Strawberry Spinach Salad

I know that I wanted a light salad, and one that didn't include meat for those vegetarians that were going to be joining us at the shower. I figured strawberries are in season, and what goes best with strawberries in a salad, spinach of course! So I found this recipe courtesy of Paula Dean, and I hear that it turned out pretty good. You don't know this, but will in one second, I have a lot of food allergies. I didn't bring my own oil with me, so I had to use what the bride had on hand, which was one that I cannot eat, but there wasn't any left over, so I'm thinking it was a hit.

This is super simple and easy to make. I didn't add the almonds, since I'm allergic to those too, but I'm sure it would be equally delicious with those added in.

Ingredients

• 1 (10 to 12-ounce) package baby spinach, washed and dried
• 1/3 cup sliced almonds, toasted
• 1 pint strawberries, hulled and quartered
• 1 medium cucumber, peeled, seeded, and finely diced

Dressing:

• 1/2 lemon, juiced
• 2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
• 1 teaspoon poppy seeds

Directions

In a large salad bowl, add the spinach, almonds, strawberries, and cucumber and toss together.

For the dressing:
In a small glass bowl or jar with a tight-fitting lid, combine the lemon juice, vinegar, sugar, oil, and poppy seeds. Whisk together in the glass bowl or shake if using a jar.
Dress the salad right before serving.

And the finished product:

Quinoa Salad

I figured that the food at the shower was such a hit that I would post the recipes here. So this week, we're going to do a recipe week. I only have 4 recipes, so the rest of the week, I'll fill in with recipes that I really like (but those won't have pictures, boo) I don't have pictures of step by step, but everything I made was really easy, so I'll just post the after picture of what it should look like.

Before I post this, I would like to say that I got this from a close friend, and don't know what website she found it on.

ACTIVE: 30 MINTOTAL TIME: 2 HRS 45 MINSERVINGS: 8HEALTHYMAKE-AHEADVEGETARIANINGREDIENTS

12 ounces dried black beans, picked over and rinsed (I just used a can of black beans, and it worked great, you can even do a can and a half if you really like black beans)

Salt

1 cup quinoa, rinsed

3 tablespoons sherry vinegar

1 tablespoon soy sauce

1 tablespoon fresh lime juice

1 chipotle in adobo, minced

1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

6 scallions, white and light green parts only, thinly sliced

1 small red onion, finely diced

1 yellow bell pepper, finely diced

1/4 cup chopped cilantro

 DIRECTIONS

In a large saucepan, cover the beans with cold water and bring to a boil. Cover and let stand off the heat for 1 hour (unless you're doing the canned and then you can skip this step)

(and this step, see how much easier it is if you just used canned? You get to skip two steps) Drain the beans. Return them to the pot and cover with 3 inches of water. Bring to a boil and simmer over low heat until tender, about 1 hour and 30 minutes; season generously with salt during the last 10 minutes. Drain and let cool

Meanwhile, in a medium saucepan, combine the quinoa with 2 cups of water and a pinch of salt and bring to a boil. Cover the saucepan and simmer the quinoa over low heat until the water has been absorbed, about 15 minutes. Spread the quinoa on a plate and let cool.

In a large bowl, whisk the vinegar, soy sauce, lime juice and chipotle. Add the olive oil in a thin stream, whisking until blended. Add the black beans, quinoa, scallions, red onion, yellow pepper and cilantro. Season with salt, toss to combine and serve.

See, totally easy right? And this is your finished product, always a crowd pleaser and lasts in the fridge for a while, easy lunches too!

That Time I Ran a Half Marathon

Okay, so maybe it wasn't that long ago, 2 weeks...but now I'm left with, now what? I spent the last 3 months running over 200 miles trying to train for this sucker...I knew what I was going to be doing every other day, running, and running, just keep running. But now that I'm done, I'm not sure what to do. This week I went to my beloved cardio kickboxing class, this used to be my favorite form of exercise, after class I felt great, but I feel like it's not enough any more. I have a love/hate relationship with running, I like the way I feel after I'm done, but hate almost every moment while I'm doing it. This could be the heat talking...where is Fall? Weather.com says it's supposed to be 97° tomorrow, huh? I want cooler weather please, thanks! I digress, I signed up for personal training sessions (okay I didn't sign up as they told me I had unused sessions left from 2005! Yep 2005, heck ya I'll take them!) I had my first session on Thursday, still don't know how I feel, got a good workout, but it's not something we can afford to keep up. What is your exercise regime?

What's a post without pictures? Here's me at mile 12.5 or so...only 0.6 miles left, I can do it!

 

Me and Baby Fox, yep we got him up at 4am to come with me to the run, he stayed awake the whole time and then took a 5 hour nap when we got home (does that even count as a nap?) 

If you ever do run a 1/2 marathon try out the Disney Half, it's Labor Day weekend every year and it's a fantastic first one to do. You run through Disneyland, California Adventure and actually run through Angel Stadium (with people cheering for you), it was an awesome first 1/2 marathon.

Tuck it In, Tuck it In

Another outfit with my shirt tucked in. I feel so grown up. Seriously, for whatever reason, the only people I associated with tucked in shirts are old women, with their pants up over their waistline, or those really skinny models who don't have an ounce of fat and can pull it off. But I went out of my comfort zone and pulled these two things together. I haven't worn this skirt in forever becasue I didn't know what went with it. I think this works...I'm far from being a fashionista, but you've got to start somewhere right? Happy weekend! We finally have a weekend with NOTHING planned, it's going to be glorious, what are you doing?

p.s. the reason I am sans bracelets or anything on my wrists is that I sit at a desk all day and it was driving all the guys nuts with the clanging of bracelets...they just don't understand fashion...

My camera broke

My.Camera.Broke.

Bad pass off between The Mr. and me...*insert sad face here*

I'm sad, I still have my DSLR, but it's not the same, I miss being able to grab my camera and go. There have been NO pictures taken of Baby Fox this week, double sad. He got a haircut, I have not documented it.

The Mr. and I decided to wait till the Christmas sales on cameras come around Thanksgiving, it cannot come soon enough! Don't get my wrong I love me "fancy" camera, but I miss taking my little point and shoot with me everywhere I go...

Please a moment of silence...

Bridal Shower - Tiffany Style

I threw my best friend a bridal shower. She lives up in the mountains, so we had to bring everything up with us, but I think it turned out pretty good (I am jealous of the grass, how does he get his grass so green and fluffy, yep this is totally real, not that fake stuff, and it's so soft to walk on). So the first table on the left is where the gifts went, the next table is the drinks, and the far table is where the food went.

I got pictures of the bride and groom as kids and then made frames using my cricut, and put the pictures in them, used some ribbon and there you have frames in trees.

Drinks, you can see the pictures a bit better from this view.

I hung some of paper lanterns from the trees above where the food was going to go. These were bought at Micheal's, they are reusable, so a good investment in my opinion.

Here's the table when we got the food on it (top left - quinoa salad, top middle - fruit salad, top right - chicken sandwiches on criosants, bottom left - strawberry spinach salad, bottom right - chinese chicken salad). We had about 20 people and this was the PERFECT amount of food. I couldn't believe how pefect it was, there was about 1/2 a serving left on each plate.

 

We knew that it was going to be outside and sunny/hot in early August, so we found some EZ tents, so people had shade to eat lunch under.

 

The table just had mason jars filled with Daisy's, and then we put a fork and knife in the napkin tied with ribbon.

Here's those tissue pom poms  I know you were dying to see! Don't they look great? 

If you look close there are little chocolate favors, they have Hershey kisses with a tag that says the bride and grooms name along with their wedding date.

There you have it, a bridal shower fit for a queen. Considering we had to bring everything up the mountain with us, I think we did pretty good. Everything turned out perfect and I couldn't have asked for a better bridal shower. Up next week, another bridal shower, I threw with my mom and sister for my brother and his wife.

DIY Tissue Pom Poms

Okay, so I didn't get great pictures towards the end. I had 20 of them to make, and had people helping me make them, sooooo, here are the pictures I did get. It's super easy. When looking up how to make these online, like on this site, it calls for 20 x 30 tissue sheets, but those aren't really readily available at the stores. Well they might be, but at the cheaper stores, like the Dollar Store or Big Lots they come in 20 x 20, and trust me, you can make them with this size too. So I started off with tissue paper, some good sharp scissors and some wire, mine was white but you can use anything.

First unfold the tissue, the best pom poms have more tissue (the tutorial calls for 10 sheets), but I did one with just 10 sheets and that worked too, but since I only had 20 x 20 sheets, it was a little on the light side, and "airy", with 15 sheets, it had the more full affect, I think some of mine had 16 or 17 (yep I can't count, those suckers are thin and hard to separate)

Then you need to accordion fold it

Continue the accordion or "fan folding"

When you're done, you'll have something that looks like this. The folds don't have to be totally perfect.

Then you need to wrap the wire around the middle. Like so:

I added a little loop in there, so that I had a good place to add the string so I can hang them easily. You'll thank me later for this part. Make sure you make the loop is on the flat part, if you put the loop anywhere else, like on the the side where the folds are, it won't work, I tried that, and the pom pom didn't "fluff" right when hung.

Next, if you want to make the edges rounded, or pointy, this is when you cut. I wanted rounded for mine, but the same application can be used for the pointy, etc. The tutorial shows them cutting it all at once, I found this REALLY hard, so I did it phases. As you can see below I took about half the stack and cut my rounded edge.

Then took the second half and matched it, I found this much easier, and nicer on my fingers and my scissors.

In the tutorial it's this nice pile, this is what my pile looked like, don't worry, it's slightly messy, I think they stage stuff in those pictures to make it look easier then it really is, just to make people feel bad when ours doesn't come out the same. Join me in a messy pile!

When you're done, it should look something like this:

I added a string at this point, I tried doing it after, but it didn't work out as well, and the string really doesn't get in the way.

Now here comes the long part. Spread out your "fan" and then one by one start separating the tissues from each other. When you're separating the tissues, if you try to separate as close to the middle as possible. If that makes sense.

See how my model (aka, best friend who's shower I'm throwing and I'm making her work), starts her separation from the center? The more separation you can get from each sheet, the fluffier your pom pom is going to be. So you're going to "fluff" half of the stack up, then flip over the stack and fluff the other half in the other direction.

Looking at the picture below, she's fluffing alternating sides. She's fluffed the right side, and is now fluffing the left side. You can either separate from the left, then the right and switch back and forth (I found that this worked better), but you can also separate the sheets from one side, then the other side, then flip the whole thing around...

This is just part of the stack being fluffed, maybe 3 or 4 more sheets and we're going to flip the stack the other way and do the same thing to the other side.

After you fluffed both sides, you just need to move the tissue around so it looks seemless. Sorry I don't have a picture of this part. But you'll get it, and if you tear some of the layers, don't worry, you won't be able to see it. These are all the pom poms we made that night. You can tell they don't look "perfect" but just wait till you see them hung (post coming tomorrow). Until then...happy Pom, Pom'ing'!