Archive for the ‘in my kitchen’ Category

Central Texas is not known for producing apples. In fact, I can’t find a pick-your-own apple orchard anywhere. So I will just have to watch all of you northern types, who actually have four distinct seasons and rain, and oogle over your baskets of apples. In the meantime, I stock up on the wonderful varieties that the supermarket brings in this time of year. Make my lists of appleicious recipes. And force fall into Texas.

With all of the apples, the first item on the list was to make an apple pie. So I googled ‘apple pie recipe’ came up with this FANTASTIC recipe. It is one of the best apple pie recipes I’ve ever tried. Yummy! Add these items to your shopping list and make it now. Okay, tomorrow. Or even next weekend. But you have to make this pie. And don’t forget the Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla Ice Cream. That combination will knock your socks off. If you don’t have Blue Bell, you’re going to have to make your own. Just kidding!

Do you have any apple recipes to share? I’d love to collect them and put them on my blog in a post. Send me a link or comment with your favorite apple recipe by Friday. Can’t wait to try them all!

He said it was going to rain. The weatherman that is. A shower for five minutes this morning does not, in my book, constitute rain. Whatsoever. The grass is all brown. Most plants have dried up. And Lake Travis is beginning to look like Lake Havasu. Boy do I sound like Debbie Downer today.

Speaking of the lake, we spent a lot of time down there this weekend fishing and throwing rocks. And can I tell you that Makena’s little princess pole catches more fish than any pole we bring down there?!? Granted they are little perch, but a caught fish makes everyone happy. Anyhow, we’re not fishing for dinner. We’d starve.

On another note, why do people flip me off with my kids in the car? I was thinking about painting a huge sign on my back windshield that says ‘Keep your finger to yourself. My kids are in the car.’ How do you think that’d go over? Yeah, I figured as much. Fun to think about anyway.

Happy Monday friends!

I’ve had a few projects on the brain lately that I finally completed this weekend.  Oh how I love three day weekends.

This pillow that I had seen in this book.  It is not a crafty/pattern book.  It’s more of a lifestyle book.  How to really live at home.  I have gotten several ideas for decorating and simplifying in this book.  I used some of my favorite fabric and linen.  My first time working with linen and I have to say that I love it.  I struggled forever trying to do an invisible stitch and just finally gave up.  I couldn’t quite ever make the knot big enough to not pull right through the linen.  And if you haven’t picked up a copy of this book yet, you really should.  It’s one of my favorites.

I also made some cafe curtains for my kitchen window.

Adds a spash of color to the kitchen and ties in the red from the rest of the house. I’ve been wanting to add some orangey-red (official name) to this space and it just feels right.

For my birthday I was given this sweet mixed media art piece by a wonderful friend.  She’s a scrap booking genius and has started making and will soon be selling her work.  I’ll keep you all posted on this.  She has an etsy shop in the works.  The quote above the owl says “The art of being wise is knowing what to over look.” Wise words.  Very wise indeed.  Sarah and I were talking about our knee jerk reaction to situations.  A constant work in progress for me.  This sweet picture will remind me of that everyday.

A little something to take you into the weekend. Consider it my little mid-summer happy hour gift to you.

chikaustin margaritas

• 1 can limeade
• 1 limeade can full of tequila
• 1/2 limeade can full of triple sec (orange liquer)

Get out your trusty blender. Pour entire can of limeade into the mixer. Pour tequila into limeade can until it reaches the top. Pour into blender. Pour triple sec into limeade can until it reaches half way. Pour into blender. Mix. Now pour out half of your mix into another pitcher/cup. With half the remaining mix, fill the entire blender with ice. Blend. You will now have one pitcher of super yummy margaritas. Put the rest of the mix in the fridge and blend it with ice when you are ready for another pitcher. You might want to label the container so that other family members do not mistake this for juice. This has happened at our house and was caught just in time. It makes apx. 8 margaritas! Concentrate.

You can add strawberries, mangoes or fruit of your choice, before the ice, to your mix to make flavored margaritas.

Have a great weekend friends!

It’s dinner time and Makena is bouncing around the kitchen saying “I can hip and scop, hip and scop, hip and scop.” It takes me a second, but I soon realize what she means is skip and hop. Aaahhh the mind of a three year old.

With all of this talk about sustainable living and the planet, I’ve started giving some serious thought into what I feed my family. The above picture is not my family by the way. It was just feeding time along the Texas roadside and the perfect family dinner portrait.

I’ve been searching online, asking friends and hitting up the bookstore looking for new recipes. I took a night to myself this week and popped a squat in a comfy chair at the bookstore… all by myself… to peruse some cookbooks. After a few glances at the cost of these cookbooks I quickly got out my composition notebook, I love school supplies, and started copying recipes. Is this legal? Aw shucks, who cares. I’m trying to feed my family here.

I copied a few recipes and then got a few ideas of cookbooks to check out of the library. With my newly acquired knowledge and our recent trip to the library I was able to check out one cookbook by Jamie Oliver :: Cook with Jamie and another by Nigella Lawson :: How to Eat. Both of these books are now full of sticky notes of recipes I need to copy. I would think at this point they are worth purchasing, at a second hand bookstore.

Last night we had a recipe I copied from one of Jamie’s cookbooks and it was delish. In the middle of dinner, Makena leaned over to me and said “you know mommy, sometimes kids just don’t like vegetables,” just as she was putting another snow pea into her mouth. Strange these little three year old creatures are, very strange.

Since I took the time to copy it down, I might as well pass it on. Here is a great, healthy, easy recipe that the entire family will love. Courtesy of Jamie Oliver of course.

Salmon Escalopes with Watercress, Sugar Snaps and Avocado

• 2T. rice vinegar
• 1/2 t. salt
• 1 t. sugar
• 2 t. wok oil (I used evoo)
• 4 c. watercress
• 1 c. sugar snap peas
• 1 small avocado

Cook salmon. I cook my salmon with a little olive oil, sea salt and lemon. Whisk rice vinegar, sugar, salt, oil - drizzle on salmon. Drizzle oil/vinegar mixture over watercress, avocado and snap peas. I served this with Rice-a-Roni parmesan and romano rice. They have an all-natural version out. It’s yummy.

So what are you cooking these days? Any great cookbook recommendations???

A day filled with a flurry of activity getting ready for daddy’s birthday. Dishes washed, a cake baked, a card made, presents wrapped and colored and decorations hung. A wonderful day spent with my little ones to show daddy how much he means to all of us. Happy birthday love.

Today we are loading up the car and hitting the road for a little road-trip. Have a wonderful weekend friends.

Ever feel the urge to peek in your friend’s cabinets? Just to see what they’ve got going on in there. Want to open those closet doors to look for skeletons? Peek under the bed? Uh huh. Guilty as charged. So my friends, thus begins the first installment of Exposing Myself.

I’m going to let it all hang out. Metaphorically speaking.

As I begin this organization/disorganization journey I’m going to bring you along with me. To take a look at my mess. Maybe show some before and after shots. Or maybe just after… since it’s prettier that way! Now not every day will be filled with decluttering. Since I have ADD I have a tendency to bounce around. I might be cleaning out my closet and find that fun fabric I was wanting to make curtains out of. So we’ll see where this takes us.

Let the clutter challenge begin! We’ll call this Exposing Myself.

Does anyone want to play along? Need to clean out? Have a garage sale? Just have too much stuff all over the place? Are your closets bursting at the seams? If so, leave me a comment telling me you want to participate and I’ll include you on the list. You too can expose yourself without the shame normally involved. You can show us what you clean out. Organize. What you are able to create now that you are able to find everything. It will be fun and we will have cleaner, healthier homes in the end.

I’ll be posting links to other sites that I find to be helpful in this process. And if you feel urged to participate, please share your knowledge and found resources on your site.

Last week I tackled my kitchen and boy did I have a lot of things that I never ever use. It was time to get organized and create zones.

This is the baking/prepping drawer. Anything used in the getting food ready process goes in this drawer. Before it was all scattered around the kitchen, hidden in different cabinets and drawers. I probably walked twenty circles around my kitchen to make cupcakes. Now everything is all in once place.

The beautiful thing about this process is that I didn’t have to go out and buy anything. It’s not about spending money to make your life easier, it’s using what you have. Just using them in more functional ways. All of the plates and bowls got organized with these shelf racks and my spices got a new spin on the lazy susans. I had these lazy susans in my pantry, to hold a few odds and ends. Now I can find my spices without taking everything out of the cabinet.

I’ve struggled with the space above my cabinets for some time now. I’ve moved picnic baskets in and out. Cake plates have been arranged a variety of ways. My kitchen is not large so I don’t have a lot of room to work with. Storing the cake plates on top of the cabinets makes a nice display while making them reachable when I need to use them.

I hope you decide to play along. Once we tackle the clutter, we’ll have more time for our families and ourselves. Without the mess.

I have a tendency, when I’m cleaning house, or cleaning out for that matter to stay in my pj’s. I have always imagined the Oprah show showing up with their cameras because someone wrote in saying that I need a mommy makeover. So today I decided to spice it up a bit with a little sparkle. I got this headband last winter at The Gap. I’ve only worn it to go out, until now. I think it’s perfect for decluttering don’t you agree?

I told you that I’ve been working in the kitchen and was able to find all of my recipes and get them organized. I had clippings from Martha’s Food magazine, the newspaper, my Mema, emailed recipes, blogger recipes, you name it. I had them all, stashed haphazardly in a notebook. When I would need that guacamole recipe I would dig and dig and finally, or not, find it. Most of my recipes are stained, depending upon what was on the counter at their time of use.

The book says that you can’t keep magazines. You have to cut out what you like, put it in a folder, and then toss (recycle) the magazine. This didn’t bode well for my four year collection of Martha Stewart magazines that I recently picked up at a garage sale.

Scissors in hand I began to cut. And cut I did.

All recipes have now been cut out and reside in nice page protectors in that folder. I bought pretty page dividers to section the recipes and even have a section for party ideas. Being an old school teacher I love office supply stores. The paper, the organization material, I just can’t get enough.

Total cost for total recipe organization was about 10 bucks. Well worth the amount of money I will save because I can’t figure out what to fix for dinner and we eat out.

Father’s day didn’t go exactly as planned. It was 100 degrees in the Texas Hill Country so we all decided that it wasn’t ideal to go sit in a lavender field and have a picnic. Texas. It’s hot.

The deer around the lake keep us from having a garden, or any fruit trees for that matter. Maybe next year I can get a six foot fence up to keep the deer out. But for now, we rely on local farmers to provide fresh fruits and veggies.

So we moved the festivities indoors, grilled bratwurst on the deck, drank German beer, made homemade sangria and my Mema’s peach cobbler. I had the recipe to the cobbler in my recipe drawer and had never made it. I love it because it is written in her handwriting. Something that I treasure. Last week, amidst the organization whirlwind, I organized my recipes. In my next post I’ll show you how they all found a new home and became organized.

Mema’s Peach Cobbler

• Melt one stick of butter in a large oblong dish.
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup flour
• 1 1/2 T baking powder
• 3/4 c milk
• Stir altogether and pour over butter.
• Top with 2 cans of sliced peaches, or fresh peaches if you have them.
• Bake at 350 degrees for one hour.

I even had time to update my Etsy shop with some of my vintage finds. Check it out.

In my past life, a Friday consisted of getting up early. Rushing out the door. Rush hour traffic. Meetings. Working all day. Dinner out. Drinks on the town. Dancing. Late nights.

Friday now consists of getting up early. Dancing. Tea while reading the paper. Play dates. Play doh and finger paints. Laundry. Hugs and cuddles from babes. Working all day. Dishes. Naps. Crafting without kids. Playing with blocks. Blogging. Home cooked meals. Taking baby dolls for walks. Bird watching. Flower picking. Drinks at home. Star gazing. Early nights.

I wouldn’t trade today for the world. Thanks to Emily for hosting Green Week. Good times!

If you were to ask anyone who knows me they would tell you that my favorite food is Mexican food, with Mediterranean food coming in a very close second.  So you might find it appropriate that those types of food are mostly what I fix at home.  I can fix one heck of an eggplant parmigiana (thanks to my Sicilian relatives) or throw fajitas on the grill.  I’m getting hungry just talking about it.

Just like all of you, my favorite foods involve fresh ingredients.  Some highlights in my eating experiences would have to be a trip Miles and I took to Italy about a year before Makena was born.  I can still see the Cinque Terre coastline covered with grape vines, basil and lemon and lime trees.  The fresh pesto we had was out of this world.  I’m patiently waiting for basil plants to arrive at the nursery so I can attempt to recreate that experience.

With tostadas on the menu for dinner last night, I began to gather my ingredients.  Before I knew it I had assembled my green picture for day 3 of Green Week.  With cilantro, avocado and lime on the cutting board I was ready for a Mexican fiesta.

The weather today has been absolutely beautiful in Austin so we spent a lot of time outside in all of the green goodness.  I’ll share those pictures with you tomorrow for day 4.  Until then, bon appetite!