Labor Day

I wasn't too excited about it being Labor Day weekend, it meant that summer has flown by and I haven't properly enjoyed it. No camping, no hiking, no water activities, shame on me! We also didn't do much for this Labor Day so I'm extra naughty, we turned down our normal activities (the Soldier Hollow Classic) so that we could just enjoy some time at home.

We stayed up past midnight every night and slept in until 10:30 every morning like we were in college again. Saturday we divided up the mass amounts of dog food which always takes a couple of hours, but has to be done because we start getting bloody puddles on the kitchen floor and the dogs won't stop licking the boxes. A normal statement around our house that doesn't send up any cause of alarm is, "Enna's has blood on her head."

After that we slowly made our way into the backyard to do some yard work, last year we built a garden bed, but never got around to buying flowers for it. Probably for the better since the bricks were falling down and the dogs climbing in it, so John decided that we were going to glue the bricks together and it get ready for fall planting. There were millions of spiders and I was fine unless there were any that were arachnophobia big, those all seemed to live between the bricks that we were taking down. After a couple scares I let John take the rest down with the shovel and we'd bash in their little spider brains. Now it's all back together and I just have to think of ways to keep the dogs out.

Sunday I made cookies from this recipe since they're fat free, but my first batch was a bust. The dough was too thin so the cookies were wafer thin and  burnt. I added more flour to the remaining dough and it turned out much better. Once cooled I turned them into ice cream sandwiches with my homemade fat free vanilla ice cream.
People are always wanting my ice cream recipes, but I never make the vanilla the same, it usually just what I have on hand - boxed vanilla pudding, fat free vanilla yogurt etc. I always use fat free sweetened condensed milk though, that's the key to making it amazing. This time I used 2 cups fat free milk, 14 oz. fat free sweetened condensed milk and 4 oz. fat free cream cheese. When using fat free milk you have to use something that is creamy (the pudding, cream cheese or yogurt) or it won't freeze and scoop like normal ice cream.

Monday we relaxed all day and crossed some of the movies off of "1001 movies to see before you die", Strictly Ballroom, Beverly Hills Cop and Raising Arizona. I also went through 1970 through present in the book since I noticed that we hadn't been very diligent about crossing them off. We missed 10 titles that we had watched and it would have been more if John could remember movies he's seen. Now I just need to go through the rest of the book to see if we missed marking any in the earlier years. In the evening we went to Sugar House BBQ with some friends from Kansas as they were craving some back home cooking, they said it was almost as good as mama makes (Dad, we tried to go to Pat's but they were closed for the holiday).

It was such a nice relaxing weekend and I think all holidays should be that way.