Brutul

There are limited GF beers (even though every time we go to the store I ask). Ciders can get old quickly because of their sweetest. A nice compromise is to make a Black Velvet, which is a combination of cider and dark GF beer. I talked about my first experiment here. Last weekend, Justin spotted this Brutul (brew tool) at Spec's.

For this combination, I chose Woodchuck Farmhouse Original Hard Cider and Green's Dubbel Dark Ale. My sister, Kristen, gave me this awesome Woodchuck glass from a dinner she went to where they paired food with ciders. For Justin, in honor of Movember, I took out this mustache glass that he received while in a wedding.

I took a picture of Justin with his glass mustache and I pulled up an old photo when he grew a mustache in 2009 to support Movember.

The brew tool worked awesome! It took a minute to figure out what position (close or far) gave the best pour. The closer to the turtle shell, the better. Plus, the turtle's mouth is also a bottle opener!

The perfect pour and mixture!

Amy's GF Pizza

It's Sunday night, and I am thankful that I don't have to work tomorrow. In fact, I have the entire week off for Thanksgiving; it couldn't have come at a better time. This school year has been nonstop! I'm looking forward to sleeping in, catching up on cleaning, going to appointments, and just relaxing. I'm hoping to be able to start blogging regularly again.

I'll start this post off with some football food that we enjoyed yesterday during the MSU game. We had an Amy's gluten free pizza that Justin and I found it at the commissary.

It was a plain cheese pizza that we cooked on our pizza stone. 

But, we decided to jazz it up with some cajun sausage that we had left over from Jambalaya.

 I sliced it up and spread it across the pizza. You could of course add veggies, other meat, or eat it plain.

The pizza cooked up nicely with the sausage and added extra flavor.

We also made a Black Velvet to drink with the pizza. Last weekend we bought a new tool that makes the process much easier. I'll share about that tomorrow! I also had some Wishbone buffalo ranch salad dressing to dip my pizza in (seen here). Overall, the pizza was decent. I think adding to the top of it made it taste better. The crust was thin and the sauce wasn't over powering. 

Hello November

It's hard to believe that it is November already! I feel like it was just yesterday when I was welcoming Justin home and now October is gone too. Last weekend we went to an '80s themed Halloween party. 

My hubby's costume was totally rad: a mullet, glasses, and a laser background! The background was inspired from Pinterest. I took a laser background that I found online and made a poster at Walgreens. We glued it to a box and connected a backpack so he could wear it. We configured the straps of the backpack to go through the back of his sweater so you wouldn't see the straps. 

We dressed Iivana up as a ladybug this year on Halloween. She wasn't a fan of the little hood with the heart antennae, but she did look adorable! (Remember last year, she was Minnie Mouse!)

She enjoyed a new rope toy that was sent from her Grannie and Uelo too. 

Whenever I think of Halloween, I think of beef stew. My mom would make it every Halloween! It was a tradition that I wanted to share with Justin this year so I called my mom up for the recipe. I made it the night before and Justin came home at lunch to put it in the oven so it would be ready for dinner.

It was actually a pretty easy recipe to make too; it just takes 5 hours to cook so you have to plan accordingly. Below, I'll share the recipe. It's my grandma's recipe and makes me think of my childhood. I made one minor adjustment to make it gluten free!

Beef Stew:

• 2 lbs. of meat (I used precut stew meat. But my mom says she has also used round steak or even sirloin.) 
• 4-5 potatoes (I like to use a crinkle cutter and cut them into about 1 in. chunks.)
• 6 large carrots (I used baby carrots and cut them in half. I used about half a 1 lb. bag.)
• 1 big white onion (cut into rings)
• 1 small can of peas (I ended up using about half a bag of frozen peas.)
• 1 tsp. sugar
• slice of bread cut into small pieces (I used the ends of 2 slices of Udi's bread that I had in my freezer. I cut them into small pieces and it worked great.)
• 1/2 tbsp. of salt
• pepper to taste
• 4 tbsp. of tapioca (sprinkle in)
• 46 oz. can of V-8 (use about 2/3 or until all the stew is covered)

Mix all the ingredients together and bake at 250 degrees for 5 hours.