To start off with, here are just a few of the things that we have been up to for the last 4 months.

We went to Minneapolis for a mini-vacation.

We discovered Jovie likes to build her own sandwiches with her food.

We catered a wedding.

We discovered how Gavin really feels about cake.

We stood in awe of the penne pasta we cooked that somehow ended up looking like this.

We found out Jovie was trying to sneak Dove chocolates, but neglected to take off the wrapper first.

We had a serious discussion about our finances.

We celebrated Marley’s 6th birthday.

We had an Avengers tea party.

Marley had her first day of kindergarten.

Gavin had his first day of preschool.

Jovie found random spots in the living room to watch TV.

We dug up a late 80′s Lego set and put it together.

We went to an apple orchard.

We played games.

We stocked up on candy during Halloween.

We celebrated Jovie’s 2nd birthday.

We decided to start on holiday food early.

Last, but certainly not least – we experienced one of the coolest nights of our lives. Our church, Two Rivers, decided to have worship in a barn. Since we lead worship for our church, we spent a good amount of time preparing for the night. This night was so incredibly cool! We even busted out some bluegrass!

Now then…on to our plans for the future of 1 Cup Awesome.

Last December, we considered walking away from 1 Cup Awesome for good, even though it had only been around for about nine months. However, we found a renewed energy for the blog and decided to keep posting. That energy didn’t last long.

After much thought and discussion, we have decided to stop posting on 1 Cup Awesome for the foreseeable future. We will keep the website running, mostly because we reference it for our own recipes on a regular basis. We also want to keep the option open for us to return to posting in the future if our schedules allow. But for this current season of our lives, we need to walk away. Keeping up with new posts on 1 Cup Awesome was taking time away from the things that were most important to us: our relationships within our family and our church.

What you see in one of our blog posts is a nicely presented meal with some neatly crafted words and pictures.

What you don’t see is that our family meal time is delayed because we have to get pictures of everything we are making.

You don’t see that our kids are cranky and ready for food.

You don’t see that we feed them first to keep them happy while we finish up taking pictures and we miss out on a meal together.

You don’t see that we are so worn out from our day and from making sure everything is perfect for a blog post that we don’t even enjoy our meal together.

You don’t see that instead of spending time relaxing with each other at night, we are writing up recipes to have ready to post for the next morning.

You don’t see that what we really want to be doing is writing and working on music for our church to sing together (our true passion).

Here’s the deal. Keeping a food blog is a ton of work. For those that have one, you know this to be true. Keeping a food blog when you have three kids under the age of six and are making a concentrated effort to invest in your church is even harder. We had to say “no” to something in our lives. When we laid everything out, our blog was the least important to us personally. So we are saying “no” to 1 Cup Awesome so that we can say “yes” to everything else.

Don’t get us wrong, we still love cooking and eating awesome food. We have had some AMAZING food over the last few months. We also loved interacting with all of you! We were always so amazed and honored when you would let us know that you decided to make one of our meals and you or your kids loved it. That was, by far, the greatest part of 1 Cup Awesome.

So long for now!

Keep loving people. Keep cooking them tasty food.

The final component of the party menu is Spice Rubbed Pork Loin.  This pork is where it’s at! It’s juicy, tender and spicy. The combination of cumin and paprika gives it a warm smokey flavor without being too hot. If you prefer a little more kick, just up the amount of crushed red pepper you add to the rub. For the party, we roasted the pork loins and put them into a roaster on the lowest setting just to keep the meat warm. We wanted to keep the heat nice and low so the meat didn’t continue to cook. We found a great roasted salsa verde at Costco that went beautifully with the sliced pork, saving us time and money! This shaved a good (valuable) hour off our prep time. But, really, any salsa verde would work great.

(photo courtesy of The Wedding Format)

Even friends of ours who are not big fans of meat loved this pork! That’s success in our book! We ended up with a good amount leftover meat so we bagged it up and threw it in the freezer. The spices here are right up our alley, so we’ve come up with quite a few ideas to make good use of it! We’ve been able to make tacos, BBQ pork sandwiches, and torta sandwiches with avocado, pickled red onion and sliced radishes.

Thank you, Josh and Carrie, for taking a chance and allowing us to be a part of your celebration. We are so honored! It was truly one of the most beautiful things we’ve ever been a part of!!

We hope everyone had a great weekend! We celebrated Dave’s 29th birthday, went to the Des Moines Zoo with Dave’s work, and also found time to eat some great food. Here is a run down of our weekend:

Saturday

Breakfast:
Poached eggs with smashed avocado on toasted baguette

If we ever open a restaurant that serves breakfast, this is going on the menu for sure! We’ve been digging poached eggs for the last couple of months. Add a toasted baguette and fresh avocado and you have yourselves one of the best breakfasts we’ve had in a long time.

Lunch:
Chicken salad sandwich, fresh fruit

Lunch on Saturday was all about cleaning out leftovers. We wanted to get rid of our leftover grilled chicken breast, so we made chicken salad. While it tasted good, neither of us were really feeling this meal. I think the problem was that the bar was set pretty high at breakfast and there was lots of anticipation about our dinner.

Dinner:
-Cuban pork sandwich (roasted pork loin, local ham, peppered bacon, black bean spread, chipotle mayo, provolone, house pickles, torpedo roll) with red-skinned potato salad
-Fish tacos (wood-grilled mahi mahi, grilled tortillas, cafe slaw, chipotle mayo, pico de gallo) with black beans and rice

To celebrate Dave’s birthday on Saturday, we headed to our favorite restaurant, The Cafe in Ames, Iowa. We knew right away which meals we were going to get. We both love fish tacos and cuban sandwiches, so we ordered one of each and split our meals so we could enjoy both. AHHHHHH!!!!! These were so good! We want them again, NOW.

Sunday

Breakfast:
Strawberry Banana Chobani

We were still full from dinner the night before, so we enjoyed a light breakfast. It gave us enough energy to play music at church on Sunday, where one of our guitar players broke out his banjo for this first time. We had a mandolin last week as well, so we are pretty close to a full on bluegrass band!

Lunch:
Toasted tomato sandwich, multi-grain chips, fresh fruit

We made one of our summer favorites, toasted tomato sandwiches. Only this time, instead of using mozzarella cheese, we used herbed goat cheese. Winner.

Dinner:
BBQ pulled pork, pasta salad, chips, fruit

On Sunday night, we headed to Blank Park Zoo in Des Moines for a night sponsored by Dave’s work. While it was super hot, it was still nice to be able to walk around the zoo and get a free meal.

That’s all for this weekend. Have a great week and eat some amazing food!

• Dancing
• Cartwheels
• Math, specifically math that involves fractions

However, there are also some things in life that I am great at doing. One of those things is grilling chicken breast. I don’t want to brag here, but I will. I have yet to eat a grilled chicken breast that tastes as good as mine. I really can’t take all the credit though. Much of my success comes from my grillfriend:

The Charbroil Infrared Grill takes all of the guess work out of grilling. There are no hot spots and cold spots…just consistent perfection. Today, I am sharing my grilling secrets with the world so that you too can enjoy perfectly grilled chicken breasts.

1. Start by making sure your grill grates are nice and clean. You don’t want the junk from your burgers last weekend sticking to your chicken. Turn on your grill and heat it to high.

2. Place the chicken between two pieces of plastic wrap and, using a meat mallet or the bottom of a heavy saute pan, pound the chicken light to an even 3/4-inch thickness.

3. Starting with the underside of the breast (the rough looking side) brush each side of the chicken with olive oil and season with sea salt and fresh cracked pepper. The reason I start with the underside first is all about presentation, and I do this with almost every piece of meat that I grill. If you season the underside first, it doesn’t really matter what happens to it when you turn the meat over to season the topside. If some of the seasoning falls off or moves around, who cares. No one will see it!

4. Place the chicken on the grill, top side (smooth side) down. Again, this is all about presentation. You grill should be hot enough that you can get a good sear on the chicken breast. All of the seasoning you put on the top side should stay nice and pretty and you should get those beautiful grill marks that make you look way cooler than you are. Close the grill lid and cook until golden brown, 4 to 5 minutes. This may vary slightly on your grill. I know that mine takes exactly 5 minutes, no more and no less.

5. Flip the chicken breast over and continue grilling until the chicken is cooked through, 4 to 5 minutes. Again, this will vary slightly based on your grill. For me, I cook the underside of the chicken for 4 minutes, no more and no less.

6. Remove chicken from the grill. Tent the chicken with foil and let rest 3 to 4 minutes. Don’t worry, it will not get cold. It will actually continue to cook a bit as it sits. THIS IS KEY!!!! Letting the meat rest allows the juices to evenly distribute throughout the chicken breast and will help keep it nice and moist after you cut into it. The chicken breast should have a nice golden brown crust on the outside, and be moist and white on the inside.

Besides the 6 tips to grilling perfect chicken breasts, I also have a few “DO NOT’S” that you should keep in mind.

DO NOT flip the chicken too early or turn it over to take a look at your cool grill marks. If you do this the chicken will stick to the grates, your grill marks will be jacked up, and you’ll look like a fool who can’t cook chicken.

DO NOT cut the chicken breast in half on the grill to see if they are done. If you really want to be sure, you could use a meat thermometer to make sure the chicken breast is 160° F, but you should be able to get to a point where you know the chicken is done without cutting into it or using a thermometer. 

DO NOT eat undercooked chicken. I know this should go without saying, but seriously…don’t do it. It can make you sick and it’s just gross. You can cut into the chicken after it has been removed from the grill and rested. If you notice it is undercooked, throw it back on the grill for a couple minutes. Please don’t put it in the microwave. You will lose all your friends if you serve microwaved chicken breast.

And there you have it! Those are my secrets to grilling perfect,delicious, moist chicken breasts. Follow these rules next time you grill chicken breasts and let us know how they turn out!

Check out more awesome recipes with perfect grilled chicken breast:

Lemon Grilled Chicken with Mediterranean Toasted Quinoa

Chipotle Chicken Sandwich

Frontega Chicken Sandwich (Panera Copycat)

The Big Salad

Chipotle-Lime Tacos

Sorry it’s taken us so long (too long!) to get the rest of this series posted. We have said it before, but our lives are a little jam packed! The kiddos have been in full action these days! Over the last month we’ve had vacation bible school, T-Ball, playdates, birthday parties, and Father’s day festivities. Not to mention the usual time we like to carve out for friends, church and TV! Yes…we protect our TV time. Our current TV addiction is Breaking Bad. We are hooked.

Anyways, on to the food..peppers. Quinoa stuffed poblano peppers to be exact. We started with fresh, off the truck poblano peppers from a local Mexican grocery store. Dave had to wait until the very last minute to get these babies. The truck didn’t get there with the peppers until the morning of the party, so he was waiting at the front door when the store opened at 10:00 AM.  Cutting it close! Once all 60 peppers were cleaned and halved we filled them with a warm quinoa salad. We’ve posted a very similar version of this before…it’s one of our favorite ways to use quinoa. It was extra awesome and satisfying when it was stuffed into the peppers, roasted, and drizzled with salsa verde.

(photo courtesy of The Wedding Format)

Perfection! Smokey, salty and slightly sweet from the corn. We served these as a side dish but they were definitely not JV team. We wanted to make sure that we were serving food that was fresh, full of flavor, and healthful. These peppers are all of that! We also wanted to keep in mind that there may have been some people at the party who were vegetarians. That’s why we chose these stuffed peppers. They could be served as a main dish and be super satisfying.

At the end of the night, one of the musicians from the party came down and asked for another piece of Brownie Pie. Then, he changed his mind and dug into 2 more stuffed peppers for dessert and asked what restaurant we ordered them from! His mind was blown when we told him that we made them. That is the ultimate compliment!