Spring reds

I love baking, but have somehow missed out on the spring glory that is Rhubarb. All of my favorite food bloggers have been cooking up decadent pastries, pies and panna cottas (I might be guilty of spending far too much time lusting over this over at Tartelette's blog..) so I thought I'd give it a try. The husband was in the field all week for training eating crappy Army food (mmm MREs) and, as this is one of his favorite pies, I thought he deserved it. I've actually never even tasted rhubarb (gasp) so once we slice into my first strawberry rhubarb pie attempt after dinner, I'll let you know what I think.

I didn't know where to begin as far as finding a recipe, so I initially turned to the recipe collection on Williams Sonoma's website. While they rarely disappoint, I couldn't help but think their particular pie recipe looked a bit boring, so I headed over to the Food Network site to see what they had. This was the winner (I mean, who can resist strawberries and rhubarb mixed with cinnamon, lemon zest and all that lovely butter...).
I have a fantastic gluten free pie crust recipe (found in Gluten Free Gourmet Comfort Foods cookbook) that I'm too lazy to type out here. Generally it works like a dream but the humidity must be low or something today because we had an all out fight. Instead of the usual silky dough, I ended up with a pile of crumbles that, in the end, I did manage to force into two crusts. It didn't make for the most gorgeous pie (thankfully you can't see my awesome patch jobs on the bottom crust) but man, that crust is so flaky it's unreal! I also threw some cinnamon and nutmeg into the crust to spice it up a bit.
It smells incredible and the little bit of filling that bubbled over was immediately swiped up with my finger...and it tastes fantastic.

I should mention that we are also having Pioneer Woman's meatloaf for dinner b/c J loves meatloaf and hers is positively decadent. I mean, who else has the balls to wrap her meatloaf entirely in bacon...that woman is my hero.

So before I eat my arm off (the smell coming from my kitchen is having that effect..), I'll leave you with a little project I did last week: I have one of the best neighbors ever living upstairs whose mothering skills I hope to emulate someday. I was making my mom a flower arrangement for Mother's day so I thought I'd make her one too..

Again, I'm too lazy to write out a tutorial on how to make the butterfly but it's pretty simple...I just covered some pages out of an antique french book (the literary gods are going to get me someday for cutting it up, but until then, it makes for great crafting material) with some tissue paper, cut out the butterfly wings, glued them on a little wire body that i made and stuck the little guy into the bouquet.

And with that, I'm off to gorge myself on some seriously amazing food.
And hang out with my awesome husband who I haven't seen in a week...YAY!

Granola bars on a breezy Friday afternoon

Today was another quiet day--carless and still no baby. The car problem will be remedied Sunday evening when my [completely awesome] parents arrive from SC with my beloved VUE. The baby problem...well, we'll see when that goes down.

Springtime in Kansas has proven to be absolutely gorgeous. Today was slightly on the cool side, probably mostly due to the fairly stiff breezes all day. I decided to make homemade granola bars and the scent of baking oats, cranberries, apricots and honey paired with the gusts of wind coming through my window kind of evoked a bit of Fall. I imagine Fall here is beautiful...

Here is my first attempt at granola bars:

I don't think I'll ever buy the packaged kind again!
The thing I love about these is that you can put whatever you feel like in them AND be totally sure they're gluten free. I used gf oats, cashews, chopped dried apricots, dried cranberries and puffed flax (puffed rice would be good too, but flax is full of all sorts of wonderful nutrients)...the binder was honey, a little butter and a little vanilla.
Next time I think I'll probably make them a bit thinner so they're crunchier and stay together better (these just sort of fall apart, which is also fine since I've just been grazing off the pan all afternoon!).

That was the extent of my excitement today. Hopefully I can convince J to take me to Hobby Lobby so I can get some stuff to work on a couple of projects I have in my head. Oh, and tomorrow is the first Saturday Farmer's Market in Manhattan and I can't WAIT to go!

Finally, I just had to post this beautiful travel baby bed by Lalapanzi. Yes, I'm lusting...

Happy Weekend to you all! Hopefully I'll have a baby by the end of mine.....ha!

Evolution of an empty fireplace

Yesterday I discussed my disdain for the unusable fireplace in my living room...which got me thinking about it even more....and made it impossible for me to go to bed last night without at least attempting to make it look awesome.

This is a rough draft of what the final product will be.

The greenery is temporary, simply a filler until I can get some actual plants to fill in some of the empty space. I'm loving the mirror, as it kind of opens up the cavern a bit. All of the candles are yellow (the color is a bit washed out in this picture). I'm also going to get one or two small paintings to add to the mix from my dear friend Annie (and I'm hoping this one is still available...):

I still welcome your suggestions. I had considered using it as a bookshelf (good call Rachel!) but this would require way more cleaning than I'm willing to do (lots of historic soot!).

nesting much?

Let's face it, weeks 37-40 are the most brutal weeks of the pregnancy. Everything is a major operation, from turning over in bed to walking down the hall, not to mention the waiting. Just waiting.

Today, however, I apparently began "nesting". The dishes have been piling up in my sink for the past few days because my belly has become a barrier between me and any waist-high counter space, and I've generally lacked any desire whatsoever to do them anyway. The bathrooms were bordering on almost being disgusting, and the laundry was to the top of the hamper. None of this has phased me much until this morning, when I woke up horrified that I'd let the place go and determined to rectify the situation before lunch. So as I write this, my house is sparkling and I also hung all the artwork in the dining room that had previously been chilling on the floor.

I also managed to completely exhaust myself, so here I am sitting on my couch, contemplating my next decorating move. Which brings me to my latest source of consternation--the cavernous eyesore, otherwise known as the fireplace that doesn't work but can't be removed because my house is a historical landmark.

Perhaps in an effort to ease the blow of a fireplace that must forever remain useless, the housing people left us that incredibly high quality piece of crap screen and a couple of tools to at least make it look legit (both will be finding new homes in the basement shortly). I am now left with the challenge of figuring out how to decorate it without it looking cliche (read: candles) and without it being a hazard for crawling babies eventually (read: candles, most live plants, just about anything else you can think of). I may give myself a pass on the latter since she won't be crawling for some time and since, knowing myself, I'll need a change of scenery about the time she does become mobile.
So if you're reading this, feel free to give your ideas. I'm not entirely against plants and candles, I just don't want them done in the way that every other new housewife does them.

Speaking of plants, I stole a few clippings from the landscaping in my yard and popped them in a couple of spice jars (my new favorite bud vases).

There really is nothing better than fresh flowers sprinkled throughout the house.

And last but not least, my walls would be extremely happy if either of these lovely Etsy finds were hanging on them...I mean, how cool is that lightbulb vase??

Light Vase by JohnCorcoranDesign
Hanging Test Tube Vase by PigeonToeCeramics

Zen

This post is entitled 'Zen' because today I'm going to give you all the tour of my [stubbornly] unborn child's nursery and it happens to be the only room in the house that is completely unpacked, put away and decorated. Sometimes I go in there and sit on the floor and soak up the calm while silently trying to will my water to break.

Before I get to that though, I have to take a quick detour to talk about my breakfast, which was inadvertently awesome (hey, when all you do is sit around waiting for your water to break, a fantastic breakfast can be an enormous diversion!).

Last night, I made a giant pot of homemade soup, but was fairly disappointed when I realized I had no buttermilk to make biscuits with. I scavenged the cabinets and came up with a gluten free pancake mix that could, supposedly, also be made into muffins. I figured I'd give it a try but after following the directions explicitly, I ended up with something the consistency of play dough that has sat out too long. Not to be deterred, I went ahead and baked them, figuring they would kind of melt and spread and puff up like normal muffins do. The husband and I watched as the little muffin balls remained staunchly in their original form and began to resemble small rocks as the timer ticked closer to 0:00.

We decided to try them anyway and, to our amazement, they actually tasted like decent shortbread! Soooo this morning, after stumbling into the kitchen all bleary eyed and contracting and hungry, I did what any pregnant woman (or my mom) would do and tossed a couple of the shortbread muffin rocks into a bowl, covered them with strawberries and doused the whole thing with a healthy shot of cream. And then I did it again, and would've done it a third time, but my strawberries are all gone.

So there you have breakfast.

Now on to the Wee One's room..

I had this room painted and the dresser refinished within 3 days of us moving into our new house. No doubt this is the reason I ended up in the hospital on Terbutaline a few days later, but I digress...

I had absolutely no desire to have a pink, frilly or otherwise overtly girly room so I chose artwork that I knew I wanted on her walls and kind of based the color scheme off of those--very loosely. I wanted a very light, airy look, which ended up working out well since the room itself is quite small. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves, with a few comments interjected here and there.

This is the whole room, taken from her doorway:

We like books, what can I say:

We also like glass jars full of tiny baby socks. I recovered the lampshade with fabric from Heather Bailey's delightful fabric line. I highly recommend finding some excuse to buy some pieces, as they are beyond lovely! The wallflowers were a local boutique find, but they are made by Umbra and come in several different finishes. 

Next stop is the dresser. Oi, the dresser. This was a last minute Goodwill find that I picked up a week before we left California. It was in pretty rough shape, so I decided to go ahead and start sanding it down and refinishing it while I waited for the movers to come later in the week. Being the brilliant soul that I am, I failed to lead paint test the thing until I had most of the top sanded, and of course, the test came up positive. The husband and I decided to go ahead and at least try to get the paint stripped off before it went on the moving truck (brilliant idea #2) which ended up being more of a hassle than we expected. We still managed to get it stripped and primed..just in time for it to rain non-stop for the remaining 3 days before the big move. The day the movers came to load the truck, it was still tacky and I told my neighbor that he could just keep the thing (I wanted to kick it off a cliff at that point..). The movers laughed, stuck it out in the sun and it was dry by the time they were finished, so on it went. Thankfully, it all ended well and it is now the perfect little accent for the nursery, complete with ceramic hardware from Anthropologie and a very large Crocodile from Ikea.

These are the pieces of art that were the basis for the whole room: the beautiful fish were created by Annalisa Fink and the two smaller ones were finds from Venice, Italy and Carmel, CA. The two beautiful prints are the work of my dear friend (and artist extraordinaire) Cory Godbey and can be bought here for your own enjoyment.

A little diversion from the decor: We will be cloth diapering, and I dare you to find anything cuter for your baby to poop on than these lovely little numbers from Bum Genius and Thirsties. I buy all of my diapering paraphernalia from the wonderful cloth diaper queens at Baby Cotton Bottoms in Colorado Springs, CO.

Ok, almost done. This rocking chair was mine as a child, made with love by my dear grandfather and used/abused with as much love by me. I really really want to paint it, but I'm struggling with sentimentality issues. Maybe someday. In the meantime, I just dressed it up a bit with a little handmade cushion and an alpaca teddy bear from a street vendor in Bolivia.

Aaaand last but not least, the crib. I fell in love with this gorgeous canopy crib from Babyletto back in the first trimester and was originally going to deck it out with some filmy white cotton curtains I have from a former apartment. And then reality hit and I learned about babyproofing (double Oi) which is another post in and of itself. So I spent quite a while trying to come up with something that wouldn't choke, suffocate or otherwise do major harm to my child, while also making the canopy bed actually worth having. This was the result, and while I'm not 100% happy with it, it's not bad, and gave me an opportunity to bring a bit more yellow to the room.

So there you have it. I'll leave you with one of the most beautiful nurseries I've seen pulled off in a while, courtesy of Ohdeedoh. I've lusted after it all day and contemplated repainting my own nursery a lovely greyish plum color...but I'll refrain.

                                                                 full post and more pictures here

Kansas

I can distinctly remember the moment several years ago when, on a family road trip across country, I stared out the window at the bleak flatness off I-70 and said to God, "God, I'll go just about anywhere in the world you want me to go, but please don't ever make me live in Kansas". On a subsequent trip to Colorado, upon passing the exit for Fort Riley, I remarked to my parents how bad I felt for the people who got stuck stationed there.

Or rather, for the people who got stuck stationed here.

As fate, luck, karma, but most likely God would have it, I'm currently attempting to take up blogging again (for the 4739294th time) from my house here in the middle of Kansas. My life as I know it has taken a drastically different turn from the one I assumed it would take once I graduated with my BSN last December. I entered nursing school extremely single with the intention of getting the degree and getting the heck out of the US, preferably to the most remote, 3rd world location I could find, where I would live with the natives, help them birth their babies, learn to be an amazing photographer and keep one of those fascinating blogs that makes the middle of the Sudan seem like a place where anyone would want to go for the rest of their life (I blame my friend Sarah for that last part).
Several things happened though:
1) I found out I couldn't eat gluten and that it was the cause of several random but potentially serious ailments I'd been dealing with. The areas of the world I had been looking at survive off of a lot of wheat. So, end of story.
2) I met this guy in the Army and married him...within a couple of months of meeting him. In case that wasn't enough to upset my precious set of plans, I...
3) got pregnant.

The fact that I married into the military really didn't shock me since I'd grown up in that life. However, I was never going to be that girl who got married and then got pregnant and then *gasp* decided to be a stay at home mom.

But I am, and I did, and I'm going to be...and I couldn't be more happy.

Back to the Kansas issue. As I pointed out earlier, Kansas has always been a waste of a state to me: there is no ocean, it's flat, and it appears entirely monochromatic (at least from I-70).
When we got our orders to move here, I decided I was going to have to do everything in my power to find all the wonderful aspects of Kansas, otherwise three years was going to drag.

And so that's what I hope to do with this blog from now on...if I can actually manage to keep it up once the baby shows up.

I'll go ahead and start by saying that I actually love it here so far. I-70 isn't a very good indicator of the rest of the state, as evidenced by the fairly lush green trees here on post, the hills (my running shoes can't WAIT for those!) and the amazing sunsets that seem to go on forever. There are lakes, rivers, creeks, cattle, farms and actually a lot of decent sounding events in the surrounding areas.

I'll be posting about these as we get to explore and experience them. In the meantime, I'm kind of preoccupied with the goings on in my uterus and am waiting to either go into labor or have my water break or both. Either would be more than welcome right about now, and since I'm stranded at home without a car, you'll probably have to put up with me raving about various baby products or posting pictures of my house which has yet to be completely unpacked and cleaned.

lovely bikes

Lots of you, please click on that so I can win one of these!