Making cooking more enjoyable

There are so many things to do everyday and I'm always looking for ways to make those "things" easy as possible. I have to say there are certain "things" that I like to do more then others. Cooking dinner is low in that list, particularly when I'm in a time crunch.

Over the past year, I have used Evernote to have me be more organized with the "what's for dinner" dilemma. I took all the recipes that I had in my three ring binder out of their plastic sleeves and starting my recipe library in Evernote. With the Evernote Web Clipper in Firefox, I was able to search for the recipes and clip the webpage into Evernote. For those recipes I could not find on the internet or the handwritten family recipes, I scanned them in.

Let me tell you why I LOVE this! I have Evernote on my laptop, iphone & ipad. If I'm in the grocery store and I decide I want to make my delicious spaghetti sauce. I can pull up the app on my phone and get right to my recipe without have to navigate through Safari. It's amazing & a lifesaver. How many times have you walked out of the house and left the "printed" recipe on the counter. You're saving trees and your insanity.

Here's a screenshot of how I have my Evernote set-up:

Here's some more details on my methodology of using Evernote for recipes –
If I clip if for the web, then it goes directly into a folder that I have designated called "To be organized". I leave it in this folder until I actually make the recipe. Then I can decide if it's worth keeping or not. No need to file it, if you don't love it. If I love it, then I put it in my recipe folder and change the title of the note to the categories I have designated within my recipe folder.

So let me explain recipe categories. It's the same way you would set up your traditional recipe book with tabs or the different chapters in an actual recipe book. I use the following categories:

• Main Dish
• Appetizer
• Side Dish
• Vegetable
• Dessert
• Breakfast
• Soup

OK back to the title. I change the title to the following format - Recipe Category | Title of Recipe Name - Source of Recipe

This way all the same categories appear together. This is just my method. The sky is the limit with Evernote on how you want to organize your recipes.

When I get ready to cook, I can pull them up on my phone or ipad. This has been especially helpful when we go out of town and we are looking for something to cook.

So in my very own OCD way, I have made one of my least fun "things to do" more enjoyable with a little effort, organization & Evernote. I promise you will never go back to that three ring binder.

Side Note – Do you keep magazine because you like the recipes? Well just search those recipes on the web and clip them. Then recycle all of that old magazines that are cluttering up your house.

As an added bonus to this very information blog and a thank you for reading all the way through, here are some links to my favorite recipes.

• Grilled Bacon Wrapped Jalapenos - A great appetizer for a party. super easy and quick to prepare.
  http://allrecipes.com/search/default.aspx?qt=k&wt=Grilled%20Bacon%20Jalapeno%20Wraps%20Recipe&rt=r&origin=Home%20Page
• Brie & Sausage Breakfast Casserole - My favorite breakfast casserole EVER. I make this for Christmas morning every year. It's also great if you are hosting a brunch.
  http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/brie-and-sausage-breakfast-casserole-10000000403274/
• Easy Chicken & Dumplings - A great recipe for a cold day. It freezes well too.
  http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/easy-chicken-dumplings-10000001951477/
• King Ranch Chicken Mac & Cheese - Do you get tired of box Velvetta mac & cheese? Well this is the upgrade. It's delicious and it also freezes well. (do you see a pattern here?)
  http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/king-ranch-chicken-mac-cheese-50400000118342/
• Black Bean Salad - A great, fresh recipe. It always makes my summer more delicious.
  http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/black-bean-salad-10000000257591/

For a girl doesn't like to cook, I did have quite a portfolio of recipes that I love. Want more? Leave me a comment. 

Twinkle

I love the twinkle lights of a lighting bugs. It signals to me that summer is here. I'm sitting at my kitchen table, looking our the window and watching the flicker of random lights.

I remember the summer days when my sister and I would make a fort in the middle the of living room. We would use all the dinner room chairs. We would raid the linen closet and pull out all the sheets and towels and spread them over the chairs. Then we would grab mom's canning jars and run outside to collect lighting bugs. We would arrange the jars in the fort so that we would have our night lights. Soon we would fall asleep and wake up the next morning to find all the little bugs dead in their jars. We would learn the next night to punch holes in the lids. We kept the fort erect until mom insisted she needed to vacuum up all the crumbs on the floor from our nighttime snacks.

Those were the lazy days of summer. Thank you tiny bugs for memories.

Excerpt from my journal #1

I love thumbing back through my old journals and finding little thoughts such as this. I'm going to start sharing them more often.

McKenna was about 4 weeks old in the picture
and Jonah would have been just over 2 years.

The days seen to fly by so fast.
My good intentions to do this or that get lost.
I'm happy to do nothing, accomplish nothing.
Just enjoy my new family.
Smiles & giggles from Jonah make me forget all about the laundry,
cleaning the bathroom or putting away dishes.
I wish I could bottle that laughter & open it when I need a "pick up".
It's just so pure & heartfelt.
Who said the house has to be perfectly clean?
A little dirt on the bottom of your foot never hurt anyone.

– Written on March 24, 2008 at 10:37pm

7 ways to stimulate your creativity

Creativity encompasses everything we do in life. People always say that they are not creative but they are. Just because your creativity doesn't land in the form of paint gobs on a canvas, doesn't mean you are not creative. Words are creativity. Fashion is creativity. Arranging a room is creativity. Problem solving is creativity.

It's within you. You just need recognize it and practice it. And here are a few ways to stimulate it ;)

1.  List 10 alternative uses for an everyday item.
2. Take a new route the next five times you set out for a familiar destination. 
3. Pick a word at random from the dictionary and think of all the ways it might relate to a problem you are trying to solve. 
4. Doodle with your opposite hand. 
5. Explore connections between seemingly unrelated things. 
6. Routinely ask: What if? What else? Why not?
7. Make up your own impromptu word games. 

Time away with family

It's not often that I get time away with my mom & sister. We traveled up to a friends cabin in Alabama for four days with all the kids in tow. And these were some of the highlights from our days together –

• Five kids - four girls & one boy
• Three adults
• One dog
• One cabin – The Reeve's Fishing Camp, "Where fishing is not so good & drinking is a hobby"
• One small lake
• Two boat rides
• Roughly ten dead animals hanging throughout the cabin including: deer, boar, raccoon, bobcat, black bear and fish
• Three waterfalls
• Dozen of tadpoles to catch in small puddles
• Two bumps on the head (both my niece, Erin's, incidents)
• One broken clay pot
• Six Band-Aids used for boo-boos
• Ten Yoo-hoos
• One snake under the kayak
• One bobcat (or some kind of large cat) being chase by a fox
• Three peach mojitos that were scraped from the kitchen counter
• Four bottles of wine to unwind in the evening
• One bottle of champagne for AM mimosas
• Zero fish caught by the kids
• Twelve Adirondack chairs
• One afternoon of rain
• Twenty-five blackberries picked
• One local art show in the tiny town of Mentone, AL
• Five sad kids when the trip was over

Easy Craft for a Summertime Accessory

We all get a massive amount of emails from retailers letting us know that today is the last day for an extra 30% your purchase. I usually mass delete those emails. Today, an email from The Gap caught my eye. It was a DIY for a summer tote (see below graphic for instructions).

I think this craft is super cute & easy. We all have t-shirt in our drawers that we like but just don't wear or might have a tiny hole in them. I have several so I picked one and spent a few minutes and created my own summer tote. I think I might try this with some of my kids t-shirt so they can have their own as well. Watch out beach, here we come!

Idea Credit: Gap.com. Critique of my handy work –  I would have cut the sleeves closer to the seam. It seems like now there is not a lot of room for anything to be stored in the tote. I also would have ironed the t-shirt before I start to ensure that I did get "clean" cuts.  I have a few jagged edges. I would cut the bottom strips smaller than an inch as well and knot them real tight. Would I carry this to be beach? Yeah, sure.