Here is my handle, here is my spout...

Happy Friday! I have a couple of fun things coming up, but for now I wanted to share a pretty new addition to my home :)

I don't drink a lot of hot tea and I definitely don't make it at home.  But I just love teapots.  They are so classic and pretty and I'm a big fan of teapots from Pottery Barn.  Not such a huge fan of the price, especially if I intend on using one for decorating purposes.  I loved these white ones I saw online...

potterybarn.com- $29.00

potterybarn.com- $39.00

potterybarn.com- $39.00

Come on, you know me! Look what I just happened upon at Goodwill one day! And yes, it's from Pottery Barn! Flowers in this adorable pot are icing on the cake... 

The flowers are now on top of the piano so they don't get munched on by a certain feline...

Goodwill actually had the whole tea set with cups and containers for sugar and creamer.  I almost bought the whole thing to sell on etsy/ebay, but I didn't think I'd ever make time to actually do it and I really wanted to be selfish and keep the teapot for myself.  This was a great find and she'll be used often, even if its not for her intended purpose.

So, whatcha think? 

Linking up:

Southern Hospitality's Thrifty Treasures

Masterpiece Monday

Weekend happenings and cooking challenge results

Let's have a collective grunt to express our feelings about the most dreaded day of the week.

uuggghhh

Ok, now that's out of the way let's talk about good stuff! We hit the road again this weekend to visit my hometown, Portland, TN.  Got in some good family/friend time, some killer steaks, a much-needed pedi with the ladies, and we were introduced to quite possibly the most bizzare/complicated/nerdy card game EVER, Munchkin. Although it fried my brain and I had no idea what I was doing, somehow I won. 

A couple highlights of the weekend:

1.  I spent Saturday morning on the back of my dad's Harley, and we stopped to visit with my grandpa for a bit.  When my dad took him outside to show him the new bike, grandpa said he just had to get on it.  You could see a spark in his eyes as he grabbed the handlebars and remembered a time when he used to ride.  You could tell he would give anything to get back on the road.

2. We recently got some help from my parents with landscaping our yard, but because we didn't have any rock (and didn't want to pay for it) we had to use brick temporarily to go around some of the areas with mulch. 

The brick served it purpose but wasn't so cute.  Not far from my parents' house in Portland there's been some road construction and looky what we found!

This is the only time in my life I've been excited about rock on the side of the road.  It's the little things... haha

So we loaded some up in Adam's truck and headed back home!

Literally, the very second I walked back into our house I packed up and headed out again for my first grocery trip in a lloonnngg time. (Definite perk of stockpiling! Who wouldn't want to skip a trip to the store for a couple of weeks?) While I was searching for the best deals on food to keep us fed for the next couple weeks, my hero of a husband moved all of the bricks to our back yard and arranged our new rocks around the two trees and around the bushes on the left side of our house.  We were only short by a few to we'll be keeping our eyes peeled for some more rocks, but look how much better it looks! Good job, hubby!

Please ignore the shephard's hook leaning up against the tree.  The squirrels destroyed our finch feeder so we're going to be trying our luck with a hummingbird feeder.



I think it looks a lot better, and I like it even more because it was free! I wish the grass looked better in our yard, so we'll have to look into options for that.  It's more important than ever for us to get our house looking fabulous because over the weekend we made a BIG, IMPORTANT decision:

***We will be putting our house on the market ON OR BEFORE January 1, 2012!***

I am so excited to move on to the next chapter of our lives, and for me personally, that involves us starting fresh in a home together. It's very interesting getting married and moving into a home that your husband has been in for several years, and even shared with his mother and brother.  It's just felt like an apartment to me, and I've not really formed an attachment with this home. I. CAN'T. WAIT. to start the house hunt, although I know the whole process can be very stressful.  Totally worth it in the end.

Last but not least- the cooking challenge results! My ultimate fear did not become a reality, and a few people actually voted.  haha.  No overwhelming numbers (my own MOTHER didn't vote, for crying out loud) but at least I got some input.  There was a tie between the vinegar cookies and the carrot souffle, so as blog author and cook I took the liberty of making the ultimate decision on what to make... carrot souffle! I'm so interested to see how it turns out and I already have a post coming up very soon about one of my favorite cookie recipes, so the decision was easy.  I'm planning on making it later this week to go along with a whole chicken I'm putting in the crockpot.  I'll probably do one other kind of veggie and a side salad. Come back soon to see what happens!

Delicately Constructed Friday

Give me a cooking challenge!

It's no secret that I love to cook, and I try new recipes frequently.  There are some weeks where I make a new recipe every night, and I love it. 

I mostly use allrecipes to find new recipes (if you use it a lot, too, you'll eventually see one of my reviews or uploaded pictures!) and I'm too embarrassed to even tell you how many recipes I have saved on there that I want to try.  It's A. LOT.  The problem is there are some recipes I've had saved forever and just neer seem to get around to, even though other allrecipes users have given them really high reviews and ratings.  So I thought it might be fun if you guys help me start knocking some of those recipes off of the "to do" list and get them on the "done" list!

Here's your mission, if you choose to accept it:

Look over the following recipes and choose the one you'd most like to see me try out and write about on here.  I'll include pictures of the process, the finished product, and what Adam and I had to say about it. For this round I chose some recipes that had a "weird factor" so this should be fun. 

In order to get your vote counted, you have to leave a comment on this post and let me know what I should cook! (I need people to actually comment here, or this will be slightly embarrassing.  You can't ask a question in a post and not get any answers.  It's a total diss, blog-style.)

1. Quinoa with sweet potato and mushrooms

We really like all the ingredients in this recipes, but we just haven't put them together before! Quinoa is so good for you, so I've been trying to use it to replace rice and pasta in a lot of our meals lately. I've also not really used sweet potatoes yet in a savory recipe.

2. Vinegar cookies

Honestly, the name of these gross me out.  They might be great cookies, but why do we have to openly announce they have vinegar in them? When I think vinegar, I think cleaning.  And I don't generally mix cookies and cleaning.

3. Carrot souffle

This may be perfectly normal to some of you folks, and that's cool.  I actually think I will love this, but I think Adam gets confused when I make side dishes that could pass as dessert. What kind of main dish would you serve this with?

4. Lentil tacos

The Wyatt family is A-Ok with meatless meals, so this is kind of a no-brainer for us.  I make black bean burritos all the time, so this seems like a natural next step. 

So, spill... what recipe would you like me to try out before you make it for your family? Or what do you think will turn out terribly and make for a really entertaining post?

You have until Sunday July 10 at 1:00pm Eastern time to vote! (I got to know what I'm adding to my shopping list for my Sunday grocery trip :) )

Cashberry Chip Cookies

I totally just made that name up. It was either that or Cranshew Chip Cookies... just doesn't sound as cute. :)

I love to bake! It's pretty common for me to spend my Sunday afternoons whipping up big batches of homemade muffins so that I can put them in the freezer for us to heat up for quick breakfasts throughout the next couple of weeks.  I'll definitely be sharing some our favorite muffin recipes soon. (Be expecting lots of recipes that use bananas... I ALWAYS have several bags of ripe bananas in the freezer. Don't you? haha)

But today is no day for muffins.

No, today is a cookie kind of day!

I've made a lot of different cookies since we got married, but this is probably my FAVE.  I made them for Christmas this past year because they seemed so festive and pretty with the cranberries, but seriously, these are so so so good, why only make them for holidays?? I cannot remember where I got the orginial recipe, but I do remember that it called for macadamia nuts.  While I love macadamia nuts (especially with white chocolate) I didn't have any at the time and thought cashews would be just as yummy.  Yummy they were!! This dough is very buttery and I love that it uses a full tablespoon of vanilla extract, as a lot of cookies only use a teaspoon or two. Feel free to use milk/semi-sweet chocolate in place of the white chocolate, or use a different kind of nut.  I keep several different kinds of nuts in the freezer all the time, so with most cookie recipes I just use whatever I want, but I love the cashews in this one.

Cashberry Chip Cookies

• 3 cups all-purpose flour (I used 2 cups AP flour, 1 cup whole wheat flour)
• 3/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 1 cup light brown sugar
• 1 cup butter, softened (I use Smart Balance spread with no problem)
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• 1 cup white chocolate/vanilla baking chips
• 1 cup chopped cashews
• 1 cup dried cranberries

Mix the flour, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl and set aside.

Use a handheld mixer (or if you're one of those lucky ducks that I am so envious of that have a Kitchenaid mixer) to cream together the butter, brown sugar, and white sugar.

Mix in the eggs and vanilla (and get really, really excited when you remember that your homemade vanilla will be ready in just three more months!).

Slowly add flour mixture just until combined (don't go crazy with your stirring here). 

mental note: If you're going to go anywhere with this blogging thing you've GOT to get some nicer mixing bowls... these old things from the college days just don't photograph so well.

Once that's all mixed up just add your cranberries, chocolate chips, and cashews.  Try to snack on equal amounts of all three as you're mixing so the ratio isn't off for the actual cookies.  This is also a good tip to keep in mind when you're bringing fast food home and eating french fries in the car.  Eat some from both yours AND your husband's so he won't be able to tell a difference.  See there? Cooking advice and marriage advice all rolled into one post. Genious.

Just a note about saving money on baking supplies... I get a lot of my stuff from Aldi's because they have great prices on baking supplies.  For this recipe, I used Aldi's white chocolate chips and dried cranberries. I buy Groupons for Nutty Guys to stock up on nuts because they have great quality products and a lot of organic stuff to choose from. 

Now just drop heaping teaspoons of the dough on an ungreased cookies sheet and bake at 350 for 10 minutes or so (just get them out when they're as soft as you like).  I really like letting my cookies cool using a wire cooling rack, so use one if you have one.

Enjoy! I got 40 cookies out of this dough.

Optional: I mixed up this dough and then put heaping teaspoons of the mix on cookie sheet lined with wax paper, then let it sit in the freezer until the dough was pretty firm (you can put the dough close together because you're not baking them- they won't spread out). Then I dropped the "dough balls" into a gallon-sized ziploc bags and threw it back in the freezer.  I will say that because this dough is really sticky with all that butter, they didn't firm up as much as other cookies I've made, so next time I will form the dough into a roll and put it in the freezer rather than individual cookies. Either way, now we have homemade cookie dough to pop in the oven any old time we want, and we can just bake as many as we need.  This is a great time-saver for those last-minute dinner guests or when your rockstar of a hubby has friends over to "jam".  Boys love cookies.

"flash freezing" cookie dough

Linking up with Balancing Beauty and Bedlam

Lady Behind the Curtain

Delicately Constructed Friday

Masterpiece Monday

My pretty little magazine rack

A couple of weeks ago I hit some yard sales with some girl whose mom pays me to be her friend (love you, B!) and got a lot of great stuff for less than $10. I had my arms full of stuff and was walking around looking some old guy's shovels and tools to pass the time while that girl argued with some women about bed lifts (for the record, B won!). There wasn't anything that I really wanted until I looked down and saw an old, disgusting magazine rack on the ground. The man wanted $1.00 for it, but I explained that the only place I could put it in my house right now was my garage and that I wouldn't put anything in my garage that cost more than 50 cents.


I won.

Might as well get used to Jonesy in every shot. He's kind of full of himself. Rightfully so.

This thing was guh-ross. Bugs, cobwebs, and unidentified clumps of grossness.



I cleaned it as well as I could, popped out the broken screens, and covered the handle in professional paint protectant (aka, aluminum foil), because I wanted to keep the handle brown.



Then came the fun part... blue spray paint! This color is uh-mazing and you'll see it in other projects. I also used a sanding block to distress it a little.

Ah! Isn't she pretty in blue??

My father-in-law has every man's dream shop with every tool, gadget, and supply necessary to repair, build, or create anything.  AND he lives like 4 minutes away from us. So, as I always do when I need help with a project, I took my pretty little magazine rack over to see if he had any kind of screen material to use to replace the damaged screen I pulled out.  When we went to his shop, the EXACT kind of mesh screening material was sitting at the very top of his trash can! I couldn't beleive it. He had a nice size roll of the material and was able to cut it and insert back into the side of the rack.  But before he did that I had him spray it with some almond-colored spray paint.

I could have stopped right there, but no! We need something to make her extra special! A little scrapbook paper and some Modge Podge and now this little beauty sits in our bedroom waiting to be filled with books and magazines to enjoy in our big, comfy bed. I will try my best to avoid choosing only books that match... :)

LOVE.  Do you have anything laying around your house that you could fall in love with all over again with a little updating? Could something come out of the garage and into the home with some touch-ups creativity?



Linking up with some other crafty folks!

Six Sister's Stuff










Southern Hospitality's Thrift Treasures

Delicately Constructed Friday

Masterpiece Monday

I was FRAMED!!

Isn't it amazing how vacations and short getaways seem to take forever to arrive and then are over in a flash?

Adam and I had an amazing time in Savannah and the whole time we were there I was thinking "when can I come back???".  It's just drop-dead gorgeous there and you just can't possibly take it all in over a couple of days.  I highly recommend it. But we're back and ready to face another week of every day life.  Blessed to have a great life to come back to, that's for sure. But for the record, if someone told me I had to move tomorrow and I could go anywhere, Savannah would be on my list of places to consider.  Just saying...

I have a few projects that I completed recently and they all involved frames. The first two are not even necessarily blog-worthy. Well, maybe blog-worthy, but definitely not tutorial-worthy. This sutff was easy peasy!

Last summer I moved into a new office (my FIRST office!) and all of my co-workers in the new hall gave me an "office-warming" gift. One of these said gifts was this frame:



It's been on my desk ever since, although the picture has changed over the months. Recently I've started to think it needed something, and since I've been using fabric rosettes on a lot of my wreaths it was only natural... I think it's pretty cute now and my gray, paperwork-filled desk seriously needed some cuteness!



One recent Saturday morning I woke up before the rest of the world did (or so it seemed...) and hit a couple of yard sales. They were a bust for the most part. Mostly kids stuff, but I did find this frame for 75 cents:



I loved the design, but we don't really have any rooms in the house where a white frame would work. Cue spray paint!! I am obsessed with this color, and so is the rest of blogland. And I had plenty of it left over after working on another project, which you'll see later :) Both our master bedroom and master bath are done in robin's egg blue, beige, and chocolate brown, so this frame could work in either one. For now it's in the bedroom and I love it!


ps- how cute is that bird? Pier 1 goodie that I found at Goodwill. Score!

Ok, last but certainly not least, I took a risk with this last project. I wasn't sure how it was going to turn out, and even now that it's done I'm not 100% sold that I love it. But it was practically free, no one else in the world has one like it, and will (at least for now) fill up some blank wall space in our hall. Plus it was my first experience with Modge Podge. Modge Podge is to crafting like salt is to cooking so it was about time.

This basic principal can be used to make all kinds of different art, so pay attention! Step one: go to your favorite home improvement store (we tend to prefer the Blue one :)) and pretend that you are painting in your home and you need a lot of color samples. No one batted an eye at me, so I must have looked serious about that painting business I had waiting for me. I knew that I wanted something for our living room or hall, so I went with paint samples in all different shades of red (and orangish reds), brown, and gray. In retrospect I wish I had picked up more brown samples. Oh well! The true colors don't show up well in these pictures.

I used a 1 inch circle hole punch and went to punching while watching HGTV, naturally. I had a long frame with its original print out in the garage awaiting a yard sale, but realized I could put it to use rather than buying a new one for this project.



Gold. Ick. Nothing a little spray paint can't fix!

Ok, so I used a paint brush to apply a thin layer of Modge Podge onto the original print and then added a line of randomly-selected circles. Lather, rinse, repeat, and continue to layer lines of circles until you cover the whole print. Here's what it looked like after maybe 15 minutes or so:



Once you've covered the entire print, let the Modge Podge dry for a bit (a very technical and precise term) and then apply a thin layer of Modge Podge over the entire surface. Here's mine still wet. Don't worry, it will dry clear.



Once dry, just put it back in the frame and enjoy (or decide if you even like it!). In my case I had to spray paint the frame and clean the 1.5 years worth of hair spray off the glass since it was originally hung in my apartment bathroom pre-marriage. Here's mine in all it's glory! It's growing on me.  Also, when Adam first saw it pre-frame he said it looked "kind of 70's", but he sort of likes it now that it's on the wall.  What do you think?

I hope this reminds you to start looking at looking at home decor as something totally customizable and easy to do yourself! Thrift stores are full of pictures frames and mirrors with great details, sometimes you just have to look past the color/condition. And most importantly, I hope that after reading the cheesy title of this post that you'll still come back to my blog sometime... I'm sort of a nerd.

Linking up to Rhoda's Thrifty Treasures

AND Six Sister's Stuff















Delicately Constructed Friday

Masterpiece Monday