Ah, Summer

So, it's been a while. :-)

June brought visitors from across the country (or at least half of it), involved two trips to Arkansas, and lots of 11 hour workdays for yours truly. Needless to say, blogging took a back seat, as did many other things. I was doing good to do Bible Study and laundry.

We did have a pretty fabulous time though. We got soaked after climbing to the top of Grandfather Mountain...

And got to be a part of our friends' wedding, catch up with old buddies, and enjoy a very long, but fun road trip.

We are now down to 9 1/2 days until we leave for Europe, a fact about which we are both EXTREMELY excited! In a way I feel a bit guilty about gallivanting off on a two and a half week vacation... Other than family vacations and our honeymoon, I don't think either of us have ever just gone on a vacation for the sake of just doing something fun -- it's always been work and mission trips of some sort. It's definitely going to be a different experience just doing what we want when we want to for fun. I'll save trip details for later, though.

We're also taking a mini-trip tomorrow to Richmond, VA, to see our friend Skyler play baseball on Richmond's minor league team, the Flying Squirrels. On top of that, our Sunday School class is going to see Winston-Salem's own fine minor league team, the Winston-Salem Dash (Yes, the Dash. What that's supposed to mean, no one is really sure...) next Friday, so that brings our total up to two baseball games in one week. That's more than I've been to in the last two years.

As for my cooking adventures, I decided tonight that it was time to get back to trying new recipes. This is what we ended up with.

Yeah.

So here's the tale of The Great Asparagus Catastrophe.

Last week I found a can of asparagus at the grocery store. Now I just discovered asparagus a couple of months ago. It's not my favorite vegetable in the world (I mean, really, can anything beat carrots??), but it definitely has been put on my list of things I can absolutely tolerate. So I thought to myself "Hmm. Asparagus isn't so bad. I bet it would be even better if I used it in some sort of casserole. You'd hardly be able to taste it then!" And I bought it. Mistake #1.

I then proceeded to search online for recipes using asparagus. I found one for Spring Turkey and Asparagus Pot Pie on pillsbury.com, usually a decently reliable source, and it called for - gasp! - exactly one can of asparagus. My lucky day, right? Not so much.

So I follow the recipe, and I notice as the sauce is cooking that it smells a little funny. But sometimes things change once they're fully cooked, so I ignored the smell. Plus, I hadn't added the magic asparagus yet, so anything was possible. Mistake #2.

I opened the can of asparagus. It pretty much made manure smell good. Why I proceeded from this point I'm not sure, but I was getting a pretty good idea that this was not going to turn out well. But maybe, just maybe, I thought, it would all turn out okay when put together and cooked. I mean, it had good online reviews. That had to mean something. Mistake #3.

Yeah, so you can guess the end of the story. Eric and I each took one bite and had to keep ourselves from gagging. Once we recovered from the trauma, pizza was ordered, and we even got free Cinna Stix thrown in, so it ended up being a pretty delicious meal. :-)

Maybe when we're in France I can take cooking lessons at Le Cordon Bleu. Or I'll just hire a chef....