What's to come...

So, I have been trying to organize EVERYTHING at once in my house & life.. What a mess!!
I moved in with my boyfriend almost 10-11 months ago, just recently in the last 3 weeks I emptied my storage & brought it all to the house. *sigh*
The house I lived in before I think I tried to fill every drawer/closet/cabinet I could & that house was really big! LOL  So now I look like a hoarder with my craft supplies, kitchen appliances & dishes. Unbelievable what we keep and buy, yes, I say WE as woman! hee hee
My craft supplies have to be condensed, I had enough for a huge closet (the closet was really the size of the wall in the bedroom) and now it has to all fit into a 5 shelf rack. Ohh goodness. I have been looking online at all the different ideas on how to organize my supplies. I have to narrow it down by pricing and the room I have. It is so great to have the internet. OG would be to buy magazines or watch tv to see and probably never get something that works well for oneself.
My other organizing I am trying to get together and prep is dinner- I work full time & get off at 5pm, I have to drive in 30 min of traffic to get my kid from daycare, drive 20 minutes back home. If I do not prep our dinner the night before, then we eat at 7pm, which I prefer no later than 6:30pm. My daughter goes to bed by 8:30pm and she needs a shower before hand, don't through in any homework if that needs to be done!

A couple of things I am doing or learning as I move through my life. I love to wake up early- 6am to do a load of laundry, so I don't have to do that when I get home. If I am going to use ground meat for dinner (I don't eat red meat, so it will 98% of the time be ground turkey or ground chicken)- I will cook it the night before, this saves me about 20 min at night. I cut up any vegetables, needed or measure out dry stuff if needed.. I am now looking at making breakfast muffins also. My boyfriend usually eats his sandwiches at breakfast and then buys lunch. I understand that sometimes, but why waste the $$ if you don't have to.

I have to share my stuffed Zucchini recipe:
I made my ground turkey the night before because I was going to make an enchilada pie. So I put a taco/fajita seasoning pack into my meat, I added chopped jalapenos. Needless to say my stuffed zucchini was a mexican style. I love HOT/SPICY things and so does my boyfriend, unfortunately he gets heartburn, so I have to mellow on the hot stuff sometimes. Of course, our girls can handle a little bit of heat, but not much.. Since this was going to be a mexican style stuffed zucchini- I added spanish rice, salsa, garlic, sauteed onions, shredded mexican mix cheese,  & cotija cheese. It was amazing! I can not tell you the measurements, because I just did  a dash of this or that, I go by how it looks. Really the salsa was maybe 1/2 a cup.

That is it for now. Thank you for hanging in through all this!


TO COME:
Hair flowers made out of hair
Organized Office/Craft room
Craft area for the girls in the above room
Organizing scrapbook paper
Organizing my recipes for my menu board-the try and the i love already.. :)
Recipes
Edible Crayons for Girls back 2 school treat

Just a little lunch time note

I found this online, and once I can find it again. I will make sure to give credit where credit is due.
I printed up the apple with the writing on it, got a pipe cleaner, apple jacks & punched a whole in the apple.

It is cute and sweet!

I made my own Grocery & Pantry Lists

As we all know, I love Tip Junkie! I get weekly emails and I love it all, they always have free printable and such. The one thing I keep finding,  but have not found something that fits me is the Grocery List and the Pantry List. I never take inventory of what I have, so I end up buying more and that is a waste of money to me. So I decided to make up my own Lists.. As much as I like to write what we need, there is time I would rather circle it and move on. So, I thought of a cool idea with our normal staples in our house.  What I did, is just take a regular word document and used images from Google and put this together. There are things I can add & delete as time goes on, that is the nice thing about it. You can print these at the bottom of my blog, there are links attached.

I did 2 versions of the pantry inventory: 1 is the way I see it a lot, where you check off each box for every one can of item you have. Which is great, but didn't really work for me. It was taking up to much space. I also used pictures like my grocery list. Everyone LOVES pictures! So the second one that is horizontal, is the one you can fill in the number of cans/bottles in the circle. That seemed more logical to me. Let me explain something, if you notice on the soups it has 4 circles- well that is for the different soups I have int he pantry. The picture is cream of chicken, but I didn't want to have 6 different soup pictures, so I added circles and I can fill those in with the numbers of cans. Same with Pop Tarts, Hamburger helper, Jell-O and spices..
The spices, may have to change up- I have many spices to choose from!

Print Grocery List (Print Here)
Print Pantry Inventory List 1  (Print Here)
Print Pantry Inventory List 2 (Print Here)

Making Headbands

I saw several ideas online. I started buying different supplies for this, several months ago. I love this one bidding site called Tophatter, most sellers are from etsy. So I bought these silver metal headbands, twine, flowers, buttons, hello kitty clips, strands of beads, etc.. I had promised the girls that Thursday night we would make headbands. But, the only problem I was having was I had to put the twist the twine on the headband before we could put anything on it. That takes time & patience. So, we did the mini hamburger cookies & they took showers as I twisted twine.. I used hot glue & honestly do NOT recommend using it. I then moved on to gorilla glue, which I would recommend or some other tacky glue or something.

These are the items I used and how we started....

              

Danika did not get to pick her color because her mom (ME) just grabbed a color and started twisting the twine on there. She got to chose her beads. I should have taken a picture of all the string of beads I had. I will add those later. So we made 2 headbands for her. She got the bottom one with the Hello Kitty. 

This one is my favorite, because the way it came together. This is the way I had it in my head. Hailey loved it and she picked her own color. What a goofy face. :)

 

I may have to redo the beads on this one. They started popping off a little, I think the string got broken. But the concept is cute. I love this one, but it really frustrated me because a couple of the beads started popping off. And I have to admit, the Hello Kitty is a clip and I clipped it on and then hot glued it on the bottom with tons and tons of glue. Then got distracted and grabbed under the Hello Kitty, so guess what? I got a glump of glue on one of my fingers and burned the heck out of it. I had to put it under cold water... ugh

Next times, we are adding flowers. We will be making our own & then adding button some how. Need to use my imagination. 

Mini Burger cOoKiEs

I saw a picture online & had to do this with the girls. So adorable, so easy & very quick. With hardly any mess.  They look so cute!!

Nilla Wafers

Keebler Grasshopper cookies

coconut (dyed green)

tube of yellow & red frosting

          

      

 Hailey's creations above

   Danika's creations


We did not use a lot of coconut, because only my boyfriend likes it. He is not going to be eating all those...

Making Rock Candy

So I been wanting to do this for awhile with the girls, so I decided I had enough sugar to do this project. I also had mason jars from Danika's birthday left over. I had bought skewers and clothespins to do this project, so I had everything on hand. I read several different recipes, one of my girlfriends had done this project for her kids for science. So I got her feed back also on what to do and not do.
So I used 3 cups sugar to1 cup water; boil to candy stage. You then turn off the heat, let set for about 10 min. You want it to cool some. We used 3-4 drops of color. 1/2 tsp for imitation flavoring and 1/4 tsp if it is oil based.
Since we were doing 4 jars (2 colors for each kid), I had put the sugar mix in a bowl and waited for it to cool, while getting the other girl ready for her next color.












It was fun and messy. The girls picked cherry, raspberry, peppermint & plain for their flavors.

The girls had plugged in the radio in the kitchen so we were rocking out making rock candy!!

I have to say within 2 hours the blue peppermint began crystallizing. I will show you pictures.












I also read that during the time, if it begins to crystallize on the sides to pour into a new jar and wash out the old one.. move the stick over too- don't forget.

It was all over the mason jar, I could  not pry it out at all. I used  a knife to jab it out and then the stick came out with nothing on it. Guess what we might have to do tonight? Start a new blue one over. This one got crazy and over grew. I really think it was the flavoring, because that was the only difference between all the jars.

Baking Cakes

SO, my boyfriend volunteered me to make cakes for his oldest daughters boyfriends birthday. About 50+ people were suppose to show. More like 20-25 showed, but the point was Andres (the boyfriend) likes Burnt Almond cake & I figured for that many people I will just do 2 cakes & one will be chocolate. You can never lose with chocolate, right?! Burnt Almond takes alot of time to do & many ingredients! I use to work in a bakery for about 20 years and so I use to decorate & at some point started making all the icings, etc..
I made the cakes the night before, and the burnt almond crunch. I gave myself about 3 hours to make the icings and decorate the cakes. I make the icing from scratch and ice the cakes right away. The 2nd cake was chocolate, strawberries & buttercream.  I can not give out my burnt almond cream recipe, but I must say it turned out delicious! I brought some in for a girl at work, who loves to bake also & she could not stop eating it & begged for the recipe. The only thing I have to say, is that when I know how to prep a recipe, I never go by the measurements. I do my own thing, whatever looks right. Hard to explain, I guess it is like something you know so well, you don't have to follow directions. You know what it is suppose to look like.

One thing, I do miss about working in the bakery is the fact that you have a huge table to work on. I had to sweep my floor 4 times in this process. And then this morning mop it, I would have  mopped it that day or the next but time restraints and to many people in the house at one time.