kpaupau's Profile

There is a really good recipe on Homesick Texan for fish tacos. It calls for tilapia, but when my husband brought back 10+ lbs of trout filets from a fishing trip, I realized that trout was a perfect substitute.

It involves making a marinade (chiles, cilantro, spices) and letting the fish marinate for a couple of hours before cooking in a skillet. There is a delicious serrano pepper/red cabbage slaw that you use to top it off too.

We are from Texas and eat a lot of tacos - my husband claims these are the best fish tacos he's ever had!

I try to make one new crockpot recipe each month and try at least 3 new recipes each month. It averages to one new recipe per week in the average month and has worked like a charm so far.

My motivators are: 1) if a new ingredient is on sale at the grocery store that I've been wanting to try; 2) job stress (cooking is therapeutic for me); 3) rainy weekends - I will cook up a storm (pun intended) all Saturday and Sunday if we're crammed in the house watching movies.

We also spend a lot of time outdoors, so I'm always seeking new camping recipes which are fun to try, and everything tastes so amazing cooked over an open fire.

We have had nothing but positive responses since tearing out our old, outdated tub and installing a large shower similar to that pictured. Ours is door-less and has a small ledge/step to keep the water in. A bathmat on the part right when you step out catches any spray.

We also added some seating in the shower stall which gives it more of a spa-like feel. I had a glass of wine in there the other day. Heaven!

I'm not a tub person, but we kept a tub in the guest bathroom in the event one is needed someday. I just know that I've lived in my house for 5 years and had used the tub 4 times and the space was able to be used in a much more useful way (for us).

everyone knows the best way to get up some speed while sliding down the stairs is in a slick sleeping bag! aaaaand maybe with your little sister acting as the "weight" at the bottom of the sleeping bag to make it go faster.

I was Little Sister in this scenario. We all survived.

We used the same tiles in our master bathroom reno! They're beautiful.

My mother taught me how to do my laundry when I was 5 (I'm the younger sibling of two). I remember her telling me that since I was starting to go to big kid school, that I had to be ready to plan out what I was going to wear for the week and make sure those things were clean.

She made sure to put a smaller container of the laundry detergent we used at my level and show me the lines for measuring (also an important skill). Mom also told me she remembered more than once seeing me upside down, little legs kicking trying to reach the bottom of the washer for a sock or something that had stuck to the side.

Before I learned how to do laundry, I remember helping folding and then bringing my fisher-price shopping cart into the living room to "shop" for my clothes to take back and put away in my room. Mom was a genius!

Contrast this with my HS best friend whose mother did her laundry all the way through HS and into college. She was at a total loss for how to do laundry in the dorms freshman year.

I'm with everyone else - it's terribly rude and annoying to not RSVP, or to not update your RSVP if your situation changes somehow (things happen). Anyone who's planned a wedding or other event outside their home with vendors, etc. automatically understands the importance of the RSVP.

On the flip side, I have a sister-in-law who was hosting a 1st birthday for my niece (I know this isn't a baby birthday discussion, but bear with me). She didn't send out invitations, but sent out a mass text invite the week of the party (which drove me crazy). I had several people call me and say "was this a pity invite?" to which I had to reply, "No, that's just how she does invitations." They ended up having OVER 50 PEOPLE show up. No clue how many were intended. The whole ordeal almost gave me hives.

Our current neighbors are pretty fantastic. In 2008 when Hurricane Ike came through Galveston/Houston on a Saturday, we were set to be married in Dallas the following Saturday. The night before the storm blew through, our neighbors hosted an "empty your freezer" party. We laid out a huge buffet, two of the neighbors fired up their grills/smokers and went to town cooking a bunch of food so it could be saved in coolers.

The kid next door had his 9th birthday that exact day, so we all sang happy birthday to him around a mix of different ice creams and a frozen pie that had been baked.

The next day, after the storm had passed and everyone was stuck cleaning up the debris, one guy walked up and down the street with his chainsaw, cutting up limbs. My husband helped our elderly neighbors rake and sweep. People ran cords across the street to each other, since some houses on the street had power and others didn't. At the end of the second day, we were all exhausted from working outside all day, so we staged a rebellion and 6 houses worth of people snuck into the neighborhood pool for a refreshing swim (it was closed for the season).

We made it to our wedding with blisters all over our hands and about 3 trashbags full of "stink" clothes from all the cleanup. When we came back from our honeymoon, our neighbors who were watching our house had collected our mail, wedding gifts that had been delivered, made sure all our heavy "hurricane" trash had been thrown out when the crews finally came through to pick things up, given us a gift themselves, and plugged our refrigerator back in so it was cold by the time we got back. Great neighbors, I tell ya!

To each their own. The only weird thing I ever saw was a woman at a place where I briefly worked. She had a framed 8x10 photo of herself on her desk. Right next to her computer screen facing her chair (where most people would put a tasteful 3x5 of their family vacay or something similar). It was just her in the photo, from the waist up, sitting in a garden all dressed to the nines. I never understood having such a large picture of oneself but never cared enough to ask her the meaning behind it (and thought it might be perceived as rude or envious if I did ask her).

LRC, Scattergories, The Game of Things, Catchphrase and SceneIt! movie trivia for Xbox. Pretty much anything where you can play with close friends or people you're just getting to know. Anything that players won't take too seriously. My husband's family loves playing poker, but I find it gets too competitive and they always want to keep the game going even after it loses its "fun" to me.

If it's just my husband and I, it's usually Scrabble. We are a bit competitive, and have kept a running Wins/Losses score since we moved in together. I'm up in the series overall, but only by one game.