I Heart Faces: Best Face Photo in January 2011

 

The photo challenge of the week over at I Heart Faces is called Best Face Photo in January 2011. Meet "Sissy", my best friends sweet little girl. On the day of this photo, just a couple weeks ago, she was having her 4th birthday party. It was a Toy Story themed event and while she was all decked out in her best Woody attire she just could not resist getting a beautiful unicorn painted on her face by a very talented face painter at the party. This photo was taken just after she caught a glimpse of herself in a hand held mirror. You can tell by the way her eyes shine just how proud she was of the creation! Happy Monday and please go check out the rest of the entries over at I Heart Faces. 

Love,

Cooking Club; January 2011

Im sure most of you have seen my Facebook posts or have been part of a conversation with me where I talk about my monthly gatherings with the 8 lovely ladies of my cooking club. I love cooking club. It is only once a month but it helps me to keep my sanity. If any of you love to cook and enjoy a glass of vino, some good conversation and a night out of the house every now and again, I strongly advice organizing your own club. My best friend organized it when she moved to town 3 years ago and we have been holding strong ever since. 

Here is how it works. Each lady picks the month they want to host. They select the recipes and do all the shopping. The rest of the gals show up with a contribution of $20 to the dinner expense and we all start cooking.  The cooking time is a least a solid hour in the kitchen with a glass of wine and hovering over the beginnings of a tasty creation while engaging in some even tastier conversations. Oh to be a fly on the wall! Then we gather around a dinning table to eat and chat further. We all look forward to nights like we had last night even though we were missing 3 gals.

 I took some photos while we were in the kitchen. I need to take more pictures of the completed meal but I worry you readers would salivate all over your keyboards. :)

Since our inception we have been collecting our recipes for a cook book that we can all share with our friends and family. It is still a little bit of a work in progress but we are all very proud of it and wanted to share it here. 

Ladies of Cooking Club cookbook.

Enjoy!

Love,

What to do with this damn chicken: Wednesday

If you are anything like me you have countless amounts of untouched chicken breasts, whole chickens, thighs, or otherwise, in your freezer. If you have a Costco membership you more than likely have overflowing amounts of chicken breasts!  Here is the deal folks, I hate to cook chicken, I pull it out as some kind of ritualistic obligation and immediately loose all sense of creativity and just think... BLAH!

It has to be done though, we have to break thought the barriers of the chicken blues and actually cook it with something more than BBQ sauce every now and again.  Lets face it, there has to be another way to cook chicken that my whole family will come to appreciate. My poor children think that all chicken comes fried and in a nugget form. Bad mommy! I don't force them to eat it any other way because, frankly, I don't want to either.  Thus, I am going to change!

The other thing is that i am trying to go organic, so chicken is not cheap and definitely not to be wasted.  If you buy it at Costco you know you are probably still saving but at the same time spending a pretty penny. If you are living in the Sacramento area and need another place to buy your organic meats I will make a shameless plug. My husbands longtime friend from Chico now owns a ranch where he raises and sells organic chicken, beef and pork. If you are interested in going in on some meats as a group or getting a sample for yourself you can check them out at Barbarosa Ranchers and talk to John Raftery.

To help a girl (and the occasional guy) out, I will try to post a fun and interesting chicken recipe every Wednesday. 

The following is from my old college buddy Jenny who knows a thing or two about cooking for her family which includes 4 year old twin girls.  If she can get her kids to eat it, im willing to give it a try!

Feta Chicken

•  chicken breasts
•  1 package feta cheese plain 
•  Italian dressing (I use the make it yourself Good Seasonings mix)
•  salt and pepper to taste
•  olive oil 2TBS

Heat oil in big frying pan

cut a pocket in chicken breasts and fill with feta
coat both sides of chicken with salt and pepper to taste
with heat on high sear chicken in frying pan 2-3 min a side
reduce heat to simmer/low and add Italian dressing (usually I make a lot so I use 3/4 of the bottle, cover and let cook for 20-30 minutes depending on thickness of breasts.  Turn chicken twice.

Super yummy and super easy. Really good with mashed potatoes :)

Enjoy!

Love,

Taco Tuesday Creative Moments: Feeling inspired and ...not so inspired

Since this is my first Tuesday post I will fill most of you in on a little secret. We have a tradition in our house that includes mass amounts of Tacos for dinner every single Tuesday night. We usually invite friends, neighbors, or family members over to share in the grub providing everyone in our house is germ free, which has not been the case lately. 

There is also something else that happens on Tuesdays. For whatever reason, maybe the joy that goes with knowing a margarita will be in my hand in a few hours, I get super creative on Tuesdays. I have been sending out e-mails with little stories, poems, photos, etc. to family and friends on Tuesdays for a long time now.  Now all those poor souls have a place to go to see that creativity rather than being on my spam list. 

So, if you were wondering what any of the creativity in this post has to do with Taco Tuesday, wonder no more! Really, they have nothing to do with each other.  I just happen to love tacos on Tuesday nights and tend to have a creative moment on Tuesday mornings. So here goes. 

Today, my sick little mouse and I drug out the sewing machine and started to cut out hearts from old pieces of card stock, wrapping paper, and pages from books (Twilight to be specific) that I had laying around. Once our random hearts were cut out, we sewed them together in a long strip and interjected little quotes typed on velum along the way.  These turned out to be very cute an easy Valentine’s Day garland that we hung in our windows.  Mouse was happy with the finished product and I have to say I was too.                                                                                                           

One thing I am not so happy with is my lack of inspiration and creativity in another area of our home. This is the yucky wall that screams at me to do something with it. I see this wall every time I am in the kitchen or watching the TV, so basically a lot.  It needs something on it but I have been waiting for an idea to hit me over the head and…nothin.   

 I don’t take these things lightly, I want something that has some meaning to me or it is at least a cluster of colorful and interesting things. The room as of yet is dull but we all know I LOVE apple green so I would like to incorporate that somehow. Anyway, I am leaving this to you guys to help me with. Consider it your challenge. I don’t mind if you have to get back to me after your margaritas have encouraged your creative juices to flow. Just please HELP a girl out here!  Okay so with that said…. im waiting patiently....(tap, tap, tap).

How do you like them apples?

Happy Taco Tuesday!

Love,

I Heart Faces : Innocent Wonder

Poor sick Mouse

The photo challenge this week over at I Heart Faces is called Innocent Wonder. Well I think I captured this first thing this morning when my baby said, "why do I feel so yucky mommy?"  I took my poor little Mouse's temperature which was a whooping 102! When  I proclaimed she had a fever she immediately said, "let me see that" and here is the sad look on her face afterward. 

Well, here is to sick days, jammies, and snuggle time with mommy!

Love, 

Well here I am ..

Okay everyone, stay-at-home mom life has taken me by the reigns, and now I am blogging!  How I will squeeze this into my busy life of soap operas and bon-bons is yet to be seen.  Okay, we all know that stay at home moms really do stay busy, so I won't promise a ton of posts but at least now I can share all kinds of useless information with anyone that wants to care about all the craziness going on in our lives. 

Today, I will keep this post short, since I have a sick Mouse (my 6 years old daughter you will come to know), also my little Jedi (4 year old son) needs to return to the outdoors since the skateboarding incident which subsequently caused some chin stitches a couple days ago. 

note the chin

Once I get rolling and figuring out all of this blogging business I will be posting... 

 

Lucy (8 weeks)

 
 

• Regular Taco Tuesday creative moments that some of you have come to appreciate. 
• 10 on 10 photo projects and link you to my coming photography blog spot.
• Countless pictures of cute Lucy(our new lab) who is now 8 weeks old as of yesterday.
• Growth stages of the plant, animal and children life around my home. 
•  Many opinions which we all know I have, I am my father's daughter after all.
• and lets not forget my moments of insanity, silly kids, and daily acts of randomness. 

I cant wait to get started! 

Until next time my fantastic friends and family! Happy Saturday from your favorite hunting widow.

Love,