Expanding our horizons

Anthony and I recently started to really look at our daily diets and how it effects our lives. If you weren't already aware, I am SUPER picky. I don't eat things that are green, except for green apples and celery. I don't eat vegetables except for corn, celery, & carrots. I don't eat seafood of any kind. I don't like potatoes, or meatloaf, or most soups. I don't like tomatoes, or onions, or mushrooms. And I'm not a big cheese person at all. But I still HAVE to have cheddar cheese on my hamburgers and Parmesan on my pasta. Oh - and my foods are almost never allowed to touch each other on the plate. I hate that. Bleh.

When Anthony and I met, I felt wonderful because I'd finally met someone who ate a lot like me! Plain, simple, and carbo loaded. But a few years ago, Anthony started to branch out, and he has FAR surpassed me. But maybe not in a good way - he hasn't been eating all that healthily. So we decided 2 things. That I needed to branch out more, and Anthony needed to eat better. So, we've been trying. And it's been going well! We've almost totally cut out Soda (and Anthony has already lost a pound or two because of it!) and there are more fruit and veggies in the house now than I think there has ever been.

So, in honor of making this new lifestyle a routine, Anthony (the cook between the two of us) made us dinner last week in our brand new wok! (Shout out of Thanks to my parents for buying it for him for his b-day! It's coming in handy!)

We marinated lean steak strips in a Baja Chipotle sauce overnight. Anthony threw the meat, along with an orange bell pepper and some shrimp into the wok, and voila! A pretty hearty meal! We put that over rice, and had at it. It was so tasty! And much healthier than what we normally eat! Check out the pics!


Now, I could just stop there and pretend I ate it like it looks above. But let's not kid ourselves here, folks. First, I don't eat shrimp. Second off, I'm pretty sure I don't like bell peppers. And third - IT'S ALL TOUCHING!!!!

Nope... This is what my plate looked like:Now, I did eat the pepper! I didn't like it enough to say, yea - I'd eat that all by itself! Or even enough to say I'd eat a lot of it in one dish! But I can tolerate it enough to eat them if they were mixed in with a dish, say at a Chinese restaurant or something. So that is a start. I didn't get the shrimp down. Smelled it and gagged. So Anthony ate it for me. But the meat and the rice were great together! And no soda, either. I had propel water. So while I'm so not saintly yet, I'm doing well on the trying new things!!! Let's hope I can keep it up!

-Jen

Cupcake Project - Box of Chocolates

Sorry for the delay - It's been over a week since I actually made these! But I will tell you, already, that I want to do this one again - in February when all the great Valentines day candies are out! It will be so much better!

This project is: Box of Chocolates! Here is the pic from the book.
This is the first time I've made Chocolate Cupcakes for the project. Gotta tell ya - it's a welcome change from all that vanilla! And this project is also of the "Mini" kind. I love working with Mini cupcakes! They are so fun and have so much potential to be something creative. And they are so cute!
Like I said earlier - I need to do this project again near Valentines day. The candies I had available to me weren't all that fabulous. Not a lot of reds or pinks. Kind of had to go scrounging, and it left a lot of other candies left over. But we were able to bring back the runts left over from "TV Dinner" night. The Pink Hearts were PERFECT!
I covered all of the cupcakes I could (there were several left over) with chocolate fudge frosting (yum!) and each "chocolate" was supposed to look different. Some of them had Hershey's kisses on top, some had peppermint circles, others had flowers made out of Smarties, and some even had actual pieces of chocolate (Snickers/Milky Way/3 Musketeers in bite size) on top. I decorated the chocolates with a thin drizzle of vanilla frosting (you know, how See's Candies does on their chocolates) and voila! I had "chocolates" to go in my box! (Oh, and excuse my scruffy look - I'd just gotten home from my Pilates Class - don't worry! I washed my hands before baking!)
Now... Also because it isn't around Valentines Day, "Chocolate Heart Boxes" were pretty scarce, so I improvised. I took some crinkled up tissue paper and placed that in my Cupcake garage. I placed all the little "Chocolates" in the "box" and put on the lid!

TaDa!
Elissa took the mini's to Family Game night for the cousins all to enjoy. Ant and I would have brought them ourselves but we were on a plane to NorCal! Hope the gang enjoyed this week's creation!!!

Next Project (and it may be a week or two before I actually accomplish it) is rather daunting: Van Gogh's famous painting "Starry Night" in Cupcakes. Yikes!!! But it is the last project in chapter one, and from here on out, I can do them in any order I want! Woot! Wish me luck!!!

-Jen

Cupcake Project - TV Dinner & Spaghetti Dinner!

WARNING!!! MEGA LONG POST AHEAD!
(Stick with me here, people - I promise it will be worth it!)

So, for the most part, I thought I would be taking on this cupcake journey solo. Immediately I realized that wasn't true, since Anthony has been with me every step of the way. But what I wasn't ready for was all the people wanting to join in! It's so neat to have people thinking that what I'm doing is cool.

With that said, this week's project is different in 2 major ways. First - It isn't just the normal 1 project/2-page spread that I've dealt with so far. It was 6 pages!!!! 2 Projects! That is 4 pages of instructions for the TV Dinner project, and the normal 2-page spread for the Spaghetti Dinner. (Don't worry - it is super large font and has pictures!). Second big difference - I was not alone!

Meet Beckie:
Beckie is one of my best friends in the whole world. I was a bridesmaid in her wedding and she was Matron of Honor in mine. We've been friends for over 7 years now, and she's been one of the greatest roommates I've ever had! And she was the first to volunteer to help me out with my project. We had so much fun!

We started out with teaching Beckie all the new techniques that the book taught me (because that is a rule! We follow the book, even when it leads us down an unsure path!) and got baking!

Our first project was TV Dinner. Here is what it looks like from the book:

We took it in turns and did the "peas & carrots" first. Beckie made the frosting green, and we added green runts and orange runts. It looked cool! Then came the potatoes! Mashed, to be precise. Vanilla frosting (over frosted, really) with a yellow starburst (circa Corn on the Cob) for butter, and caramel sauce to look like gravy.
Then came... the chicken bones. *WARNING* At least a P-G13 RATING for the next paragraph or so...
So the book innocently says "Trace this out on wax paper, then fill in the outlines with melted white chocolate." Ok - so. We did that. And when you fill it out with the chocolate, it ends up looking a little... ummmm... phallic. No getting around it:Of course, jokes ensued, and we giggled a lot. But it turns out that is what they are supposed to look like! Because when put into the tops of cupcakes covered in frosting and Special K crumbs, it actually looks like a fried chicken leg! Add one last cupcake covered in chocolate frosting and jimmies (or sprinkles, or 100,000's, or nonpareils - take your pick) to look like a chocolate pudding dessert, and voila! TV Dinner!

We had a lot of fun!
Then, we got right to work again, this time on our Spaghetti Dinner! (Obviously, it was the night of entrees). And I had the perfect Pasta Bowl my mom gave me a few years back to display our masterpiece. We put the rest of the cupcakes from the batch into the bowl. Then the instructions said to add cocoa powder and yellow food coloring to the frosting to make it "brownish-yellow" for the pasta. We were skeptical - not gonna lie. We thought it was going to look like mud.
But once again, I was taught to trust the book. It looked great! We covered the cupcakes in a thin layer of frosting and all three of us (Anthony joined in too!) had at it! It was so much fun to just be messy with frosting! We squeezed the whole bag out over the cupcakes through a tiny little hole and it really looked like Pasta!



Beckie added the "Meatballs and Sauce" which are Ferrier Roche chocolates and strawberry preserves. It looks pretty realistic. And smells so good! That really is a lot of frosting!

Thanks, Beckie, for coming over and helping me with my project! It was so much fun. Can't wait to do it again!
Next week - "Box of Chocolates." Oh - and if you are interested in helping me, come on over and claim a page in the book! Miranda called dibs on the "Owls" project, and Alyse called dibs on about 4 projects (don't worry - there are still a ton of projects left untagged) and I'm looking forward to all the help! I'm loving this project.

-Jen

Charming Pet Products

Hi All!

I'm blogging from work (have a little down time at the moment) and wanted to give you all a little update on my new home away from home.

It's been great. I've been here for a few weeks (already got my second pay check! Woot!) and have settled in nicely. I love my hours (although Anthony HATES them because they are so much better than his!). I start every morning between 9am and 9:30am, and leave around 5pm. I get to go home for lunch every day because we live about 10 minutes away, and I bring Pup to work on a pretty regular basis. It's pretty sweet!

I've never had a 35 hour work week before (I'm used to 45-50 with most of my past jobs!) so this is a really nice (and in my opinion well deserved) change. Don't get me wrong - I may only work 7 hours a day, but this is the first job I've had in a LONG time where I work all 7 hours (minus 15 minutes every now and again for things like blogging!) My down time here is really limited. This fact makes the day go by SO fast. I love it. There is always something to do. I could finish 100% of my To Do List for the day, and it wouldn't matter - There is still a ton to get done.

They now have trained me enough to take over the customer service phone - always fun and interesting - plus I do half the orders on a daily basis and most of our in-house shipping. Plus I manage the office (Duh - I'm "Office Manager") so I'm in charge of all the filing and the phones, and the mail, and all that "stuff" that has to get done. No clue how my boss, Christine, was doing it all by herself. Literally, I took half of her job off of her plate and she is still up to her ears in work! Hence why there is so little down time around here.

The other half of my job is working with Christine's Husband, Nick. He is our Marketing Department, Design Guru, and all around "Idea Guy." I work with him on up-to-date marketing techniques to help the business grow. I've also helped out on a couple of toy designs and hope I'll get the chance to design my own toy one day! How cool would that be? And part of working with Nick means doing a lot of work for our trade shows (we start this coming weekend with 6 of them back-to back! It's going to be crazy!). I've been helping with our booths and designing an easier set for our out of state Reps so they are more likely to follow through on the look. I even hopped into AI (Adobe Illustrator for the readers not in the trade) and did some design work and had header boards made for all of our floor displays! It was cool to get the final product back knowing I designed them! I'm so used to taking other' people's ideas and making them realities, so it was a big step to start with a blank canvas and make something new. I know I'll get to do it again with this company, and that sparks a whole lot of motivation and imagination for me.

I'm starting to ramble on - thanks for getting to this point, if you are still reading! I'm really enjoying my job. It's keeping me busy and the versatility is keeping me challenged. I'm pleased about that. But the greatest piece of the pie is that they (my bosses) wholeheartedly believe in me. They know (as I continue to prove it) that they can ask for something, on top of everything I already have going, and know that it is still going to get done, and BEFORE they feel the need to ask for it again. I have no one breathing down my neck, or checking over my shoulder. And as the days go by, they feel less and less of a need to "check" my work for errors, as I'm making less and less of them as I go. It's a great feeling to be needed and to know that I was hired to do a job they know I can do. Things are looking good on the Pet Toy front! I promise to do a blog if I get the chance to design a toy!

-Jen

Buttered Popcorn Cupcakes!

Today's battle: MINI CUPCAKES!!!

And when I say Mini, I mean teenie-weenie!! 3 of these little babies equals one regular size cupcake! A batch of batter that makes 24 regular cupcakes made 72 (count them! 72!) Mini Cupcakes. Wowzers. And I have special cupcake pans and liners just for them! Check it out!

See! Lots of Mini Cupcakes!!!Today's project required a LOT of work. I cut 200 mini marshmallows into 3 pieces each to make the bottom part of the pieces of popcorn. I laid them out in a leaf pattern, and then put a dab of frosting in the center of each grouping. I added a whole marshmallow on top of the frosting to complete the kernel. It was cool! They really looked like popcorn!



Buttered Popcorn means both yellow and white marshmallows. Vanilla cupcakes and vanilla frosting! Yummy!

We took them to Family Game Night to share with everyone. They were a big hit!!! And I thought they were cute! My favorite so far.

Next project is a combo! TV Dinner, Spaghetti & Meatballs, & a box of Chocolates. Yay!!! I love this project!

-Jen