Here is a long awaited post about our chicken coop that has been in production for about 6 months. We have finally finished the structure and are excitingly waiting to have a chance to go and pick up our chicks from grandpa's farm!

The coop was made almost entirely from found pallets. Almost entirely means that we bought some screws and hinges, and were given some roofing shingles. Otherwise all of the wood is "reclaimed" scrap pallets that were scavenged!

In an attempt to motiviate ourselves and our housemates, we have instituted a bi-weekly Yellow House Workout Night.  We figured it would be way easier to get our butts in gear if there weren't friends in the other room that you would rather be hanging out with.  So here's the plan:

Mondays: free weights/yoga/whatever you want in our basement work-out room
Thursdays: go on a walk as a house

Maybe I was a little preemptive calling this a success but we have worked out twice in the past five days and I would call that a small victory!  With Brandon's class schedule he gets home later some days than others but we work with it and make it happen.  Stay tuned, we'll keep you posted!

xoxo Katie

What's that you say?  You bake vegan monkey bread, vegan chocolate chip cookies, and vegan rum balls and then eat them along side meat?  Real meat?  As in you are "we just bought a sixth of a cow to eat" meat-eaters?  Who are you people???

Well, as it turns out, we aren't as crazy as we sound.  Because Amanda can't eat milk or eggs (without paying dire consequences and who wants to go there) we tend to follow vegan recipes and then add some meat to our meals in other ways.  At first I thought that cooking for someone with allergies was going to be a huge challenge and limiting in the variety and complexity of the food we eat.  Turns out the only thing we haven't been able to find a dairy and egg free version of is meringue.  Well, and cheese but that is a sore subject for Amanda anyway.  And me?  I have become so accustomed to cooking without milk or eggs that it is second nature!

As we mentioned in our Christmas post we made vegan monkey bread for our Yellow House Christmas which turned out just as well as the original and was tres délicieux.  If you haven't heard of monkey bread it is basically balls of biscuit dough dipped in melted butter, rolled in cinnamon sugar and then baked so that when you turn out the pan there is a pile of gooey, sticky, sinful little bites of deliciousness to pull apart and devour.

A classic monkey bread recipe via http://www.craftyinthekitchen.com/

So how do you take a non-vegan recipe and make it safe for Miss Amanda to eat?  We typically break a recipe down into its components and look at them separately to see what makes the most sense.  In the case of monkey bread, since the base is biscuits (most commonly refrigerated biscuit dough) we looked at our options for biscuits first.

The Joy of Vegan Baking by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau has become our Bible when it comes to the basics of vegan baking.  Using her Drop Biscuits recipe and making a few tweaks in their preparation, we were able to make a pretty darn tasty version of what would be a completely off limits food for Amanda.  And you never would have guessed that there was no milk involved.

Yellow House Monkey Bread

Ingredients
1 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup coconut milk
1/3 cup canola oil

1/4 cup Earth Balance dairy free margarine, melted
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon

Directions
Preheat the oven to 475 degrees F.

Mix together sugar and cinnamon in a shallow dish.  Set aside.

In a large bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder, and salt until combined.  Add the milk and oil and stir just until the dry ingredients are moistened. It will be very sticky and thick, not smooth like cake batter.

Turn dough out onto a floured surface and roll out to 1/2 inch thickness.  Cut into roughly 2 inch squares.  Roll each square into a ball.  Dip balls into melted Earth Balance, then roll in cinnamon sugar.  Place balls in baking dish.

Bake about 10-12 minutes, depending on the shape of your dish.  The Earth Balance should melt and the dish should look gooey and shiny.  The dough is cooked when it is is firm to the touch.

Let cool for  5 minutes, then turn out onto a serving dish.

Adapted from The Joy of Vegan Baking.  Patrick-Goudreau, Colleen. "Drop Biscuits." Recipe. The Joy of Vegan Baking: The Compassionate Cooks' Traditional Treats and Sinful Sweets. Beverly, MA: Fair Winds Press, 2007.pg. 48.

Merry Christmas from the Yellow House!  We have all be super busy, getting ready for all the festivities that the holidays bring.  Care to take a look?  Of course you do, don't lie.

There were Christmas gifts to be made.

You can't expect us to reveal too much, now!  Christmas isn't until tomorrow after all.

And there were stockings to make and hang,

Stefan slaving away at the sewing machine, once again.

The finished product!

Stefan, age 3

Katie, age 3

Amanda, age 5

Brandon, age 9

The living room pre-tree...

...the tree being fitted....

...and being lit...

...posed with...

Our tree's name is Nigel.  He is a nobel fir.  We love him.

...and decorated.

And then there were stockings and gifts.  It was a lovely and relaxing way to spend our last morning together before heading off to our various family gatherings. I love these people and I am so happy we got to have our own special Christmas together.

Merry Christmas from SKAB (aka the Yellow House).

xoxo Katie

With two of us in Oregon and two of us in California we may not be together in the Yellow House to do so but, here's wishing you a very happy Thanksgiving from Team Yellow House.

We are so thankful to live in such a beautiful home, surrounded by people we love and close to so many friends and family. Thank you for encouraging our adventure and for being a part of the journey, in person or as a reader of this blog.

Hope you are spending the holiday with the people you love and eat a piece of pie for us!

Well check that off the list! We officially have a bench for our entry thanks to Stefan and Amanda's hard work.

Two coats of paint, some sandpaper and elbow greese and you have this!  The perfect piece to sit next to our new IKEA coat tree. Add a couple baskets underneath and, viola! Entryway storage and seating problem solved.

Other major progress in the living room includes getting curtains of our choosing hung so that we don't look like we are living in our grandmothers' house. After much discussion and a few sketches by yours truly we settled on using tiebacks instead of the existing drapery pulls. Excellent choice Team Yellow House.

Yup, that's Stefan on the couch, working on his latest blog post.

In other parts of the house things are getting settled and beautified as well.  The basement bathroom (Stefan and Katie's) has been painted Tiffany blue to jazz things up at bit in an otherwise neutral and dark room.  Check out that amazing tile though!!























A quick photo tour of the rest of the house for all of those inquiring minds out there.

The kitchen.  (Note the dueling Kitchen-Aids.)

Stefan and Katie's Bedroom (at the back of the house)

The Media Room (in the basement)

Brandon and Amanda's Bedroom complete with test patch of paint (front of the house)

Brandon and Amanda's Bathroom (main floor)

The Girls' Craft Room: a work in progress (upstairs)

The Boys' Office (also upstairs)

Stay tuned for more and feel free to comment!  We want to hear from you!

When Katie and I got hitched we received a Penzeys Spices gift box from some long time family friends of mine. It came in a nifty pine box that we have used to store the spices in the kitchen until now.

In its new home