Country Livin'

[I know I JUST changed my header and background, but I just wasn't loving it. So hopefully these will stick for a little bit longer ;-)]

On Wednesday, Paula Dean fried up some homemade potato chips. They looked so delicious, I decided to try my hand at it. We have a deep fryer, and I have to admit that I use it a lot! I like to make homemade french fries, mozzarella sticks (it's a really great recipe made with string cheese! maybe I'll share it sometime), fish sticks, chicken fingers, etc. But I had never tried crispy potato chips until yesterday.

I used 4 Yukon potatoes.

After rinsing them off, I peeled them, and sliced them into the thinnest little slivers I could:

Next I threw them in the fryer

And waited about 6 or 7 minutes until they started getting golden brown:

I took them out, used a paper towel to soak up all the grease, and poured some salt on them.

They turned out pretty delicious!

They were so easy! I might try to keep some on hand at home a lot of the time for two reasons: #1 - hopefully guests will feel special when they get to eat some homemade potato chips at the Wallace house. And #2 - A whole bag of potatoes is always too much for Luke and I. I always have to throw a few away when they get old. So this is a good way to use up a lot of potatoes if I need to get rid of some.

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I'm helping my sister house-sit and pet-sit for my parents while they are in Myrtle Beach this wek. Yesterday while I was feeding the dog and cat, I decided to play photographer again and take a bunch of pictures of their beautiful flowers. My mom was a florist and her parents owned a nursery for years and years. So she's really into flowers, and they're beautiful! Here are a few, just for fun:

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And just in case you were wondering, date night was fun last night! Our dinner at Olive Garden was delicious! Luke dressed up which was sweet. And he was such a gentleman all night...it felt like we were dating again :-)

We went to see "Knowing" with Nicholas Cage at the dollar theater after dinner. It was a really strange movie. I was expecting an action movie. It started out almost like a horror/suspense movie (I was a little freaked out by a few parts, and I don't scare that easily anymore) and ended up as a weird sci-fi movie. The ending was strange, and Luke and I both left the theater saying, "huh??" It made sense, but was just kind of out there. Not what we were expecting. If you're into sci-fi you'd probably like it, though!

And one of the best parts of the evening happened when we got home. Luke was figuring out our budget, and how well we've been sticking to it this month when he realized he HADN'T BUDGETED IN HIS THIRD PAYCHECK (it worked out weird since there were 5 Fridays this month). Next month is already budgeted for, so we had a bunch of extra money on our hands! Yay! We decided to use it to pay off one of our credit cards. (We're following Dave Ramsey's plan, and he says debt is a no-no). We're so excited, because we only have one more credit card to go and we will be DEBT FREE!! Except for the house. It pretty much made our night :-)

I'm off to enjoy this beautiful weekend!