Time to Change Things Up

Here we are a couple of days into a new year and my house is all a mess right now. We have been in this home for almost 18 years and it needs a refresh. I have spent time over the last couple of weeks moving furniture, taking down our Christmas decorations, and removing some really old wallpaper. Once we have texturing done on a couple of walls, I will be ready to repaint most of the walls in our home.

My husband and I were talking about some home projects the other day and I was telling him my reasoning why the dishes have always been in the lower cabinet.

inside the kitchen cabinets

When we first moved into this home, I wanted the dishes in the lower cabinet so the kids could help with unloading the dishwasher. As the kids got older, we just kept the dishes in the lower cabinet. When our daughter got married last summer, I removed some of the dishes and silverware and moved those to another area in our home, but kept these dishes in the same spot.

As we have been spending time talking about home projects, I realized how much wasted space there is in this spot. And my husband never realized my reasoning behind why the dishes were in the lower cabinet in the first place! He thought that everyone placed their dishes in lower cabinets!

So it is definitely time to change things up!

Ideally, I would love to move the baking supplies to this lower cabinet, but I would hate to have to pull things out from the front in order to get to things in the back. So I need to start hunting for a solution before I make this change.

Are you making any changes this year? If so, what changes are you making? Are you someone who is pretty adaptable to change? Or are you pretty resistant to change?

wallpaper removed

To end this post, I will leave you all with a photo of what our living room looked like last week after the wallpaper was removed and before the Christmas tree came down. The house repainting is going to be a big project, but the timing is good with all the rain we are receiving right now in California.

An afternoon in the kitchen

This afternoon, I did not have anything I needed to do. So, I decided to bake a cake I found in a book I picked up at the library yesterday. Not that I needed to look at another recipe book, since I have a pile of printed out recipes from the internet that I still need to try.

I found this particular recipe book when I was scrolling through my Goodreads account. The title is called ‘Snacking Cakes’ and it is written by Yossy Arefi. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I want a bit of dessert, but I don’t want to spend the time making a big cake with all the frosting. So the cover of this book and the title made me search for it in our local library.

The book arrived yesterday, so I walked down to the library to pick up the book. As I was looking through the book last night, I spotted a recipe for Browned Butter, Pecan, and White Chocolate Cake. Oh my!

Browned Butter, Pecan, and White Chocolate Cake

Since part of the recipe is on the following page, I did not realize that I needed to keep back some of the white chocolate and chopped pecans for the top of the cake. Oh well! I am sure it will still taste delicious.

I do like that this recipe book has some suggestions for using different pans, provides some flavor variations, and offers a way to dress up the cake when serving it.

It is too soon to tell whether I will add this book to my cookbook library, but in the meantime, I know what I am having for dessert tonight.

Making My Life Easier: Menu Planning

Twenty-nine years times 365 equals 10,585

Why that calculation?

That is approximately how many times I have had to make a decision about dinner. Now obviously, I have not made dinner that many times over the course of the last twenty-nine years, but probably pretty darn close to that number.

No wonder I am stuck in a rut and just a bit plain tired of planning dinner each and every week.

A friend of mine posted an article on Facebook recently about dinner planning and all that goes into it.

It is just not planning what to eat each night of the week.

When I sit down on Monday morning to plan our week of dinners, I look at the weather, who is going to be home each night, what ingredients we have on hand, is anything on sale, what additional items I need to purchase, what ingredients need to be prepped, does anything need to be taken out of the freezer, when do things need to be taken out of the freezer…. I think you get the picture.

Obviously, my individual family situation is much different than many other families.

Up until a couple of years ago, I was pretty much a stay-at-home, homeschooling mom with time to shop for and prepare a good portion of our meals.

But now that I am substitute teaching a good number of days a month, and traveling to Compassion events at least once a month, my schedule is all over the place.

And our kid’s work schedules are not consistent.

So, to make my life easier, a few months back, we had a family meeting to discuss menu planning and dinner.

The solution…our two adult children are each responsible for dinner one night a week.

This week, our menu looks like this:

Menu planning

I have even started making notations for each day so I know who will be home for dinner.

This is just one thing I have implemented that is making my life easier these days.

What one thing are you doing to make your life easier?

Baking Bucket List

At the beginning of this year, I wrote down a few goals I wanted to accomplish this year. Since I love to bake, I decided to make a list of things I have never made before. My list included the following:

Baking Bucket List

Basically, this is my Baking Bucket List for 2019.

As you can see, I have not made much progress.

But I have made a couple of batches of macaroons (macarons? does anybody know the correct way to spell this word?):

Making macaroons
homemade macaroons

I still have quite a bit of almond flour, so I really should make another batch or two and experiment with different flavors and colors.

They really are not too difficult to make, you just need to make sure to really pay attention to the details.

And bagels?

Homemade sourdough bagels
Homemade bagel and coffee

I have been using a homemade sourdough bagel recipe from this cookbook: Artisan Sourdough Made Simple by Emilie Raffa

If you have a sourdough starter, you will want to give the bagel recipe a try. They are so delicious and really easy to make.

As far as the rest of my baking bucket list, I am not sure how many recipes I will try this summer.

After all, summer is not the usual time of year to spend a lot of time in the kitchen with the oven on.

What would you put on your baking bucket list?

Bringing a bit of Italy home to our table

After spending ten days in Italy last month, all I want to do now is learn to make homemade pasta, cappuccinos, croissants, and authentic Pasta e Fagioli.

If anyone has the most amazing recipes for any of these, please feel free to pass them along!

Over the past few years, I have made a Pasta e Fagioli recipe, but when I ordered it for dinner one night in Orvieto, the recipe I make looks nothing like this:

Pasta e Fagioli in Orvieto Italy

It was cold in Italy and all I wanted was a bowl of soup for dinner. This was so amazing! Rather than being tomato based like I was used to at home, this was more like a white bean soup filled with homemade pasta.

So I began to search the internet for a recipe that might be similar and I was happy to find one and made sure to add it to one of my Pinterest boards.

This week, I added the ingredients to my grocery list:

Ingredients for Pasta e Fagioli

Today was the day to give the recipe a try:

Homemade Pasta e Fagioli

This recipe came together pretty quickly. Since I have not tried to make homemade pasta yet, this is probably as close as I am going to get to the soup I had in that restaurant in Orvieto.

Have you ever tried Pasta e Fagioli like this?