MMMmmmm Good

We're getting over colds in our household so that means soup. Something we like to do (any maybe you will too) is to use orange juice instead of water or milk in out tomato soup. The soup is a bit more tangy and less creamy than if you usually use milk but it's the perfect way to add some extra vitamin C to the mix. So next time you're sick, give it a try (even try it when you're not sick so you can appreciate it's awesome deliciousness all the more). Simply substitute the one can of water or milk you would normally use with one can of orange juice.

Movie Review: The Whistleblower

Last night we watched the 2010 Rachel Weisz move, The Whistleblower (based on a  true story).

The quick rundown: A tense movie with a tragic story line, not for the faint of heart.

The long rundown: Rachel Weisz plays a divorced mother whose child was in the custody of the father.Although it is never really explained why she doesn't have custody, you are led to believe it has something to do with her loving her job as a police officer? (that makes sense?) Not really an important plot point so moving on. In an effort to make neough money to move to Georgia so she can be closer to her daughter she signs up to work for the UN in Bosnia. She gets there and is quickly promoted because she is so good at her job, yaddie yaddie yadda, she is soon causing trouble. She finds out that sex trafficking is a huge problem and she wants to save all these girls but every one seems to be telling her not to bother.

Without ruining the movie for you, I will just say that she gets herself  and the girls she is trying to save into more and more trouble. The whole movie had me upset (mostly because this really does happen and this is really how governments handle it). The move was fairly well done in that respect; it makes you want to help these girls. Story line wise, there were some things I would change (such as the poorly developed love story between Weisz and some Dutch guy whom the whole time you are thinking must be some sketch ball since every other guy in the movie seems to be...) but there are some good plot twists as well that make the movie worth while.

If you like political movies or tense dramas this would be a good pick. If you are looking for a feel good movie, this is definitely not it. Also, if you get squeamish there are certainly some scenes you would have to close your eyes (even when they don't show it, they suggest a lot...)

Bandana Holder

I've been really busy lately and haven't been able to do any crafts because we have been having the interior of our house painted and we've been staying with relatives till it was over. Finally... two weeks later, the painting is done and the odors have subsided enough for us to stay in our house for more than 30 minutes. Suffice it to say, first day back and I am already crafting.

Today, I made a nice little container for my bandana collection. I've been collecting new colors over the years and there is no good way to store them without them going everywhere every time I take one out... until today. I found an old box and some scrap fabric and got to work. All in all, it only took about a half hour to do the whole thing and it looks a heck of a lot better than the pile of bandanas I used to just leave on my dresser.





Step One: Cut the flaps from the box and make a pattern for the interior. I did this by simply tracing the bottom of the box onto my fabric, then tracing each side along the bottom (does that make sense?). Once you are done tracing, cut it out and fold the flaps over the fabric that will become the bottom.

 

Step Two: Use spray adhesive ( I used Elmer's Multi Purpose Craft Bond) and completely spray the inside of the box. Once you have a good covering of glue, go ahead and place the fabric into the box as pictured. I then press one side in at a time smoothing it out towards the edges as I go until the inside is completely covered.

Step Three: To cover the outside, I cut a strip of scrap fabric about an inch wider and an inch longer than I need to go around all the sides. I sprayed the outside section by section, smoothing the fabric over the box. After the sides were completed I folder the corners under the bottom and with a glue gun, I glued a piece of felt on the bottom to cover the edges.



Step Four: To add a little pizazz, I added some pom pom trim with a glue gun around the top and my box was complete. My bandanas fit in perfectly when folded into squares and they look so nice when they are organized by color!

Movie Review: Midnight in Paris

We had movie night last night and I managed to convince my boyfriend to rent Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris", which was a fight since his first impulse was to rent "Cowboys & Aliens".

The quick rundown: Pretty good, worth the watch.

The long rundown: The movie started a bit slow. As with most Woody Allen films the dialogue seemed a bit contrived at times and it took some warming up before the actors really started to flow. No spoilers here, but here is outline of the plot. Gil (Owen Wilson) and Inez (Rachel McAdams) played an engaged couple visiting Paris while Inez father is there on business. Gil is a screenwriter who is working on his first novel, Inez is the slightly bitchy bride to be who plays the part of the girl more interested in the wedding than the husband. Gil stumbles upon a car that brings him to the 1920's as soon as the clock strikes midnight. He takes traveling back in time every night and makes some revelations about his life.

As I mentioned before, the movie starts a little slow. Took me a while to get into it and there were moments where it just came off a bit awkward. Pretty much all the actors who played the famous characters of the past (Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, the Fitzgerald's...) were awkward and not very convincing. When the story focused more on the individual relationships between the characters it went a lot better. As the movie progressed, it got better and better.

I'll leave it at that, I don't want to give away any major points. If you like Woody Allen, you'll like this movie. If you like Owen Wilson, you'll like this movie. If you like Rachel McAdams, well, she is kind of annoying in the movie so maybe you won't like this movie so much.

Kitchen Creations: Skillet fun

We cooked up some sweet potato hash for dinner tonight but we took it to the max. We really pimped it out so it was a meal by itself.

Ingredients:
1/2 a container of mushrooms (it could use more)
1 apple (I used granny smith)
1 can garbanzo beans
1 small onion           1 sweet potato
2 tbs brown sugar  1 tsp paprika
2 tbs curry               1/2 tsp ginger
1 tsp cinnamon       1/2 cup chopped nuts
salt & pepper to taste


The Process:
1. Slice and dice the onions and apples and use a cheese shredder to shred the (peeled) potato. Start cooking the onions as soon as they're chopped up on medium/low heat- be sure to oil the skillet with some olive oil. Go ahead and preheat the oven to 400 as well.
2. Mix in the spices (sans the brown sugar) with the onions once they have been cooking for a couple minutes (we are really exact here...)
3. Throw in the diced apples, mushrooms and garbanzo beans (rinse them first) and cook for three or four minutes, stirring them occasionally.
4. Once everything is getting nice and hot, transfer it all into a large heat proof bowl and mix in the sweet potatoes and nuts. Stir it up till the sweet potatoes are evenly mixed and throw it all back on the skillet (if you can do this is the skillet go ahead, but I didn't have any room to stir it like it needed).
5. Keep cooking it on the stove for four minutes and flip every two minutes. Transfer it into the stove and let cook for 10-15 more minutes (or until it looks tasty and you are too hungry to wait any longer).
6. Sprinkle with brown sugar and serve it up. I ate it over a bed of greens that was sprinkled with red wine vinegar and my boyfriend ate it with salad on the side, either way it was delicious.

Enjoy : )

Avocado time!

Now, I am no vegan, nor do I necessarily endorse giving up cheese in any way, but The Vegan Stoner is a great web-site for vegan recipes that are tasty for vegans and non vegans alike. I found a recipe for avocado pudding which looked amazing (about half way down the page). I decided to make it myself in the form of a smoothie by adding an extra half cup of soy milk and using vanilla soy milk instead of plain.

Ingredients (altered from the original recipe to make my smoothie):
1 Banana
1 Avocado
1 cup vanilla soy milk
3/4 cup ice
spoon full of agave
squirt of lemon (the original called for lime but I did not have any)
Enough granola to sprinkle on top (I used chocolate flavored)

Mix it all together (leave out the granola) in the blender till smooth and creamy.

It will be really thick (even though the soy milk has been doubled from the original recipe) so you will need to spoon it into the glasses. Top it off with a little granola and your smoothie is ready!

If you feel really ambitious and you want to stray from the vegan side of life, this would taste really good with bacon. Chocolate goes well with it too. I have also made this smoothie by using frozen bananas instead of ice if you want a creamier taste.

Whatever you decide to do, you wont need to do much. This smoothie is filling. I had one of these in place of lunch and felt full for hours.

this is what happens when I don't have an idea

I decided it would be a nice day to paint, but I had no idea what I wanted to paint. I decided to set up my mini painting studio on the floor in our extra room and hoped an idea would just come to me by the time I started painting.I set up everything I needed to do a little oil painting.




I sit down to paint, squeeze out some quick dry white oil paint when it dawns on me that I don't want to use oil, I want to make a quick painting and I think red will be a good base. So I scratch the oil paint idea and reach for some red acrylic paint and layer it on the canvas. 



I like the red, it's so crisp and sharp, but I still have no idea what I want to paint. I feel like it needs some white, but just white with red is too much of a contrast so now I'm thinking white and orange with red. OK, I like train of thought but I still don't know what I want to paint. So, what's a girl to do? Oh I know, squeeze some color on the canvas and mush it around with my hands, great idea.

OK, so it was a little messy and now it's looking entirely too unintentional (almost as if someone just slopped a bunch of paint on a red canvas, oh wait.... that is what I did....) So, I add some green.






Well, the green is nice if you like toxic waste areas, but that is not really what I am feeling, so, I add some blue.






 Well, the blue helped a bit but the painting still has absolutely no direction. I decide to fall back on my go to design that I use whenever I don't want to finish a painting but need to do something to make it look "done". I paint some white flowers and swirls.






Although I am normally inclined to just cover the canvas with the white swirls and flowers, I decide that I like the background too  much to just cover it with a meaningless design.... So I do the next best thing. I cover the rest of it with shiny gem stones! Yay!





Yes, it may be a "pointless" painting void of all meaning, but I kind of like it and I had fun painting it. And let's be real, gem stones are always a win.

quick magnet

So I have always really loved the album cover of the US version of The Strokes album "Is This It". Since high school the color palate has been my go to for random doodles. I was bored today, big surprise, so I took one of those lame advertising magnets you get in the mail off the fridge, used my sticker paper and made it a touch prettier.

Of course, now that I see them side by side I see what a horrible miss this was on my part, but whatever! It's better than it was and it only took five minutes.

myth busters

      So I have been seeing this tip all over the internet, on pinterest, when I use stumbleupon, on blogs, and I decided to put it to the test. 
     The claim? Rubbing a walnut over scratched furniture will erase the scratches (or at least soften them). Seeing that I own ample scratched and dinged furniture and also always have a jar of walnuts on hand I figured I ought to give it a try.

I am going to apologize right now for the picture quality, we have the worst lighting in our house during the mid day.




So I tried it. First on our dinning room table. The first picture is the before, and the second picture is the after....

You can see the small ding in the center of the image

Rubbed the ding with some walnut and wouldn't you know, the ding got bigger...

The first attempt was a fail, the ding actually got bigger! (don't tell my boyfriend I did it...) So I decided to try my luck again because I thought maybe it was the wood.

Before walnut

After walnut

Believe it or not, these are before and after images, it's just, well, nothing happened.

So, what have I learned? 

• Don't use a wamut to lessen the look of dings and scrapes on wooden furniture...
• Don't trust everything you see on the internet (no matter how many times you see it)

I hope this saves you the trouble : /

Peppermint Fudge

So, this is a little late.... I did this about two weeks ago, almost three and I am posting it now. Better late than never though!

For my coworkers this holiday season, I decided to make some peppermint fudge. I have made fudge before and I swear by fudge recipes that use marshmallow creme. I used Aunt Teen's Creamy Chocolate Fudge recipe from allrecipes.com as my base and then experimented a little bit to make it peppermint using some white chocolate chips and crushed candy cane (note that the recipe I used as my base includes nuts but I did not, I'm just not a fan of nuts in my fudge). I had found these great little ceramic dishes in the dollar bins at Michaels that I used so not only did they get fudge, they could reuse the package, win.

Step One: Gather the ingredients!

• 1 (7 ounce) jar marshmallow creme
• 1 1/2 cups white sugar
• 2/3 cup evaporated milk
• 1/4 cup butter
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 cups milk chocolate chips
• 1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
• 1/2 cup chopped nuts (optional!)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• pretty ceramic miniature bread pans

Peppermint part (what I used at least)

• 1 1/2  cup white chocolate chips
• 1/3 cup evaporated milk
• 1/8 cup butter
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 cup crushed candy canes or other peppermint candies (the more finely crushed the better)

Step Two: Mix up the ingredients!

In a large saucepan over medium heat, combine marshmallow cream, sugar, evaporated milk, butter and salt. Bring to a full boil, and cook for 5 minutes, stirring constantly. 

Step Three: Pull it off the heat and mix in the chocolate. Stir until well blended then add the vanilla.

Step Four: Pretty much do the same steps for the peppermint part. Mix together and melt all the ingredients except for the crushed peppermint. When it's completely mixed add the peppermint.

 Step Five: Pour the chocolate fudge into greased pans. Pour the peppermint mixture on top of the chocolate in a thin layer (or thick layer if you really like peppermint!) and use a toothpick to swirl the peppermint into the chocolate; this helps to blend the two together and looks kind of nice as well : )

And that my friends, is how I made my coworkers Christmas gifts. Enjoy!