bundle of joy

Idle Husband brought home the best gift!

A selected bundle of Ghiradelli chocolates.

Flavours included:

• Sublime White: Vanilla Dream
• Dark Chocolate with White Mint filling
• Intense Dark: Mint Bliss 60% cacao
• Dark Chocolate with Raspberry filling
• Luxe Milk: Hazelnut
• Luxe Milk: Almond
• Intense Dark: Midnight Reverie 86% cacao
• Dark Chocolate 60% cacao
• Milk Chocolate with Caramel filling
• Milk Chocolate with Peanut Butter filling 

And he had the foresight to get two of each flavour so we could enjoy them together

Top four:

1. Sublime White: Vanilla Dream (white chocolate trumps over all chocolate)
2. Milk chocolate with Caramel filling
3. Milk Chocolate with Peanut Butter filling (think upscale Reese's)
4. Dark Chocolate with Raspberry filling (raspberrylicious)

menu for two

{the menu}

monday: meat pies

tuesday: leftover meat pies and Chinese food (ginger beef, deep fried shrimp/egg rolls, mixed vegetables with shrimp and pork, sweet and sour ribs, and stir fried rice)

wednesday: leftover Chinese food

thursday: tuna pasta salad

friday: pizza

saturday: roasted chicken

sunday: peanut noodle slaw

what really happened

{monday} OMG this recipe is to die for! I'm so glad I didn't ditch it out of laziness. Some notes, though. I didn't realize it was instant yeast, so I had to adjust accordingly for my traditional yeast (which really only meant adding all of the water instead of a quarter of it). I also didn't have the pomegranate molasses which was really annoying, because it's not like it's some strange ingredient I couldn't find. I've seen it. I know where to get it (the Italian market). There's no reason I couldn't have it other than that I forgot it. I also didn't add any parsley or pine nuts, and I used only one tomato (one tomato each day, otherwise I run out too early. I have to ration those babies). I'm sure Idle Husband would have been really happy with some red pepper flakes, but I don't have them seperate from salt. Also, I'm not going to listen to the part where you use parchment or a silpat on the pan again. I used my stupid silpat, and I totally didn't think about the hamburger juices flowing everywhere. So the juices ran under my silpat and burned up the corners of both my (beautiful brand new nonstick) pan and the silpat. That's going to take some cleaning (and silpats are a total pain to clean). Had I used my brain a little more, I would have used tinfoil with a spritz of nonstick cooking spray. And I rolled out 15 dough balls, but I only got 12 meat pies (and I used a whole pound of ground beef). I'm thinking three tablespoons of meat per pie is over-doing it. I cooked the last three just as pitas/dough circles. The meat pies taste delicious just as they are with some plain yogurt (as instructed). Idle Husband wants these weekly.
{tuesday} I was gone, so Idle Husband was on his own for dinner which is why I planned to make the whole meat pie recipe on Monday. There were still six leftover for him to eat and they were easy for him to prepare since he just had to pop them in the toaster oven for 10 minutes to heat them up again. I had take-out Chinese food. I always have Chinese food of some sort when I'm with mom and IH is not around. I originally just wanted some ginger beef and maybe some noodles, but mom insisted on ordering a dinner for four which was ridiculous considering she wasn't eating it either. So I had it for dinner and I had it for breakfast the next day.
{wednesday} And then I drove that Chinese food home, and we had it for dinner. I'm proud of Idle Husband for giving Chinese food a second chance. He really loved the ginger beef (which is sad for me since that's pretty much my favourite thing ever). He actually ate quite a lot of it, and what was left was starting to taste a little old (blech green peppers in the ginger beef and soggy sliced onions and celery), so we ate what we could and I froze the rice (why do they give you so much rice?) and tossed the rest (it was mostly sauce, don't gasp).
{thursday} tuna pasta salad: good; idle husband not particularly hungry (and completely disinterested in a non-meat meal): bad. I had cooked the last of the rotini but didn't use all of it for the salad, so I put it in a freezer bag and froze it for some other day. And good thing, too, cuz I pretty much ate this whole thing myself between this dinner and tomorrow's breakfast and lunch. I did. I hate it, but I did (I keep telling myself it was mostly salad with a sprinkling of noodles).
{friday} Always well received. Always good. I did have a ball of frozen dough in the freezer, but I opted to make fresh dough. I thought I'd be happier with two frozen pizza doughs in the freezer instead of one and besides, I had the time. I did, however, use one of the two tubs of cooked ground beef and bacon I had frozen from the last pizza (I had a lot of meat topping leftover since half the pizza was vegetable).
{saturday} I chose to do a roasted chicken only because I wanted leftover chicken for Sunday's meal. It also just happens to be one of IH's favourite dinners. So... win/win, I guess. Same as usual with salt and pepper, but I also added some lemon juice to give it that flavour and I diced some potatoes to go around it. I hoped that they would soak up the little pool of lemon juice and turn into delicious lemon potatoes (a Greek specialty), but they kinda didn't bother and chose to adhere to the pan instead. Oh well. The pieces we could pull off were pretty delicious, and I got my leftover chicken!
{sunday} I was on my own for dinner, so of course I wanted to do something asian (that's my go-to alone food!). I didn't use leftover spaghetti. Instead I used some of those cheap itchiban-type noodle packages (Double Happiness brand, Dongguan rice stick, in the red package). For the salad, I chopped up some lettuce, threw in a few handfuls of spinach, and added some carrots and green onions. The dressing for this salad is so delicious and with the noodles thrown in there, it was just so good. I think I'm going to have to start a recipe card just for delicious salad dressings. I'm totally making this one again.

friday fixations

{landscape paintings} I just realized we're starting to collect a lot of landscapes. I've never really been drawn to them before, but every time I see one at a thrift store now, I have to have it. I'm starting to think it's directly related to the shit weather we've been having. -32 C with the windchill. More snow and drifted to look like even more than what actually fell. March came in like a lion, please let it leave like a lamb.

{kitchen miniatures} I absolutely love these little kitchen dollhouse dioramas. It's positively irritating when a tiny fake kitchen is infinitely cooler than your large real kitchen. My favourites are the first and last spaces. There's so much neat stuff in one tiny room!

{daylight light bulbs} This isn't a new concept for me, but for some reason, it just never occurred to me until now to install them anywhere in this house. They were a god-send in my tiny basement apartment's bathroom where (in the yellow light) I had a really hard time combining colours. There were a bunch of times when I'd get to a public bathroom and think, "why the hell did I wear this shirt with this sweater?!" When we first moved, I took them all with me (they're not cheap and I didn't want to leave them for my slum landlord) and put them in almost every fixture in the old house (save for the dimmer switches). Unfortunately, since I had quite a bunch of bulbs cluttered together and they don't mark on the outsides which is which, I wasn't able to get all of my daylight bulbs back. I took the ones from the bathroom (an obvious grab), and I took the boxes marked daylight hoping there were still some in there. Thankfully there were, so I put them in the master bathroom. Boy, what a difference they make! I honestly didn't think it was that bad in there before, but after switching, white looks whiter, my face looks brighter, the walls look greyer (they seriously looked like a weird grey-brown hybrid before), and colours are sharper. I'm going to put them in the kitchen next!

{vim} Idle Husband had a bottle from his bachelor days and I recently found it in an effort to use up all of the stupid cleaners in the house. This is the best product ever. I don't know why I never tried it before, but I really don't think I'll use anything else now. It's the only thing that's been able to remove those blasted water spots from the shower faucet and I love that I only need a tiny squirt on a sponge and I can do the entire bathroom. Brilliant.

{cupcake fondue} I've been circling around fondue pots for a while now. I've never been particularly fond of fondue (see what I did there?), but they're just so neat looking and retro (and honestly, I probably just want to take a bazillion pictures of it). The cupcake fondue almost gives me an excuse to buy one. So cute.

{plastic animal planters} Oh what an amazing idea. I love the dinosaurs -- their colours, how some of them casually look over their backs at a spiky plant. So clever. I wonder if I could DIY this...

{bird rings} The other week, we were looking at all the clearance at the Bay (gawd they have so much clearance in every store in Red Deer. It's crazy), and they had all of these different creature rings. Octopus, spiders, frogs, butterflies, all bejewelled and shiny. I was trying them on and I really loved them (especially the octopus and the way it hugged my finger), but I wished they had thought to put a bird on one (yes; I'm a walking cliché now thanks to that video). I really love this ring, but I wish it were green instead (I immediately thought of this blogger when I first saw it, though).

earring storage ideas

Your earrings probably don't look like this, but since I developed this mild obsession, my little earring tin had gotten so full, I was having a hard time finding what I wanted to wear and spotting earrings I hadn't worn in a while (and probably would wear if I could just see them).

It was getting really irritating, so I started brainstorming ideas for how to display or store them better.

I suppose I could have bought an earring stand from anywhere. (And in fact, here are some of my favourites from Urban Outfitters: spinning ribbon stand, kaleidoscope stand, spinning bird stand, birdcage display), but none of those fit into my bathroom so I kept pondering it.

Eventually, I came up with this idea.

Do you remember these? I used the two matching goldish frames (top left and bottom right), and fiddled around with them and a couple doilies.

I thought I might be able to hang my earrings right on the doily and the frame would kind of tie everything together and finish it off. Like my earrings were little pieces of art.

february recap

the brownies I made twice they were so good

honestly, I don't think I'll ever squeeze a key lime again

I finally used my glue gun after a long hiatus

the duck lamp lights our way at night

I used my heart cookie cutter a lot this month

we added some chi with a fish tank

Idle Husband flew away on a jet plane