Food and Projects

Pinterest is a great place to find recipes...I mean, you see all these pictures of delicious looking food.  There are captions saying how much flavor the recipe has and how its the best of x,y, or z that the pinner has ever had.  It makes it incredibly easy to find meals and recipes to cook, however, each comment/caption should be taken with a grain of salt.  I have tried several recipes that I got off Pinterest now and most of it ends of tasting bland or just gross.  We all have different palates, but I am starting to lose faith in Pinterest recipes.  I think I'm going to stick more to allrecipes.com from now on.  Most of my successful meals have come from the daily emails that I have gotten from them.  In any event, here are some of the meals that we have been trying lately.  

Parmesan Squash Casserole:

This would be an excellent side dish for any meat.  I was lead to believe (by Pinterest) that this could be an easy main dish to make.  While it is very simple, it is definitely NOT a main dish, nor is it something that guests would rave about.  Honestly, the best part of this dish was that I could boil and puree the leftovers for Mikey.  If you are interested I will post the recipe below. 

I sliced 2 large squash and 2 large Zucchini.  I alternated them in a casserole dish and this is what I had left.  I was able to make several tastey and healthy meals for my little guy.

Seasoned and ready to go

The recipe is as follows:

-Dice 1 medium white onion and sautee in oil and garlic until clear and tender.

-Line bottom of casserole dish with onion and then make 4 rows with zucchini and squash slices.

-Season with salt and sprinkle Parmesan cheese on top.

-Bake for 30 minutes at 350.

I attempted the chicken and dumplings again with a little more success.  I have added this recipe to my cookbook only because Brian thought it was awesome.  I'm my opinion, it was missing something.  It just wasn't up to Cracker Barrel standards.  I just found their recipe online so I will give that a whirl later in the month.  I'll post the recipe on my recipes page.

Chopped onions and fresh parsley

Cream of chicken, butter, and chicken breasts all go into the crockpot, along with some chicken stock

Add in the onions

and parsley

cook on low for 6 hours, add dumplings and cook on low for another 30 minutes

Mikey's meals from the leftover zucchini and squash.  I also made him some sweet potatoes...all of his favorite veggies!
I freeze these bad boys for later.

I finally finished our map.  All I had left to do was buy some background paper and a frame to put it together. I finally did it and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.  You actually can't see the paper layered when its hanging, my camera is just THAT good.  Maybe I'll eventually get a picture of it hanging up.

Please excuse our disgusting ottoman...we are in the market for a new couch.

 This one was really good too, but I need to make a few changes to the recipe.  Next time I am going to cut off the lemon peel, it gave the green beans a weird taste.  I am also going to marinate the chicken in the sauce that the veggies and chicken were just briefly dipped in.  I think it will add a lot to the chicken and improve the overall flavor of the meal.

To be quite honest, I was really disappointed with this...even more so because I wasted an entire carton of delicious strawberries :-(  The picture and description on Pinterest really sold me so I decided to give this a try this morning.  It was really just kind of bland.  We added some sugar after having a few bites, it helped, but it still went on the never again list.  Leave a comment if you want the recipe.

This is Brian's new baby.  He purchased a Miter Saw last weekend so that he could complete some of my household projects.  He had been using his old West Point trunks to elevate it/as a table, so he decided to build a work bench.  I think he did an awesome job.  Now we have a place for all of our random tools too!

He also built some saw horses to support it, we found the plans on this website.  There are lots of good tips and projects on here.

Our pallet table is still under construction.  Brian finished it, but we weren't satisfied with how it looked so I made him take it apart to make it look more like the photo we were working off of.  We will finish eventually.