Dinner with the Hoots {Sunday Snapshot}

We love getting together with Hoot's Mama and family.  In fact, Kate literally counts down the days until Libbie comes over. Yesterday, when she woke up, the first words out of her mouth (even before she opened her eyes) were "Libbie comes today!" Our whole family really enjoys the company of their whole family.  So, they came over for dinner last night and we had a great time as always.

We had a really yummy dinner (menu and details below) but the hi-light of the night was watching these girls play together.  The boys had a lot of fun too but Libbie and Kate had a BLAST!  Libbie is just a funny little HAM!  We did a little photo shoot and I have a 100 photos to go through but wanted to pop a few up today.....

{taken with a D700, 24-70mm 2.8 lens, 800 IS0, f/3.2, 1/320}

{taken with a D700, 24-70mm 2.8 lens, 800 IS0, f/3.2, 1/320}

I also ran the Florabella Envy action from Luxe II (link on sidebar) on both images and lowered the opacity.  Finally, I smoothed out Kate's skin with a Florabella natural skin action (from the retouch collection) a little too.  It is GREAT! I highly recommend these actions.  Kate is having a major skin problem right now that I will blog about another time but let me tell you it is a NIGHTMARE and now I have it too.

Okay, now onto last night's menu.  Dave and I really enjoy cooking and entertaining and I like to kind of keep track of some recipes on here.

Appetizers:

Avacado, Salsa, Cheese Puffs

Fig and Brie Bites

NOTES: I was making both of these for the first time and they were delicious BUT I would add some spice to the avocado puffs next time (maybe a jalapeno or some chipotle powder OR pepper jack cheese instead of cream cheese...yes that is it!).  I did have one or two of these for breakfast this morning too and the avocado puffs were even better warmed up the next day!  So good!

Main Course:


Dave's famous slow smoked beef brisket (so yummy!)
Baked Idaho and sweet potatoes with all the fixins
Broccoli slaw (I love this!)  Cook Illustrated recipe.

And finally for dessert...Harry helped me make Blackberry Cobbler
(served with BlueBell Homemade Vanilla ice cream)




Pioneer Woman 

Kate was SO excited for them to come!!!! She set the table. She made placecards (all her own idea...she started them while I was in the shower).

{sometimes we call Shelly "Shirley" for fun}

As I said, after dinner, Shelly and I took the girls to a nearby park and took about 200 quick photos (both of us us snapping away at once) of the girls.  I have not had time to go through them all but I did spy some really cute ones of the girls together. I am sure my next post will be a "part two" as we had quite a lot of after dinner activities and photos (fireworks, sparklers, dancing, violin).  I am just too lazy to upload them now.

You can see more Sunday Snaphsots here