Dinners for the Week(s)

Still have this miserable cold! (going on a month) I'm on antibiotics now but they don't seem to be helping much so I'll talk to the doctor about it at my appointment this Friday. Meanwhile we are still making lots of simple meals not worth mentioning (frozen stuff, grilled cheese, etc.), but we've made a few 'real' meals this week & last.



► Perfect Paella (pictured above, 2 dinners) - this one takes a little while but it is soooo worth it!

► Cheesy grits with Kielbasa, Roasted Brussels Sprouts - The grits were loosely based on this recipe. Pretty good but a work in progress! For some reason our 2 year old wouldn't touch the grits or 'hot dog' but wolfed down the veggies!

► Polynesian Chicken (pictured below, two dinners)

Color Club "Wild at Heart"

After a few weeks of naked nails I finally sat down and painted them. No nail art, just a solid color, and I really only put that on because I was doing nails with a friend (we stamped a few butterflies on hers). So sad!

For this plain manicure I pulled out Color Club "Wild at Heart", wanting to give it another try.



This polish looks so pretty in photos but in person I was once again disappointed. You do get a lovely rainbow shimmer in the brightest sun, but in the shade or indoors you end up with a non-shimmery, rather bland purple. This is more like what I usually see ~



Now that I know a little more about holo polishes I can understand why. They always look better in the sun, and only the strongest ones will still show the rainbow shimmer indoors. The pigment used to create the holo effect also lightens colors, so the strongest holos are always silver, gold, or a pastel (anything dark is going to be rather subtle). I see a lot of girls that are crazy for holos, but as someone who spends most of her time indoors, I'm just not that interested in something that is going to occasionally look nice.

The good news? It is a nice, thick polish that works well for stamping. Holos chips easily, so I don't know how often I'll use it as a base color but for now it's sadly the best purple I've got! Every dark purple I've bought recently has been so sheer I can still see my nail line after 4 coats. Time to hunt around online for something nice.

Dinners for the Week(s)

I can't seem to shake this bad cold, still feeling miserable, so we've made more easy dinners lately (like a frozen breakfast egg scramble, or rotisserie chicken with veggies from the freezer). For breakfast & lunch I've been mostly living on cup-o-soups, ramen, anything with lots of broth! But we've also managed to cook a few recipes, which makes me happy. Last week we made...



► Sausage, Kale, & Lentil Stew (2 dinners)

► Asian Drop-in Soup (pictured above)



And this week...

► Chicken Tetrazzini

► (Frozen) Pot Stickers and Miso Soup - For the soup I follow the recommended ratios of dashi, water, & miso on my dashi mix (basically Japanese bouillon) and toss in some cubed tofu & sliced green onions. Bring the water nearly to a boil then remove from heat before adding the miso (boiling kills some of the healthy enzymes).

Gradient Stamping

My nails have been naked for over 2 weeks now - it's craziness! I was planning on doing something simple to match my costume for Halloween but wanted to wait until I was done making the costume first so I wouldn't mess up the polish with spray paint, Sharpie, glue, etc. Of course I was working on the costume until the last minute so that never happened! Now I'm just sick & nauseous & don't feel like doing *anything*. It's a shame too, because I have new nail plates to try out! Maybe next week.



Meanwhile, here is an old manicure that got bumped by Halloween goodness. The base is Wet N Wild "Silvivor" with a gradient stamp using Color Club "Cold Metal" (blue), Color Club "Wild at Heart" (purple), and No Miss "Palmdale Paprika" (red) with Bundle Monster plate BM-212. To create the gradient you just place a dot of each color along the side of the plate & drag it across. Next time I'll probably try blending the dots together a little first with a toothpick to see if it helps the colors transition better.

After two nails I decided I wasn't really loving the color combos & didn't finish the others. I'll have to find a better base for the lovely blue, purple, and red next time. Now I at least have some nail wheels so I can test these things out beforehand!

Dinners for the Week(s)

► Asian Lettuce Wraps (pictured above, 2 dinners)

► Chicken Tikka Masala (2 dinners) - Great recipe, but you only need about 2 tsp of salt total. This time I tried adding some green peas to the rice, inspired by this version, but I didn't think it was quite as good.


Dinner has been all over the place lately! We cooked these meals leading up to our Halloween party, which we also did a ton of cooking for, and after that my husband demanded a week of easy meals! Leftovers, chicken nuggets, I don't even remember what all we made. This week I have a bad cold & not much sounds appetizing, so we are going simple again - grilled cheese with soup, rotisserie chicken, and a frozen lasagna.

This is the last week of my first trimester and I'm hoping the nausea will be over soon. It actually hasn't been too bad over all (and seemed to be mostly gone before I caught this cold), but my weak stomach has been choosing most of the dinners lately.

Halloween Food Fun

We had a small Halloween get-together last weekend and I couldn't resist making themed foods!

For the main dish I liked the idea of topping a casserole with something like this. Disgusting! There was no way I was going to stuff strips of puff pastry with the filling like she did though, I just liked the look for the top!

I debated a bit on the filler, leaning towards something with a red sauce, and we ended up using my mother-in-law's Goulash recipe... I mean "Ghoul-ash"! Justin actually made that on his own and we ended up with enough leftovers for 2 more dinners!



For the top I just coiled up some crescent roll dough (they were out of the 'sheets') and wound that around to create the intestine look, leaving a little space in between since I knew it would puff up a bit. I was about to wipe the edges of the casserole dish clean, but then realized the grosser the better! Here it is cooked ~



On the side I used this idea to make some bone shaped bread sticks. Super easy! Just snip the ends and roll them in a little on each side.



They used home made dough, I bought a tube of bread stick dough! They were good, but definitely could have used a brush of garlic butter across the top.



I also threw together a skeleton veggie dip tray. I've done this in the past & this was not one of my best!



Last year I made some cheesecake mousse cups (candy corn colored) and they were tasty but lumpy! (should have been heated beforehand) Everyone excitedly asked "Oh, are the different layers different flavors?" Nope, just colored! This year a similar recipe caught my eye that did have different flavors in each layer - including one layer made of melted candy corn!!



The bottom layer is (instant) vanilla pudding, then candy corn melted into whipping cream (which I whipped in my mixer, but it didn't seem to do much), Cool Whip & a candy corn on top! The recipe has you making your own whipped cream for the top instead, but I skipped that! The middle layer tastes like 'caramelized' candy corn & is super sweet, so the whipped cream and pudding help tone that down.

The verdict? Way too rich! My cups were about twice the size of those in the recipe and I think you definitely need to stick to a shot glass for these. I could only eat about half of mine, and that was with salty snacks in between bites! They might be nice as an after dinner desert, but not great at a party with lots of other snacks & sweets & soda!

One of our guests brought a lot of fun themed food as well - "Guaca-moldy" with chips, pumpkin cheesecake bars (with an Orea crust), and puff pastry pumpkins stuffed with cheese. Sadly I only got one terrible picture of those!



We wore our home-made costumes that night but the pictures did not turn out at all so we'll have to dress up again on Wednesday and try again! We're going out with Orson for his first time trick-or-treating and stopping by a church's Fall Festival.

Halloween Scene on Purple

For next week's manicure I'll probably just be doing something plain to match my costume, so this is my last real Halloween themed design of the year. For this one I wanted to create a scene across the nails using a bunch of fun images. You'll have to pretend like some of these things are up close and some for away or else the scale is a little wacky!



The base color is an old unlabeled bottle with the color named "Imperial Violet". It's a pretty light purple with silver glitter, but my goodness it was sheer (4 coats) and slow to dry - a pain in the butt.

I stamped the designs with Konad Special Black and then added the grass along the bottom with Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in "Black Out" (covering most of the tip with the polish brush & then adding in a few blades of grass with a detail brush). The designs were all from Bundle Monster - the cat from BM-04, pumpkin from BM-222, house from BM-224, and bats from BM-13. I also used the witch from BM-13 on my thumb, not pictured.

After stamping the images I thought it might be fun to add a few stars in the sky & painted around the stamps with China Glaze "Snow Globe". It was a little too faint to create the look I was thinking of, but my goodness that iridescent glitter is gorgeous over any color!! It doesn't really show up in the photos though - you can almost see it shimmer over the pumpkin - so you'll just have to trust me on that one.