee!  Then we got special graduation snacks - fruit roll up diplomas for the kids, and graduation cap chocolates (from Pinterest) for the grown-ups :)  My parents and sisters FaceTimed in to watch the ceremony, so even though they couldn't be there in person, they still got to celebrate with us.   And the super fun thing - my dress!  I just finished making it this week!  I'll post more about that later...

Today is also Mother's Day, which means I got to celebrate my wonderful mother.  Unfortunately, I couldn't be there to celebrate with her in person, so I sent her a gift instead and was FaceTimed in for the big reveal.  I made her a Grateful Jar, which is a jar filled with thank you notes so whenever she's feeling sad or unappreciated or missing her baby #2, she can pull one out and be reminded of how much I love her.  She loved it :)  I also got to celebrate my mother-in-law and my two sisters-in-law, all of them fantastic mothers who work tirelessly and selflessly for their families.

To be honest, this Mother's Day was bittersweet.  Sweet, because I got to celebrate all the wonderful mothers in my life (especially my own!) who have been such an encouragement to me.  Bitter, because I was painfully reminded that my first child would never be able to celebrate this day with me.  I would've been 22 weeks along today, over half way through. I read a blog post from Deeply Rooted magazine this week, and Allie Rasmussen wrote it beautifully:

We grieve deeply, but not “as others do who have no hope” (1 Thess. 4:13). We have hope to press on because we see His good gifts to us, even in our pain: our salvation, family members, His Body surrounding and comforting us. We have hope in knowing that this life never has the last word. Think of what awaits us that we do not yet see: God himself, along with the precious itty-bitty babies that we never got to hold or know. We have babies to miss but to rejoice in meeting someday, with the One who saved us from our sin and promises all will be made right and new. Author Timothy Keller writes, “If the death of Jesus Christ happened for us and he bore our hopelessness so that now we can have hope—and if the resurrection of Jesus Christ happened—then even the worst things will turn into the best things, and the greatest are yet to come.”

So today, I'm celebrating.  Celebrating the end of college, celebrating precious time with family, celebrating the women who pour out their lives to raise us and care for us, and I'm celebrating the hope I have in Christ that all will be made new.

One Year

One year ago...

The Marriage of Arianne Winston & Jeff Lott from Anna Lisa Stone on Vimeo.


...I married my best friend and the love of my life.  It's been a crazy year, filled with travels, new adventures, and a whole lotta growth, but it's been a fantastic journey so far!  So to celebrate our first year of marriage, Jeff got me flowers!

Some wonderful family members treated us to dinner as an anniversary gift as well, so we got to eat at a fancy local restaurant.  The food was great!

beef, onion, and goat cheese sliders

foie gras and brioche

glazed bacon - which was fantastic with the foie gras and the brioche!

Jeff's NY strip steak

green beans with toasted almonds

my filet mignon

The restaurant was pretty dark, so the pictures aren't as clear as I'd like.  But the food was tasty, and my date was pretty awesome too :)

my handsome date :)

And for fun, we got all dressed up in our wedding clothes to recreate one of our favorite wedding pictures.  Here's the original (photo taken by Matt Thompson):

...and here's this year's photo:

Sadly, no adorable nephew in the background :(  But not too shabby for a self timer!

All in all, it was a lovely anniversary.  On to year two!

Dumplings!!!

Tonight, my parents and younger sister came over to hang out and make dumplings from scratch!  I love dumplings, so this was pretty much the perfect meal for me.  They brought over the pork and vegetable filling that my dad and Helena made earlier this week when they were doing a test run.  Helena made the dough - using flour, salt, and water.  After waiting half an hour for the dough to rise, we cut it into little pieces and pressed them into circles.

Then Helena put a little filling in, sealed the edges, and formed the dumplings into crescent moon shapes.

We used a "triple boil" method - involving added very cold water to the boiling water (after putting the dumplings in) 3 times, and then put them in a frying pan to crisp up the bottoms.

Then it was time to dig in!  We made maybe 30-40 dumplings in smaller batches of 5 or 6 at a time, and they were delicious!

The process of making the dumplings takes a long time, although it is easier with a bunch of people helping, and not very difficult.  It was totally worth it!

Avocado Egg Salad

I'll admit it, I'm slightly completely obsessed with avocado right now.  I want it all the time.  I'm frequently looking for new ways to incorporate it into my meals.  I was so excited to find out that I could add guacamole to my bacon burgers at Burger King for 60 cents...

Anyways.  I was wasting some time on Pinterest a while back, and I found this recipe for avocado egg salad.  It looked yummy, so I pinned it for later.  Now, I'm not usually a big egg salad fan.  I think it's the mayonnaise... But since I've been craving avocado so much recently, I decided to give it a try.  Unfortunately, there are no pictures of my attempts at this recipe, because I inhaled it.

Here is the original recipe (you have to scroll down past the family photos).  I tweaked it a little bit since a) I didn't have the right spices and b) because I like to tweak recipes.  Instead of the curry or fenugreek powder, I used spicy Dijon mustard.  I also used a little less than 2 tablespoons of mayonnaise because the mustard was liquidy and I didn't want the whole thing to turn to mush.

Result: avocado egg salad for the win!  I didn't put it in a wrap because, well, I ate it too fast.  I couldn't wait long enough to mess with spooning it into the wrap.  It was delicious!  I have a feeling that this will become a regular snack for me...

(this is Ashley's picture from her blog post [link above] - it is most definitely as tasty as it looks!)

Homemade Vanilla Extract

Around Thanksgiving, I was admittedly wasting time on Pinterest looking through the DIY/Crafts category (something I do quite frequently, to be honest...), and I stumbled upon this cute picture for making labels for homemade vanilla extract.  I had no idea how vanilla extract was made, or that it could be made at home, so I began to research how to make vanilla extract.

The clearest instructions I found were on Beanilla, a website that sells vanilla beans and other cool stuff.  I decided that this was a really cool idea, so I talked to my dad about doing it for Christmas gifts.  He loved the idea!  So we began to look at cheap ways to get bottles and vanilla beans, since Beanilla was too expensive for our budget.  After more research, I found a seller (here) on eBay who sold vanilla beans for a lot less.  We ordered some Madagascar Bourbon beans, 12 glass bottles, and my dad brought back two bottles of bourbon from Kentucky.  We decided to use bourbon instead of vodka because we thought it would add a little depth and sweetness to the extract.  Plus it sounded cool :)

all you need is 3 ingredients - vanilla beans, a bottle, and bourbon (or brandy or vodka)

After everything arrived at the house, we got out the beans, split them into twelve groups of five beans each, and then cut them all lengthwise.

getting everything set out - had to try the bourbon first, of course!

separate the beans into groups of five

split lengthwise down the middle

The beans themselves are really small - they're the little black dots inside the pod.

tiny beans!

my dad, working on splitting the beans

We put them beans into the bottles, and then filled the bottles with bourbon.  Now, the extract has to sit for a while - at least 8 weeks - before it's ready for use.

tip - use a funnel.  less spillage.

at this point, it only smells like bourbon.

Our next step was to make the labels.  We were using my mother's Cricut and a ton of card stock to make our labels.  The Cricut, for those of you who don't know, is a die-cutting machine.  It's fantastic.  I love making cards with it.    We decided on a simpler design after a few test runs - a tag cut out of patterned card stock, and on top of it, the same-sized tag cut out of vellum with the label part printed on it.

the card stock for the background

cutting the vellum

the assembled tags

A couple weeks passed between the making of the extract and the labels, so the final product shown with the labels is much darker.

the final product!!! at this point, starting to smell a lot more like vanilla

The most complicated part in the end was making the tag - mostly because we had to print on the vellum exactly where the Cricut was going to cut.  Good thing I've got an engineer for a father... But all in all, it was a pretty simple project that was lots of fun.  Best of all - it's the gift that keeps on giving!  You can top it off with more alcohol as you run through it, and it will replenish itself.

Thanksgiving

... or عيد الشكر...

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays.  I mean, it involves a ton of really awesome food (pumpkin pie, need I say more?), being around family and friends, a long weekend off from school.... Thanksgiving also tends to be very different each year in my family, so it's always fun to think about how to out-do the previous year.  Last year, it was the invasion of the Brits.  My uncle (on my mum's side) was there, as well as one of my closest friends, Anna Lisa, and two other girls from Scotland who were all studying abroad in Georgia, and another good friend, Maya, who was in choir with me in Jordan.  Anna Lisa wrote a great post about it.

This year, it was shaping up to be very different.  My younger sister wasn't going to be there.  Until the week before, we thought it would be just 5 of us.  But then it changed a bit - I invited my Arabic professor, who brought her friend from Egypt with her, and my mum invited some colleagues from work, who were from Saudi Arabia.  By the time Thanksgiving day rolled around, it looked like there would be a lot of Arabic heard around the house.  I was pretty excited about it.

The real adventure though was in the cooking.  We had roughly 17 dishes that were prepared, some I didn't even know about until we were cleaning up...  I was in charge of 6 dishes, which probably won't happen again.  It was kind of crazy.  But the food was delicious!  We deep fried the turkey - it was perfect this time - and made some traditional dishes, like green bean casserole, sweet potatoes (with marshmallows of course), stuffing, and pumpkin pie.  Then we had had some more interesting dishes, like jalapeno poppers, whiskey-glazed carrots, potato and carrot cake, roasted parsnips, apple dumplings, lemon creme pie, pumpkin creme roll, tabbouleh  and grape and rosemary calzones.  Of course, I insisted on a number of Pioneer Woman recipes. I love her stuff.  Our guests brought some traditional Arab sweets and Arab coffee.

We only had maybe two major hiccups.  The first was around 11am, when I put the pumpkin pie into the oven.  After about 15 minutes, the oven decided it didn't want to play nice anymore, freaked out, and shut down.  So we fired up the grill outside to finish cooking the pie, but when we went to take it out of the oven, it locked.  My dad spent a few minutes trying to jail-break my pie, and eventually got it free.  It finished cooking just fine in the grill.  We gave the oven a few hours of time-out, and then it worked just fine for the rest of the day.  I was glad we weren't trying to cook the turkey in the oven.  The second snafu was a total blonde moment on my part.  I took the sweet potatoes out of the oven to check them, forgot that the glass top of the casserole dish had been in the oven for 40 minutes, and picked it up with my bare hand.  Yeah, it burned my thumb and three fingers.  I also may have thrown it across the kitchen when I realized I was getting burnt.  But it was very well made and didn't break.  Other than that, everything went smoothly!  The only thing that I'm sad about is that we forgot to get a group picture... We were having too much fun to think about it.  So, here are the few pictures I do have:

making the pumpkin desserts with my mamma

locked in!

jail-breaking the pie

turkey's done! 

...beautifully done!

pulling out the fine china 

what was left of the spread once I remembered to take pictures

Pioneer Woman's apple dumplings.

lemon creme pie

pumpkin creme roll

traditional Arab sweets

and pumpkin pie, of course!