I love cupcakes. 

My husband loves cupcakes. 

My parents love cupcakes. 

I blame my mother. She makes the most delicious white cupcakes with chocolate buttercream frosting. They are simple but are always super moist and have the perfect cupcake to icing ratio. Unfortunately, I cannot make cupcakes as good as my mom. To disguise my weakness, I like to make cupcakes with filling and pretty swirled tops. 

There are a lot of ways to get filling into a cupcake. You can buy a little tool that will hollow out the middle of the cupcake, use a knife and cut out the middle yourself, or you can buy this nifty little cupcake decorating kit from Wilton for $8 (or for $4 if you use a coupon.) The kit comes with 4 tips, one is long and designed to fill cupcakes. 

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I need to have Will take pictures of me... not in a mirror,

In my mind it is fall. I don't care that it is still in the nineties here in Austin... I am wearing boots. That is one of the big benefits of living in Austin. In Champaign you could only wear cute boots for a few weeks before the weather would turn all wet and slushy. Then you would switch to the more Ugg style boots to slosh through the snow. Now that we live in the land of virtually no rain or snow, I can wear cute boots all the time! I was feeling very Texan yesterday and this is the outfit that happened. The shirt that I am wearing was from a barn dance sophomore year. You can't tell from the picture but it is a small plaid print of pink and purple. I hadn't worn it since then until yesterday. I don't have cowgirl boots yet so my new tan pair of boots are the best I got. Now I just need a cowgirl hat and a big belt buckle. We will call this our "before" picture and see how my Texas style evolves over time.

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I had the opportunity to spend last week at home in Bethalto. When the trip was finalized the first thing I did was make a list of all of the food that I wanted to eat. Even though Austin has some great restaurants, you just can't beat the food you grew up with. Here are the food highlights of the trip.

I got in late on Sunday night, just in time to go to the carnival on Monday with the family. We only go to the carnival for one reason: to eat. And eat we did.

Pork burger

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Hooray! My amazing hubby has finished updating the look of the blog. He did a wonderful job, didn't he? I want to point out a few features that you may find useful. On the left hand side there are lots of useful things. You will find a blog archive, where you can see all of the posts organized by month. There is also a "Tags" section where you can find blog posts that are related to each category. Beneath that there is an option to follow the blog via email. If you enter your email address you will automatically be sent an email with each new blog post. And finally there is the option to follow with Google Friend Connect aka your google account. Also, now comments automatically post as you from your facebook account if you are signed in. With this feature you have the option to post only to the blog or to also have your comments post to facebook as well. So try out some of the features and let me know what you think... or if anything is broken.

In other exciting news, my hubby gave me my birthday present early. I got a new DSLR camera and I am super excited! I have been taking pictures like crazy.

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So I think that one of my most annoying qualities (to my mom) is that I like to know what is for dinner... sometimes days in advance. My family has traditionally not planned out meals until about 30 minutes before supper time. Imagine my joyous surprise when my mother-in-law introduced me to planning meals out for the week. I was in love. So that is how I do things now that I am on my own and responsible for feeding Hubby. Typically I will sit down and plan out a weeks worth of meals for us and then go to the grocery store and stock up for that week. I love doing things this way because I always know what we have and what we will be eating for the next few days. It also helps us save money by not buying extra food and it eliminates the purchasing of snack food (Cheez-its are my weakness but I have never purchased them since being married).

Now, 9 months into doing things this way I am bored. I hate planning meals every week and I put it off until the last possible moment. Currently Will and I eat a lot of the same meals every couple of weeks but I feel this pressure to have new and healthy meals for us. So I feel like changing things up and hopefully make things a little bit easier... especially for when we are both working.

Here is my plan: I want to plan out a month of meals... without repeating a meal. My goal is to have various meats each day like beef, pork, chicken, fish, and possibly a vegetarian meal here and there. I could then use this month plan over and over again since each entree would be spread out over 4 weeks. Of course I will need to plan for favorite meals (aka pizza) a little more frequently and account for family dinners and nights eating out. So I think having 5 varied meals planned for each week for one month would be awesome.

I need your help. I am stuck in a rut with the current meals I am use to fixing and I need some ideas from you. Please comment below with some recipes that you love! Hopefully in a couple of weeks when I have this compiled I will be able to figure out how to post it on here and share with you!

Apparently some people are having problems commenting on this post... the one time commenting needs to work! So please send recipes in a facebook message or email me. Thanks!