Taco Pizza

Given that Matt loves anything with cilantro(meaning mexican-ish), and we both are liking black beans more and more, I knew we had to try the taco pizza featured on The Pioneer Woman's blog the other day.


















This was a super easy to make recipe. I think most pizzas are. And I cheat a little buy NOT making my own crust. I know homemade tastes much better. I KNOW. I've had both. But I don't plan far enough ahead to give it time to rise and stuff. I need the dough ready NOW because I want to eat in 30 min. So Pillsbury dough it is!

As with all tacos and pizza, you can easily change/add/subtract any ingredients to your taste. I mostly followed the recipe as is, BUT..

I didn't:
-make my own dough
-fry corn tortillas
-add hot sauce to the sour cream

I think my pizza looked even prettier. It was in a round pan, and had less lettuce/cilantro/tomatoes covering it(like you could still see some cheese showing). And I had more sour cream(it needed it, because beans aren't as moist as tomato sauce). But it's ok: I use fat free.

*A little tip about adding the sour cream:
The Pioneer Woman uses a pastry bag(which I don't have and wouldn't want to waste anyway). I used a snack sized zip-lock bag. I reinforced the corner with masking tape before adding sour cream and snipping the end off. If you don't reinforce, the seam could bust open and you'd have a pile of sour cream in the middle of your pizza. I know from experience from working with melted chocolate.


















The verdict was: we loved it!

The recipe: click here

I didn't really follow a recipe. I just followed the pictures. Just don't add a whole packet of taco seasoning when you spice up the beans. That's too much! I used my own spices and added a generous shake of cumin/red pepper/garlic powder/onion powder.

Our first baby!

After waiting 3 years(because we wanted to be moved into our new house first, but we got impatient) we finally got a dog!!

Matt and I knew we wanted a female German Shepherd(mix) puppy and that we would adopt a rescued dog(everyone should!). German Shepherds are very smart and naturally protective loving dogs. I used www.petfinder.com to begin my search. It's a database of ALL the animal shelters and then some who are trying to adopt out dogs and cats. You can search by breed, age, and location.

My search came up with about 20 or so dogs. Many could quickly be eliminated based on the photo, description, and location. The photo gives you a clue as to what it's mixed with if that information wasn't provided. And yes, of course, I was looking for the cutest dog I could find! Most of the shelters were just too far to drive anyway(search options are 100mi/200mi). We started with the best and closest matches.

One was 30 min from us. The other about 2 hours(and they had a whole litter of pure breads). We went to see the closest one who was a 3 month old German Shepherd mixed with an unknown smaller breed. She was only 12 lbs, which is half the weight of a pure bread shepherd of that age. She had a clean bill of health and the vet predicted her adult weight to be between 40-60lbs. That's a big range, but still much smaller than a 90 lb. shepherd.

Here are her photos from the ad:



Matt and I fell in love with this dog right away. She was very people friendly and somewhat calm for a puppy. We put in our application to adopt to beat out the other people that took the forms home to "think about it". We had to wait a few days for them to do a background check on us, then we came back to sign the adoption papers and pay.




They don't release the dogs until after they are spayed/neutered, and since it was a holiday weekend, we had to wait 5 long days before we could pick her up(right after surgery).





The first night she was still groggy from anesthesia and not herself. I could tell that she was really unsure and confused by not only how she felt but who we were and where she was going. All she did was sleep for the first 20 hrs. It didn't take her long to get to feeling better. The vet sent some pain meds home and she had her energy back the next day. She was even wanting to play with other dogs.

Matt and I tried out several names for our baby girl, and finally decided on Lucy. House training is a lot of work, but Lucy is catching on. She only has accidents if we don't take her outside regularly enough(like every hour or so). We're also crate training, at least for now. While, we both grew up with dogs, neither of us have experience with puppies...at least as an adult owner. I learned that since dogs are den animals, they will naturally not mess in their crates and this helps them learn bladder control. We crate Lucy when we are not home or able to watch her, and also at night. She can go almost all night without needing to go out. She knows it's "her room" and has even started taking naps in there voluntarily! I'm so glad it's not traumatic for her when we put her in there to leave.

The crate must be just the size of the dog so they don't have room to make a "bathroom spot" in the corner. So since we don't know how big she'll get, we're borrowing a crate made for medium dogs, which fits her perfectly with a little room to grow. Also, since she's a puppy, she'll be traveling in the crate and a large crate would be really difficult to move to different rooms of the house or put in the car.




More pictures:

Bulldozer Driving and Rough Mechanical

This is a two part update, so please bear with me. First is the grading work we're doing on the land. Second, is a construction update about the rough mechanical(aka electrical, plumping, HVAC).

Part1:

We've been borrowing our neighbors industrial sized bulldozer. Yeah, some neighbors borrow sugar or maybe a chainsaw. We borrow bulldozers. And he borrows ours. His is 3 times as big as ours and has a scooper bucket on the front to pick up dirt, and also grab things. It's what's necessary for the type of work we've been doing.

Our little bulldozer doesn't have a scooper bucket. It has a scraper blade on the front. It fits in small spaces. It's very useful, but not for what we're doing right now.

Our neighbor has/had a grading company, which is why he has large equipment. We recently found out he is selling it because the economy really hurt his business and I think it is no more. That means our time with it is limited. It being a commercial bulldozer, it's newer and nicer than ours, which means it's easier to drive. Which means...I can drive it. Yes, that's right I DROVE IT! And I was fantastic at it. It's also fully automatic and has pretty simple controls(compared to ours which I will never attempt to drive).






That's me doing work on our loop-around driveway.

Another task Matt wanted to do before losing access to the large bulldozer was to carve out a spot to build a tractor shed at some point in the future. Here's a picture just as we got started on the work. Matt already cleared the trees to the right side.



We're cutting into the bank of this old logging road. It's located just off our driveway, to the right of our house. But set back enough, that it's still kinda hidden. The shed will need to house our little bulldozer, the skid steer, and the little red tractor. No walls, just a roof to protect the equipment.




Here's what it looked like after about 4 hours of work. P.S. I dug out about half of this dirt.





We also made yet another road. This one cuts between the new tractor shed location to the clearing behind our house. The existing road back to the driveway was too sharp of a turn for the tractors, so we made a new one.



Our land kinda has a split personality going on. Half thinks it's in the piedmont, and half thinks it's mountains. The piedmont side is gently sloped and full of pine tree. The mountain side is steep, full of hardwoods, mountain laurel, and large rocks. We were digging into the beginning of the mountain side and dug up many rocks. I have big plans for these, so we are gathering all we can(think rock garden and chimney).




There was a little excitement that afternoon, when we saw a black snake go into our garage and hide under a tarp. It took 30 min of pulling equipment out from under the tarp to finally find the snake and chase it out. He was not happy. I suspect this is the only snake we have(although I don't know how that could be true) because it's the only one we've seen in 4 years.



We saw the same type/breed/species of snake 3 years ago. Might have been the same one. Who knows! We need more. We have lots of rats. I think we scared our owls away by knocking down trees. I hope they come back.


Part 2:

The rough mechanical on our house/apartment is finished. A few loose ends need to be tied up before we have the rough frame inspection. Like the framer has to come back to make repairs to what the subcontractor guys messed up structurally. That's completely standard and unavoidable. For that reason that is why inspectors won't inspect the frame until it's been cut up and repaired.

Here's what it's looking like these days:





The heat pump and air ducts took up more room than we expected. We've pretty much lost our entire attic space.







Washer and dryer hook-ups:



Garage bathroom.
They had to bust up the concrete slab floor and remove some gravel to install the pipes for the toilet.





When the insulation guy came by to make an estimate, he told us it would be wise to seal up all the holes around every pipe running into the living space of the house to save on energy costs. Most were already done by the sub contractors, but there was a huge hole around the tub pipe. We used expanding foam to close it up. I guess we haven't used it enough to know just how much it expands after sitting. We may have gone overkill.


It went from this:



To this: