The Fennel Countdown

Our credit card statement is in amazing shape this month, partially because of us not making a big grocery trip since early April. On the downside, we haven't made a big grocery trip since early April. This means dinners have been a bit random as of late, including more take out than we're used to having or rifling through the cupboards trying to come up with something of interest.

I forced myself to make a grocery list last weekend and to find a few new meals to focus on over these next couple weeks. Flipping through an insert that has been arriving with my Martha Stewart Living subscription the last two months, a recipe for prosciutto-wrapped chicken caught my eye. We have a good amount of chicken in the freezer, thanks to recent "buy one get one" offer so this seemed like a good one to take advantage of. Although, let's be honest, the recipe had me at "prosciutto-wrapped!" 

The recipe itself called for a whole chicken, but our chicken breasts would work just as well. 

Prosciutto-Wrapped Chicken with Fennel
1 whole chicken (or equivalent chicken breasts)
4 oz prosciutto
1 large Fuji apple, cored and cut into 8 slices
1 fennel bulb, cut into 1/2 inch wedges
1 bunch leeks (about 3), cut into 1/2 inch slices
salt and pepper
2 Tbs olive oil plus 1 tsp olive oil
10 Sage leaves

Pre-heat oven to 450 degrees. Salt and pepper the chicken, then cover with overlapping prosciutto slices, tucking underneath. Toss apple slices, leeks and fennel with 2 Tbs olive oil and salt and pepper, line the pan alongside the chicken. Toss sage leaves with remaining 1 teaspoon oil and place atop the chicken. Bake for 30-40 minutes or until chicken is done.

We got everything set on the pan, and looked at each other like, "so that's it?" It was such an easy meal to pull together we had to re-check the recipe to make sure we weren't skipping a step!

I will admit to making a common Lydia Mistake: when I wrote out my grocery list, I wasn't as specific with some of the areas as I should have been, so ended up coming home with one leek instead of a bunch of three. Oops! I tend to do the same thing with dairy products - I'll write down heavy cream but then not know which size container to buy once I am staring at the options in the grocery store aisle. 

I love these "one pan" meals - the vegetables and apples made a great side for the chicken, and I think Bob and I have a newfound love of fennel. Who knew? Plus, did I mention "prosciutto-wrapped?"

*This blog post's title is a subtle ode to Arrested Development coming back to us! I hope the Netflix servers are prepared for the streaming overload sure to take place after May 26th!

My Closet is Experiencing Layoffs

One of my goals for the year was to donate at least 1 bag of clothes. I'll see your one bag and raise you another. 

A few weekends ago I stared into the abyss that is my clothes closet and decided to do a purge. The deciding factors in getting rid of an item:
1. Haven't worn it in a year (dresses can be the exception)
2. I wear it, but don't like how it fits/how I look in it.

I would say I do this type of purge about once a year, but typically only focus on deciding factor #1. By being honest with myself about what I don't feel good in, it certainly limits the items of clothing I'll have to work with, but also forces to me to lose all that dead weight. A couple pieces that survived the last two purges finally saw themselves shoved in a bag.

I waited until the start of the spring/summer season to take on this activity so that I was able to take a good look at the sweaters I was about to pack away. Some I hadn't touched all winter, some I avoid wearing because they are stretched out or too pilly. As the survivors got packed away and the shorts and polos came out, I gave the summer clothes a yay or nay before it got hung up/put in the drawer.

Most of these items of clothing can be donated, but a few are too ragged to justify giving to Goodwill. We found a site to mail in old jeans to be recycled that we need to take advantage of.

In the end, I "laid off":
3 skirts
2 hoodies
11 tops
5 cardigans
9 sweaters
1 blazer
4 jackets (I let the coat closet get in on the action)

This freed up about 25 hangers. I'm sure they'll make their way back to the rack eventually, and so until another purge....

Of course, the news isn't all grim. New closet entries include colorful ankle pants from The Limited, a threesome of Benetton sweaters, light enough for spring but heavy enough for our air conditioned office, and a couple more work tops that force me to step out of my Cotton Comfort Zone.

What's new in your closet? Are you good about replacing or are are you continually "adding to?"

Pinterest Project: Christmas in May

As if I needed an excuse to get crafty. 

Young House Love issued another seasonal Pinterest Challenge along with Bower Power,  Sparkle Meets Pop and Red Bird Blue. (Links go to their projects!) I looked over some recent pins and landed on a not-so-seasonal decision for this weekend's project: Christmas present gift tags!

For years I created a wrapping paper theme for each year (check them out here), but after seeing red in 2010, I decided to simplify matters and stock up on brown kraft paper from Staples. I was sold after spending $5 on a giant roll and bought two more for the next holiday season. So now the key is to jazz up the brown paper in different ways each year. Here's a pin I'm keeping on hand for future reference: making it look like mail.

source

The last two years I used my alphabet stamps to apply the to/from directly onto the paper., but I think I'm ready for a change....

I have tackled tags a few times over the years - my Aunt Christine serves as an inspiration as she makes some pretty cool ones out of rubber stamps and paper goods. A couple examples from an Easter themed craft day:

Speaking of red, a quick shot of the tags from 2010 - definitely heavy on the stamp ink usage!

Two years ago, I created a set as a thank you gift for a friend, with generic tags, congratulations tags, birthday tags and more.

This time around, I used this pin's comment to drive the project: "Old Christmas Cards"

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A quick trip to Michael's stocked me up with tags of different shades and sizes. I decided to start out making 20 Christmas tags, with at least another 20 to make over a future weekend. This still leaves another 40 tags to make non-holiday specific tags when the mood strikes!

The toughest part of this project? Remembering what holiday bin I put the bag full of old cards! I save all Christmas cards and many have come in handy over the years for display purposes. It also allows me to cheat and look like I have A LOT more friends who all send their cards out by the first week of December!

I sorted out the cards I couldn't bring myself to cut up, and then took to the scissors and glue dots with the ones that would make great tags.

Its amazing how my craft supplies can seem to explode all over the room...I finally brought myself to clean up three days later! That's the nice thing about having it all contained to a second bedroom that I can close the door to at the end of the day....

20 tags later:

To highlight a few favorites, this one was cut out of a piece of scrapbook paper, trimmed to size and glued over a tag that was dabbed with cranberry colored stamp ink.

A card that featured stand up reindeer when opened came in handy when I cut them out individually! There were more than a few tags like this snowman one that I covered completely with the card's design. One hole punch later and it was done-zo.

A few 3D elements were created with cards, stickers and raised double sided tape squares.

Another pin helped me solve the issue of where to store these new tags.

source

I ended up repurposing a tin that previously held a set of alphabet stamps I never use. The stamps got downgraded to a ziploc baggie and the tin got a facelift with scrapbook paper and some leftover letters from my Every Holiday Blocks.

The perfect size, with room for a few more - looks like "Tags 2: Electric Tagaloo" will be coming to a weekend near me soon.

On another note, we built the project table and I took over the second bedroom in order to avoid making the couch the craft workstation - I kept losing things between the cushions.

Yet, there is one thing I can't seem to avoid even with a dedicated space: "helpful" cats!

Later, Sonny expresses his joy in working on gift tags....

Okay, that's enough cat pictures for one post. What projects are you working on months ahead of time? Does reading this make you want to pop in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation like I almost did?

Photo Finish

Back from a long weekend trip to our nation's capital, and I've got inspiration on the brain!

In all of my work trips over the last eight years, and far-flung vacations, I had never made it to Washington D.C. so planning a spring trip for 2013 was heavy on my radar as I looked at the year ahead. With a few of Bob's friends living in Baltimore, we combined the trip to take advantage of seeing a play written and directed by Bob's best friend, Aldo Pantoja. If you find yourself in the Baltimore area, check out Single Carrot Theatre!

But, back to D.C. - we walked...and walked...and walked...I think my feet were ready to fly back home without me after how much we walked between the actual museum tours and just getting from place to place! 

We hit up the Capitol, took far away photos of the White House, paid respects to Bob's Navy Admiral Uncle buried at Arlington Cemetery, covered a fair share of the Smithsonian museums, made 1 too many references to the Nic Cage movie "National Treasure" at the Archives and received this disapproving look from Mr. Lincoln for not seeing the Spielberg movie yet.

One of the highlights of the trip was the Newseum. Well worth the price of admission (the Smithsonian museums we went to were all free of charge), this museum focuses on journalism and the history of world events told through "the news". Exhibits included FBI's greatest cases and how they were chronicled in the papers, unaltered portions of the Berlin Wall and a 9/11 gallery with a wall full of newspaper front pages from the day.

One of the most emotional exhibits was the Pulitzer Prize Winning Photography room. With added stories from the journalists/photographers behind the photos, some of them are striking, some of them are joyous, most of them cause a lump in your throat.

This got me thinking about photography as art in your home. Now, we are no stranger to oversized art. We are lucky enough to have 17 foot ceilings and brick walls for days. Bob's five foot tall painting hangs above the fireplace, and he has a six foot canvas ready for paint as soon as inspiration strikes him. We have photography on a smaller scale featured in our office area, four black and white prints from Bob's college days in Denver. Here's how they were displayed in our previous home on a kitchen wall:

I have a subscription to Elle Decor and always linger on the pages that have an oversized piece of photography hanging in the home like this bustling train station:

If crowd shots aren't your thing, perhaps a view into the lives of famous people? I'm assuming this is Mr. Andy Warhol capturing a model's pose above the fireplace.

A mug shot of The Doors' Jim Morrison against a mirror'd wall in a home gym/office.

Here are a couple "photography as art" clips I have pinned on my "New Home Inspiration" board over the last couple years. Something about this room speaks to me - the light fixture, the threesome of dressed up dancers, the simplicity of the rest of the room.

File this under "funny strange" or possibly "best title ever": Dali with Bride & Ocelot. Can't you just picture this five feet tall, begging to be talked about at a party?

These beg the question, do they have to be in black and white to work in the home? I haven't been able to find much in the way of oversized full color photography in my (less than extensive) Google search. Weigh in on if you think color is "too much" or if we are over-doing the b&w in the art world.

It must be a careful decision to feature large scale photography as such a statement piece, but perhaps one worth exploring! Should we try it out?

Fun Fact: of the photos above, 1 is from the (semi-)home of Semi-Homemade star Sandra Lee and 1 is from the home of Grey's Anatomy star Ellen Pompeo. Try and guess which before clicking on the source links!

Double the Comfort Food

It was 5:00pm at work one day last week when I opened up Pinterest before shutting down my laptop for the day. One pin later and a grocery list was made for dinner that night!

I'm a bit of a mac and cheese connoisseur  If its on the menu at a restaurant, I'm about 67% likely to order it. I have had a go to recipe for homemade cheesy stuff for the last 5 years or so. And beyond the go to one with no more than 4 ingredients, I made a Martha Stewart recipe to die for a few holidays ago.

So when the words Tomato Soup Mac and Cheese stared out at me from the Pinterest wall, I knew we had to try it.

We had to do a little bit of compromising, considering the recipe came from a blog post for a particular brand of dairy product. For our purposes, the store brand ricotta cheese and Kraft cheddar would have to do. I've also tried to jump on the whole wheat pasta bandwagon and just can't do it. It tastes too mealy to me.

1/2 pound elbow macaroni
1 can condensed tomato soup
5 oz ricotta cheese
5 oz shredded cheddar (set aside 1 oz for topping)
10 oz milk (roughly 1 soup can)

Except for the ricotta, the recipe was quite similar to my go to recipe, replacing a can of cheddar cheese soup for tomato to add in extra flavor. 

Mix cooked pasta with ricotta cheese and add milk, tomato soup and 4 oz of cheddar. 

After baking, broil for a few minutes with the remaining cheddar sprinkled on top.

We baked it for 20 minutes at 350 and served up with some leftover Baby Artichoke Salad from the latest issue of Martha Stewart Living. Bob found this when planning out a salad to bring to his family Easter dinner. I have never been a big fan of artichokes, but really enjoyed the taste of this salad. We had to replace pea shoots with a regular spring mix because Whole Foods did not have any in stock.

In the end, I think we could have added a little more spice or flavor to the dish, but it was far from bland and it actually tasted great when re-heated. If we do this one again, I'd probably use a bit less milk to thicken it up - I didn't quite hit the consistency of the pinned photo!

So what about you - have you ever found a random recipe and then had it in the oven within hours?

The Wedding Pinterest Projects That Weren't

I joined Pinterest just a month before I got engaged, and the timing was more than serendipitous. I didn't spend a dime on 350-page wedding magazines filled with dresses I couldn't afford, I didn't have to take to scissors and glue to create my own inspiration binder and I didn't have to sift through the thousands of webpages on theknot.com (even though I did use their checklist feature).

However, there is danger within Pinterest that I have seen many a friend fall victim to:

Overpinning - the act of pinning to the point that it is near impossible to complete any actual project, recipe or idea because of the sheer volume of pins of interest.

For example: a quick search on "green smoothie recipes" results in 15 new pins in one sitting. Or your "places to see" board contains 1,216 pins. The question is, when are you going to take the extra time to make something happen if you've given yourself too many options?

I don't believe I overpin in general, with only 437 pins across 11 boards over the last year and a half, but I will admit to my eyes being bigger than my crafty hands when it came to planned wedding projects. Check out my wedding board for direct links to sources for everything discussed below. I'm still adding to this with a few of my own recap blog posts. You may also notice that the wedding dress I ended up purchasing was one of my early pins!

Bob and I DIY'd more than a dozen elements of our wedding, most of which have been detailed on this blog, including: table numbers, luggage tag favors, card box, lantern centerpieces, altarpiece backdrop, invites and programs, menu cards, hotel gift bags, our save the date and thank you cards. Almost all of these began as a pin on my wedding board. However, a few never made it past the conception phase...

Without further ado, the Wedding Pinterest Projects That Weren't:

String Balloon Balls

Picture this: A loft venue with high ceilings, exposed ductwork and brick walls. White string lights looped along the beams to illuminate down during the reception. Airy, white globes of different sizes hanging above the head table.

It was a nice idea, but the picture below illustrates just how far I went with this one. The time and effort required, not to mention the logistics involved with actually getting all of these hung the day before the wedding put the kibosh on this project. I literally stopped halfway through a balloon and said, "What am I doing this for?"

Aisle Runner Vases

This Pinterest Project had a cute backstory. When Bob proposed to me in the park, he had almost a dozen vases filled with flowers on the bench we ended up at. In an effort to reuse the vases, I tried my hand at spray painting the rubber band-covered glassware. The thought was to line these up along the chairs as aisle runners, the candlelight illuminated through the unpainted sections of the vase. This would also play off of the stripey theme of our invites, programs and cake.

However, my Nervous Nellie nature shook its head at the potential of them being kicked over: loud noises, shattered glass, fire, screaming...Plus, once I got going I wasn't as impressed with how they looked, though I'm sure my spray painting skills would have improved after these first 2 I tried for a Young House Love Pinterest Challenge.

In the end, our centerpiece lanterns pulled double duty and I think made for a more colorful, relevant and fire-proof addition to the ceremony.

photo by GReyes Photography

Just Married Banner

This one never made it past the pin. Since we used map paper for the table numbers and the escort card wall, I thought of creating background circles of map paper with the letters for "Just Married" spread across. Since the ceremony was in the same location as the reception, the thought was to say "Just About Married" and remove "About" during the cocktail hour.

This was strictly a nice to have and got cut from the roster pretty early on. I wasn't sure how or where in the venue I would have even been able to hang this and didn't need to focus my attention on taking down a banner five minutes after saying "I do!"

Paper Flowers

If I thought the centerpiece yarn balls took me a long time, I can only imagine how many hours I would have slaved away on paper flowers. The idea is valid - I was never picturing a huge bouquet, floral centerpieces or a large presence from the fragrant ones at my wedding so a way around the cost would be to make my own. And here was another way to use map paper....

I tried to make one after watching a youtube video tutorial four times in a row. It did not go well. Let's just say I think there is a reason some of those bouquets on Etsy cost well over $100.

I quickly came to my senses and managed to keep the florist bill under $500 anyway by sticking with simple bouquets, bouts and corsages. I also asked my brother in law to pick up the flowers on his way to the hotel to save on delivery charges. As a bonus, Billy Balls seem to last forever so my bouquet still looks great after seven months.

photo by GReyes Photography

So there we have it. Four projects that might have added a little something to the wedding, but none that were vital to it. My sanity thanks me for being okay with removing things from the to-do list. Almost as satisfying as crossing the accomplished things off of it!