Hello 2021! This past January in review…

I am back in Connecticut, and it is cold here! A snow storm hit this past Tuesday – there’s still some of the remnants of the snow left today. Tonight, another winter storm is supposed to hit, so I think I will be spending a lot of time indoors this week haha! Work has been really busy and accompanied with some weekend work, so I haven’t had as many adventures to blog about.

But! Yesterday afternoon Jake drove us into Brooklyn to visit one of our friends from college. It was actually not a bad drive from our place, and parking was surprisingly easy! I guess that’s the Brooklyn vs. Manhattan difference. It was really nice to get out of our apartment. Of course, I made a point of getting Levain cookies since we were in the city. Luckily, our friend only lives a few blocks from one of the locations.

Sorry – no actual cookie pics. We devoured them haha. This past week where we live has been covered in a pretty blanket of snow. We got a chance to sneak out before the sunset and frolic in the snow this past Wednesday. There’s this big empty lot by our apartment that is normally just some half alive grass and weeds, but with the snow it looks gorgeous. There was a little kid playing and a dog playing catch when we were over here! I also finally got to break out my snow shoes I bought way back when we decided to move up here.

Although we both have been working a lot, we still try our best to make time to go hiking and cook fun meals since that’s something we really enjoy doing together. We have done a couple hikes since we got back here from our Texas holiday visit. One cool one we did was near Redding, CT. It was very pretty, and we got a bit lost! Luckily, Jake has pretty good directional sense when we’re hiking, and the lake being always in view never made me feel hopelessly lost.

Another weekend in January we also went to the Greenwich Audubon Center, a place we’ve been before and I mentioned on a previous blog post. This past visit was awesome because we actually saw a fox! Besides hiking, I have been trying to run more near the water since we’re so close to it! There’s always a good view near sunset.

I feel like every blog post I’m talking about something I tried making from Half Baked Harvest. What can I say! I really like her stuff. I could never make her meals every day – they can be very labor intensive and dairy heavy (Hi Jamie, who I text about how can she eat so much cream everyday). I think her dessert recipes and creative meal ideas are such fun weekend treats. She recently put a step by step video/photo montage of her making these folded crispy buffalo chicken wraps on her Instagram story. I sent the story to Jake, and we both agreed we HAD to try them. We did make them, and they were a success! We both thought they were super yummy and kind of like fancy (and much less mystery ingredients) Taco Bell. We actually made them with regular sized flour tortillas because we have been doing Whole Foods pickup for our groceries since we got back, and the burrito sized ones were out of stock. This recipe was still completely doable with smaller tortillas! I wish I had taken more process pictures, but the link I included to her blog post has fun photos of how you fill the four quadrants of the tortilla with the buffalo shredded chicken, jalapeño ranch, lettuce, and shredded cheese.

These were some dense quesadilla-ish wraps. My brother would probably refer to them as “lads.” Hahahaha. Anyways, thanks for reading! I hope you all have a good rest of your weekend and Happy February!