Masters Celebration

Sorry I fell off the edge of the earth. Between starting comps studying in earnest, traveling, and packing up our apartment, it has been go-go-go. I honestly am surprised I'm able to blog right now but I have a headache that's preventing me from reading comps material so I'm playing catch up! 

I wanted to do a quick recap of the ways we celebrated Matt finishing his Masters degree. He finished his last exam Thursday morning and then had to go to work (poor dude). Once he got home, though, it was party time! I surprised him with one of his favorite meals-- chicken enchiladas (from Cooking Light of all places; seriously these are amazing- make them!) along with chips & queso that I made in his new Little Dipper. For dessert, I made a slow cooker apple bread pudding dish, served with Blue Bell vanilla ice cream. So good! 

Matt's loot

Yay! He's done!

Have to stir the queso

Chicken enchiladas

A little bit of back story: as opposed to getting him one big gift, I decided to go for a series of small things he has wanted but were hard to randomly purchase at the store. So yes, I got him a Little Dipper. While my waist line may regret our easy access to queso, it is totally worth it. Some of the other things I got him included Maple syrup (yes, we're silly) and an Amazon gift card so he can start ordering the books he has wanted to read. 

But anyway, we had a fun time eating good food and relaxing that night. We were a bit more adventurous on Friday. After I finished studying for the day, we headed out to one of the local Studio Movie Grills to watch the Captain America sequel. It was a fun movie but we had ordered chips and dip (can you tell we like this dish?) and might have spoiled our dinner a little. The movie was a lot more suspenseful than anticipated and that resulted in mindless eating. Oh well, it was delicious! 

Benefit to middle afternoon showings on
weekdays- theater to ourselves!

For dinner we headed to the appropriately-named Celebration Restaurant in Dallas. As soon as I saw the menu, I knew it would be the perfect place for Matt as it featured home-cooked recipes such as chicken fried steak. It had a nice laid back environment and we both enjoyed our food a lot, despite not being that hungry.

Have to have a bread basket!

My entree, a pecan-crusted chicken salad. So good!!

Matt's chicken fried sirloin steak with sides. You could get
seconds on these items by the way. Unfortunately we couldn't take
advantage of that as we simply didn't have room!

The graduate :)

Since Matt wasn't wanting to have a party or anything and since he didn't walk across the stage, that about sums up our formal celebration of his graduation. It was fun and relaxing though, both perfect qualities after all the time studying!