30 Days of Eating In

Let me 'fess up to something.  Most A lot of nights my boyfriend and I pick up our dinner at fast food restaurants.  We have a tendency to not plan our meals ahead, which results in me working on a project or homework or whatever until about 9pm, then looking up and saying, "Holy crap I'm starving!"  By then it's too late to try and cook something, so we run to Burger King.  It's either that, or I get home from work/school and I'm too exhausted to make myself anything so we just pick something up.  Gross, right?

Well, recently we decided enough is enough.  We absolutely need to eat healthier or we'll die very, very young.  So we've challenged ourselves to 30 days of eating in.  We'll cook every day, every meal.  The idea is that by the end of 30 days, we'll have gotten used to cooking at home and made a major lifestyle change.  Hopefully by the end of the month when it's 9pm and I realize I'm starving instead of running to McDonald's I'll think to myself, "Sucks to be me.  I should have thought about this sooner" and make a sandwich.

We started our 30 day challenge on July 26.  That means we've been eating in now for 14 solid days.  Honestly, I'm surprised we've made it so far.  I thought surely we'd give up.

It's really taken some planning.  Like, if we go somewhere in the middle of the day I have to make sure we eat before we go or bring a snack because we won't be able to eat again until we get home.  (I've been very strict about this.  I didn't even allow us to buy a soft pretzel during an exceptionally long trip to the mall for an interview outfit.)  We're really getting the hang of it.

And since we're cooking at home so much and I have about a billion recipes marked on Pinterest, I decided to try a few of them out for dinner this week and share them with you here.  Here's what we'll be making:

Monday: Chicken Crescent Rolls

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 We'll be making these with Pillsbury Crescent Rolls (my favorite!) and 2 cups of leftover rotisserie chicken from a few days ago.  Easy, economical and hopefully delicious!

Wednesday: Turkey Pesto Sliders

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Okay, so I know this recipe is like, "Duh."  But we have leftover buns from dinner tonight and I have a job interview on Wednesday, so I thought this would make a quick and easy dinner.  We'll see how it is. :)

Thursday: Easy Crockpot BBQ Chicken

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I'm excited for this because I'm always forgetting to thaw the meat beforehand (another reason we end up with take-out) and according to this recipe you can stick the chicken in the Crockpot still frozen!

Friday: Chicken with Garlicky Tomato Gravy

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This is actually "Romanian Ostropel."  It sounds delicious and can be served over rice, pasta or mashed potatoes.  How versatile!  Plus, we always have leftover potatoes or rice from other meals, so it would really only take one skillet for me to make!

Tune back in throughout this week to see our meals and get the tutorial review!  Hope to see you again soon!

--CC

Savory Spice Shop (Picture and Text Heavy)

Last week this little thing followed me home and proceeded to live in my bathroom for two days until we found him a new home.

One of my friends over in St. Petersburg took him.  So, naturally, after my boyfriend and I dropped kitten off to his new home we had to stop and look at the little shops by the marina.  And that's how we came across this boutique called Savory Spice Shop.

It. Blew. Our. Minds.

The entire store is just walls and walls of spices.  Spices you've never even heard of.  They had big barrels just filled with cinnamon sticks and more varieties of salt than I even knew existed.  They also had all kinds of cocoa and sugar. 

You could buy your own small jar of spices, or you could fill these cute little muslin bags with different amounts of spice.  It definitely gave me some great ideas for  homemade Christmas gifts that I'm sure I'll share with you later this year!

 Each different kind of spice had suggestions on the label for how to use it.  They also had gift sets of various spices that they've paired for specific purposes.  Since it was just before Father's Day, I found the perfect gift set of coffee spices to give to my dad.  (He's replaced alcohol with coffee since he quit drinking.  Lol.)

What's cute about the gift sets, too, is that they separate each spice with Bay leaves and cinnamon sticks that can actually be used.  They also garnished the gift set with whole nutmeg, chili pepper and [insert something fancy that I forgot what it's called here] that can be used, too.

I wrapped it up and mailed it to him.  I also sent off a handmade card, but it was so ugly I couldn't bring myself to share it with you!  (P.S. The reason I'm just now sharing this post is because I didn't want to give away the secret before my dad opened his gift!)

Boy, was this a bugger to wrap!

And of course we had to get something for ourselves.  I picked out a chai mix.  They pre-selected all the different ingredients for you and put them in a bag with a recipe for you to follow.  Mmmm.

And Tyler, who loves baking chocolate chip cookies with lots of cinnamon, got this Ceylon "True" Cinnamon.  Did you know the usual store bought cinnamon isn't actually real cinnamon?  It actually comes from the cassia tree.  We bought this real cinnamon and haven't had a chance to use it yet, but it smells different (and more delicious!) than the kind of cinnamon we usually buy.

I was in heaven, and when I went home my fingertips smelled like spices.  My boyfriend and I rambled about how great the store was for about 15 miles on the interstate on our way back home.  I can't wait to visit again!

Hope you've been crafting up a storm while I've been off rescuing kittens and galvanizing in spice shops!

--CC


Note:  This post was not commissioned or prompted by Savory Spice Shop.  I actually loved it that much! :)

Homemade Crepes

Another one of the reasons I hadn't posted in a long time that I didn't mention was that, almost immediately after I returned from California, my friend Raelynne came to Florida to visit me.

She hadn't visited me before, so I had a lot of fun taking her to see all the local sights.  Raelynne studies foriegn languages (she speaks English, Spanish, German and French!) and spent some time in France recently.  While there, her French friend taught her to make homemade crepes.  I told Raelynne that if she stayed with me, she definitely had to teach me to make crepes!

First, we bought a crepe pan from William-Sonoma, which is one of my favorite stores! :)  Then we got cooking.  Raelynne mixed up a beer batter crepe recipe that she wrote down while in France.  I don't have the exact recipe now because I didn't make a copy, and it's just as well since they don't make some of the ingredients here in the U.S.  But if you're interested, it's similar to this beer batter crepe recipe from Allrecipes.com.

Next Raelynne taught me how to cook the crepes!  It's hard, but not as hard as I'd always been led to believe.  You're supposed to pour a very thin layer of batter into your pan and then, using your wrist, rotate the pan so that the batter spreads around into a circle.  All of this should be done within 35-45 seconds!  If you don't have your wrist movement perfected, then your batter doesn't spread all the way into a circle because it's already finished cooking on that side!  Note that you only want a very thin layer in the pan, so the thinner your batter is, the better.  We ended up adding more milk to help thin out our batter.  Since my wrist action wasn't perfected, my crepes were more amoebas than circles.

 

Once that side is done cooking, it's time to flip your crepe.  Raelynne taught me to actually flip the crepe in the air, which was the most fun part of this whole process!  First she demonstrated (sorry, I didn't catch any of her flips mid-air):

                                     

Then I gave it a try.  It took a few attempts, but I finally got it!  (Excuse the jammies...we'd been to the beach that day and I felt like lounging around comfortably!)

And I was so proud! 

 Monica (my dog) was very interested in the whole process, so I asked her if she wanted to try and flip a crepe, too, but she did not.

 

When they were all finished, they looked like this:

For more, read on after the break. :)