Captain America Date

While the rest of the country has already seen the movie Avengers a couple of times, my wife had not yet seen Captain America (imdb link).  I wanted to  keep the movie part of this date a secret, so I just advertised it as a red-white-and-blue night and had the family dress accordingly.

 I used some comic books from the half-price bookstore for a centerpiece, with another Superhero Squad comic for my boys to read.  I had the boys decorate some white plates with colored electric tape to make Captain America shields for table decorations or to use as their actual plate.  For dinner I made good ole American hamburgers. Dessert was plain white and blue colored whipped cream with strawberries.  Simple but yummy.

We let the boys start a different movie in another room so we could start watching Captain America a little earlier.  I really liked the movie (I had seen it previously in the movie theater).  I like how it's the little guy with the right attitude and determination who gets the power to do what he knows is right.  I like it when an action movie has a good moral.  Great movie!

Tin - Tin Foil Dinners and a Movie

My wife had been wanting to see Tin-Tin, and after a long, busy week at work I was too tired for much more than a movie (and too tired for even a movie it turns out).  I was in charge of dinner that night and quickly thought of tin foil dinners as a nice complement.

Tin foil dinners are often cooked in a campfire (or even under a car hood), but an oven works fine.  Here are some recipes, courtesy of The Art of Manliness.  I planned on doing some Mexican style chicken, with some leftover diced green chiles and pepper jack cheese.  But we were out of chicken breasts.  So I set out what we did have and let each person fill their own foil packet.  They are pretty simple, and you can't really go wrong with throwing some meat and veggies (potatoes would have been nice) on a piece of tin foil, wrapping it up, and cooking it in the oven.  Our boys probably made some of the most original tin foil dinners -- chicken nuggets and hot dogs anyone?  My wife and I made more traditional ones with hamburger, onions, and zuccini.  The hamburger was already cooked, actually, so we didn't have to worry about undercooking them.  So we threw them in the oven until everything was hot and steamy and then ate.  I think they turned out pretty well.

After we put the boys to bed, we settled down to watch Tin-Tin.  The title character was a little older than I expected, and there was enough action and danger that it would have been too intense for our 5 year old.  It might have been interesting enough to me, but I was so tired from the long week I kept dozing off.  We only made it through an hour before deciding we should just go to bed and finish the rest the next day.

Pure Country

Howdy y'all!!

This here was a date I'd been wanting to take my purty lit'l lady on since moving to Texas.  Maybe it was just an excuse to have me some yummy barbeque. So a country theme seemed appropriate, with a country music movie from a while back that I'd never gotten around to seeing.

I bought a couple cowboy hats at the dollar store.  I also bought one of them "hair volumizers", as we've sometimes joked about big Texas hair.  I pushed this date up on the calendar as my purty lit'l lady has been complaining about how hot her hair gets and that she just wants to chop it all off, so I wanted to do this date while she could still pull off the big hair look. She did a great job dolling herself up for the date. So here we are:

I picked up a nice variety of food from C&J Barbeque :  smoked sausage, brisket, pork loin, and half a chicken.  Fried okra and potatoe salad.  I also picked up some jalepenos and some other kind of pepper, but they were a wee bit strong for us city folk.  We went to a park for a picnic.  I picked a park with horse trails, hoping we'd see some, but we didn't.  Here's a picture of our picnic, and my sweetie eating some fried okra:

On our way home we stopped to see some longhorns up close (but safely behind a fence).

After we put the yungins to bed, my lady and I cuddled up to watch Pure Country (Internet Movie Datebase Link).  George Straight's "I Cross My Heart" was one of my favorite songs when I first started liking country music.  I had never seen the movie before, and I enjoyed watching it with my girl.