Oh the Joys of Baking.

I have been meaning to make bread for a while now and I finally got the opportunity to make some today. I didn't have school this morning and I didn't have work until 1. (Leisy, are you still looking for a bread recipe? Because I am going to post this one just in case.) This recipe is from the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book.
Whole Wheat Bread:
3 to 3 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 pkg of active dry yeast
1 3/4 cups water
1/3 cup packed brown sugar
3 tablespoons butter, margarine, or shorting
1 1/4 teaspoons of salt
2 cups whole wheat flour

1. In a large mixing bowl combine 2 cups of all-purpose flour and the yeast; set aside. In a medium size saucepan heat and stir water, brown sugar, butter and salt just until warm (120-130 degrees F) and butter almost melts. Add water mixture to flour mixture. Beat with an electric mixer on low to medium speed for 30 seconds, scraping sides of bowl constantly. Beat on high speed for 3 minutes. Using a wooden spoon, stir in whole wheat flour and as much of the remaining all-purpose flour as you can.
2. Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface. Knead in enough of the remaining all purpose flour to make a moderately stiff dough that is smooth and elastic (6 to 8 minutes total). Shape dough into a ball. Place in a lightly greased bowl, turning once to grease surface of dough. Cover; let rise in a warm place until double in size (1 to 1 1/2 hours).
3. Punch dough down (punch down the dough by pushing your fist into its center, then using your fingers to pull the dough edges to the center). Turn out onto a lightly floured surface; divide in half. Cover; let rest 10 minutes. Meanwhile, lightly grease two 8x4x2in pans.
4. Shape dough halves into loaves by patting or rolling. To shape by patting, gently pat and pinch, tucking edges underneath. To shape by rolling, on a lightly floured surface roll each dough half into a 12x8 in rectangle. Roll up each rectangle, starting from a short side. Seal seams with your fingertips. ( When shaping it with the rolling technique, I like to put a little honey on it while it is flat and then roll the honey in)
5. Place shaped dough halves in pans. Cover, let rise in a warm place until nearly double in size (30-45 minutes)
6. Bake in a 375 degree oven for 35-40 minutes or until bread sounds hollow when lightly tapped (if necessary, cover loosely with foil the last 10 minutes to prevent overbrowning). Immediately remove bread from pans. Cool on wire racks.

Movies

Last night we went and borrowed Ratatouille, and Meet the Robinsons from my mom, and we also went and bought Oceans 13. We then came home and watched all three of them. We had seen Oceans 13 before but not the other two. We watched Ratatouille first and loved it! It is probably one of the funniest Disney movies I've seen in a while. It was very original and great for anyone. The only thing I found fishy about the movie is that the two main characters didn't have French accents, yes they could be from other places, but, at least for the Rat, he is probably from England or somewhere over in Europe so he should have some kind of European accent... After that we watched Meet the Robinsons, which was also pretty darn good, although pretty predictable. It was a very cute movie with a good moral. Then of course we watched Oceans 13, too bad I fell asleep but I do like that movie.
Also, we went and saw Beowulf on Friday... I don't know if I would recommend it to anyone. It was pretty interesting. We saw it in 3-d which made it really cool. Other than that, the movie was pretty predictable. I looked on yahoo to see what other people though of the movie and users said that the movie was not like the poem, and if you wanted to know the real version of the story then read the poem. I did just that. They veered from the poem. I am disturbed that our society is so disgusting these days and perverted that they would change the story just so they could put a pretty much naked Angelina Jolie in the movie. The woman isn't even supposed to be beautiful. Other than the Angelina parts, and how Beowulf is married and has a mistress that his wife, the queen, knows about. Other than that the movie was pretty entertaining. At least it was better than that HORRIBLE movie Rush Hour 3. (my advice, don't waste your time or money watching it.)

Tagged

Wow, I just got tagged. So... I guess it's time for me to figure out some little known facts about me... Well this certainly is harder than it looks.
1. I love learning about new things. I really mean it, the only thing I don't like is actually doing homework. I guess I just don't like being told I have to do something, or I'll fail. Sometimes I wish teachers would give a description of what they wanted us to learn out of the class and then say there were a certain amount of assignments and you could pick a way that you wanted to express your understanding or knowledge of a subject.
2. I like going to bed early. I enjoy being in bed by 10, even though it doesn't always happen that way. I love being able to go to bed early and be able to wake up at a decent time and feel refreshed. I like to get at least 8 hours of sleep because your body actually needs it! You can't really make up sleep, and you can't really understand anything completely if you are half asleep.
3.I just barely decided upon a major. It has taken me a long time and I have finally picked one. I am going to major in English and I plan to be done sometime in 09... Hopefully. I previously wanted to go into; psychology/nutrition working especially with eating disorder patients, a computer programmer, and also thought about being a nurse.
4. I love riding in the car. I do enjoy driving, but not as much as going on car rides.
5. I am taking a womens self defense class this semester... The first half of the semester we didn't really do much, the teacher didn't come half of the time and when he would show up he would come in 15-30 minutes late... We now have a new teacher and he is always on time and we practiced so hard on last Thursday, kicking, that my legs were sore until the next class the following Tuesday.
6. I love baking. I love sugar. One of my favorite things to do is to just bake something from scratch... Chocolate chip cookies, sugar cookies, bread, rolls, cake, and a lot of other things. I'm a very picky eater when it comes to my sweets. If the recipe calls for some sort of nuts I'll keep them out. If it calls for something like coconut, I'll keep it out. We got a few cook books for our wedding and then Jason had this huge cook book from before it has 1000+ pages. Apparently it is the book culinary arts schools use as their text book. It has the most complex recipes in it and it gives tons of tips and directions on how to make things. The only problem is that the sweets recipes make a lot of food. Some recipes make 6 or 7 cakes.

Family video

A few weeks ago I started to upload some old family videos onto the laptop to edit them and use my birthday gift. I stumbled upon this clip from a family vacation to McCaul, ID (I don't know how to spell the city) We went up there sometime in October in either 2003 or 2004. (I'll update later when I know for sure) I just love this clip. It was such a fun family vacation. Everyone was so young. Tanner is pre-miss, I think it shows how much he changed on his mission. That cabin is the David Howell family cabin, I'm not sure if they named it or not. Anyways, I am going to get back to studying and then actually editing that little family video.

OPPO

We have this big tv and a ton of movies. We have a clearplay dvd player that edits any movie we want it to.. as long as they have a filter for it. We can change the levels of editing, so it will take out all the yucky stuff. So we love that dvd player, but the picture quality and the sound quality just isn't that wonderful. For our regular dvd's we use our x-box to watch them so we don't wear out our clearplay dvd player and the picture is about the same, the main difference is that we can't fast forward with the x-box, we have to either skip the whole scene or just watch until we get to the part we want. The other day Jason was online looking for a new Dvd player. At first he just wanted an x-box 360 elite because it upconverts dvds to HDMI, which is almost HD quality. Then he changed his mind, and kept looking. We didn't want to get an HD-dvd player because they are so expensive, and we would have to go out and get all new movies just in order to watch them in HD, for that same reason we didn't get a Blueray player. In addition to buying the player and new movies, we don't know which player is going to win the battle, so we didn't want to invest in something that is going to become obsolete. So Jason did some research, and we both read a lot of reviews from people who had bought players with HDMI, and decided to get the OPPO. We ordered it last Saturday night and it got to us by Wednesday afternoon!! I got home from work and Jason had already set it up and was watching Transformers, it was AMAZING. The quality of the picture was just soo good I really couldn't believe it. It was almost sad because when we want to watch our movies that need to be edited with our clearplay the picture quality is drastically lowered.

October 6...

October 6. My 20th birthday. We had gone to bed the night before at one in the morning and then had to get up at 6:30 to get ready for our Saturday up in Salt Lake for general conference. We started out the day by going to Ernies for breakfast, and then we headed up to Salt Lake. As soon as we got there we headed straight for the conference center. Conference was really good. We went shopping a little bit and then out to eat. We went to Chili's and opened gifts. Jason's aunt got me a jacket to match the pants I had bought the night before. The next gift was from Jasons mom, two shirts, and then Final Cut Express HD. I was completely shocked, in the good way. I used it in high school in my video editing class and I loved it, I would go into the class during lunch to work on my movies, that's how much I loved it. I was so excited to get it. Then Jason gave me the gift from him, it was in a gift bag like the rest of the gifts. I opened it up and inside was a movie (mini-series) called "The Tenth Kingdom" and then Jason asked me to read the back of it to everyone and as I turned it over I realized there was something in the back of the movie in between the plastic and the movie. Two Celine Dion tickets for December 8th. A week before her last showing ever. I was in such shock!!! I was so excited! Jason and I had been looking for tickets for a few months. They were sold out on the Celine Dion website and on ebay the tickets were up to 700 dollars for two tickets. I told Jason I didn't need to go that bad and we could save the money for something else. I guess he got the tickets for cheaper than that but I was still shocked. I called my mom and told her and she told me not to tell Janna, because she would be so mad that i got to go and she didn't she would probably kill me. Haha. Well, we left Salt Lake at around 9 and went to my mom's house (she had called and told us to come over for cake) We went over again on Sunday and had a little family get together and my family gave me some really cute shirts and really cute jewelry, and some food storage. It was amazing.
Overall it was a pretty good birthday.

Shirts and Makeup

A few weeks ago we had a family get-together at the Oswald's house and I started to tell the girls about this website that I got some cute shirts for only 10 dollars each. I found them on a website and wasn't sure if it would be safe to buy them, but I took a chance and it worked. It was great and I decided to tell everyone about it. It's called Junior Trends ( Juniortrends.com ) Most of the shirts are trashy but there are some that are really cute, and really well priced. After I told them about that website Laney told us about a different website that sells makeup for only $1.00 it's amazing! I went on the website to check it out. It seemed too good to be true... We'll see though, I ordered a few things about a week ago and hopefully they will get here soon and I can tell you about it and let you know if any of it is good... Hopefully it's good stuff. Although the makeup is cheap the shipping costs are fairly expensive... compared to the price of the makeup.