Apparently I resolved to eat my weight in chocolate in 2011..

I wanted to involve the traditional Southern New Year's dinner ingredients in our New Year's dinner, but good Lord I did not want to eat collard greens. I don't even know how to MAKE collard greens. And I knew that Steve would probably puke at the thought. So I had to get a touch creative. I needed to make this meal contain the correct ingredients (ham, black-eyed peas, collards) and also be somewhat appealing to my husband (who, for the record, will usually eat anything placed in front of him). So I consulted with my good friend, Paula Deen, and she recommended that I make a collard green pizza. Appetizing, no? I figured that would satisfy my Italian husband, as well as my desire to consume enough good luck for the coming year.

I added black-eyed peas to the ingredients and omitted bacon (but ONLY because I didn't have any thawed out dangit) and used some ham that I had prepared and frozen a few months ago. I decided to try my hand at making the pizza dough because I was ASSURED that this recipe was simple! and easy! and fun! and it made nice, thick, fluffy dough, similar to Pizza Hut's crusts and I just KNEW I could do it! Also, I was cooking out of my *new* Sister Schubert cookbook and Sister just inspired me to do it. She personally cautioned me to "be gentle with the bread" and I was determined to make her proud.

That turned out about as well as my bread and dammit you bread people need to quit lying to me and just be HONEST and say that bread-making sucks for a really long time until you become some sort of kitchen-baking-professional. I can follow instructions! That is all that baking is! But with bread-making, the instructions are all left up to your own judgement and I clearly have no good judgement when it comes to this. I have NO FARKING IDEA when bread is done kneading. I have no clue how to correctly flour a rolling pin either and the entire bread-making process makes me feel like I failed to complete the sixth grade. It is so FRUSTRATING. Sister's all, "It's such a joy and stress-relief!" Well maybe for you, honey, but that might also be because you are making a shoot-ton of money off of those little biscuits and the stress is well worth it. For me, I wish I'd paid the three bucks and gotten the dough out of a tube. Anyways, here is my misshapen pizza before the cheese went on. Homemade sauce, steamed collard greens, black-eyed peas, and ham.

Trust me, I was under no impression that this was going to be good. I hoped that covering it heavily with cheese would help.

In addition to this pizza, I had gone completely anal and made Sister Schubert's Peach Tea Crumb Cake. I followed her instructions LIKE A CRAZY PERSON. I wanted something from this meal to be edible. And I figured that the worst that could happen would be that we eat cake for dinner. BUT! I've been having loads of trouble lately getting things to not rip off in my pans thanks to stupid PAM. And they say they have a money-back guarantee! HA! Don't believe them. They sent my little form back (I recently RUINED 4 loaves of banana bread thanks to them, and YES, I sprayed heavily hoping to avoid such a disaster.) saying that my receipt wasn't specific enough. Well, SORRY PAM, but I can't quite make the commissary change their register system so it looks like I'm stuck with this stupid bottle of no-non-stick spray. Losers.
ANYWAY. I had to take a picture of this cake before it came out of the pan in case the inevitable happened.

Please excuse all of my crappy iPhone pictures.
I popped this baby out and it was BEAUTIFUL.

The top part looks a little different than the rest because it is a streusel topping that is crunchy and delicious.
I checked on the pizza in the oven and whoa, I kinda forgot that that crust might expand. Please don't grow off the edge of my pan!

I cooked it for slightly over the suggested time since there seemed to be a lot of toppings on it and no matter how much I smushed it, that stupid crust would not go any thinner. So after the timer went off, I pulled it out and the center was still mushy. At this point, I was dropping a lot of F bombs. (Sam was asleep. Not that that would usually stop me.)
I finally pulled this monster out of the oven and it vaguely resembled the weight of someone I birthed a little over a year ago. It also smelled way too similar to what I was covered in yesterday. Doesn't look TOO shabby though. Does it?

I was still eying this beauty down, knowing full well that my disgusting labor of non-love was not going to end well.

Look at this. We didn't eat til 8pm!!

I didn't take a picture of our slices of pizza because that would really gross you out. It looked wicked disgusting. But surprisingly.... it tasted fine. We couldn't taste any collards in there (I might have accidentally steamed out any hint of flavor they once had) and the ham and cheese part seemed to take over. The sauce was weird. Not gonna life. Paula didn't get it right there. But the rest of it was not bad. The crust was decent, although it was still too thick in some places to cook properly and some parts were doughier than others (which I HATE). But Steve liked it and asked why I didn't give him a bigger slice. We both had another slice and then decided to quit messing around and went for the REAL star of this show:

That's a big ol' slice o' peach in there! It was goooooood. Don't go getting jealous of my paper plates now. I had washed about 6,384,962 dishes by hand by this point in the evening and I was NOT washing another plate. Steve wouldn't eat the streusel part (which was probably the best, in my opinion) because he could smell a hint of cinammon. <BIG OL' SIGH> I tried lying through my teeth that I didn't use any ("It's brown sugar! Honest!") but he wasn't buying.
So anyways, that was our New Year's Day Night dinner.
We had collards to hopefully make us rich (and not just with happiness dammit, we wanna strike the Powerball), black-eyed peas for luck (again, to help us with the Powerball), pork for progress and moving forward, and the peach dessert for health and to remember to savor the *sweet* things in life. I forgot to make cornbread, which is supposed to bring you happiness, but I swear I'm happy. I really am. I also think that making one more bread-related product yesterday would have pushed me over the edge and done the OPPOSITE of making me happy. So we're probably better off skipping the cornbread this year.

Since I do enjoy a good list, but know myself better than to keep a resolution for an entire year, Steve and I decided to do something a little different this year. We have been slacking on our tithing lately. We just don't feel comfortable giving it to our church since we go on post. It almost feels like giving money to the government. Now I'm sure there is a nice portion of it that goes to those coffee and donuts after mass, but we wanted to see our tithe have more of an impact. We decided that we would use half of our tithe each month to sponsor a child and the other half would go to a charity of our choice. Steve picked six charities and I did the same. We are writing out the checks NOW and sticking them in addressed envelopes so that all we have to do each month is stick it in the mail. No more forgetting to tithe and feeling the guilt later.

In case you're curious, we sponsored four children from My World Vision. It costs so little that we realized we could do more than just one child! And our charity lists...

Mine:
1. Catholic Charities
2. Dolly Parton Imagination Library
3. Local food bank
4. Local no-kill animal shelter
5. Pro-life crisis pregnancy center
6. Local homeless shelter donation

Steve's:
1. Fisher House (sort of like the Ronald McDonald house, but for military families)
2. Wounded Warrior Project
3. Team World Vision Clean Water Campaign
4. Habitat For Humanity
5. Soles for Jesus (provides shoes to children in Africa)
6. Army Emergency Relief

Some other non-resolution-y things we're doing:

• I'm giving up Coke (which encompasses all carbonated beverages) during the month of January. I realize that sacrificing caffeine once Second Baby arrives will be laughable and I want to knock a few more things off of my 101 in 1,001 list. (This being #54.)
• We are cutting off our cable once our DirecTV contract expires in March. We're hoping this stimulates more talk and good ol' fashioned fun in the evenings instead of flipping endlessly through channels that are filled with nothing but CRAPOLA.
• I want to focus more on my marriage. Not that it's struggling, but we use our lack-of-a-babysitter excuse for not going out alone more often and we REALLY gotta change that.
• I've GOTTA hit the gym once this kid pops out in March. Steve wants to do a vacation to the Caribbean before he deploys late this summer and that does not give me much time to get this ol' body back in proper working swimsuit order.

What are you doing differently this year?