Jen Russum

Shepherd’s Pie Pockets

This is one of Micah's new favorite meals. I improvised from a Shepherd's Pie recipe I found online and the results were amazing... These are basically little crescent roll pockets filled with meat and potatoes (and some veggies) and they are sooooo good. What you need: 1 pound ground beef *(I use half beef/half ground turkey. I would use all turkey but Micah doesn't like it.) 2 carrots, cut into thin slices 1 large onion, cut into 1/4-inch pieces *(and as usual, I only use half an onion and freeze the rest for my next recipe) 2 stalks celery, cut into 1/4-inch pieces 1 large clove garlic, finely chopped 2 large baking potatoes, cut into 1/4-inch cubes (you can peel them, but I never do) 1/2 cup dark beer 8 ounces sharp cheddar cheese, shredded Salt and pepper 2 packages crescent rolls What you do: Preheat the oven to 375°. In a skillet, add the beef, carrots, onion, celery, garlic and potato and cook, breaking up the meat, over medium-high heat until the beef is cooked through and some liquid has evaporated, about 15 minutes. (If your meat is not all the way thawed, I would cook it alone for about five minutes before adding the veggies.) Lower the heat to medium, add the beer and cook for 10 minutes. Add the cheese, 2 teaspoons salt and 1/2 teaspoon pepper. Let cool. Open the cans of crescent roll dough and unroll. Each section should consist of two triangles that are facing each other to create a rectangular shape (scalene triangles...I had to look it up... geometry was never my strongest subject...). Break the dough apart as rectangles keeping the pairs of triangles attached. Lay one rectangle on the baking sheet and scoop a big spoonful of the meat mixture on top of it, trying to keep the meat to one side of the dough. Then fold other side of the dough square over the meat, creating a little pocket with the filling in the middle. Crescent roll dough is flimsy, so do this carefully, but don't worry if it splits apart a little as you stretch it over the meat. Just mold the pocket together a little bit, pick up any meat that spills out of the sides, and move on to the next pocket. When you bake it, it will be delicious. Do this with both cans of dough, which should create 8 pockets total. Bake for 8-10 minutes and viola! I forgot to take a picture of the pockets themselves, which would have been the helpful picture... but here is a picture of the delish filling cooking! *8 pockets easily serves 4 people with leftovers. You really only need one pocket for dinner, but they are so good you might be tempted to eat two. If you are only feeding two, I would half the recipe and just use one can of dough. Enjoy! ... Read more

About Us

Although the deadline I gave myself of March 1st has come and gone, I FINALLY have an "About Us" page posted. Check it out! Now I don't utterly fail at participating in my blogging culture.... ... Read more

29

29

As of yesterday, Micah is now 29 years old. Gulp. Almost 30! I will revel in these six months that I am not almost-30 and remind Micah that he is WAYYYY older than me. Micah's 29th year has brought us many new changes already. The first being diabetes. Okay, we don't really have diabetes, but we should after all the sugar we have eaten for the past two days. It all started Tuesday night. I was making homemade snickerdoodles, which has become a tradition for Micah's birthday. He loves these cookies, so I started making them for his b-day a couple of years ago, and now I will be making snickerdoodles on March 9th until the day I die. On Tuesday, Micah was watching a movie after dinner and asked me to bring him a cookie sampler which consisted of two balls of snickerdoodle dough, one with cinnamon, one without, three squares of oatmeal/chocolate chip cookie dough and one of each type of Girl Scout cookie that we have in our house right now (Thin Mints, Tagalongs, Dosie-dos, and Samoas). It was disgusting. I'm pretty sure he kinda wanted to puke by bed time. To make matters worse, I was munching away on freshly baked snickerdoodles in the kitchen. I am a sucker for freshly baked treats as long as they are homemade. If they are store-bought or contaminated with nuts, I will pass. But if they don't break those two violations, I'm all in. I seriously bet I ate ten cookies before bed time. To make matters worse, I also made creme brulee french toast for breakfast, because I wanted Micah to have a special start to his day, since he had to go to work on his birthday. I can't say that either of us wanted french toast cooked in brown sugar, butter, cream and eggs after all the cookies the night before, but since I planned it and prepared it, I felt like I had to make it. It was really good, but hard to choke down as our bodies were slipping in to sugar rejection mode. We definitely both felt a bit ishy on our way to work. But Micah's 29th year has also brought us other things. The first being a new level of maturity in Micah as he put the doors back on to his work clothes closet!!! He keeps all his work clothes in the closet in our guest room and about two days after we moved in, he took of the doors to the closet for easier access. Our closets were poorly designed and the rod for the clothes sits too close the front of the closet so the hangers brush against the doors when you close them. Sure, it's annoying, but removing the doors to reveal the most crowded closet in your house? Not my style, and apparently, now that Micah is 29, it's not his style either. He put them back on this week (after I sold his old bachelor "sports" cabinet/nightstand on Craig's List and he realized our guest room didn't have to be a crowded wreck of room) and I LOVE IT. Goodbye awkwardly large and ugly storage cabinet from Target. Hello $20 in my pocket and hello regular bedside table. Hello closet doors. Good to see you again. And finally, Micah got the best birthday present ever yesterday, better than anything I could have given him myself, in the form of a new oven. It has arrived and it is beautiful. It's white to match our new dishwasher. It's brand spanking new with no crumbs, no stains, no uneven baking tendencies. We love it. As soon as it arrived, I used it to make homemade cornbread and MORE snickerdoodles for our missional community last night. Ugh. Snickerdoodles, you and I are through....until next March, of course. Hello gorgeous. I can't wait to see a beautiful relationship develop between you, me, and our other pal, the dishwasher. Hello cookies. Goodbye cookies. We were fast friends. ... Read more