Here’s a sweet treat for the New Year. Perfect for a light breakfast, or a pick-me-up in the middle of the day. We enjoyed them for our first breakfast of 2014. 🙂 I replaced the low fat yogurt with non-fat, and the butter with Earth Balance. Since Earth Balance already has salt in the mix, […]
Happy New Year! Check out these really cute little wine bottle labels from the Blissful Bee. They are free, and printable. They make any bottle a little more festive on the first day of 2014! May you have a happy and healthy new year. 🙂 Cheers!
Almost every New Year’s Eve, we get together with some dear friends of ours and ring in the new year together. We usually pick a theme for our evening. This year we chose to try some Spanish dishes. They made a delicious mushroom tapas-style dish and flan for dessert (and also made sure we had […]
I decided to explore my British heritage a little this December by making Christmas pudding. It is also called plum pudding, but the interesting thing I learned is that there are no plums in the dish. The pre-Victorian use of the word “plum” meant “raisins,” and it does have plenty of those! I love the […]
Happy holidays! We had a festive weekend – We put up our Christmas tree, decorated the house, and baked gingerbread Christmas cookies. We also cut out some snowflake shaped marshmallows to go with our hot cocoa. Since I learned how to make homemade marshmallows last month, I am excited about all of the possibilities! This […]
Happy Thanksgiving! This year I learned how to make homemade marshmallows during the week of Thanksgiving. So fun! I thought it was pretty amazing to see how they come together and how easy they are to make at home. Now I have all kinds of ideas about how to use this recipe throughout the winter. […]
Happy birthday to my hubby! Every year he likes to have a fillet of beef dish for his birthday, so I decided to try beef Wellington this time around. I have tried several British/UK dishes this year, so this added to my collection. 🙂 He said it was within his top 1% of anything I […]
I made a pumpkin shrimp curry dish for dinner this Halloween. It is definitely one I’ll keep in my recipe archives to make again and again this fall. The pumpkin and butternut squash with a little bit of spice made it the perfect dish for my favorite autumn holiday. 🙂 Yummy and festive! The recipe […]
I have been enjoying the printable freebies on the Elli Blog all year long, and Halloween was no exception. There are some very cute Halloween wine bottle labels to download and print. I used a simple bottle of inexpensive wine, and I cut out and pasted the festive little labels on the bottle. I put […]
Happy Halloween! We made devil’s food cupcakes again this year since we enjoyed them so much last year. We tried decorating in a fun and different way this time around, however. My mom gave me some cute little ghost cupcake papers this year, which is what inspired me to make little ghosts on the top. […]
Happy Oktoberfest! The world’s largest fair is being held in Munich Germany right now. I love the fact that it started as a wedding celebration about 200 years ago, and it continues today. Now *that* is a wedding reception! 😉 World celebrations and holidays give me a fun excuse to try recipes from different countries. […]
Our 13th wedding anniversary happened to fall on Labor Day this year, so we celebrated the whole weekend long! The grand finale was a homemade gourmet Italian dinner on Monday that we enjoyed under our grape arbor. 🙂 Dining under the vines made it feel a little like being in Tuscan wine country. Rob even […]
Our 13th wedding anniversary falls on Labor Day this year, so we are celebrating the whole holiday weekend! The traditional gift for the 13th year is lace, which led me to think about lacy afternoon teas. So, first stop, England! Virtually at least. 😉 I made a couple of little tea sandwiches and a couple […]
I love to celebrate the little anniversaries in our life. They give us an excuse for a special meal, a bottle of wine, and time together. 🙂 Every August, we celebrate the date that we moved into our current house together, and I also celebrate the date I moved to Seattle from the Midwest a […]
I found a wine that pairs perfectly with all of my summer reading called Well Re(a)d. It has a really cute label, and it’s even organic, which is an added bonus. At $7 a bottle, it is a nice and simple house wine. The label drew me in, (since I’m easily taken in by a […]
Happy Fourth of July everyone! I made the most summery thing I could think of to celebrate this summer holiday today: A watermelon and cantaloupe salad tossed with mint and lemonade. A recipe inspired me from Giada DeLaurentis, but over the years, I have tweaked it to be the way I like it :). […]
I am enjoying a summery book named The Cottage at Glass Beach by a local Seattle author, Heather Barbieri. I discovered the book on a fun little book and food website called Books and Bites. I’ve been choosing a lot of my recent book selections from the recommendations on that site. Not only do I […]
I decided to post my latest recipe on a recipe website I discovered recently called Food 52. It is an online community where you can share recipes, compare them and just chat about food. My favorite part about it is that they run recipe contests, so everyone’s favorite dishes rise to the top. They even […]
We have a romantic little Italian restaurant in Seattle underneath Pike Place Market called Il Bistro that has one of our favorite calamari dishes in the city. They serve it in a tomato sauce instead of frying it, as most places do. Since we can’t go downtown everyday, I worked on replicating the dish at […]