So What! Wednesday

So What If...

• I am planning on wearing a maxi skirt everyday for the rest of this week.  They are comfy, cute, and I can get away with them at work.  However, I am thinking my co-workers might think I have started a uniform for the office.
• I made some more peanut butter fudge...but I ate like 3 pieces and now I am completely over sweets for a while.  That's how I get with things like that.  I gorge myself on them, and then I won't eat them for like a year.
• I am legitimately sad I have deleted past episodes of My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding.  That show is a trainwreck, and I seriously wish I could have my own marathon some days. 
• I watched the part of Gypsy Wedding where the girl brushed her teeth with household bleach to whiten them 3 times because it is just that funny.  When she says, "you go get your 2 dollar bleach and you are killing 2 birds with 1 stone.  You get your house cleaned and your teeth whitened.  I don't have to spend $600 at a dentist."  OMG! Hilarious (and a little sad too)

This is the whole episode...skip to 19:45 if you want to see the teeth bleach part.

• My So What!s are basically the same this week as last...I have a very interesting life huh?!
• I haven't vacumned in 2 weeks...instead I have been sewing maxi skirts! haha!

What are you saying So What! to? To join in, go over to Shannon's blog and link up!

Menu Monday - Roasted Red Pepper Pasta

I love roasted red peppers!  The other day, I was in the mood for a chunky marinara style pasta sauce that featured red peppers, so I threw together this.  I used Racheal Ray's recipe from food network for a jumping off point but made it my own.  This was delicious and very light!

Ingredients

• 1 small-medium onion, chopped
• 2 jars roasted red pepper in olive oil with garlic (you can also roast your peppers, would need about 5.  If you can't find this item, you can buy the regular jar in water and add 4 cloves minced garlic to the recipe)
• 1 14.5 oz can petite diced tomatoes
• 2 cups chicken broth 
• 1 tablespoon parsley (or about a handful of fresh)
• salt and pepper to taste
• olive oil 

Directions

1. Over medium heat, saute onion in olive oil until soft.  Use your olive oil from the peppers if available.  
2. While onion cooks, grind red peppers and garlic cloves in a food processor.  Do not pour in the olive oil from the jars! Save this for another use in your kitchen! When onion is soft, add this mixture and your can of tomatoes now.  Cook for 3-4 minutes.
3. Add chicken broth to pan and let it come to a boil.  Boil until the sauce starts to reduce.  Add parsley, salt, and pepper and reduce heat to low.  Cover and simmer for about 45 minutes.  If the sauce reduces too much, add a little more chicken broth or some of the pasta water.
4. Serve over noodles and top with parmesan cheese.  Enjoy! 

Friday Iphone Dump

It's that time again! I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend! 

So What! Wednesday

So What If...

• The bulk of my knowledge of today's music comes from Glee! I listen to oldies, broadway, and soundtracks 90% of the time.  Glee keeps me modern! haha!
• I ate a ton of peanut butter fudge in the last week.  You would think I would have learned by now I have no self control and need to keep things like this out of my house!
• I am watching the past seasons of Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, Making the Team on Hulu Plus! I flippin' love watching that show and it makes me want to get up off my booty and exercise!
• I also say So What! to the fact that the show only makes me want to exercise, I haven't actually done so yet.  I actually just have sat on the couch watching and eating that peanut butter fudge. 
• My roots are starting to look bad! I need to get my highlights done stat, but I have a conference next month and I want to look fresh for that.  I am putting off the color appt. until at least June 1st!

What are you saying So What! to?  To join in, go over to Shannon's blog and link up!

My Summer Project

I mentioned last week that my mom is cleaning out her garage in preparation for an upcoming move.  This means that it is finally time for me to come and get my things that I have kept there.  Yearbooks, childhood mementos, clothes, and so much more! My mom brought a ton of boxes to my house this past weekend and I started to go through them.  One of the things I found in there were all of my cheerleading t-shirts from high school.  I have tons of them! I remember around graduation my now MIL telling me I should get a family friend to make them into a t-shirt quilt.  I wasn't quite ready to stop wearing them yet at that point, so I declined.  As I got older though, I set them aside planning to have someone do this one day.  As many of you know, one of my main hobbies is sewing (particularly crafts and clothing).  I am not a quilter, but I decided to try my hand at this because I thought it would be a fun trip down memory lane and a great memento to have of this time in my life.  I have a lot to learn about quilting, but I am really looking forward to making a great quilt!

I am using this company's awesome quilts as my inspiration.  I hope that my quilt comes out half as great as one of theirs!  If any of you have experience with quilting, or have some links that might give me information, please leave them in the comments!  I am really nervous about the actual quilting part of the project! I will keep y'all informed as I progress through this project!

Menu Monday - Beef Enchiladas

I had a request for my beef enchilada recipe that I mentioned last week, so here is it! We love mexican food and do a taco night every week.  This was a nice change that tasted different...which is funny because most of the ingredients are the same! I just kinda made it up to suit our tastes, but it was yummy and I will make it again.  This is a good basic recipe and you can change it up based on what you like.

Beef Enchiladas - makes 5-6 large enchiladas

Ingredients

• 1 lb ground beef (I always used 93/7 lean beef so I don't have to drain it)
• 1 small-medium onion, chopped
• 1 package taco seasoning 
• 5-6 large tortillas
• 1 can enchilada sauce 
• Cilantro to taste, chopped
• 2 cups cheddar cheese (or mexican blend)

Directions

1. Brown your meat over medium-high heat.  Drain if needed.  Return pan to stovetop and add onion. Saute until soft. (Sidenote, if you use 93/7 lean beef, then don't drain that tiny bit of fat that comes out.  You can saute the onion in it).  Add water and taco seasoning according to your package directions.  (Another sidenote, we like our taco meat to have a tiny bit of sauce, so I add about 1/3 cup more water to the seasoning and it makes a very small amount of sauce.  It's almost negligible, but that little bit just makes it taste better to us)  
2. In a casserole dish (13x9 or other large size), place a tortilla.  Spoon the meat into the tortilla and wrap it up.  Don't try to do it like a burrito, just fold the sides over and let the top and bottom stay open.  I spooned 2 heaping tablespoons on my tortillas, but just eyeball it.  The first tortilla will be hard to keep closed, but once you get one next to it, they help keep each other closed.  Keep doing this until you run out of meat.  
3. Pour a can of enchilada sauce over the top of all the enchiladas.  Sprinkle your chopped cilantro over the top of that.  You could also do black olives (my hubby hates them, but I LOVE them).  Top the entire casserole dish with cheese to taste.  
4. Bake in 375 degree oven for about 20-30 minutes until the enchilada sauce is bubbly and hot and the cheese is melted.  
5. Top with sour cream and enjoy! 

Friday iPhone Dump

I take a ton of pictures on my phone every week. From funny things I see, to things that are just a normal day to day thing in my life. I always have my phone and always am snapping pictures! I have seen people do something of this sort in the past, and I am going to try to start do this on Fridays. You can see my life from my iphone pictures!

  

Have a happy weekend!  This weekend my bestie Ashton is coming to stay at my house the whole weekend and the hubbys are spending the weekend together at her house! It's going to be a fun weekend full of girl time!



Stop and Smell the Roses, Week 1

2 posts in one day! Wow!  There is just a lot going on in the blog world today.  Tonight I am linking up with Mandy at House of Rose.  First off, I look around A LOT during this video and I was a little nervous!  It's also almost 7 minutes...I am a talker.  This was fun and I definitely will be joining in from now on.

So What! Wednesday

In order to try to get my blogging back into a little schedule and give me more ideas of what to blog about, I am going to try to start linking up to more stuff.  Today I am linking with Life After I "Dew" to join in on So What! Wednesday.  I have seen this done a lot in the past and I think it will be fun!

So What If...

• I love to watch trashy t.v. that my husband says is made for the "lowest common denominator of the human race."  He literally (jokinly) told me this last week!  He loves to raz me about it! It's a-okay because he has started watching Hard Core Pawn and that show is a hot mess (and I LOVE it), so he can't be holier-than-thou now! haha!
• I was more than a little excited to catch up on my shows over the past few nights!  My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding, The Real Housewives of New Jersey, and now that it's back SISTER WIVES!!!!
• I have been saying I was going to start a couch to 5k program and even went as far as to tell some of my co-workers and have yet to start it (2 weeks later).  I want to, but I just have a hard time doing it early in the morning and after work I am so tired!
• I haven't decorated a cookie in 2 weeks! I have planned out some to decorate for tonight just for fun though!
• My husband has been surviving on freezer section Chicken Nuggets and French Fries for dinner for the last few weeks.  I have not felt like cooking, but this week I did a meal plan and have made thus far: Beef Enchiladas, Stuffed Peppers, and White (and Black oops bad grocery shopping) Bean Chicken Chili.  We have leftovers for days now and my husband still will probably want to eat Chicken Nuggets! haha!
• I am the last person on Earth to discover Pandora radio!  My workplace blocks it, so I never wasted my time with it and just listen to other sites for radio there.  Well, I was taking a bath the other night and all Apple products block Grooveshark (my go-to).  I wanted to listen to music while relaxing in the bath, so I used my husbands iPad Pandora app.  I flippin' love this thing!  I put it on the Wicked station since I am obsessed with listening to Broadway music and that thing plays Glee, The Sound of Music, Rent, Disney songs, and even Michael Buble and old school 90s music like Kryptonite (I think that's 90s!).  I have yet to find a song I dislike.  I swear, it's like that thing knows me!

Have a fantastic Wednesday!  I am going to try to do a vlog tonight, so look for that!

Hair Tutorials

Do you read The Small Things Blog?  I imagine a lot of you do because Kate's blog went viral with the Pinterest craze, but if you don't I will fill you in.  The Small Things Blog is a beauty/personal blog were Kate, who is a professional hair stylist, talks about things from her cats, her life, beauty products, and most notably, her hair.  She started doing hair tutorial videos on youtube, and they have just taken off.  I have read and watched a ton of her tutorials through the past few months and she honestly has changed my relationship with my hair.  I think a lot of us women feel like we want a low maintenance style that we can wash and do something easy to and look stylish.  It's not even that we don't want to put a little time into it, but it's that we don't really know how to replicate what the stylist does.  Kate's tutorials are great because they teach you what you need to do from curling your hair to flat ironing it to blowing it out for volume.  It's so nice to be able to watch something and realize, "Hey that's why mine doesn't look right!"

I would say I have okay hair and I do think it's pretty.  It's blonde, which I like (although it's not so natural anymore) and it's silky soft.  However, the softness is a terrible combination with the fact that it is thin.  Kate says in one of her videos that she has a medium amount of fine hair.  Yep, that's me.  Combined with the softness, it is very hard to do anything with it.  It has never liked to hold a style and bobby pins like to slide out of it.  The one saving grace is that as I have gotten older, and it's gotten darker, I have gotten a full set of highlights every 2 months or so for about 7-8 years.  This has really helped it to get less soft (dries it out some), and it hold styles better.   But still, I never know what to do with it!

Enter Kate and her tutorials!  I chopped all my hair off shortly after my wedding because I was sick of feeling like it was a limp noodle hanging down my head all the time.  I thought this would help me feel like I had a style. 

right after I cut it...I liked it but I only had one option for what to do with it and the upkeep was awful.

However, short hair styles grow out FAST and I didn't like that up keep.  I started watching her tutorials, but I couldn't do any of them until I grew it out a little bit.  I don't want my hair to be long again, but I am aiming to keep mine around a medium length (a little shorter than Kate).  Well, through the months my hair has been growing and now I can happily say I can start to utilize some of her tutorials!!!! 

Last night I decided to try out her curling tutorial.  My hubs loves my hair curly, but I have always been terrible at doing it.  I always have kinks in it when I am done.  Turns out I have been doing it wrong all along.  I would start at the ends and wrap up, instead of starting at the root!  When I learned the right way to do it, my hair curled easily and pretty quick.  It took me about 30 minutes last night (second time to try it in a couple months), and I decided to do it again this morning for work.  It took me 10-15 minutes once I got the technique down!  I like to shower at night and go to bed with wet hair, so this was a pretty big time savings considering how long it takes to blow out!  I have also used the flat iron tutorial for months now and some of her ideas to braid my bangs and the different twist techniques lately.  I feel a lot more stylish and amped up that I actually can do something with my hair! 

I just wanted to share this great resource if you have hair troubles! 

Random Tidbits

• You may have noticed I have a watermark on all of my photos of cookies.  This is because I have started a little hobby bakery in my spare time.  I had overwhelming response to my cookies on Facebook as I was starting in this hobby around Christmas and had many people ask me to make them cookies for upcoming events.  I ended up making a Facebook page and starting this as a little hobby.  It is really small scale, but that is a-okay with me since I am super busy with work and home and an order every now and then funds some fun new cookie cutters.  Who knows what this could eventually grow into, but for now it is a perfect balance of fun orders from time to time and plenty of time to exercise my own creativity on projects for my family and friends. 
• I also have to mention that my hubby laughs at this cookie hobby quite often as it has overtaken our lives (and our dining room and kitchen and part of the garage because of the mess and the supply storage.)  He is quite a good sport and always oohs and awhs over my cookies like I would like him to.  The other night I was all giddy because one of my many cookie idols "liked" my facebook page for my cookies.  I exclaimed to him that my cookie idol liked my page, and he bust out laughing.  He was like, "Cookie Idol?  What is that!  You are such a dork," which I replied, "Yes, my cookie idol LilaLoa and yes, I'm honored, and yes, I am a dork...but you are too! So there!"  It was a funny moment! 
• I have gained a good bit of weight since I got married, which I hear is quite normal.  However, I am not digging it!  I am starting a couch to 5K to try to get in better shape.  Wish me luck! 
• I am really looking forward to Kelly's Korner starting up the home tour again, and I am going to show you our progress of decorating our home as the link up starts!  It will be fun!

Super Paper Mario

One of the characters that I was the most excited to make into a cookie was Super Mario Brothers.  I decided to do a simpler version (or so I thought) by doing Super Paper Mario.  Any cookie that is 2-3 inches and has that much detail isn't easy!  I really enjoyed doing these, and with the vast number of characters in the Super Mario Brothers franchise, I am sure I will do these for fun over and over again.  I hope you enjoy looking at these cookies!

 

I haven't transformed into a cookie only blog, I just have been doing a tons of cookies lately, so it's naturally a topic for me to blog lately.  Stick with me, I am working on some Disney World vacation posts.

Sleeping Beauty Cookies

I preface just about every post that has to do with Disney with "Everyone knows I am a Disney nut."  Maybe I need to just add this to my sidebar because a lot of Disney posts are coming at you soon (just went on a dream trip to the World and working on my posts). 

The first thing I made with my Kopykake projector were these Sleeping Beauty cookies.  I am especially fond of the Disney Princesses and plan to make them all into cookies eventually.  Won't that be a fun little project!

I made two of these cookies.  I think for the decorating part (not including making dough, baking, cooling, making icing, coloring icing, thinning icing, filling bags and bottles, and clean up...whew!) I spent about 2 hours.  I seriously wanted these to come out perfect!  I have to do my princesses justice!

These were tons of fun, but it might be a little while before I tackle my next princess!

Hello Kitty Cookies

I have 3 nieces.  They are so sweet and fun and precious! I only wished they lived closer to me.  It's funny because they used to be my "birth control" as people say.  BUT the older I get, and the more settled I get, they have turned into a trigger for my "baby fever."  Look at how precious!

Last weekend was a family birthday party for Olivia and Sage since they are both born in April.  Olivia is 12 and Sage is 2! Time flies!  Of course, I sent presents to the party since I couldn't be there, but I felt bad to leave out the middle sister Autumn.  She is at that age where she loves characters, so I decided to make her some cookies of her favorite at the moment!

For these cookies, I used my Kopykake projector to get the outline.  I used the Wilton set of cutters for the shapes, and the cardboard backing in the KK.  I am slightly a hoarder in that I keep all those little cardboard backs that come with Wilton sets.  I like to have them to look back at if I especially liked the design cookies, or if I think the shape would be useful (like Hello Kitty).  I cut the cardboard to make it fit in the KK, and got to work.  I didn't flood these since I wanted the outline to be up to the edge.  I simply piped the Hello Kitty outline with the aid of my KK (she needs a name, don't you think).  After this was pretty set, I flooded the sections progressively with thick flood icing (15 second). 

I really like the way that these came out and by the looks of it, the kids liked them too!  It was so nice of Auty-boo to share at the party!

Mermaid Cookies

Recently I picked up a new toy on Groupon.  It's called a Kopykake Projector. 

Groupon was having an amazing deal, and my sweet friends at the Cookiers R Us forum let me know about it.  I have known about the KK for a while, but didn't think it was for me since I just do cookies as a hobby and the KK costs a good bit.  Well, at the price I got it for, I could justify it as a good tool even for a hobby baker.  The KK is basically a projector for cakes, cookies, and other food items, but you certainly can use it for crafts as well! It has a board on the bottom for placing your item on, and then the light bulb and projector unit is above so that it doesn't heat up the cookie and bake it more or cause it to break!  The KK has greatly increased the amount of designs I can do, and I feel a lot more inspired and motivated just having it as a tool available to me.  I am sure I could lightly draw out the designs I have done with a food writer and then pipe them, but the KK does the hard work for you and you know your designs will be consistent and free from the wonky-ness your freehand sometimes causes.  I love my KK!

One of the first designs I did with the help of my KK is a set of mermaids inspired by a clip art set by Jessica Weible Illustrations.  I love Jessica Weible's designs and couldn't wait to cookie-fy this one!  I really enjoy her stick people illustrations and have a few more in line to create, so be on the lookout on the blog. 

Click the picture to take you to Jessica Weible's website!

 For these cookies, I hand cut the mermaid shapes (with the aid of my KK!).  To decorate, I flooded the base with teal blue, which is a mixture of fleshtone and sky blue Americolor gels.  Once the icing was crusted, I CAREFULLY piped the mermaid outlines with black piping icing.  I let all of this dry overnight.  The next day I flooded the sections progressively with a thick flood icing (maybe 15 count). 



I am linking up over at the Bearfoot Baker blog where the theme today is "BLUE."  I think these underwater themed cookies fit the bill very nicely for that!