Welcome to your monthly dose of font love! Whether you’re whipping up a batch of valentines, some sweet subway art or just happen to love typography.
Some super sweet heart fonts:
4 My Lover, AlphaShapes Hearts*, Heartland*, Hearts BRK*, I Love What You Do, Jellyka Love and Passion
Google+This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Mrs. Smith’s for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.
I love pie. I was lucky enough to get the Pie Queen of New York (my title for her) for my Mother-in-Law. But we can’t all be that lucky can we? That’s where Mrs. Smith’s comes in. They contacted me and I was given the chance the try all 4 varieties of the Mrs. Smith’s Signature Deep Dish pies.
They come in Cherry, Peach, Apple and Pumpkin and each has a special topping you add after baking. Unfortunately we couldn’t find the pumpkin so it was a fruity pie party for us. And a big party it was. Those pies are hearty! I picked up the stack of 3 and was a bit shocked by how heavy they were.
My favorite was the apple (maybe because I fell asleep and my husband made it for me so I awoke to the smell of fresh pie) with the crumble topping and the caramel sauce. I’m ashamed to admit it didn’t last more than two days. Sliver by sliver more and more found it’s way into my belly and then it was all gone.
The cherry was very good as well, we took it to a party (we somehow lost the sauce so I didn’t get to taste it, sad face!) and I don’t have any pictures, but it looked just like a cherry pie should. The filling was bright red and had the perfect sweet-tart flavor you expect.
I made the peach pie and took it work where it was polished of pretty quickly. I loved that it had giant chinks of fruit. I love a pie where the fruit really stands out. The peach chunks (and the apple chunks in the apple pie) are big enough that they don’t get lost to the sauce but not unmaneagable so it’s like trying to eat a whole peach. Am I making sense here? I’m apparently very picky about fruit slice size in pies.
This is what the apple pie looked like before baking. See the giant fruits?
The only thing I didn’t care for was the sauce for the peach pie. It was too sweet for me, I thought it tasted a lot like straight confectioners sugar. But my husband enjoyed it so it’s all a matter of personal taste.
Now for the fun part (for you)! The folks at Mrs. Smiths have given me a $50 gift card to Williams and Sonoma to give to a lucky reader AND a voucher for a free signature deep dish pie. Want to win? Check out the Rafflecopter entry below:
For more pie info check out the Mrs. Smiths Facebook and Pinterest pages!
I’ve been cooking a lot for the last month and I wanted to round up my personal kitchen “must haves”. All of our meals have been made from scratch following paleo guidelines: no grain, no sugar, no dairy and no legumes. I’ve been cooking lots of vegetables guys, sooooo many vegetables! And lots of meat, but mostly veggies. Here is a list of the things I use almost every day in no particular order (all amazon links are affiliate links, most things can probably be found at Target or BB&B):
We were lucky enough to get a collection of cast iron for our wedding and we use it every day. If you don’t have any and aren’t quite sure where to start the two pieces I recommend are the largest skillet you can afford (or lift! That stuff is heavy!) and a dutch oven. If you aren’t used to cooking with cast iron there is a learning curve, the pans stay hot for a long time, before they are fully seasoned they really soak up your oil and you can’t throw them in the dish washer. It’s really important that you NEVER put your cast iron away wet. Continue reading »
Google+It’s amazing how much freedom I’ve found in paleo cooking. [Paleo eliminates grains, sugar and dairy, though some people occasionally eat dairy] Mike and I started on January 2nd and we’ve already experimented more with food in 2 weeks than we did in the previous 6 years.
Before our paleo experiment we ate spaghetti, steak and potatoes and macaroni and cheese. Sure we’d pop open a can of corn or beans once in a while but our diet was mostly starch and pretty awful. We both gained lots of weight, we were sick and achy all the time. We made the deal to try paleo for one month without cheating and so far it’s been amazing. We’ve tried new foods and lots of new recipes (I learned my steak-and-potatoes pierogi-adoring Polish husband loves curry). The first week sucked, I was dealing with a major caffeine addiction as well as everything else. But I think we are starting to come out of the ‘brain fog’ and it’s all down hill from here.
I thought I’d share one of our new found favorites. I found this recipe for Crispy Carnitas from Mark’s Daily Apple. If you’re at all curious about paleo check out that website!
If you want to make some of your very own delicious carnitas you will need pork butt, an onion, some cumin, chilli powder, salt and water. Check out the link for the full break down. We used chipotle chili pepper and I ended up needing double the amounts of cumin and chili to cover all my meat. After you pat the seasoning onto the meat you place it in your pot, we used our cast iron dutch oven. After 3 hours we pulled it out, tasted a bit and managed to find the will power to shred it (shreds up with 2 forks) and placed it on a cast iron pizza pan under the broiler until crispy. By this point your kitchen will smell so good you’ll be wanting to eat ASAP.
We each chopped up a romaine heart and topped it with some of the crispy porky goodness, some bell peppers sauteed with more chipoltle pepper and a little bit of salsa. The lettuce was a nice relief from the spicy heat of the meat. I can’t even begin to explain how amazing the meat comes out. See all the little black bits? Those are your crunchy bits of yum.
If you do happen to eat wheat and dairy these would be amazing in soft taco shells with sour cream (I’m drooling now so I’m going to stop with the dairy imagery)
This meal got two energetic thubs up from both the husband and I. We agreed that it’s the kind of meal you could feed non-paleos and they wouldn’t even mind!
Google+Are you ready for my yearly cleaning/organizing tip? Last year I showed you how to hot glue a magnet to a stack of post-it notes for your fridge. This years tip is just as intense.
That’s right. I’m going to show you how to clean a wide-ish mouth bottle without a bottle brush. I got a nifty blender for Christmas that uses these bottles, the blade screws to the top, you flip it and blend then flip it and remove the blender cap, screw on the drinking top and it’s good to go. I’ve been having fruit smoothies for breakfast every day and they are delicious. By the time I’m done I usually end up with some half-dried fruit moosh on the sides.
You might not know this, but I have giant man hands and I can’t get more than 3 fingers in the bottle. There is no way I can get to the bottom of it to scrub off the fruit. I don’t actually own a bottle brush, and even if I did I usually wash my bottles at work and we don’t have one there either.
So I invented a little trick. All you need is a wash cloth and soapy water. Get the wash cloth wet, drop it in the bottle and fill the bottle about 1/4 – 1/3 full with warm water. Cap it and shake. Watch out for high pressure systems, you might need to burp it, preferably not at your face. After a few good shakes the wash cloth should have dislodged most of the pulp.
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Google+Happy New Year everyone! I wish all of you the best in the coming year and I hope you’ll continue to stop by when you get the chance. I’ve got a lot planned for 2013 including organizing, decorating, gardening, cooking (we’re trying out the paleo diet for a while to see how it makes us feel) and of course crafting.
I’ll be kicking off the year with a Fun and Light, Swirly and Girly font collection.
Arizonia, Black Flowers Blossom, Delicious Curls, Dobkin, Gingersnaps, Girls are Weird
Kingthings Wrote, Lovers Quarrel, One Starry Night, Sofia, Sweetly Broken, Windsong
This months featurerd Kimberly Gewsein fonts are: Airplanes in the Night Sky, Janda Swirlygirl
Previous font round ups can be found here:
November - Kimberly Geswein Fonts
Unique Fonts for your Blog or Projects
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Can you believe it’s almost over? The year 2012 I mean. It was my first full year of blogging and I think I might finally be getting the hand of it! Here are the top ten* posts of 2012:
9. Barn Quilt
8. Alternative Wedding Guest Books
7. Vintage Lace Pennant Banner
2. Fourth of July Firecracker Centerpiece (I believe this is my most pinned post to date!)
In other 2012 news, I started a Facebook page and joined twitter. Oh, yeah, and I GOT MARRIED.
Just the little things you know 
*Several word searches would have placed on this list but I left them off to focus on the project-related things
Google+Frosty winter windows, classic Christmas tunes and the flicker of candles in a mirror. Serene and peaceful. Something we all need in our lives around the holidays right? It can be hard to find in the weeks and days before Christmas but this project will help you find a little calmness in the crazy. It was first shared a few days ago with my Christmas hutch decorations.
Can you believe Christmas is in less than two weeks? We just got our Christmas cards tonight (yeah Walmart 1 Hour!) and it brought to mind a somewhat odd but awesome gift I got from my mom last year. It’s simple, cheap and heartfelt. How can you go wrong? It’s the perfect gift for the college bound, new house owner, newly-wed or anyone who recently headed out on their own.
All you need is an address book, a pen, lots o’ addresses and time. Sit down with a hot cup of coffee or cocoa and fill that baby up with the addresses of close friends and family. Tuck in into a stocking or wrap it up with pretty stationary. You might get some raised eye brows but wait until it’s time to send out thank you cards, holiday or birthday cards and then you get to be a hero!
[Even though I give the credit to my mom, I'm pretty sure it wasn't a self-less gift, she just got sick of my sister and I calling her for addresses every time we sent a card]
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