Hicks House

I find for whatever reason whenever I’m asked “how’s the house coming along” the best I can come up with is a lame “fine”. I struggle to be able to verbalize all the hard work we’ve put in so far in both big and small projects as well as how much we still have left to do.

When I started this blog I thought it would be a great way to keep family and friends updated on all the little things we’re doing to the house. Flash forward about 8 months and I’m unsure of how many of my original intended audience actually reads the blog – yet I find I really enjoy writing it and putting posts together. It’s become a sort of accountability for myself so I no longer have a lame answer to what we’ve done to the house lately, so that we can look back a year, two years from now and see how far we’ve come and the step by step process we’ve taken to make our house our home.

Maybe as I’ve found my stride and passion in accounting for our journey the internet community has taken notice and stopped by to read. Perhaps I have just paid “my start-up blog dues” This last month especially I have seen the readership go from 2-4 on a good day to 100-150 on a good day – Holy Smokes! Now I know this is nothing compared to really any of the blogs I follow – but it was exciting for me.

Then the unthinkable, unimaginable, magical moment happened while I was scrolling through the Popular section on Pinterest:

BAM!

There it was, the Hicks House Color Scheme. Since then it has been pinned over 300 times. As it’s Pinterest there is no way to know how many of those pinners have actually clicked through to read my blog and impossible to tell of those who did – what they thought and if they will re-visit.

For those of you who do read and keep up, I just wanted to say Thank You. Thank you for reading, thank you for coming back and most importantly thank you for feeding my desire to keep you updated and continue creating the account of our story home.

It’s been a little while since the last time I posted a recipe. When I first started this blog I never imagined I would post a single one, since my skills in the kitchen are quite limited. However once in awhile something is just too delicious not to share so I hope you enjoy reading the occasional food post as much as I like eating ~~sharing~~ them!

Luckily for me, Ken is more adept in the kitchen than I am and willing to indulge my sometimes odd food requests. Last weekend while in the grocery store pondering what to make for lunch we we’re staring a giant guacamole display in front of the meat counter (hello thick cut bacon) and the idea struck “what about avocado BLT’s?”

So with no other idea and the pains of hunger growing we decided to stop deliberating and just go with it. We purchased our avocado and headed home to assemble our sandwiches.

Once we started things slowly got out of control… “What if we grill the sandwiches rather than just toasting the bread – that would be yummy”… “If we’re going to grill it then we need cheese too – what’s a grilled sandwich without melted cheese”…

So that all led us eventually to this awesomeness:

Here it is step by step how we did it:

Ingredients:

4 slices of bread
butter or margarine to spread on 1 side of each slice of bread (or cooking spray if using a panini press)
6 slices of bacon cooked
1 tomato cut into slices
2 slices of cheese (or 4 if you had mini slices like we did)
spinach or lettuce – enough to cover one slice of bread
avocado cut into thin slices

The first step is to prepare all your ingredients and cook your bacon. Spray your panini press or butter two slices of bread and place on a cold skillet.

Start layering your ingredients. We did it in this order: spinach – avocado – cheese (we used monterey jack) – bacon – tomato.

At this point we remembered we own a panini maker and were wondering why we always make these large stack sandwiches in a skillet… So we transferred it to the panini maker and topped with the final slices of bread.

If you are using a skillet top with your second bread slices and turn the heat to medium until browned (just like grilled cheese) then carefully flip without loosing all your fillings. (This is an art that Ken has mastered due to our perpetual forgetfulness that we own a panini maker) Continue cooking until the other side is browned.

If using a panini maker turn it on and press till browned and cheese is melty.

Enjoy!