A Fantastic Week

It has been such a long time since I have done a weekly recap.  This week has been a pretty great week.  A great balance between busy and relaxing.

I was off from work on Wednesday and instead of sitting around watching TV and napping all day, I had a great sushi lunch with a friend.

We sat around for about 2.5hrs and just chatted and ate.  It has been a really long time since I have had a lunch or dinner like that.  The conversation flowed so easily and the time pasted without either of us noticing how long we had been there.

The weekend was a mix between relaxing and busy.  I went for a long over due massage on Saturday and then prepared and served a charity dinner.

Every February our church has a charity auction where people can bid on services or items donated to the auction.  For the last couple of years I have offered to make the lucky winner a home cooked dinner for up to 6 guests.  This weekend was the weekend that I made the lucky winners dinner.

It's a pretty simple/rustic dinner of roast lemon chicken, mushroom risotto, roasted root veg and tiramisu.

Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves so I am going to say that dinner was a success.  I think this might be mine and the hubs contribution each year. 

My blogging hasn't been the only thing that I have been neglecting, family dinner has been less then reliable.  But this week I changed that.  Since I had a pretty busy Saturday I wanted to have a more relaxing Sunday so I decided to make a winter and slow cooker staple....chili.


Where there is Hope, there is Faith.  Where there is faith Miracles happen.

Creamed Honey

A little while a go I saw this post on Pinterest about how to make Creamed Honey.

It looked like a great way to use up some crystallized honey (something I always have because it takes me FOREVER to use up a container).  So after reading the post a couple of times I thought I would give it a try.

To view the original post click here.

For my version I basically took the "idea" of the post and sorta free-handed it.

I started by dumping all of the honey I had into my stand mixer.
Then I scooped out about 1/3 to 1/2 of the honey, put it in a bowl and microwaved it till it was liquid again.  The original post says to mix liquid honey with the crystallized honey but I was too lazy busy to run to the store to get fresh honey.

I combined everything in my stand mixer, attached my whisk attachment and turned it on low.

Honey after 10 mins of mixing

That's all hard work it took.  I let the mixer do it's thing, changing to medium speed about halfway.

Honey after 40 mins of mixing

1 hour of mixing

After about an 1hour and 20 mins, I decided that was as whipped as I needed and transferred it to a small glass jar.

While I did find mine still had some crystallized bits in it I am sure that could be solved by reducing the crystallized honey and adding more liquid honey.

All in all I am going to say this is a great way to use up old honey.

Test Results = Success

A Great Day.

Hi Everyone, it's been SOOOO long since I've done a post.  I have had such a crazy couple of months and am excited to be back to my blog.

I thought I would have my fist post back be a recap of a great day I had.  This week my lil' sis came back to Ottawa for a visit.  Last summer lil' sis moved to London ON.  She's made a pretty awesome life for herself there, but London is about 7 hours away from Ottawa so I haven't been able to see her since she's moved. 

Since she was only here for a couple of days, and she had friends in the city to see I got to hang out with her all day Tuesday. 

Lil' sis has been missing/craving some of the awesomeness that only Ottawa has to offer so we made a morning of hitting all the places she's been missing.

We dropped the hubs off at work (so we could use the car) and then started our 

Super Day of Fun.

We had breakfast at Wild Oat.  A vegan/vegetarian cafe/bakery that lil' sis used to work at and has been craving for a while.  While it's not my first choice for breakfast (I LOVE bacon) it is still a yummy place to eat. Lil' sis got the traditional breakfast (eggs, hash browns, toast and homemade jam), while I got a crepe stuffed with ricotta cheese and blueberries.

She's just so happy to be at the Oat

Once we were fully charged we headed over to La paradise a cooking supply store that lil' sis loves and has spent way to much money time at.  After watching her "browse" for what seemed like forever (it was probably more like 30 mins) we we headed out.

We headed over to Suzy Q's doughnuts a Ottawa staple that she has been craving for months to pick up some yummy treats.

I couldn't wait to get to the car, I ate half a doughnut on the walk to the car

We grabbed a movie from Jumbo Video (yep they still exist) picked up a movie, hit up my favourite sushi restaurant for lunch and then back home for some jammies and a movie marathon afternoon.

It had been a long time, and this was soo good

Movie time with the lil' sis

It was a short visit and while I still hate how far away she is, I loved getting to spend the day with lil' sis.

A Week of Lunches

Between working long hours, volleyball and other commitments the Hubs and myself have a very busy weekday life.  To help cut down on stress (and to keep us on budget) I try and make lunches for the week on the weekend.

This week I made creamy cheese polenta, veggies and baked ham.

Creamy cheese polenta is so easy to make and a great starch substitute when you are tired of potatoes or rice.  The recipe can be found here.  I baked up some ham which I coated in red pepper jelly (during the last 15 minutes of baking) and added some veggies.

In total it took me about 45 minutes to get everything done, and I had all the ingredients at home already so no extra cost.  Now we don't have any stress worrying about lunch for the next week.

PS. I never make 5 lunches for us as I found that we inevitably only eat 3-4 of them because we usually go out once, or the Hubs is so busy he doesn't get a chance to eat lunch one day.