It's the Life

Cilantro Lime Dressing with Tomatillo

In Utah, we have a Tex-Mex restaurant called Cafe-Rio. People are CRAZY about it. Even years and years after it's first opening. A long time ago someone told me how to make a dressing that tastes like their salad dressing. I don't remember who told me, and I don't know if this is even the way they told me to make it. This is how I make it, and it is delicious. I might even say I like it better than the restaurant version.

 

At the restaurant, customers usually get this dressing for their salad: Tortilla, rice, beans, meat, lettuce, pico, dressing, etc.  That is very yummy, but I'd like to offer an alternative use for this dressing: The Salmon Taco

We love salmon at our house. My boys like to eat it straight from the oven with a side of asparagus. I usually buy extra salmon so I can use the leftovers for salmon tacos. 

Start with a tortilla. I like to buy the raw tortilla and heat it on the stove. Add your salmon.

Drizzle on some of the dressing.

 

Break off some lettuce pieces. Some additional cilantro would be good here. I didn't save any when I made the dressing. Roll into a taco. So, so, seriously good.

This recipe makes a lot of dressing. You might want to fill a mason jar and share with your neighbors. They will love you. 

Happy Anniversary

Happy Anniversary Ryan!

I bought both of us a "love" cookie today...but I ate yours on the way home. 

You can have a bite of mine. That's how much I like you.

Tutorial: Shorten your Jeans, Keep the Original Hem

I don't think I've ever bought a pair of pants that were the right length for me. My legs are just too short. When I used to hem my jeans I would just cut them to the length I wanted plus an inch or so, fold back the fabric and stitch a smal line around the leg bottom. I never really liked the look of it, but I'm short, what choice do I have? I like the manufacturers hem, but I didn't know how to get that same look. I still don't know how to create that look, so I decided to keep it. I'm going to show you how to hem your jeans, but keep that original hem. Don't stress, it's easy.  Really, really, easy!

Start with a pair of jeans that are the length you want. Lay the shorter pair on top, making sure the tops, hips and crotch lines are all matching.

Using a pin or a pen, mark on the longer jeans where the stitching for the hem on the shorter pair hits. Not the bottom of the jean, but where the yellowish stitching is.  This is where you will sew the stitches of the longer jean.

Now, fold the leg of the longer jeans up until the bottom of the original hem lines up with the mark you made. Pin in place.

Make sure the stitch lines that run up and down the leg line up.

Pin it in place.

Line up the other side as well. Pin in place.

Do this on both pant legs. 

With a sewing machine, stitch along the original hem line. As close to the fold as you can, without going onto the fold.  Stitch all the way around each leg.

As you sew around, make sure your lines are still matching as you stitch.

When you have stitched all the way around, you can fold the excess inside the pant leg. At this point you should be getting excited! Look at that beautiful orginal hem. Look how those lines match up perfectly.

Heat up your iron and press your stitches from the inside and out. Make sure your fold is where you want it to be.

At this point you should find a thread that is a blue/grey. It doesn't have to match perfectly, but you don't want to use white (or pink). I use this same thread for dark and light jeans, and it hides just fine.

Bring your nicely pressed jeans back to the sewing machine. Stitch all the way around the leg bottom as close to the fold as you can.

Feel your heart swell with pride as you see your lines lined up perfectly.

Remind your husband how lucky he is to have married a catch like you! 

Gift Idea: Fun Kitchen Items

This holiday felt like a Kitchen Christmas for me. I loved it. If you know someone who likes to cook or likes to decorate their kitchen, you can't go wrong with fun, colorful, yet useful items like these. 

 

I love each one as much as the others! 

Gift Idea: Sugar Cookie Kit

 

My friend, Rachel, over at A Little Cuppa Tea and her awesome mother, Laura, gave out Sugar Cookie Kits during Christmas.  What a fantastic idea!

They even provided the cookie dough and frosting! Check out Rachel's blog for her recipes!

See those brown dots on the dough?  That's flavor people, lots and lots of flavor! We used both the Superhero cutters for Jefferson, and the snowflake cutters for me. 

 

How awesome are those Superhero cutters? I think I might find a gingersnap recipe we could use them for as well. We had to get really creative in order to frost them so you can still see the faces. I think a ginersnap would be perfect, because you don't need frosting. 

We used a very clean paint brush with some corn syrup to fill in the lines on Hulk.

Then we pressed black sanding sugar into the sticky gaps.

Not too bad...I did say we had to get creative!

For his hair and the rest of the cookies, I added some half and half (you could use milk) to the frosting to thin it out a bit. We used paint brushes to apply the frosting in the different areas. Don't you love that green hair? 

Jefferson want's it to be made clear that his FACE should be GREEN, and his hair should be black. (Yeah, yeah six year old...just eat your awesome cookie)

Since I didn't have to make the cookie dough or the frosting, I wasn't tired of the cookies by the time it came to frosting them. So we moved on to the snowflakes.

 

You will notice that the cookie kit was made just for me. I do love the blue & red combination. I'm not sure if they know, but my favorite thing besides a good sugar cookie, is a sugar cookie with cinnamon balls. I LOVE those cinnamon balls on a cookie. Tastes so good.

Ladies, this was an awesome idea for a gift! Not only was it packaged beautifully and the items inside are fun and tasty, but it allowed me to spend time with my boy, making memories, without the prep work. 

Thank you! 

Christmas 2011

Templeman Christmas 2011

 

 

The Boys Christmas Decorations:

 

I hope you are all having a wonderful Holiday Season!

Holiday Wrap

I am a big believer in good packaging. I am a product marketer's dream. I've purchased many things simply because I loved the bottle or container it was in. Like buying a few bottles of coke when I could get a 24 pack of cans for the same price...

 

In the same spirit, I like to decorate my holiday gifts. For one, they look like a continuation of the Christmas tree decorations, but they also add to the gift giving fun.

It's really easy to add a few extra touches to your gifts. I made a tutorial of how I did mine, but use your imagination and do something that says "this gift is from (your name)"!

Most of these things I just had at my house. 

I started by adding a small glitter dot sticker to the fabric brad.

Then I inserted the metal tabs of the brad into two of the holes of a slightly larger button.

Now fold the brad tabs down to secure them all together.

So cute! That might be cute in a little girls hair.

My gift tag is just a 1.5x3 inch piece of white paper.  I stitched a line down one side with my sewing machine and then used a glue dot to attach the buttons. You could stop here and just use this for a gift tag. Especially for a smaller gift.

Next I added a couple glue dots to my 3x3.5 inch paper.

Secure the snowflake a little off center.

Use another glue dot to add your tag to the snowflake. These snowflakes came in a pack of 8 for $3 at the craft store. I think the fabric brads were the most expensive item I used, but I love them.

Hole punch the top corner and your tag is done! 

Now we do the raffia ribbon. You can use any kind of ribbon, but I have a thing for the raffia. Make a simple knot and leave some strings to attach the bow.

To make a bow with this thin raffia, you just take a long strip and fold it back and forth until you get two loops on each side.

Set the folds of raffia on the knot you already tied on the gift. Take the strings from the knot and tie the raffia folds to the package.

Isn't that cute?  This is why I love the raffia for gifts. Now all you have to do is use the long strands to tie on your gift tag.

I liked the gift plenty with just the gift tag, but I wanted to add one last thing. When I did the cake table for my nephew's first birthday, I had sewn a bunch of circles together to make the birthday sign. I thought I would do something like that again. Using a glue strip not only made sure the stitches won't come apart, but now I can glue it to the package.

I think adding the stitches makes it more "from Andrea". 

I just love it. I made sure to wrap a gift to myself so I can keep one!

To: Andrea    From: Yourself

If you live in Utah and you are interested in decorating your gifts, you should go to a Roberts craft store. They are, sadly, going out of business and everything in their stores is 40% off.

Happy Holidays!  

Christmas Ornaments

This summer I was able to get a new pre-lit Christmas tree for 90% off! It has all white lights, so I decided I would put this one in my front room.  The tree in my family room is all gingerbread and candy, so I wanted this tree to be completely different. 

 

I have a bunch of snowflake ornaments from my wedding reception.  I thought they would be a good start. I used to have a really small tree in my old house that I would put these on, but there weren't enough to make a nice looking regular sized tree.

I've been walking around the holiday section at a bunch of stores trying to decide what look I wanted for this tree. I was having a hard time deciding until I saw these babies!

How I love them. I think I might go get a few more so they can be clustered together in a few different places. 

 

Next I saw these. I fell in love with that deer.  This is not a style I would ever guess I would want for my tree, but I couldn't stop going back and checking out that deer. He's fluffy on the underbelly and legs, he's wood chips on his back covered in white glittery paint.

I don't have very many ornaments on this tree, but it will be fun to continually collect things for it through the years.  

Caramel Popcorn

During the holidays my mom always makes caramel popcorn. Her recipe is sticky, gooey and wonderful. Here is how you make it:

Bring your butter, sugars, water and cream of tartar to a boil. (Recipe here) Once it starts to boil like the photo above, let it continue for 5 minutes.

While it boils you can pop your popcorn. I did about 1/2 cup of kernals to get a large bowl of popped.

You are going to want to use a pretty big pot, because once it's boiled for 5 minutes you add your baking soda and it foams and rises. Keep stirring it as it foams.

Now pour it over your freshly popped popcorn. Use a wooden spoon to gently stir it all around. Make sure you get caramel on every piece.  It will rush to the bottom of your bowl, so you will want to make sure and scrape the bottom.

There you have it. Easy and inexpensive! This is so delicious. I've never met a popcorn I liked better. 

Now that you have a really good caramel recipe, you can add anything to it to make fancy popcorn like you see in gift boutiques and chocolate shops! Let's see what I have on hand...pecans...toffee chips...milk chocolate...How about a second batch!? 

I made the caramel sauce the exact same way, but before I poured it onto my popcorn I added some chopped pecans to the bowl. You could use any kind of nut here.

Once the popcorn, nuts and caramel were well combined, I dumped it out onto a parchment paper lined cookie sheet. I thought about stopping here, it looks really good with just the addition of the nuts...  

...but this bar of milk chocolate was begging me to melt it down and drizzle it over the top. I used a knife to cut the chocolate into shavings. I added 3/4 of the shavings to a microwave safe bowl. I heated it for 30 seconds. Then I took it out and stirred and stirred until it was all melted. Then I added the remaining 1/4 of the chocolate to the bowl and stirred until it was melted as well.

I used a spoon to drizzle the chocolate over the top of the caramel popcorn & nut mixture. Then I sprinkled some toffee chips over the top.

Oh baby! Place this in the freezer for 15 minutes so the chocolate hardens. Once you take it out, you can break it up into chunks and put in a serving bowl.

How good does that look!? Never over pay for fancy popcorn again! Download a pdf of both of these recipes here. 

(My orginal plan when making popcorn was to melt down white chocolate and sprinkling crushed candy canes on top. Then I realized it's the same recipe as the almond covered chocolate & candy canes I made earlier.  So, if you want to, you could follow the instructions here to cover your popcorn instead of almonds with white chocolate and sprinkle crushed candy canes over the top. Delicious!)

Coca Cola Christmas

 

I saw these at the grochery store this weekend.

 

I love the carton packaging, I love the shape of the bottles. I had to have them.  If you know someone who likes coca-cola items, this would be an inexpensive gift they would love.