What's for dinner?

And look at me?! Making this whole posting my dinner weekly thing happen. Do I get a prize? Oh year, I got to eat beets, that's the prize.

And such a yummy one too. For dinner this time I had green beans, salad with beets, roasted garlic potatoes (not sure exactly what I did with those potatoes but they smelled fantastic and tasted even better and I most definitely will by trying to recreate that effect in the near future because it was sooooo delicious) and lemon dill chicken. Overall tasty. With a pretty good mix of flavors and reasonably colorful too.

But Let me say, it's not easy to break out of my food routine, it's such an iffy situation. Sometimes you win big, like those glorious potato's, and sometimes not so much. Case in point, the chicken. Not so good, I mean the flavors were there but I botched the cooking time and temperature. However the best thing about mistakes is that you can learn from them. I made chicken again the next day and tweaked things around and it was much better. So, lesson learned with a bonus potato victory.
And hopefully I'll be back, same time same place, just a week later.

twinkle toes

Funny story: I needed some shoes to go with my dress for New Years Eve. Because I made my dress (more on that later) and the jersey fabric that I had was red and so none of my shoes, well matched. Or even clashed cheerfully. I know, totally tragic. So I decided to create my own from a pair of really boring shoes I had picked up for work at a thrift store for a mere $5.

See what I mean? Pretty bland. But I had a giant bottle of the gold disco ball glitter I used to make my friends shiny police badge back at Halloween, and a love for third grader style craft projects so I figured what is there to loose? Not much. What's there to gain? SPARKLES!

Step one, paint on white school glue.
Step two, pour glitter all over wet glue. Shake off the excess.
Repeat until competely covered.

To finish, cut off un-glitterized straps and spray shoes with about a million coats of clear spray fixative until the whole room stinks and you realize you have gotten just a little bit high on the fumes.
Finally...... enjoy! Sparkly shoes courtesy of a trip to Goodwill and some grammar school craft supplies that I already had on hand.

So here's to making do with what you've got, and getting Sparkles! Such a lovely way to say goodbye to one year and hello to a new one!

What's for dinner?

So one of my new goals is to be more creative with my dinners. And, to focus on making them more colorful. I was noticing that there was a lot of blah colors in a lot of past meals, with out a lot of repeats of certain items, also I need to do more vegitables. So I am going to try to post one dinner a week, and aim for more color and more creativity. And I figure if I am on a schedule and have to post, because I promised, I will be more likely to actually do it. So, here's to trying to keep it up. We will see if it works.....
So first we have dinner from yesterday. A green salad, baked sweet potato, and curry risotto. I have of course done salad and sweet potatoes before, but I wanted to do something different with the risotto (and something colorful) so I as I was cooking it I added liberal amounts of curry powder, tumeric and cumin. It ended up having a great amount of flavor and went really well with the sweet potatoes and a little crunch from the salad. Over all worked well. Old favorites with a twist.

First one down and now lets see if I can actually keep this up consistantly. Only time will tell.....

...and a happy new year!

So it is a new year, and a good time for a fresh start or several. I know that it's usually not peoples favorite part of the switch from one year to the next but I actually really like making New Years Resolutions. I think of them like as a sort of cosmically charged to do list.
And one of the things on this years list? More consistent blogging. Like post stuff regularly, and without the month long gaps in between.
So here is to new beginnings....

...and fresh starts....

...and fresh juice?

Oh yeah that's right! I decided to pull out all the stops and make a gloriously enormous amount of fresh squeezed orange juice. Well actually it was fresh orange/tangerine and it was super delish. There is something so decadent about real juice, and being able to drink it in massive quantities. Makes me feel rich, and very very pleased with myself.

festivities!!!

Its a new year! and there was a balloon drop which was pretty much awesome and allowed me to check something off of my bucket list.

It was a silly thing to want to do but it's something that I've always wanted to witness/participate in. And now I can say: "been there, done that" Oh the satisfaction. Pretty much my favorite thing ever is crossing things off lists. Makes me infinitely pleased. And what a great way to start a new year if I do say so myself. So with one thing crossed off my unbelievably long list and about a million and one things still left to be crossed off....I say, bring it on 2011!!!!!

And I hope everyone had an glorious New Years, with or without massive amounts of balloons.