Bringing Back Sunday Dinner - Creamy Shrimp and Mushroom Linguine

Tonights post is going to be very simplistic. My depression has been a little much to manage today so I'm going very Spartan with this post. Forgive me, but it is what it is. It's a thing I manage like I manage my household; somedays are just better than others. Tomorrow will be better, it always is.

I first saw this recipe on Instagram because I follow healthy fitness meals. She's got some really great recipes. Check out her site: http://healthyfitnessmeals.com/

This one looked SO good I decided to go ahead and give it a go; looked simple enough.

Ingredients:

10 oz (dry weight) linguine pasta (sub whole wheat)

1 cup reserved pasta water

2 tbsp olive oil, divided

3 large garlic cloves, crushed/minced, divided

1 cup sliced mushrooms

1 lb fresh prawns (shrimp) without shells, washed and deveined

1 tsp crushed red chili/flakes (adjust to suit your tastes)

2 tsp sweet (or smokey) paprika 

Salt to season

8 oz tub low fat/fat free cream cheese

2 cups low fat/skim milk

1/2 cup parmesan cheese, shredded

1/2 cup mozzarella cheese, shredded

Salt to season

Instructions:

Cook pasta according to package instructions in a pot of salted boiling water, reserving 1 cup of the pasta water, drain and rinse.

While pasta is boiling, heat 1 tablespoon of the olive oil in a large skillet on medium-high heat. Fry 1 clove of garlic until fragrant. Add the mushrooms and fry until browned.

Stir through 1-2 tablespoons of water and cook them for a further minute. Remove them from pan and set aside.

To the same pan, add the remaining oil and 2 cloves of garlic with the shrimp, and fry just until the shrimp changes color. Add the chili/pepper flakes, paprika, and salt. Cook, stirring occasionally for a further 2 minutes. Stir the mushrooms through.

In a separate pot, add the cream cheese and milk, and bring them to a gentle simmer for about 5 minutes, and add the cheeses. When melted, stir in the prawns and the pasta through the sauce, and cook on low heat for a further 2 minutes. 

Add reserved pasta water 1/4 cup at a time, until reaching your desired consistency.

So this is a really good recipe and Mitch told me to go ahead and keep it. We didn't go with the low fat  or fat free, and definitely didn't go with the skim milk. We made this full on, but actually did use the wheat pasta. We'll be definitely making this again. 

And even after my very rough day this is how my hubby makes me smile even when I don't feel like it:

The texted picture from upstairs while I'm exercising downstairs

I can always count on him. I'm a very blessed woman. 

Recipe: Red Velvet Cupcakes with Maroon 5 on the side

So I've been making these Red Velvet Cupcakes for over 6 years now. I always make them this time of year because in January things can get kinda sad and bleak. The color on these is fantastic! Plus the fact that I know at least four people with birthdays on or around the 24th and 25th; it's definitely my go to January birthday cupcake recipe for sure. They aren't that hard to make, but they do take some time so when I do make them its for the very special people in my life. These people are the ones that deserve more out of me then buying cupcakes at the grocery store, or making them straight out of a box. These are the people that make my heart smile and my soul shine! 

I am a HUGE fan of Maroon 5, and in honor of their new song 'Sugar' I thought this was appropriate; they actually mention Red Velvet in the song. I figured why now put the two together for this post? Makes PERFECT sense to me!

If you haven't had a chance to hear 'Sugar' I've put the link below so you can see Maroon 5 in all their awesomeness!

Sugar by Maroon 5

So yeah, what can I say, they totally ROCK! Their new album V also came out and here's a link where  you can hear it in its entirety before you run out and buy it. Because after you listen to the whole thing thats exactly what I wanted to do and did! It's pretty freakin' awesome!

V by Maroon 5

It also makes great music to listen to while you bake. They totally go hand in hand, at least in our kitchen. So turn it up and lets start with the recipe!

Sophie frosted this one just for herself!

Ingredients:

1/4 dark unsweetened cocoa powder

2 Tbsp red food coloring

1/4 C boiling water

6 Tbsp unsalted butter, cut into small pieces and softened

2 Tbsp vegetable shortening, at room temperature

1 2/3 C sugar

3 large eggs

1 C buttermilk

1 tsp pure vanilla extract

2 1/2 C cake flour

1 tsp salt

1 Tbsp cider vinegar

 1tsp baking soda

& a lot of love

So the frosting is definitely my own concoction. I call it spicy almond buttercream.

Frosting:

3/4 C butter (1 1/2 sticks) softened

3 to 4 C confectioners sugar

3 tsp of milk

1 1/2 tsp almond extract

a huge dash of cinnamon

Okay to start on the cupcakes you'll need to preheat your oven to 325 degrees F. Line your muffin pan with cupcake liners and set aside.  In a medium bowl, whisk together cocoa powder, food coloring, and boiling water. Set aside to cool. 

In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, cream butter and shortening until smooth. Scrape down the sides of the bowl and add sugar. 

Beat until the mixture is really light and fluffy. Should resemble soft snow. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. 

Stir buttermilk and vanilla into the cooled cocoa mixture. Sift cake flour and salt together into another bowl. 

With the mixer on low, alternate adding the flour mixture and the cocoa mixture to the egg mixture. Beat until incorporated. 

In a small bowl, combine vinegar and baking soda and stir until baking soda dissolves; the mixture will fizz which is wicked cool! Add to batter and stir until just combined. 

Fill each cupcake liner about 2/3 full with batter. Bake about 20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Remove from oven and set on a rack to cool.

To make the buttercream frosting: 

In a bowl of an electric mixer go ahead and cream the butter, scrape down the sides, add the almond extract, mix until combined.

 Start adding one cup of confectioners sugar one at a time until you get a consistency that is stiff enough to apply to the top of the cupcakes. Once you've got it stiff, go ahead and slowly add the milk one teaspoon at a time until it looks fully whipped.

 At this time add your huge dash of cinnamon, and mix that in. Now you can go ahead and add the frosting to your cupcakes. 

Mama Lisa's birthday is tomorrow so we plan on celebrating our favorite neighbor in high style with lots of love, lots of cupcakes and a present or two...or three. 

Birthdays are one of my favorite things to celebrate!

Happy Birthday Mama Lisa! We love you!

Recipe: Awesome Blueberry Muffins

Mitch and I were at Sams yesterday, and I saw that they had blueberries at a wicked good price so I decided to pick some up even thought they weren't on our list. Yes, I am THAT wife. I'm a bad wife that does not stick to the list. To tell on myself further I also picked up a bottle of wine that also wasn't on the list. In my defense, I needed it. This mama needs her liquid uppers and downers; coffee in the morning and wine in the evening. I've got three crazy children, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

So I came across this recipe eons ago, and have made it ever since. Mitch loves blueberries, or any other kind of berry for that matter. I don't think he's ever met a piece of fruit he doesn't like or won't eat.

I got the original recipe from Recipezaar, which is no longer around, but did some hunting and found the original recipe here:

awesome-blueberry-muffins

They look so YUMMY!

The link has a printable option for those who don't want to copy and paste.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups all purpose flour

3/4 cup white sugar

1/2 tsp salt

2 tsp baking powder

1/3 cup vegetable oil

1 egg

1/3 cup milk

1 cup fresh blueberries

Topping:

1/2 cup white sugar

1/3 cup all purpose flour

1/4 cup butter, cubed

1 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F

Grease muffin pan or use muffin liners

Combine the 1 1/2 cups flour, 3/4 cup sugar, salt and baking powder and set that aside

Flour, sugar, salt and baking powder. Set aside.

Next place vegetable oil, into a 1 cup measuring cup, add the egg and enough milk to fill the cup.

Instead of milk I used the rest of our eggnog.
These are not healthy blueberry muffins I can assure you!

Go ahead and mix in the flour mixture and set aside for the moment.

I don't like using a fork, I'm all about my pastry cutter.

In a separate bowl add together the ingredients for the crumb topping. Mix together the 1/2 cup sugar, 1/3 cup flour, 1/4 cup butter, and 1 1/2 tsp of cinnamon. 

Cut up ingredients till they have this sand looking consistency.

At this time you can go ahead and gently fold in the blueberries. If you try and put them in the mixer the blueberries will all die a hideous death, and no one likes ugly muffins.

Gently fold in the blueberries.

They are still intact. Good job!

Still intact blueberries.

Once you are ready go ahead and fill your muffin cups about 3/4 of the way to the top. This batter is thick so don't be surprised if it's hard to get it in the liners. It's not like cake batter that has more of a liquid consistency. Go ahead and sprinkle your topping on and you are ready now for the oven.

Now they are ready for the oven.

400 degrees and bake between 20 - 25 minutes. Always remember the higher the sugar content the less time it will take to bake and the quicker they will burn. So the first time you bake these you might want to check them at about the 17 minute mark +/-. Better safe then sorry with burnt muffins.

Let 'em cool!

Some small nutritional facts that you should probably know. Just because this is a blueberry muffin does not mean it is healthy for you by any stretch of the imagination! Plus the fact that I doubled the recipe and put almost a cup of eggnog in these doubles the chances that these will go straight to your hips. The facts say that it's 383 calories per muffin. Lets round mine up to about 500 calories a serving.

Go big or go home. I can always exercise later. 

Project: Jewelry Box

For anyone who knows me, knows I'm a known jewelry addict. I think that might sum up my obsession nicely. Over the years I've bought, made, explored different technics of making, and have worn plenty of jewelry. I can honestly say that I've been this way since at least the age of five when I got my first ever piece of jewelry. It was a Strawberry Shortcake ring and necklace for some occasion I can't even remember. All I remember was that I loved it. Funny enough for my daughters the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

Over the years I have searched, and searched for a box that would suit me, and my style. After 37 years I decided I would make something instead of searching. I'm kind of an odd duck. I like traditional things, but with a whimsical side. Something a little daring, but sophisticated enough without being gaudy! So in came this idea.

 What also helped spur this little project along was going to the grocery store. Yep, the grocery store, one day I was there checking out and happened to look at the back of my receipt. There on the back was a 50% off coupon for any full price item at Joann's Fabric Store. I'm not super big on coupons, but who could pass up that?!?!?!  I decided to take the coupon up on its offer and found this wooden jewelry box. This is when the ideas started swirling around in my head.

The ever plain wooden jewelry box.

Originally $24.99, with 50% off it was about $14.

Not too shabby for a jewelry box; the sky is the limit when it comes to decorating ideas!

Reused my stencils.

The North Star has always been one of my all time favorite symbols. When I was a very little girl on Christmas Eve, while my parents were at church, I asked my Grandpa Bondie about the North Star. He walked me over the front door of their house, and opened up the door, and showed me where it was. Ever since then I've had this affinity for it. Maybe it's because it's a star, or maybe it was my favorite memory with him. Either way I've always loved it; maybe because you can always find your way by it. I need ALL the direction I can get. 

Tape helps, trust a sister on that one.

So once you've figured out how you want your stencils to lay, use scotch tape to make sure they stay where you want them. There's nothing worse than a stencil that moves!

The more tape the better. 

So once you've put your tape down, and centered your stencil, go to town and stencil away. You'll have to use new tape each time you pick it up and move it to another spot. That way it doesn't lose it's tackiness. 

Et Viola! 

I also did the sides, and the back. 

The front, top and the back look like one continuous stencil, it's the side that gave me a fuss. Not many people will look at this box on my dresser anyway, so I'm totally okay with it not being "perfect."

Here's the back, I added more after this picture was taken.

The one thing with stencils is that sometimes the paint doesn't go on as thick as you'd like. Granted you could wait till the paint dries and layer, but I don't have time for that kind of commitment. Either you can use too much paint and it bleeds, which isn't good, or you can use too little and it doesn't cover as thoroughly as you'd like. Plus with these stencils it was hard find a happy medium. There was probably a problem between the paint brush and the box, i.e. me. In my humble opinion, painting by hand is quicker and sometimes easier.

So this didn't take too long and here we are. We are ready for the stain.

Mitch bought new stain for another project we are working on, so I borrowed it.

We've got another project in the works, a wood project, a shocker I know. I'll put it on the blog in the next couple of weeks. This one has been in the mix for about 2 years. It's a recycled pallet trunk that Mitch, his dad, and I have been working on for a while. Good furniture takes time.

Stain time!

So something that I didn't think about when I decided to use this was how the red in the stain was going to affect my white pain......0.o! The brown stain that I used before didn't seem like a big deal, the red one...yeah.....I wasn't feeling it after I used it. A little to late to go and change it.

I'm calling that color "ugly adobe pink."

It's awful! It looks awful, and I didn't spend this kind of time working on this for it to turn out ugly adobe pink! Minga! I'd better come up with a solution, and come up with one FAST!

You can't half ass a stain job, if you do it you've got to REALLY do it all.

What better way to get into the small parts of this box then with Q-tips! Pretty handy dandy if I do say so myself! They really did the trick!

See it looks nice!

Silver! Silver paint was the answer!

So I thought long and hard about my ugly adobe pink issue, and since I used gold metallic marker on the tags I figured that I could use silver acrylic paint on the box. I wear a lot of white metal jewelry so I thought that was a nice fit to my "oh crap that's not good" moment. I like metal and wood so this worked! I swear if I ever win the lottery I think I'm going to take up furniture making as a hobby.

The bottom drawer, love the pull!

So there are two things about this box that needed some help. One was that it didn't come with a bottom drawer pull. So I went back to Hobby Lobby (seems to be my home away from home lately) and searched thru their pulls. They have SO MANY lovely ones to choose from it was really hard to make a decision, but in the end I did make one and I think it really looks nice!

Side view....

The second issue is that the top of the box lid does not sit flush with the bottom part of the box. It needs a latch. I went to Ace Hardware and picked up a latch, but it's too small. For right now it doesn't necessarily NEED a latch, so for the time being it's staying as it looks right now. After Mitch gave it 2 layers of Polyurethane (Thanks Babe!) it's ready to go up into our room, and rest on my side of the dresser till the damn cat decides to jump up there, and knock it off. 0.o Unfortunately I'm not joking... the little buggar!  

Front View...

So there you have it! My jewelry box; my design that started out in one direction, and found another one along the way. I'm pretty happy with it. *insert big cheesy grin*

Bringing Back Sunday Dinner - Loaded Potato Soup

So it is Sunday again...happens ever 7 days, and its time for Loaded Potato Soup!

I got this recipe out of a Cooking Light magazine that came from my mother-in-law Judy.

Figured why not, since this momma could stand to lose a lb or two!

Loaded Potato Soup:

4 (6oz) red potatoes

1/2 cup chopped onion

2 tsp. olive oil

1 1/4 cups nonfat, reduced sodium chicken broth

3 Tbsp all purpose flour

2 cups 1% low fat milk

1/4 cup reduced fat sour cream

1/2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper

3 bacon slices, halved

1/3 cup (1 1/2 oz) shredded cheddar cheese

4 tsp. thinly sliced green onions

Right then, so the directions say to do all of this preparing in the microwave. They say it takes about 20 minutes. 0.o Since I'm not a whiz in the kitchen, still learning how to cook, and I'm doing this on Sunday it's not like I'm super pressed for time; I'll take their word for it. I'm going to do it old school, but I'll post the directions how they wrote it anyway. You can choose which ever one you like.

I'm an old school bacon girl! I make it in the oven like Paula Dean! Set the oven to 425 degrees for about 12-15 minutes, and you've got lovely bacon. Who honestly only cooks up 3 strips of bacon at a time, eh? Not this girl, that's for darn sure. 

So I got the bacon rolling, and peeled and cut up my potatoes and threw them in the pot to boil.

Boil until they are tender. Test with a fork.

Cut up your onions, and set to the side.

Thank GOD I scrub my kitchen from top to bottom every Sunday morning.

The floor is clean people, I promise. This is her idea of helping mommy in the kitchen.

So I'm sauteing my onions in olive oil.

Pour in my chicken broth, add my flour to a 1/2 cup of milk. Stir that in.

Add the rest of the milk to the mixture and bring to a boil for one minute. Remove it from the heat and add your sour cream, salt and pepper.

By this time your potatoes should be done. Drain off the water and mash them up. Add your liquid to the potatoes. Go ahead and stir that in nicely and get it all worked thru. By now the bacon is done and cooled too.

Add bacon and your cheese!

So I decided since this soup is supposed to be on the lighter side that tonight we were going to have soup and salad. Mitch got this lovely head of lettuce! It really was quite impressive!

Go ahead and chop up your green onions for your garnish.

So that's my version of the soup directions, here's the directions that were giving in the magazine.

1. Pierce potatoes with a fork. Microwave at HIGH 13 minutes or until tender. Cut in half; cool slightly.

2.Saute onion in hot oil in a medium saucepan  over medium-high heat 3 minutes. Add broth. Combine flour and 1/2 cup milk; stir into broth. Stir in remaining 1 1/2 cups of milk. Bring to a boil, stirring often. Boil 1 minute. Remove from heat; stir in sour cream, salt and pepper.

3. Place bacon in a single layer on a paper towel-lined microwave safe plate. Cover with a paper towel; microwave at HIGH 4 minutes. Crumple bacon.

4. Peel potatoes; discard potato skins. Coarsely mash potatoes into soup. Top with cheese, green onions, and bacon.

Either directions work. Mitch liked it, but we really agreed that it was missing something (maybe fat, lots and lots of fat), and we couldn't quite put our finger on what exactly it was. Maybe we'll try adding garlic next time. Little Miss C went to town as usual, Soph didn't like it at all, and Roo....well she ate it, said she liked it, and said that she'd eat it again. 

So there you have it. A 20 minute soup if you go the microwavable way for something warm on these cold winter nights. Maybe this recipe will make it to your tables too. Let us know what you think! Maybe you can help us add to this soup with your ideas as well.

Happy Eating!