Sharing is Caring (Salted Caramel Shortbread)

As a brand spanking new nurse, I have a preceptor for several weeks who's there to make sure that I'm comfortable taking care of all my patients and to answer the 1001 questions that I have every day.  My preceptor, Kelly, is pretty awesome, and I'm very lucky to have her to learn from.  Plus, we eat lunch together and get coffee in the afternoons.

Last week she had a handful of salted caramels from the gift shop.  Since she's a nice person, she shared one with me.  Since I'm pregnant and love caramel, it's all that I've thought about all week.

Soooooo, to satisfy my salted caramel craving, I decided to make some shortbread cookies topped with caramel and sea salt.  And since I had a few toffee bars in my cabinets, I figured that I would throw those in the cookie dough, too.  

Good things happen when we share.

Midsummer Night's BBQ (Brownie Cheesecake Bars)

Right now, as I write this, I'm sitting down, feeling Hennebaby play soccer in my belly and eating a piece of heaven.  All three things are equally exciting - sitting down, feeling the baby and eating heaven.  In the past less than two weeks, I have taken an unfortunate trip home for my grandmother's funeral, painted a bedroom, worked 6 twelve hour shifts, relocated all the furniture in our house so that we could have our hardwood floors refinished, moved two people and a dog out for a week so that said floors could be completed, moved both people and dog back in, cleaned up after said floors, had two doctors appointments, did 5 loads of laundry, moved all the furniture back and hosted a barbeque for 20 people.  

Today I'm sitting down.  And enjoying Hennebaby dancing the Macarena in there.

It's wonderful.  :-)

On to third exciting thing:  the heaven.  Brownie Cheesecake Bars.  My good friend Liz celebrated her birthday yesterday, and was sweet enough to spend some of it on our deck, getting bitten by bugs and eating my husband's grilled hamburgers.  I wanted to make something special for her, something creamy and delicious and decadent and not too hard, because - let's face it, this pregnant girl was tired.  Since I couldn't reach my cookbooks until it was too late, buried as they were under the dining room furniture stacked in my kitchen, I turned to my handy dandy bookmarked list of desserts, where I found this gem from one of my favorite blogs, Brown Eyed Baker.  How I managed to bookmark this and not make it until this weekend I'll never know.

These bars completed my life.  For realsies.

Spicy Saturday BBQ (Spicy Pork Burgers)

Baby Watch, Day 173:  Last week we found out that Hennebaby is a boy!!  So now it's time to paint the nursery, buy some furniture and start our collection of blue baby blankets.  :-)

In other news:  since putting together our grill last summer, I've been looking for new things to try on it.  Hubby would be content with Bubba burgers and hotdogs, but I was feeling a little creative this Saturday.  We had an impromptu cookout with our besties, and in a mini-panic over what I should make, I turned to the mountainous pile of recipes ripped out of magazines that's been sitting on my kitchen table, waiting to be filed and put again in my Binder O' Recipes.