Pecan Pie Cheesecake Bars

These are the product of my inability to be OK with simplicity, yet another good thing to come of that :) The original recipe, found here on Lick the Bowl Good was amazing! We made the original last week when we were in Evansville for a family dinner and everyone loved it. Haley loved it so much that she suggested I make it for Thanksgiving and in an effort to merge it with traditional thanksgiving fare, eliminate some of it's simplicity, and make it a teensy, tiny bit healthier I decided to layer it with a pecan pie type filling and swap some ingredients. Here it is, enjoy!

You will need:

2 cans reduced fat crescent roll dough
8 oz fat free cream cheese
8oz reduced fat cream cheese
3/4 cups granulated sugar
1/2 cup cinnamon sugar
2 tbs melted margarine

1 cup pecans
1/4 cup lite maple syrup
1/2 cup brown sugar
4 tbs margarine

Powdered sugar
Preheat oven to 350. Mix 3/4 cup sugar with the two cream cheese packages until blended. In a greased 9x13 pan spread out one of the dough sheets, spread cream cheese mixture onto that.  In a saucepan melt 4tbs of the butter then add syrup, sugar and pecans. Pour this mixture over the cream cheese. Roll out the other crescent roll dough on top of this. Pour melted butter on top of this, then sprinkle cinnamon sugar all over. Bake it for 30 minutes and sift powdered sugar on top :)

Busy Busy!

I haven't blogged in forever, usually that means things have been either incredibly boring and I have nothing to tell you or things have been incredibly busy and I have a lot to tell you but no time to do it. This time I've been busy! I love being busy, it is the key to sanity retention for me. Without things to do I sort of lose my mind, I get bored and convince myself that it's all because of 29 Palms and if I only had a decent book store, like in a real city, everything would be perfect. That throws me into a potentially month long I hate 29 Palms complaint fest and that is really no fun at all.

So, things that have been keeping me busy are:

1. This wonderful holiday season which I believe starts with Halloween. We did so many Halloween activities with the community that I kind of want to throw up if I hear the word Halloween now.

2. Desert Lifestyle Magazine - I started contributing my photography to the magazine which is awesome! I love portraiture but I needed a new challenge and luckily for me DL mag was happy to give me some photo assignments one of which was photographing food for their upcoming issue so you know I was in heaven. They pay me in cupcakes and coffee cake and that keeps me pretty content.

3. My little angel butt, Alice. She's a maniac, she really is. Her daily mission is to seek out and get into as much trouble as possible. This includes feeding her dinner to the dog, climbing anything she can find, patiently waiting for me to accidentally leave the toilet lid open, unraveling the toilet paper roll, removing all DVDs from their shelves, trying to get into the dog crate, etc. To say she's a handful is an understatement.

4. The USMC Birthday Ball - It was this past weekend in Vegas at the southpoint. We has a great time, I truly love Vegas but I think I love it more on the weekdays, it's less crowded. We were crunched for time but we still took the girls to MGM to see the lions, the hard rock to see the rock memorabilia, and the M&M world, a 4 story building filled with overpriced M&M merchandise. My only complaint was all the smoke filled casinos and hallways that we had to walk through in order to get anywhere. I had a hard time breathing but I felt so bad for subjecting the kids to that.

5. Lastly, we're leaving today for Evansville! I am so excited to leave here and I'm even more excited about seeing my handsome husband in my favorite uniform, which I can never remember the name of, but it's the recruiters uniform. I think the Marines are the best dressed of all service branches. If I were a young high school senior all a Marine would need to do is walk past me and I'd say "sign me up" I think the uniform exudes this classic image of what a service member should look like and it's an effective advertising tool. I know many other girls and women agree that Nick looks fantastic in this because when he was a recruiter in San Antonio the high school girls were always asking him if he had a girl friend or trying to give him their phone numbers, it was cute! I'm excited to see if that happens again.

OK so that's it! I'll update as soon as I have some free time.