Our New Kitty!

We adopted a kitty from Animal Control yesterday! Her given name was Bit Bit, but we plan to change it (I'm not sure to what!) She is 12 years old and had been in the shelter for two months, poor girl. We saw her last weekend and couldn't stop thinking of her all week, so we took her home with us. The staff was so happy we took her that they gave us a bouquet of daffodils.

She's such a little lady! Her papers said that she is a Tabby, but she looks like a Maine Coon to me, however she is very small. I really need to find the prefect name for her. She's absolutely the perfect kitty. She talks to us and comes for pets and sits like a lady on the arm of the couch.

Salmon Quiche

I found this cookbook at a thrift shop last weekend. I used to live in San Francisco and it's absolutely my favorite city in the world! I met the most interesting and wonderful people there and I always felt like I belonged there. This cookbook has recipes from chefs all around northern California's wine country. I like the creative recipes in it. I used wild Alaskan salmon that my friend caught to make a quiche for brunch.

I replaced the sour cream with yogurt, used fresh dill and used Gouda instead of Gruyere. I didn't make the Parmesan crust either. It came out pretty well I think!

Weekend Nails #2

I did a kinda-80's-nail-design this week. The pink is Milani Neon in Pink Rocks! and the blue is Butler Please by Essie.

This week went by so fast! I'm looking forward to working on my dress project this weekend. I'm trying really hard to make this dress perfect. I got the hang of french seams which really helps to make the dress look more professional. 

I'm also thinking about doing a feature on different recipes I try out from my cookbooks. I don't have a ton of cookbooks, but I have a few interesting ones. Many times I end up quickly looking up a recipe for dinner on Yummly.com because I can input ingredients that I have on hand, but really I would like to try to stick to my cookbooks for a while.

Weekend Nails

I can't have painted nails at work, so I rarely take the time to polish them on Friday nights just to take it off on Sunday night. But after picking up a few cute polishes at Target I decided to try to make some cute nail designs more often and post them for fun.

I was looking for those little nail stickers for French manicures but couldn't find them anywhere. Then when I got home I remembered that I packed away a bunch of crazy shape scissors in my closet that I could cut tape with to make stick-on painting guides!

I have HORRIBLE cuticles. I pick at them and they are totally dried out. The hand I photographed was my good hand (and I photoshopped it, lol) My husband got me manicure sets for Christmas and they came with this awesome cuticle oil... I highly recommend it!

The first coat was Eternal Optimist by Essie.

It's not perfect but I'm going to keep practicing! I have to be patient and let the first coat dry completely before using the stickers. I'm excited to try out my other scissor shapes this next weekend!

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Apple Pie Tips

I really wanted to celebrate Pi Day this year by baking a pie, but I ended up having to wait until Saturday morning. The last time I made an apple pie was for thanksgiving and it didn't turn out just the way I wanted. The problem is that the apples become so juicy that the pie is a puddle of apple juice! None of the recipes I've seen ever gave any good tips on how prevent this. I figured out a couple tips that will keep apple pies from becoming too soggy.

1. Pre-bake the bottom crust for 8 minutes at 350 degrees.

2. Instead of mixing the sugar with the cinnamon and other ingredients, add the sugar to the apples first and let them sit while you prepare the crust. When all the juice seeps out of the apples drain a little of it away. After that, add the cinnamon and other spices. Don't drain out all the juice though, you don't want it to be dry! Just enough to keep it from becoming a puddle of apple juice when you slice the finished pie.

3. Always add a couple tablespoons of corn starch to the apple mixture to help make the juice more saucy.

That's all I've got! Maybe one day I will try to tackle making my own crust again from scratch. I gave up on pie crusts a while ago because I didn't have a food processor to make the dough the right consistency. A few weeks ago, however, I was gifted a blender/food processor combo machine from a friend who never got any use out of it. Maybe then I can add some little tips for crust making.

Moved In

My husband flew in last Friday! It's been a really awesome week so far. Last weekend was spent getting our stuff together and settling in. We attempted to go see the Iditarod dog sled race, but the traffic was horrible and we missed it. However, we did end up buying a fancy TV. I've been cooking some pretty decent dinners every night and I only destroyed a couple of the meals so far... one of them was Pad Thai, which is pretty difficult to make anyway.
We finally got our bed set! A couple of my friends gave us their old bed set and another friend helped us move everything in today. No more sleeping on the floor!

Last night we hung out and enjoyed some drinks. I baked red velvet cupcakes the night before and discovered a Red Velvet wine from Cupcake winery! It was delicious. I'm definitely going to buy it again.

I haven't been able to make any really cute videos on Vine yet, but I took this one last night.