Amazon.com = Temptation

Let me tell you, getting on a good string of books on Amazon.com is just about like getting on a good string of decorating/DIY/creative blogs in blogland.

Amazon is one of those sites that has the awful but brilliant 'items you may also like' feature.

And so, even though you innocently only searched for one book, you soon find yourself with a whole string of them on your wish list.

And then the other problem is that they're all so reasonably priced.

And I want to order them all so that I can look in their pages and see what new inspirations and photos they might hold.

But today I was good. Ok, mostly good. I only bought one for $1.89. :-)

And before you know it, vintage interior decorating turns into vintage campers...

And as you wander through the many temptations on vintage campers, you soon find yourself on aprons, pies, clotheslines and any other number of topics to tempt yourself, including the title 'Dozens of Ways to Repurpose a Pillowcase' that has the cutest little girls' dresses strung out on a clothesline on the cover.

The deeper you go, the worse it gets. :-)

All of these titles are available on Amazon.com, but consider yourself warned. If I had unlimited spending money, my shelves would be full of books that are full of inspiration.

Chalk Paint: Taking the plunge

Well, I did it - I took the plunge today and ordered some of Annie Sloan's Chalk Paint to try on my crib project.

Why spend the money on the chalk paint? Because I really wasn't looking forward to sanding down each individual crib slat, and with chalk paint there is said to be no sanding or priming necessary! And, I haven't spent much of my baby things/baby room nest egg, so that's how I justified the price tag, which is steep.

The color I ordered is Emperor's Silk. Yes, it looks somewhat florescent in this paint can, which is the image on the site I ordered from, but I'm confident that once I get it and once it's dry it won't be so pink. :-)

Also, another trick to adapt and manipulate the colors of chalk paint is through wax.

Every coat of chalk paint should be sealed with wax, according to all the instructions I can find, to protect it and bring out a nice sheen, if that's what you want and you choose to buff it.

The owners of Shades of Amber, which is based on Colorado Springs, kindly gave me a call after I placed my order to clarify some order details, and to make sure that I knew every coat of chalk paint has to be first sealed with clear wax, and then dark wax added, if desired. I did not know that, and had not come across that in my research, so I was glad they called. I changed my order from dark to clear wax, and he said he's go ahead and send along a sample of the dark for me to try, which I appreciated.

So, the paint and wax should arrive on Saturday, just in time for my DIY weekend list! I just have Saturday this weekend, as we plan on going to brand at Kaycee on Sunday, but hopefully I can at least get a start on it.

Visit Shades of Amber's blog to see a few samples of what chalk paint can do, and view Miss Mustard Seed's post about the finer points of using wax on furniture.

Thermopolis is famous

"If you live there, and you drive this regularly, you are so very blessed."

That's a quote from the most recent blog post on PW's blog in the homeschooling section.

I guess I'm one of those who the guest blogger counts 'very blessed,' because the photos she posted of their drive through the Wind River Canyon and then staying overnight in Thermop are very familiar.

It's interesting to read about places I frequent so often in the words of a tourist, because anymore I take the canyon for granted. The first time I drove through it I was impressed, but anymore my thoughts run along the lines of... 'ok, I'm at Shoshoni, but it'll still take 30 minutes at least to get to Thermop, because of the canyon.'

Given the amount of traffice that PW gets on her site, maybe Thermopolis, and Wyoming in general, will have just a few more visitors this summer. Speaking from experience, familiarity aside, it's worth the visit!

Next up the blogger and her family will be in Cody, so I'm interested to see what she says. To her delight, the drive from Thermopolis to Cody will be even prettier than what she's already seen. :-)

I'm interested to see if they'll even be able to get into Yellowstone, though, much less get around in the park, because they're still getting large amounts of snow this month...

Spring Strawberries

Last night, in return for borrowing the tiller for our flowerbed project the previous evening, I made a new recipe for Strawberry Shortcake Cookies to take across the street to our neighbors Bill and Lorie.

The first step was to dice the strawberries, and then mix them with a little lemon juice and sugar. That mixture along was delicious. :-)

These cubes of butter are what put the short in shortcake.

My pastry blender is frequently used in my kitchen. I always get impatient, though, and don't get the butter mixed into the flour quite as much as I should, and that results in some cookies running at the edges when they hit the oven.

After the butter is cut in, add the cream. I ended up using a full two cups instead of the 1 1/3 cup the recipe called for, because the batter still seemed dry. Fold in the strawberries as the next step.

And drop the cookies on a greased baking sheet. The recipe called for parchment-lined, but I've had bad luck with parchment in the past, so I just grease the pans.

And the final product cooled on the counter before the prettiest ones were packaged to give away. After the first pan came out of the oven, I learned that the cookies spread quite a bit, so to give them plenty of space on the pans. Also, they might not have spread quite as much if they didn't have so many strawberries. But nonetheless, they did taste good!

Meatballs with Peppers and Pineapple

Earlier this week I made PW's Meatballs with Peppers and Pineapple. At this point I can't really tell you what day it was that I made this, as the week's been full of another trip to Cheyenne, a visit to the baby doctor, getting our editorial intern off to a good start on the paper, beginning to make calls on Horse Edition... you get the idea.

But I made it, and it was very good!!

The above picture is all those wonderful peppers getting happy in the skillet.

Again, any recipe that starts out with ground beef is right up my alley. The meatballs are composed of the traditional egg, bread crumbs, onions, etc. Because I sometimes have trouble with my meatballs falling apart in the skillet, I was glad for PW's directions to form them, then freeze for about 15 minutes. Not one fell apart as I fried them!

She also said to roll them in flour. Maybe I rolled mine too much in the flour, but I didn't care for the treatment. They were a little too flour-y for me, even after frying in the oil.

Powdered sugar-covered bon bons!

Frying away.

The completed stack. I ended up with plenty, as my packages of ground beef contain more than 1 1/4 pounds, and I just cooked up the whole thing instead of saving some small amount for a random later use. That, and I'm supposed to eat plenty of iron these days, anyway. Something about needing more blood for the baby...

As the meatballs were finishing up I started in on chopping the peppers and pineapple. The fresh pineapple is really good, and it is worth the effort, but to make this a more pantry-friendly recipe, in the future I might just use canned chunk pineapple that I can keep on hand.

After I got the peppers going in the skillet I added the pineapple. This is one of those treatments where you want the burner on high heat, so that everything gets a nice charred finish on the outside, while not getting mushy on the inside.

Then you add a beef broth/corn starch/sugar mix. Yes, sugar. It's what gives the dish it's nice sweet and sour taste, along with the pineapple sweetness.

Then just leave it alone and let it bubble for a while, so the corn starch has a chance to take effect.

And add the meatballs after a little while, so they can start to pick up the flavors of the sauce.

Don't forget to get some rice started cooking at the beginning of the dish, so that it's done about the same time as the meatballs and sauce! This time I used a mix of brown and white rice - I had a little bit of white rice left over from the rice pudding I made some time ago. Usually we use brown around our house.

When the rice is done and the sauce is slightly thickened and everything tastes wonderful, serve it up with plenty of juice over the rice, and enjoy! This has also made great leftovers this week. Last night I cooked up some fresh rice to use with the rest of the meatball mixture.

Make it! It's good. :-)

Out with the old: the first step to a baby room

This weekend I stuck around the house and got a lot done, including a good start on my next sewing project, raking the yard - it was a gorgeous spring weekend, and spending lots of time in the basement yesterday, with the goal of getting all the non-baby furniture out of the baby room.

Once all of our dressers were moved out into our bedroom, which included taking apart and moving the bed to the opposite end of the room, and moving all the hat boxes, boots and other odds and ends that accumulate, I was able to vacuum and deep clean before unrolling my new baby room rug.

I ordered it from the company Dash & Albert, who I found through the nursery inspiration blog LayBabyLay. Now that I know who Dash & Albert is, I am seeing their rugs more frequently, and most recently in my new Martha Stewart magazine.

I love the stripes, and I love the colors. It's appropriate for my nursery theme that they named it "Ranch Stripe." From the rug I'll draw the patterns and colors for the rest of the room, including a definite new window treatment. It's high time the pink/red sheers disappear, as I've just been ignoring them until now. The gold chair and ottoman are a find at Odds and Ends when they were still good, and I've had plans for a couple years now to make a slipcover for them, and I've even had the fabric that I wanted to use, but it didn't go with anything else in my house. Now I will be able to use it, because the powder blue and white pattered upholstery will coordinate perfectly with the rug.

So I feel like we made a big step forward over the weekend in preparing for the baby, because diving in and getting all those dressers moved and the bed rearranged was a big task. Thanks to Scott for patiently helping me. :-)

I'll take some pictures of the new bedroom arrangement once it's to a point where it's a little more finished... I didn't get to finish up the details yesterday because we ended up going to dinner with Uncle Sonny and Aunt Carole from Kaycee and cousin Griff, whose birthday is today. Finishing the details includes hanging some new shelves and a shelving unit on one of the open walls for our boot/hat storage, which we desperately need. I've come to realize we can never have too many shelves or hooks in our house. I also want to hang some of our yet-unused art in the bedroom space, some of which we received as wedding gifts.

Not a chicken person, but...

Having lived on a hog farm for most of my life, where my family also raised the occasional calf to butcher, before moving to cattle country in Wyoming, I've always had ready access to pork and beef. And, since beginning to work for the paper, I regularly see the numbers about the competition between the 'red meat' industries and the poultry/turkey/feathered industry.

Take this blurb, for example, that will run on this week's cover:

"In the recent 'Agricultural Projections to 2020' report, USDA forecasts poultry consumption will surpass red meat consumption for the first time in 2018. The agency says consumption of chicken and turkeys will reach 106.7 pounds in 2018, while consumption of beef, pork, veal, lamb and mutton will total 106.3 pounds."

Now, we did have our share of laying hens and broiler - or butcher - chickens at one point growing up, and we did eat our fair share of them, but lately I find myself avoiding chicken in favor of beef or pork. Mostly because both my upstairs refrigerator freezer and my deep freeze in the basement are chock full of both, because of events like this that tend to happen around here:

Almost a year later, I'm just now using up the last of the ground beef from this old lead steer. I became very creative in ground beef uses! There's more than just chili and hamburgers to be enjoyed from ground beef. (Don't worry, that's our health inspector friend Jamie in the white shirt. She made sure everything was kept clean and kosher.)

So anyway, the point is that I haven't cooked or eaten anything chicken (on purpose) for at least two years, if not longer, but this recipe posted by Pioneer Woman just might inspire me to cook up and consume some chicken:

It's called Creamy Chicken Spaghetti Casserole, and the combination of Parmesan, mushrooms and pasta looks too good to pass up... It reminds me of the Chicken Tetrazzini recipe my mom used to make frequently for catering jobs.

The best free digital download:

I really am getting ready to go to bed after an evening spent working on some editorial things for the paper... but I made a quick visit to some of my favorite blogs, and found this:

Just Something I Made

This pdf and another are available over at Just Something I Made, and I can see nursery inspiration coming on. I knew I didn't want to decorate the nursery with the normal baby animal themes, I guess they're too cartoonish and unrealistic for me, and now I'm thinking I could maybe somehow use these vintage images as a jumping off point of inspiration for our baby room's decor.... I'm envisioning trying to blow one of these up and transferring to the wall. Too ambitious? Maybe. :-)

Homemade English muffins

Does it get better than this?

The photo alone is enough to inspire me to make some tonight, and enjoy them with eggs, bacon, cheese and some leaf lettuce. The recipe calls for all white flour, but I like the store-bought whole-wheat English muffins so much that I'd probably change the recipe to whole-grain.

Here's the link so you can have the recipe for yourself: Tasty Kitchen Blog - English Muffins.

I found the recipe and photo tutorial on a rabbit trail from my main goal of finding a Superbowl menu. Here's what I've settled on for Sunday, although it's subject to change on a whim or inspiration. :-)

- Pizza Rolls - a recipe of my own devising, as I didn't find one that I liked. Fashioned after the Old Chicago appetizer. I'll let you know how it goes.
- Mushroom and Swiss Sliders with Spicy Fry Sauce - from Pioneer Woman Cooks
- Tomato/cheese/Rotel/ground beef dip - Again, nothing that has a specific recipe. Throw it all together and heat!
- White Chocolate Party Mix - from Taste of Home. Because I'm pretty sure Scott can still taste the recipe my mom made at Christmas time.
- S'more Brownies - a definite favorite, good for taking to brandings, that I haven't made in a couple years. From Food Network.
- And... perhaps soft pretzels with mustard sauce? If I have the time and/or ambition come Saturday. Mostly, I'd make them because they sound really good to me, and I know I'd eat one or two. Or more.

Where are my knitting needles...

I might have to get them out after finding patterns for these winter creatures on Etsy recently.

The patterns themselves are only three dollars, and the yarn to make these would only be another few dollars. The big investment would be the time, but they just might be cute enough to attempt at some point.

I also found these little farm animals, which is what I think my nursery theme will be. With both Scott's and my ag backgrounds, our little one needs an early introduction to farm/ranch life. I'd really like to get some things with black baby calves on them, or Hereford calves with their cute, bright-white faces, legs and tails, but having a really hard time finding something that specific. Most mainstream baby things feature dairy calves, which are cute, but somewhat out of place in Wyoming.

Dinner guests

Tonight Scott and I are having company for dinner, and the above photo is one of the recipes I'll make. I rediscovered this Pulled Pork BBQ Pizza in the folders of my Food Network online recipe box and remembered how good it was when I made it several times several years ago.

So this morning I put one of our pork roasts in the crock pot and it's getting happy today in preparation for some BBQ sauce and cheese on a pizza crust tonight. I'll also make a second pizza with something like sausage, green peppers, mushrooms and onions on it. And maybe black olives. I'm always conflicted about adding them to things, because I love them so much, but they're not exactly Scott's favorite.

And speaking of good recipes, how does Amazing Spiced Chai Concentrate sound?

I just came across this on PW's Tasty Kitchen website, and it does look very tasty. I know caffeine and pregnancy aren't the best things to mix, so maybe an adaptation of this would be a good hot drink to have in the morning, using decaf tea bags for the concentrate. It does use some spices, like star anise, that I don't normally shop for, but I'm sure they're easily found in Casper's grocery stores.

The fact that we've been below zero and single digits for the last several days makes a steaming milk beverage sound even better.

Paper Chains

A recent post on Celebrations at Home featured paper chains, and how more and more people are starting to use them for year-round parties these days.

I think they're quite pretty, and maybe I should add them to my plan for the tent at our Wyoming wedding reception the end of May. That would be quite pretty and spring-like.

Helpers, get ready!

:-)

Too many pretty ideas...

.... to even hope to make them all. The latest find is Centsational Girl's felt poinsettias.

basement inspiration

"My husband went out of town for about 36 hrs...so I thought I could put up board and batten, paint and get the Master bedroom I've dreamed of...all within the 36 hr time limit. Why is it when husbands leave to go out of town, every creative juice starts flowing? I think I can re-do the entire house while he's gone. I also think I'm on vacation and I don't have to cook and we can eat out for every meal. He's home now...so I will cook tonight."

excerpt from Pink and Polka Dot. visit her blog to find out which project she's tackled. it's occurred to me that i could do something similar to add more drama to the main bedroom downstairs... right now it's pretty 'blah.' too bad scott doesn't have any more hunting trips planned this fall. :-)

who can resist?

from shopterrain.com