Ladies lunch

This weekend inaugurated the two craziest weeks for me and Andrew this year so far.  He left early this morning to teach a Perspectives class down in Iowa, which is a missions seminar "on the world Christian movement."  It's a great class and gives lots of history, practicals, and vision for Christ's name going to the nations.  Anyway, he'll get back in a few days.  The following day we'll fly out to India for a week and a half to acclimate some other staff for their summer trip.  The next day of getting back I'll have a staff women's retreat up in Bayfield, WI.  When I get back, Andrew flies to Colorado for a support raising conference. Whew.  That wore me out just saying it.

But then...

We go to Cancun!  Andrew surprised me with an anniversary trip we'll take during student's spring break.  Though we got married in April and we'll take the trip in March, it counts.  Ya know, he is just the best!  He found a last minute deal online, but I have no idea of the details.  I wanted to know about one thing: warmth.  This filled my mind:

Since he was leaving, we planned to have a date out on Friday and night on Saturday because I planned to be a women's conference on Saturday day.  On Friday we headed out to get burgers and go see "The King's Speech."  The movie times gave us less time to eat dinner to we settled for SmashBurger instead of the Minneapolis classic Annie's Parlor.  SmashBurger was really good though and we had enough time to hike it to the theater, get tickets, etc.  The movie had enough history and hint of war and leadership for him and wit and interesting and developed characters for me.  We both really enjoyed it.  Saturday was great but then we got at call in the morning from a friend who was performing a marriage ceremony that afternoon. He had laryngitis.  The one thing you need to marry someone is a voice.  Anyway, I left the conference early and Andrew cancelled all his administrative plans and we headed down to Eden Prairie so Andrew cold marry some students we knew.   We got there,he did a run through of the ceremony, performed it, then we were out!  We were glad to help, but Andrew had a lot of stuff to get done.  Poor guy!  But he is a servant and we were grateful to help!

With all that, Andrew left today and I didn't want to be alone doing errands so I invited several girls over for lunch.  I made a bunch of different salads so there'd be little prep time after church.

Here's the run down: sun-dried tomato pasta salad, strawberry poppyseed spinach salad, Caesar (I threw that in when more girls than I expected stopped by), 4 bean salad, and a chicken waldorf salad.  Yum!

Here are the recipes:

• Sun-dried tomato pasta salad- I used about half the tomatoes, omitted capers and olives and added 1 small yellow bell pepper.  This one was my favorite.  I will definitely make this one again!
• Strawberry poppyseed- I was going to make this one, but ran out of time so I quick cut some starwberries, mixed in some asiago cheese, and poured some poppyseed dressing on top
• Caesar- this was my back up in case I wouldn't have enough food, so it was from a bag at Aldis- a steal at 1.89 per bag, I used 2.  
• Four bean salad- originally a 3 bean salad, but I also added black-eyed peas; subbed fresh parsley for dried, and red wine vinegar for the vinegar they called for.  Very good! I'll make this one again too!
• Chicken waldorf- I added 1 breast of shredded chicken, subbed fresh orange juice for lemon (grocery store was out) and used light greek yogurt instead of mayonnaise because I hate the stuff.  Makes my skin crawl.  Next time I'll add a little more fruit juice, salt and pepper

I really enjoyed having them over and it made me look forward to the afternoon instead of dreading the silence of our apartment.

Oh yeah, and we're having blizzard conditions and its been snowing all day.