Pin It and Do It

Y'all know how much I love when Trish (Love, Laughter, and A Touch of Insanity) hosts the Pin It and Do It challenge! She hasn't done it for quite a while (it being a lot of work for a working mom with two littles) so I was excited to see that she had decided to bring it back again this fall and it prompted me to open up my boards to see what I could get to this fall.

Books To Read: I will have knocked off several books from my Books To Read board before the end of this month, including Jojo Moyes' After You, Geraldine Brooks' The Secret Chord, Stewart O'Nan's Last Night At The Lobster,  and Margaret Atwood's The Heart Goes Last. It would probably be unfair to say that the challenge prompted me to read any of these since I was already planning on reading them this fall. Still...they were all pinned!

Fall/Holidays: A simple thing - I just filled a vase with a candle and yellow popping corn and tied my candle with some raffia. I actually had this pinned in several variations. I guess I must have liked the idea!

Drinks: It being fall, it was time to buy some apple cider. Since I already have caramel vodka, we made some hot cider with caramel vodka one night. I also used the caramel vodka in lieu of caramel sauce to make to make both salted caramel hot cocoa the night I watched the lunar eclipse and caramel apple sangria, both of which I had also pinned.

Food/Appetizers/Desserts:

• Texas Roadhouse Butter was a bust but one we will try again with some changes. The recipe called for sticks of butter but if you've had Texas Roadhouse butter, you know that it is fluffy. So when we retry it, I'll be using whipped butter as my base as well as reducing the honey by about a third. Hot caprese dip was a total fail. The cheese did not melt at all the way the recipe said it would. Maybe a different brand of fresh mozzarella would have worked better but I'd rather just turn it into salad which I know we all love.

• Crockpot lasagna soup would probably have been just fine if I had read the recipe through before I started or if I had even been thinking. The recipe calls for all of the ingredients to be cooked for 4-5 hours on high and then adding the noodles. Yeah, I just threw it all in at once, including the noodles. To say they were mush would be an understatement.  It's definitely a recipe I will do again. 

• Texas Trash dip, on the other hand, was a huge success. It did make a full 9" x 13" pan so I'd probably cut the recipe in half if I make it again and have a lot of other things with it. The plus side of the huge batch was that we nibbled it all through Sunday football games and I even took some for lunch on Monday. Good thing we liked it! 

• Caramel Apple Cake was another recipe that I will tweak but will make again. It called for a can of caramel frosting but that seemed to be too sugary. I'd either top it with caramel ice cream topping or make my own caramel frosting the next time. 

• Refrigerator Sweet Pickles was another hit. It turned out exactly the way the recipe said it would and everyone in my family liked them. I could chop them up to make pickle relish, we put them on sandwiches and ate them all by themselves.  I would like to figure out a way to reduce the number of seeds in them (grow seedless cucumbers, maybe?), otherwise, this is one we'll definitely do again next summer. Best part of the recipe is that you can keep adding new cucumber slices to the brine as you use pickles up so you can constantly have a full batch.

All in all, a successful Pin It and Do It challenge, I'd say! Thanks, Trish, for pushing us, again, to not just think about what we'd like to do but to actually do it.

Pin It And Do It Update

And I'm off and pinning! With the changing of the seasons, I'm fired up to try a bunch of new recipes. I kicked off my pins Sunday when I pulled out a can of pumpkin to give a little to my cats (apparently it's good for them?) and just had to find something to use the rest of the can in. Literally, the first recipe that came up on my Pinterest dessert board using pumpkin is the one we made - pumpkin dump cake. Dump cake is nothing new for us; my boys were both in Boy Scouts and brought home the idea of dump cakes years ago. This definitely takes the can of pie filling as the base up a notch.

Pumpkin Dump Cake

This is not my picture for two reasons. Miss H decided the cake mix should be pressed down which left us without such pretty layers AND we didn't have any yellow cake mix so used Funfetti cake mix. Tastes good but did leave us with kind of funny spots. Regardless, it was very tasty, especially once it completely cooled. By then we had, of course, already eaten half of the pan. Extra yummy with whipped cream!

That same night we were grilling steaks and I wanted a carb to go with them. We had potatoes and I remembered that I had pinned a recipe for Hasselback potatoes I thought I'd try. Again, this is not my picture (heck it's not even for the recipe I used!). I tweaked the recipe I used a bit, stuffing the potatoes with thin slices of sweet onion rather than garlic. I'm on a bit of a salt kick lately, so I used pink Himalayan sea salt which made a great crust.

Two of the books I've read this month, Jamie Ford's Songs of Willow Frost and Louise Erdrich's Round House, were both pinned to my Books To Read board prior to accepting the books for review this month. My review for Ford's book posted Tuesday and for Erdrich's on Wednesday. I also listened to Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking is month which I had on my Books To Read board.

Five down, three to go to reach my Pin Obsessed level goal but I'm sure that I'll be getting more than that done with more books planned from the Books To Read board and fall decorating that still needs to get finished up.  And I haven't even started on my bench yet!

Pin It And Do It - May Wrap Up

It's a wrap - Pin It and Do It May 2013 has come to an end and once again, thanks to Trish of Love, Laughter and a Touch of Insanity, I've been inspired to use the things I've pinned to a number of boards on Pinterest. This month I pulled things off a travel board, my cleaning board, my book board and even my music board. Of course, every time I go on Pinterest to see what I want to try, I end up pinning even more things. Oh well, there's always another challenge month coming up!

This week, thanks to my cats (don't ask), I tried this cleaning idea. On the plus side, it only calls for things I always have on hand anyway and is relatively safe. On the other hand, it, of course, was not nearly as magical as it sounds and I did need to use quite a lot of clean water to get the soap back out of my carpet. Still, it did work and for a lot less than the store-bought products.

My pin of The Cranberries inspired me to create a new station on Pandora, which I mentioned last Sunday. I'm still enjoying it a lot.

On my book board, I managed to finish two books and got a good start on a third that I had pinned. I finished The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout and The Thirteenth Tale by Dianne Setterfield; I'm still working on Bunker Hill but hope to finish it shortly.

Maybe the best thing about the challenge this time was that it really inspired me to reorganize my boards. When I started pinning  a year and a half ago, I had no idea that I would soon have over 500 food-related pins. Finding anything had gotten to be so time consuming, it hardly seemed worth the effort; easier just to do a search for a recipe. Now, instead of having one board labelled "food," I have separate boards for drinks, desserts, appetizers and breakfasts. Much easier to use. I've also broken up my book board so that I now have three boards: Books Read, Books To Read, and Book Love. After all, if I'm going to pin it and do it, I have to be able to find it!

Do you pin? What great things have you pinned and actually done? I'm always looking for new things to try!

Pin It And Do It Challenge - The Vacation Edition

Knowing the Pin It And Do It Challenge was coming up as I planned for our recent vacation, I used Pinterest to scout out things to do while we were on the road. I have to admit, it feels a little bit like cheating, except for the fact that now I have a lot of Minneapolis things pinned that we didn't get to do. If the purpose of the challenge is to work through the things we pinned, I've actually gone backwards by pinning vacation ideas! Here's what I did get done in the past week:

1. Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan - from my Books and Book Love board, this is a book I've been wanting to get to for more than a year. I took advantage of my in-laws' wonderful porch and a beautiful cool day to finish this one. My review will post later this week.

2. The After Wife by Gigi Lavangie Grazer - definitely not the kind of story I generally read but perfect for a vacation read. My review of this will also post this week.

3. Hell's Kitchen - located in downtown Minneapolis, everything in this restaurant is homemade and incredibly delicious. With two vegetarians in the family, finding a place to eat can be tricky, but Hell's Kitchen had us covered. Mini-him did go for the chicken wings (most meat I've ever seen on wings), Mini-me had huevos rancheros, The Big Guy had a huge breakfast platter, Miss H enjoyed the penne pasta, and I had the most incredible grilled cheese sandwich ever (3 cheeses inside, coated with Parmesan outside). On our way out the door, we picked up some of their homemade peanut butter; good thing I didn't look at the price first - expensive but the kids loved it when they had it at my in-laws'.

4. Lake Harriet - We ended up at Lake Harriet for part of two evenings. Both nights there were concerts at the bandstand, the kids swam at one of the beaches one evening and we had fun feeding the ducks and just lounging lakeside. There's nothing I find more relaxing than sitting beside water and Miss H finally got the beach time she's been wanting for a long time. The only problem? There are a lot of people who enjoy spending time at the lake in the evenings - with walkers, runners, bikers, and roller-bladers, the paths were crowded.

5. Minneapolis Institute of Art - when you have a son majoring in studio art and you're going to be in a city where there is a major exhibit of Rembrandt's works, you know that you're going to be spending time at the museum. Luckily for the rest of us, the Minneapolis Institute of Art has something for everyone, from ancient works to modern art. I plotted out the galleries I was going to visit but got off track almost immediately. It's just impossible to walk by ancient works and not be awed by them.

The museum itself is free. The Rembrandt exhibit had a fee - unless you're Mini-me, who some how managed to get in for free (do you think he played the "hey I'm a poor art student card?).  The rest of us decided to forgo that exhibit, but Mini-me said it was fantastic. The rest of us worked our way through the American and European exhibits, finishing up with the Impressionists. I'm quite sure we could have spent all day at MIA; we didn't even get to the Modern galleries. But our feet were sore, our stomachs were growling, Miss H had exhausted her interest in art and there were too many other things to be done. My favorite things? The interior room exhibits (from a Chinese reception hall to an American Revolution era parlor) and the Impressionist rooms. Here is Mini-him's favorite painting:

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - The Piazza San Marco, Venice

6. Weisman Art Museum - We weren't done with art museums yet. Mini-me is already shopping for graduate school art programs so while we were in Minneapolis is only made sense for us to take a spin through the University of Minnesota campus. Of course, while we were there, we had to visit the Weisman Art Museum, as much for the building as for the modern art collection it houses. I'm not much of a fan of modern art, so I'll confess that I spent half of my time there in the gift shop.

Designed by Frank Gehry

And that's how I used my vacation to get three-fourths of the way toward my goal for the Pin It And Do It Challenge. Pinterest was a great way for us to plan for vacation  - and with a laptop, we had easy access to the information without having to drag along a lot of brochures or printouts. I highly recommend it!

 

Pin It And Do It: A Pinteresting Challenge August 2012

It's back! Trish's (Love, Laughter and a Touch of Insanity) May Pin It And Do It challenge was so successful, we talked  wheedled her into doing it again in August. In May I used the challenge to give me a lot of great recipes for Miss H's graduation party and I managed to know out eight pins in 31 days.

Because I hate to go backwards, I'm going to shoot for the Pin Obsessed goal again (8+ pins). I'll use my upcoming vacation to get me off to a good start. I've pinned several places to visit and eat. I'm sure recipes will be involved again and maybe even one of the books I've pinned recently. After that, I'm going to start working on Christmas gift ideas. I anticipate any craft that I'll be happy with as a gift will need to be done at least twice so I need to get going soon.

Do you pin? You should join us!

Pin It And Do It - Bring On The Sugar

I've been making buttercream frosting for years, it's my go-to frosting for most cakes. But it's always a guessing game. A little more butter? A bit more vanilla? With all of the baking I was doing for last weekend, I knew I didn't have the time or the desire to play that guessing game so I turned to Pinterest to find an actual recipe. This recipe for Classic Buttercream Frosting was just the thing I was looking for - and tinted bright blue it not only tasted delicious on the chocolate cupcakes but fit right in with the pinks, greens and purples we already had.

And that's it for the Pin It And Do It Challenge - for now. Everyone's had so much fun with it that Trish is planning on hosting it again in the fall. I'm looking forward to that - so many great gift and holiday ideas to explore come fall!

Pin It And Do It Challenge - More Cupcakes!

What a great asset Pinterest was for getting ready for graduation! Want to find a new recipe? Just search for it and you'll get all kinds of options. Oh sure, you can do that any where on the net but I never have been good about keeping my bookmarks in order and you don't have the pictures. After we made the pink champagne cupcakes, Miss H decided we would abandon the idea that all of the cupcakes had to be pink when she got the notion that Key Lime cupcakes would really be great. If only there were a recipe!

Well, of course there is! It does mean that you'll have to buy a bottle of key lime juice which will set you back twice what a bottle of regular lime juice. Because we made the cupcakes a couple of days before the party and then were cranking out the frosting of all 200 cupcakes in one afternoon, we had to forgo the glaze that the recipe calls for. I knew that was going to mean we were losing some of the key lime flavor so some of the liquid I used in the frosting was key lime juice instead which worked just fine. We also added a few drops of bright green food coloring as well. These were a big hit at the party!

What other new flavors could we discover? Hmm, since the Key Lime cupcakes called for lime gelatin and I had orange gelatin in my pantry I wondered if there was also a recipe that called for that ingredient. A search for Orange Creamsicle Cupcakes brought up a lot of choices. I didn't want to start from scratch - I had too much going on - so I looked for one with a cake mix as a start. To get something that worked for me, I pulled the cake recipe from here and the frosting recipe from here.

Our cupcake plates looked so pretty with so many different colors and flavors of cupcakes - pink, orange, green, purple and even bright blue. We are going to be having a lot of fun looking for other cupcakes recipes on Pinterest this summer. Any volunteers to eat all of those cupcakes we can't possibly eat?!

Pin It And Do It Challenge - Steel Cut Oats

I've tried this one before - I got it from Trish of Love, Laughter & A Touch of Insanity - but for some reason I haven't been able to get it to pull up in a while. Then I found it again on Pinterest when I was looking for another recipe to try. It's still my favorite - it's a great base and can be easily adapted. This time I once again skipped the apple and instead used a blend of dried fruit. I also substituted agave nectar for the brown sugar.

I've yet to try making steel cut oats on the stove. I have a notion that would require a lot more attention than the crockpot variety. I've also never let this cook all night - I've found that it only takes about four to five hours to cook to perfection and I don't want to overcook it. But I'd really like to wake up to my breakfast already warm! I wish my crockpot had a lower than low temperature setting!

Pin It And Do It - Pink Champagne Cupcakes

Number five on the Pin It And Do It challenge for me was Pink Champagne Cupcakes. Miss H is having a hot pink and zebra print graduation (never mind that her school colors are forest green and black) so we've been looking for ways to bring pink into the menu and Miss H loves cupcakes. Pink Champagne Cupcakes seemed to be perfect and look how pretty they looked in the pin.

Of course, ours aren't going to look this pretty. We didn't have adorable little cupcakes papers and I wasn't going to bother to add those pretty little pink edible pearls. But we were looking primarily for a yummy cupcake that happened to be pink. The recipe makes 24 regular-sized cupcakes; we were making mini-cupcakes and got 48 out of the batch. For batter lickers like us, that champagne makes for an unusual aftertaste but the finished product loses the alcohol bite while retaining the champagne flavor. The frosting was a hit with my taste testers so we are a go with this recipe for graduation. Now to crank out another four dozen of these little beauties and move on to the next cake recipe. Miss H is thinking Key Lime cupcakes even if they aren't pink.

Pin It And Do It - Cake Batter Truffles

Miss H's graduation was the perfect incentive to shoot for the stars on the Pin It And Do It challenge. I started to wonder if I was actually going to be able to get through eight pins in one month as I began to realize that quite a lot of the great ideas I had pinned were completely infeasible given the size of the crowd we're expecting (I mean, am I really going to want to make 150 fruit skewers between the ceremony and the party?). So I may not make that lofty goal, but at least, after this weekend, I've gotten five done already!

Yesterday I made these little beauties - Cake Batter Truffles. There are actually two recipes that I've pinned but this one was so quick and easy, I'm not sure I'll try the other one. Five ingredients and only about fifteen minutes of work to make, they are easy although I will warn you that they are really sweet. The recipe said it would make 20 - 30 truffles but I only got 22 and they were quite small. The recipe calls for dipping chocolate which I bought for the first two batches. It's not cheap nor is it particularly delicious so I played around until I came up with my own version. I made some truffles dipped in milk chocolate and some dipped in white chocolate. Now I just have to hope that it's not 100 degrees on Saturday and I end up with a plate of desserts that are so melted no one can pick them up!

Pin It And Do It Challenge

Trish, of Love, Laughter, and A Touch of Insanity, found herself doing an awful lot of pinning over on Pinterest but not doing an awful lot of "doing" and the idea of a Pinterest challenge was born. I'm jumping into the deep end of the pool on this one and this is one challenge that I know I can finish! The challenge officially starts May 1, but Trish has kindly allowed us to get a jump start if we'd like. I've already done two of the eight plus pins I'm shooting for: eggs in avocado slices and avocado toast.

 Miss H was especially excited to try eggs in avocado slice; as a vegetarian, eggs are her protein of choice. Sadly, this is one we won't be making again. I'm not sure where they got eggs that small or avocados that big but we had much too much egg to fit in a small hole in an avocado slice. And warm avocado? Not a hit.


The best part of eggs in avocado slice? All of that leftover avocado you get! We used it to try avocado toast which we both loved. Okay, it's really not much more than guacamole on toast but we made lovely french bread toast and it was quite delicious. It just may become our Sunday evening light dinner With protein, potassium, fiber and loads of great vitamins, we won't even have to feel guilty about eating a delicious food!

Since I'm prepping for a graduation party the end of May, I'm sure that most of my entries for this challenge will have to do with trying foods we might want to serve at the party. Of course, I always like to do some new things around the house before a graduation party, so my For The Home, DIY, and Craft boards are bound to come into play as well. Do you pin? Interested in giving it a try? Let me know if you'd like to see what all of the talk is about and I'll send you an invitation. But far warning - you're liable to become every bit as addicted as Trish and me!