Erin's Excellent Enchiladas

Today, I am thankful for forgiveness. It is amazing how asking, receiving, and giving forgiveness from or to someone allows for great healing and renewal.  I asked for forgiveness yesterday from a friend and it has really helped me pull out of a "woe is me," super selfish attitude. Thank you Jesus for bringing me to a place where I can genuinely ask for forgiveness when I have wronged someone and for providing me with the humility to also forgive.

Recently, Phil and I have been trying to eat foods that give us good energy and encourage us to live a healthy lifestyle. We choose to eat as much fresh food as possible without preservatives, a lot of protein, etc. If you want more info on the specifics of our food choices, you can look up Paleo or Primal diets. Within the last year, we have been struggling with eating this way because it means cutting out a lot of our staple foods such as pasta, bread, any grainy or gluteny foods, etc. We felt at first very limited (and myself sort of bitter) in our choices of meals and snacks so we bought a few cookbooks to help broaden our food-rizons. I have gotten to experiment with a lot of great recipes that are SUPER healthy and tasty.

This meal turned out to be Phil's favorite so far. It was meant to be tortilla soup...but turned out to be Excellent Enchiladas with a side of Cauliflower Rice and Refried Beans (and no refried beans are not Paleo but DELICIOUS!). They are super easy to make and very very tasty. Here's a quick ingredient list:

~2.5 lbs chicken (breast or other)

~as much onion as you like

~as much celery as you like

~as many carrots as you like

~1 can of enchilada sauce (28ish oz)

~a little chicken stock if you don't want super strong enchilada sauce flavor

~3-4 cloves garlic

~1/2 a lemon's juice

~cayenne pepper for heat

~garlic powder

~black pepper

~salt

~cumin

~Let it sit in the crock pot 6-8 hours and you have tasty enchiladas. 

~Serve with avocado and cilantro...and of course cauliflower rice and refried beans.

If you want to know how to make Cauliflower Rice, I would be happy to share...but this blog is already getting long :-)

Below is an example of a not so awesome recipe...Eggs Houses where the house is a tomato. Blech.

I love you!

Recipes thanks to http://everydaypaleo.com/

J'ai deux surprises pour vous!

In the last couple of days I have received two welcomed surprises. The first was the arrival of a friend of Phil's to keep us company for the weekend and the other was a loverly house warming gift from my family.

Phil's friend, Brendan, inadvertently made this weekend somewhat of a milestone for us in our new lives in Monterey seeing as he was our first visitor and guest! I haven't gotten to meet very many people here yet so to have someone to get to know was refreshing. I had only briefly met Brendan at the wedding but had heard loads about him. I am grateful to have gotten to spend time getting to know him better and look forward to future encounters :-) One of our fun adventures with Brendan was a trip to Carmel beach where, of course, shenanigans were afoot. Luckily, with the help of our BRAND NEW CAMERA (!!!!!), I was able to document some of these fine moments.

Our first beach picture with lots of fog

The man (Brendan) stuck in the sand or the man with 1 1/2 legs getting acrobatic? 

The two crazies in the 58 degree ocean!

Ma deuxième surprise is best explained with photos. Thanks for the love family, you're the best! I miss you and love my non-killable addition to our home :-) Funny thing that I didn't tell my mom was that I had been considering getting myself a plant to liven up some space in a lonely and pastey white part of the dining room. She's a mind reader, that one!

One foggy morning

This is a glimpse of the Monterey Peninsula across the bay. I can get to this beach in a 5 minutes drive and a 2 minutes walk. It is pretty awesome! The last two mornings I have come to this beach to watch the HUMONGOUS waves...or at least they're bigger than I've ever seen. At times they were almost 6ft high (I had to look this up to know for sure...)!

It had been a very foggy morning but when I took this picture the sun had just started to poke through. If you look in the picture though, you can see the fog starting to roll back in. As I drove home from the beach, I watched it creep over those green hills filling all the space between the trees slowly.

I am getting to see and experience so many new and beautiful things here. I am not able to study in the program with Phil, but I have started to teach myself French which is fun. Practicing the accent is both hilarious and super frustrating. Sometimes I sit there saying the same word or phrase over and over 50 times and by the end I still sound like something's severely wrong with me. I haven't found a job yet slash I haven't decided what type of job I'd like. Please pray that God would provide me with patience and joy in waiting and that I would continue to hold out this job situation to Him with open hands.

Here are some more pictures :-) I love you!

Again, this time with feeling!

I took a long break blogging for many reasons. I had posted WAY too much and didn't want to spam the world wide web... just kidding. The reasons all have to do with my pride, an area that God has really been dealing with in my heart and actions.

 This time around I hope to use this tool as a means for keeping up with family and friends. This time I think I'd like to have some fun! As soon as I get my memory card for my camera back, I will post some pictures of this beautiful place we live in, some foods I've been making, and maybe some fun stories :-)

I miss you and love you!