spotlight five: yellow pendant and found hardware necklace

close... closer... closest! 

i love the closeup of this necklace - you can really see the detail of the found hardware pieces and all their different textures...!

and i made a meal this week that joey ate! 

cook 8oz penne pasta according to package directions, drain.  cook 8oz sausage and 1 cup sliced onion in 2 tsp. olive oil for 4 minutes (until browned). add 2 tsp minced garlic (you guys, for the first time in my life i bought the packaged minced garlic...! such a timesaver! though i guess you give up a bit of freshness? we didn't notice ;) and cook for 2 minutes. add 1 1/4lb chopped tomatoes (this equaled 7 Romas for me), cook for 2 minutes.  take off stove and add the cooked pasta, 2 Tbsp grated Romano cheese, 1/4 tsp salt, 1/8 tsp pepper. sprinkle with 4 Tbsp

grated Romano, and 1/4 cup fresh basil leaves, torn. - serve! jason, joey, and i all loved it, and it only has 389 cal per serving (this recipe makes 4 servings)! :) we had broccoli with it, cause i knew joey'd eat that even if he wouldn't eat the pasta - but he did! yay! success! need more recipes like this one (but different ;) 

three months in... and spotlight three: found wood necklace

 attention: 

those of you who only read this blog for pictures of the cutest kid in the world, please scroll to the bottom immediately.

now, for anyone who stuck around for the outfit and jewelry... the outfit: top, thrifted; shorts, thrifted (seen here and here and here in the past "month shots with the shed"); boots, gift from jason; necklace, handmade from cord and a found piece of wood; earrings, bought at the Light of Christmas boutique last year, made by the lovely Becca Nevius (both of us will be selling jewelry there this year!)

isn't this little piece of wood amazing?? it's like a miniature tree! love it :)

                                                                closeup of the earrings by becca

now for the "three months in" update... there is no update. i weigh exactly the same as last month (190 lbs), and have continued to struggle with eating healthy.
this month i blame:
a) jason for buying me ten pounds of bulk chai latte powder (the best in the world.) to celebrate the arrival of fall (and i have yet to celebrate or really even acknowledge its subsequent departure, with the temperatures still in the 80s this week). you have to try it to understand, but this chai sweetness is truly irresistible. and something about allowing myself to have it every day seems to undermine my healthy aspirations... 
and/or 
b) joey. this is probably an even bigger one. i got all inspired to cook and make healthy meals, and the ones i was trying were delicious! but my almost-2-year-old refuses to eat pretty much every single one. so it makes me less motivated to cook this way when i'm going to either have to cook a separate meal for him, or send him to bed hungry. i've tried to find healthy, toddler-friendly meals, but almost everything seems to be either/or. of course he'll eat macaroni and cheese, burgers, fried chicken, and sweets. but not anything I cook, oh no. he does eat vegetables pretty well... he'll ask for broccoli, peas, and edamame until their supply is exhausted! but nothing that really fills him up, and i try to fill him up in the hopes that maybe THIS will be the week he sleeps through the night...

but i haven't given up! my sister gave me this book about toddlers and it had some fun snacky ideas in there (also a constant drama in our house - he'll eat something up every day one week, and then have nothing to do with it the following one, so i'm constantly problem-solving. guess that's the life of a mother ;) 

he has not been eating bananas for me this week, so i thought i'd try a different version...

i changed the recipe a little bit on this, since i had a package of Jell-O graham cracker crust in my cupboard, and called them a different name (she called them no-bake banana cookies)

"special bananas"

1. slice up banana

2. shake in ziploc bag of graham cracker crust

3. serve.

;)

joey, do you like them? 

"yeah! spetta bananas!" ;)

beef pot pie

last week we had some delicious chicken pot pies from a little cookbook/magazine jason bought me: Cooking Light's Readers' Top-rated Recipes. we've tried a couple of recipes from it, and they have been wonderful! delicious, using pretty much normal ingredients (martha stewart's recipes, on the other hand,  are GORGEOUS, but they end up being kind of expensive to make, with all the unusual ingredients you have to buy just for that recipe, and sometimes i can't even find them at the grocery store). so, since we're trying to be more budget-conscious, i thought about what i could make with ingredients i already had instead of heading to the store to spend more money. i never make the same thing two weeks in a row (i guess i feel like it's too repetitive... for my family. i don't mind... so maybe i should find out if they do! i'd waste less fresh ingredients that way), and i had run out of chicken, so i thought "how about BEEF pot pie? used the same basic recipe, altered slightly to account for the beef-ness, and to our taste (the first time was a little bitter, and i thought it might have been the parsnips in the original recipe, so i replaced those with a sweeter alternative: carrots. beef pot pies

preheat oven to 400 degrees. 

boil 3 cups reduced-fat beef broth in large dutch oven. 

add vegetables - 1 cup each of 1/2 inch cubes of: potato, sweet potato, celery, carrots, and onion.

cover & simmer for 6 minutes, then add one pound of steak, cut into bite-size pieces. 

cook 5 minutes, then remove meat & vegetables with a slotted spoon. 

mix 2/3 cup flour with 1 1/2 cup milk in a bowl with a whisk. add to broth.

cook 5 minutes, stirring frequently. stir in meat & vegetables.

add 1 1/2 cups frozen green peas, thawed <--a step i forgot both times i made this; 1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley, 2 Tablespoons chopped fresh thyme, 1 1/2 teaspoons salt, 1 teaspoon pepper.

spoon into ramekins coated with cooking spray. recipe called for 8, but i actually only did 2 in individual ramekins - one each for me & my love - and the rest in a larger (identical) "ramekin"? 

top each with puff pastry dough, and bake for 16 minutes, or until pastry begins to brown.

and it seemed too boring to drink water, so i created a sparkling beverage out of: 

2/3 juice (pineapple orange banana - what joey calls "monana juice") and 1/3 sparkling water. 

garnish with an extra sprig of thyme, and enjoy!

ps. yes, these are the ramekins that i got the whole set of 6 + the large one for $4.50 at an estate sale - aren't they so fun!? makes me want to bake pots de creme, and other individual-sized recipes just so i can use them!

a night in Los Angeles... at work.

for those of you who don't know, i've been a nurse at children's hospital of los angeles for 8 years now (!)

 i only work occasionally now (like one 12-hour shift a month ;) so i can mostly stay home with joey full-time and play with art and stuff sometimes (much less than i feel like i should be able to, being so lucky to stay home and all... but what they say about motherhood being full-time is SO TRUE! i always have this little person tagging along, wanting to be with me, needing me almost every minute! and i love it. ;) 

these lovely instagrammers were taken in the breakroom during my lunch - ha ha.

you'll get better photos next time i hope ;)

so usually when i'm running out the door to work is the time i'm least concerned with healthy habits, but today, i had made these chicken strips (got randomly inspired to cook during joey's nap!), and they turned out so yummy! and we had these cherries that it turns out were super-sweet (but still firm - can't eat me no squishy cherries ;)

so there you have it - chicken and cherries! i wonder if those could be combined into a dish somehow... it'd have to have some cool name that also started with ch... 

a healthy dinner menu from

Martha Stewart's Healthy Quick Cook cookbook:

sparkling fruit coolers (ice cubes of cranberry juice, lemonade, limeade, with sparkling water poured over, and garnished with a lime wedge)

apricot-glazed chicken (i cut up a whole chicken for the first time in my life! even left the bones in some of the pieces - for jason - eww, but i also feel like i've stepped into the world of real cooks now :)

layered summer salad (layers of yellow, red, and orange bell peppers, radishes, and carrots, each one marinated in it's own juice: lemon, lime, orange, grapefruit, and red wine vinegar; and tossed with olive oil & salt and pepper - this one was even better a couple days later, after marinating in said juices!)

haha - you know it's a good summer day from this shot - blue popsicle covered face, shirt off, marker all over... my son, joey didn't like my food i made, but he was too cute not to include! :)

 

 ...and for dessert, my first creative recipe: a fruit salad (haha) 

"Clementine Flowers": a fruit salad

      this started out as the dessert course in the martha stewart book, but then i discovered that the only ingredient i had that she required was cherries! i hadn't been able to find "eau de vie" at the grocery store, and half of the fruit i had bought (a week earlier :) had gone bad. so i decided this would be my first foray into adventurous cooking, and just went with what i had: a perfectly ripe mango, a pound of cherries, and some clementines. this was truly brave for me! i have always wanted to "cook creatively", and had even made that a goal of mine this last fall, but have never been able to really follow through... i have learned and enjoyed being creative in so many areas of life, but never this one! so i courageously looked square in the face of cutting up a mango (never a successful task before), pitting cherries (never TRIED before - note to self: get a cherry pitter :), and creating!

     the original recipe had called for oranges, and to prepare them all fancy without any of the pith... clementines, i discovered, are a little small to attempt that with. as i cut away the pith from each clementine section, the rest just fell apart in a heap. so i came up with a new way of cutting them - cutting off the peel in segments, and then just slicing them! they ended up looking like orange flowers, and paired with the cherries, made a striking new dish. now, i didn't want to leave it at just the three fruits, so i splashed on a little sparkling water (i think this step is completely omittable - i thought it might make the fruit sparkly and bubbly, but i didn't notice a difference in taste).

     then i remembered: lime and salt on ripe mangoes. i had this for the first time when i was working full-time at children's hospital of los angeles, from the "street fruit vendor" (do they have these in other cities?? i'm curious) - my coworkers would buy mangoes with lime, salt, and "chile". i wasn't brave enough to try the spicy version, but i got it with lime and salt one day, and it became an obsession. you know how people always claim that salt brings out the flavor in fruit? i always thought they were crazy, too (let my sweet stuff stay sweet, thank you very much!) until i tried it. a-mazing. so, i thought i'd try it here - and it was just as good as i remembered it. it worked with the cherries and clementines, too! (and then i remembered how my grandpa used to put salt & pepper on his oranges, and i always thought he was crazy - maybe he was onto something after all! :) so, although i'm sure other people have cut clementines into flowers before, i don't know about any ;) so this really was a creative venture! feel free to use my recipe!