Hi my name is Angela, and I am obsessed with Pinterest. There I said it! It started with wedding planning, and I must admit, it helped out a ton. My wedding wouldn't have been as wonderful as it was without Pinterest....wait that sounds bad. I got married and that was the best thing ever, but the decor wouldn't have been as amazing without Pinterest...much better! Ok so after the wedding I wasn't sure what to look at since I don't really have finished rooms in the house to decorate. Well after some serious digging I have come up with projects!
The first one is a decoration but a useful decoration that doesn't necessarily need to be displayed.
I love this project for multiple reasons. One, because it serves an organizational purpose. And two, because I get to display my wedding earrings all the time!! This was actually a fairly easy project to accomplish. Goodwill frame, spray paint and some chicken wire. Matt refused to help me, which is probably a good idea since it was easy. But I did use the wire cutters and staple gun all by myself!
Project number two became my favorite instantly! A beautiful fall wreath. I can so decorate the front door!!
Yep I still love it!! And besides having to buy the starting tools, a wreath hook, glue guns and glue sticks, this wreath cost me under 10 bucks!! It does take a bit of time to complete this project, but I did finish it in one night. Once you buy the approiate materials, straw wreath, yarn and felt, it is a pretty easy task.
So I started with a knot on the wreath and then I wrapped and wrapped and wrapped. About three hours on and off later I was complete! Then I started on the felt flowers, to be honest I was a bit scared of these because I thought they would be hard. I am not a crafty person by any means. This was so much more easy than the wrapping of the yarn. I started with a 25 cent piece of felt and cut a scalloped circle out. Next I cut that into a spiral continuing with the scalloped pattern. Then take the very edge that you started cutting and start rolling it up. When you finish, you have a beautiful felt flower. I got creative and folding a big and small one up together to make the multi-colored flower. I hot glued the last circle piece to the back to secure the flower and then hot glued the flowers onto the wreath. I added the P last minute and I am glad I did. I think it turned out better than I could have imagined and was so proud of myself. I have already started on my second wreath and I want to make one for every season and every holiday. I just love them!!
Here are the sites with the tutorials I followed. They explain it better than me! You should make these!!
http://love2sisters.blogspot.com/2011/04/show-and-tell-monday-diy-jewelry.html
http://www.danielleburkleo.com/2010/10/diy-yarn-wreath-with-felt-flowers.html (yes I used the same colors she did)
One day back in August of last year this blog just stopped...since then I have been asked by many people if I am still blogging. I really enjoyed blogging but for some reason just discontinued. The number of people I didn't know read they blog asking me about the blog inspired me to start back up. So here goes..
So much has changed in my life in this past year. For example I got engaged, got married and went on a dream honeymoon!!
We have got a ton done on the house in the past year as well. I was trying to look through the last few blogs and see where I left off. It looks like we were working hard on the landscaping. Lets see what I can dig up for some updates.
So we finally finished the landscaping out front. We have even put a ton of plants in it and it looks great. I would say the yard is good to go if it wasn't for the extreme heat....now all the grass that was trying to get established...died. So now we will be working on that and then it will be great! We also got the new fireplace installed complete with Steve, the deer head, above it. This will not stay but for now I will humor \Matt since he thinks otherwise. We also completed our hardwood floor!! We had this floor for over a year and got it installed THE WEEK OF our wedding. Like the finishing pieces were complete on Thursday the week of. But regardless of when it was done, it IS done. It looks wonderful! As you can see from the pictures we also got the living room and dining room painted. Now we are working on the trim. We have it all stained and Matt is working on cleaning the garage up a bit so he can spray the varnish stuff on. I can't wait to have the trim around the windows, doors and floors. I really think it will make the whole space. Then I am REALLY excited to get new furniture and start decorating. I think at that point it will really feel like home!
Ok I think that is the updates for now....on to the reason of this blog FOOD!! In my last couple posts I talked about my love with the blog skinnytaste. This love is still going strong, in fact I have most of my family cooking from it as well. This morning I checked out the website when I woke up crazy early for a good breakfast idea. Unfortunately nothing caught my eye, so I went to my other go to, Alton Brown! Alton's blueberry muffins were the winner today.
They were pretty tasty, although they did call for orange zest and I did not have any oranges. So my next thought was lemon zest, which I didn't have either. So I thought I would just add a dash of lemon juice, but I couldn't get the bottle open....so nothing went in for the orange zest. Matt thought they could use more sugar, I thought they were great. Not your typical overall sweet muffin, but good. I will for sure eat the leftovers this week so that is always a good sign.
That is probably enough for the "getting back into the swing of things" post. I am planning a little DIY project today so stay tuned for that!! I have all the supplies and am excited to show it off. Thank pinterest! Until next time...
I told a few people about this recipe before I actually made it and I got some mixed reviews. When I told my brother I was making cheesy zucchini enchiladas, he told me zucchini goes in pasta or bread, but not in enchiladas....boy was he wrong! I'll have to admit, I was also slightly skeptical but when you have cheese and enchilada sauce can you really go wrong? I tweaked the sauce just a little bit, it has chipotles in adobo sauce in it and I thought the smokey flavor was a bit too much. I just upped the tomato sauce and broth and it was perfect. The whole recipe was pretty simple and if I could have you try one recipe it would be this! It had a great texture and taste. Typically Matt isn't a "non-meat" dinner person, but tonight was quite the different story. This will for sure be a make again dinner!
I am a big fan of Mexican food,
and for some reason some of my favorite things is Chicken tortilla soup. I don't really like the creamy ones, more of the broth type. Well when I end up pretty much replicating my favorite soup....you know it was a good night. Again I found this healthy recipe on www.skinnytaste.com, chicken and avocado soup. It was insanely flavorful and was still great leftover. I am a huge fan of avocado to begin with but the avocado in this soup had such a creamy good texture.
In other news....I GOT MY FIRST RED TOMATOES OUT OF THE GARDEN TONIGHT!!! I know, I know, you can pretty much get fresh tomatoes anywhere now. But these came from our garden so that makes them even better. Matt started making some pickles with the over abundance of cucumbers that we have. Other than that we haven't been able to harvest anything else from the garden.
We have some house project progression!! Matt has been working on cleaning out under the porch so he can start laying the cinder blocks to finish our landscaping project. Tonight, he laid the first seven blocks!! This might seem little and stupid...but it is a huge step in finally finishing this dang project, it makes me happy!! Pictures to come soon!!!
Two things to start off with, first I need to talk about something else before my new obsession, and second, please note that this is two days in a row I am blogging...YAY!! Ok so before the obsession, last week I made homemade pesto and I just had to share. It was super easy and so delicious. It was awesome to use some of the overgrown basil in my front yard!! I just took a large handful of basil threw it in the food processor with some toasted pine nuts, parmesan cheese, garlic and olive oil. Simply delicious!
Last night I made my first recipe, Asian glazed chicken. Well it is technically called asian glazed drumsticks....but we only had chicken quarters, so that is what we used. This recipe took not many ingredients, was remotely quick to make (defrosting the chicken took the longest), was healthy and AMAZING. Holy buckets, if this recipe is any indication of what this website has in store for me then you can count me in! I served with with some steamed veggies to keep with the healthy theme.....mouth watering....
The best surprise EVER, coming home on a Friday night and to find out Matt had gone to the asain market and got a bunch of stuff for SUSHI! I LOVE LOVE sushi so this was a perfect way to spend a Friday night. I think I have tagged myself as a professional. I must say it was a great "couples" activity. It was just alot of fun. We started off with making the sushi rice. Not going to lie, waiting for it to cool was causing me a bit of anxiety because I just wanted to eat it. Matt bought crab sticks, fresh salmon and tuna, we had avocado and cucumbers on hand so we had a good variety going. The actual rolling of the sushi took a bit of practice but was fun. I am not sure if I have said it yet or not...but we have a very small crowded kitchen....you will be able to tell from the pictures.
We also made some sashami, but the rolls were my favorite. I liked mixing and mashing the different ingredients. Man sushi sounds good right now......
We even had wasabi and the pickled ginger....measuring cups made great dippers for the soy sauce. Hey when you don't have the space or the utensil, you gotta improvise!! The best roll of the night was the "all in" roll. I put every ingredient in it and I ate it all myself...Matt was full, whatever. I am a bottomless pit for sushi!!
Stay tuned for some killer recipes from my new food blog crush... www.skinnytaste.com
I have never had this much to blog about before. I am going to have to break this up into multiple posts...this is crazy!! I will try and stay on top of this from now on. Alright, well Matt worked over the weekend, so he was off work on Thursday and Friday. He had dinner planned both nights which was wonderful. Soooo lets start with Thursday night, salmon burgers. Yum, this was a great surprise. They were simple to make and we had almost all of the ingredients on hand. Since the salmon gets broken up, we just used frozen salmon, which saved us a bunch of money. Topping for the burger was arugula and tartar sauce, we aren't the biggest fans of tartar sauce but it was delicious. If you are sick of grilling the the normal hamburgers and brats, I highly recommend this.
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and pretty much any time they are around here, we are in attendance. We have developed a little "Nadas Family" as we like to call it. Well one of the members, Emma to be precise, has a birthday coming up....and she also LOVES Guinness beer. Well as I was browsing other food blogs I came across a picture of Guinness brownies with irish cream frosting and I knew they must be made for her. So that we did, and by we I mean Matt did on his day off. We make a killer regular brownie,
seriously make them, so Matt took that recipe and subtracted this and that and added a bottle of guinness. The frosting was pretty easy a little butter, cream cheese, irish cream and some powdered sugar. We just added things until it tasted good. And I must say they tasted GOOD. We brought them to the bar to surprise her and she loved them....even the waitress enjoyed them.
And last but not least, I finally remembered to take pictures of the garden during or "weeding" day. I am still anxiously awaiting the ripening of all the baby tomatoes. I mean i literally can't wait.....man I love tomatoes. So we have a ton of cucumbers and even tonight I made a new huge batch of cucumber salad. I can't wait to start making some greek salad with my fresh maters!
Look for more posts this week, I have plenty more yummy food to tell you about!!!
