Today marks the official point of 4 months until the wedding!
Where did months 6-13 go? Whizzing by apparently. With only 4 months to go (and July being totally swamped for me) I feel like I’m running out of time! I have the major elements of planning done, it’s just the execution I’m worried about. Thankfully I have several offers to help in this area so I’m sure it’ll work out. 4 months until I experience God’s blessing of marriage. – I can hardly wait!
My sweet friend Jessica and I hung out this week to make dinner. We met in home group through church and decided we’d like deepen our friendship and share our life experiences, so we’ve been meeting weekly. Recently we’ve embarked upon what I’m humbly dubbing, “Bianca’s Cooking School for the Remedial Cook.” Jessica’s sort of a self-proclaimed remedial cook, but not for long!
This week’s menu included cheddar-stuffed burgers, boston lettuce & cucumber salad and mashed sweet potatoes. Both the burgers and salad recipes were courtesy of the Martha-Master, but the sweet potatoes were sort of an adaptation of a recipe I saw online and Jessica’s ingenious spontaneous mind.
We began as you would for making any type of mashed potatoes.
Once they were done boiling (tender to the poke of a knife/fork) I let them cool and then peeled and cut them into large chunks. The next traditional step would be to use a masher.
But we didn’t have a masher.
So we thought we’d chop them in a food processor to make them mashed. Except when we plugged in the food processor it didn’t turn on.
So we switched plugs.
Still nothing.
What now? We tried putting them in the blender.
Except the blade was no where to be found.
So we got out a hand mixer/masher.
But the potato chunks were too big and it wasn’t working.
It was like using a weed eater to mow a farm.
Were we on candid camera?
Where’s the camera?
What now?
Jessica got an idea! “Why don’t we try putting them in Ziploc bags and then mash them that way?”
I looked for Ziploc bags and there were 3 left. Hooray! We loaded the potato chunks into the bags (carefully leaving the bag slightly open on one corner so as to protect ourselves from bursting bags!) and then we got started.
In the middle of mashing we scooped the potatoes out of the bag, put them in a bowl and microwaved them for a bit to soften them more (apparently one potato didn’t completely boil because it was still hard to mash).
Once we mashed them as much as we could, we scooped them into a bowl and added butter (about 2 teaspoons) and a sprinkle of cinnamon to taste. In the end they were more like chunky mashed sweet potatoes, but texture didn’t matter to us because they tasted great and our homemade victory tasted even better!
*Note: We were cooking in a friend’s kitchen. Obviously a friend who has a broken food processor and an incomplete blender.
*Additional Note: The burgers and salad went off without a hitch and tasted amazing too!
For the past few months I’ve been trying to figure out how we will serve our guests from the dessert/candy bar. I thought plates were weird for hard candy, but could work for cookies. Maybe.
Bowls were also weird, I mean who serves their wedding guests in bowls???
I couldn’t just have them use napkins, because that seems cheap. And ghetto.
I finally decided on treat bags. I found all three colors we’re using at Michael’s. Add on a 20% off coupon, and I was sold! However, the bags seemed a little….ummm…boring.
And anyone who knows me knows I’m anything BUT boring!
So I decided to add a little something to each bag to enhance it. I found some mulberry paper flowers at Michael’s as well and I also found little pearl stickers (it’s like the pearls have been halved so the flat side can be adhered to a flat surface. Combining the two, I made these lovely treat bags that our guests can load up at the dessert bar and take back to their table to nibble from. Then later, if they want, they fill the bag with any additional goodies they want to take home:
What do you think?
I LOVE dry shampoo. It’s a great touch up for your hair without having to take a shower and start all over from scratch. Not that taking a shower isn’t an option, but sometimes it’s just not happening on a daily basis. But that’s a story for another day… Dry shampoo now comes in a variety of brands, but most still hover around the $20 mark and some even up to $30. I started out a few years ago with what I believe to be the best brand of dry shampoo and have pretty much stayed true to it since then. In fact, I’m still kicking myself for not stocking up on it when I was in Paris and could have bought it at half the price! Over the years, here are the 3 I’ve tried from Sephora:
So Rene Furterer’s brand is my favorite because it has a light scent, a powerful spray that unintentionally volumizes and a little goes a long way. It was also recently released in a convenient travel size which makes me want to use it all the more. Oscar Blandi also manufactures a dry shampoo but to me it smells like lemon-scented Pledge and I just don’t like that…who would? More recently I tried a new brand because it was significantly cheaper than Rene (I’m always looking for a way to score a good deal) but I was very disappointed when I only used it once and then put it back in the drawer. When I went to use it again several days later, the entire can was empty! I guess it had a faulty spray valve or something because the best I can guess what happened was that it all leaked out. Luckily Sephora is amazing to it’s customers and I was able to return the empty can and exchange it for something else.
Then, last month I was in San Antonio for my friend Mel’s wedding and she mentioned that Tresseme now offers a dry shampoo and it’s about $5. What?!?! Only 5 dollars?? That’s like 80% or more off the price I pay for Rene’s! I HAD to try it out. While I was there I used it a couple times and was convinced that while it won’t rank as high as Rene’s (you know, you get what you pay for), it’s still a good product at a GREAT price. Once I got home I bought myself a can and I’ve used it several times since then, always happy with the results.
So the other day I was lighting candles around my house and I set down the lighter in my bathroom.
RIGHT NEXT TO THE DRY SHAMPOO. It’s probably worth mentioning that dry shampoo is EXTREMELY flammable…don’t worry, this isn’t a story of me setting my hair, or my bathroom, on fire. I know, I know: how boring am I?
BUT it is a lesson learned to PAY ATTENTION TO DETAILS because that very well might have happened! Of course I WAS paying attention because I took pictures first, and then moved the lighter. With as much as I like to use dry shampoo, I’m really glad I don’t keep company with smokers. Or grill-master Bobby Flay for that matter.
