nailed dinner tonight

Tonight we made a killer dinner. Literally, it was absolutely delicious, not to brag or anything. I had cut a recipe out of the paper for grilled lemon chicken with lemon feta green beans a few weeks ago and we decided to give it a try. We also made mashed potatoes. So this blog post will not contain just one recipe but three!!

you can't eff up box brownies

This week was a long week, especially with Eric down in Ohio. I was a little upset that he wasn't going to be home for Valentine's Day, but I made the most of it and planned a nice relaxing night with myself.

When I got home, the first thing I decided to do was make my healthy strawberry banana muffins; which I have made before and posted about on the blog. I was pretty excited to make them so that I had a healthy breakfast for the next morning. I got started combining all the ingredients in the blender and had everything all blended up, or so I thought... I was about to start dispensing the mixture into the muffin tins when I realized I forgot to add the sugar. Looking back, I probably didn't really need to add sugar, I mean there was a whole container of strawberries in the thing, which should be plenty of sugar; but... I decided to add the sugar in and turned on the blender. Everything was going well, the blender was starting to mix up the sugar, but then all hell broke loose. My blender decided to unscrew itself and blow out the bottom, not the top, like you would think would happen. IT UNSCREWED ITSELF and I could not catch it in time. Alas, this is the mess that was made:

barley turkey chili

I mentioned that Eric is working in Ohio during the week. This basically means I don't really cook much during the week because I don't particularly like cooking for one. So today I decided to make something good seeing as he eats out during the week when he is on the job.

We decided to test out our new crock pot that we had gotten for Christmas from my parents and make some chili. I've made chili before but not turkey chili. I'm more of a red meat kind of girl, but in a effort to be healthier, we decided on turkey chili. We looked up a few different recipes to see what people usually included in their turkey chili and decided to take a little bit from each of the recipes that we looked at.

does tuna fish count as seafood?

If you know me well, you know that I DO NOT like seafood of any sort; but I will eat tuna fish (from a can). I know, very strange, but I feel like it doesn't count because I slather it in mayo so that there isn't an ounce of fishy taste or smell to it.

When I was little, I didn't have the aversion to seafood that I do now. I'm not really sure what changed, but all I can tell you is even the smell of some seafood makes me want to vomit. I'm not allergic, obviously, otherwise I wouldn't be telling you about the delicious tuna pasta salad that I made the other night for dinner.

Eric has been working nights, in Ohio, and isn't home during the week. Needless to say, he has been eating out A LOT. So, the first thing he said to me when I asked him what he wanted to do for dinner was, "Anything as long as we don't go out to eat." Normally, I would sit at work and research via Pinterest to find a delectable recipe for dinner, but with my new found responsibilities at work I just didn't have the time. I was tired and didn't really feel like cooking, so I racked my brain for something easy to make. 

I knew that I didn't want to stop at the grocery store so I tried to think of what we had at home; and it's very slim pickins' around here... I knew I had some tuna in a can , so I figured "hey, let's use some of that." On Eric's way home from Ohio he stopped to get a few things I knew we would need.

picture frame remod

I have been working on cleaning up my house and getting rid of clutter lately. This little project is a result of that...

This picture frame came from my grandma, it had a deer picture in it. Since it was pretty old the back started to fall off and the glass and picture could no longer be held in. I decided to use it for something useful. I saw something on Pinterest or Tumblr or some sort of website that I follow and decided to give it a try with my broken picture frame.

relapse of lazy

My little mini-vaca was super fun. The weather was slightly warmer in NYC than it was back in Michigan so it was very nice to get away. However, life in NYC is WAAAAAYYY different than life in Michigan and it was a little harder to get back into the swing of things; mostly cooking my own meals and being non-lazy.

The trip allowed me to relapse back into my lazy, TV watching self instead of the cooking DIY'er that I have been striving to be. Eric and I have yet to cook a meal for ourselves since being back... We returned late Tuesday night... Yeah, pretty bad. We've gone out to eat every day since our return, but I promise to find some sweet recipes or think of some good dinners to make this week for the blog.

I did work a bit today on one of my DIY projects so that post is coming soon; as soon as I get it hung up and can take an "after" photo. I promise it will be soon. I will try to bug Eric into hanging it for me tomorrow. 

With that being said, I would like to share about our trip and what we did while in New York. The city is amazing and crazy and an all around different life for us. We are both self proclaimed "non-people people," so we were both pretty excited to get back home to our "kids" (2 dogs & a cat), but we had a blast while we were there.

healthy strawberry banana muffins

I was feeling all healthy-like yesterday and wanted to make something with all the bananas we had sitting around before they went bad, so I got resourceful and went to Pinterest. Since as we all know I have a gazillion pins on my Pinterest, it wasn't very hard to find a recipe (or recipes) to make and since I had to stop at the grocery store to pick up stuff for dinner it all worked out and I was able to pick up a few of the ingredients that I didn't have at home.

Eric wanted a banana muffin recipe and I wanted strawberry muffins, so as usual I combined 2 recipes to make my own. I had originally planned on making 2 separate batches, but this is what I ended up with...