Plum Platinum

My current project is to put all of our photos from the past year and a half (over 2,000!) into a coffee table book.  This is a daunting task, but I know that when I’m finished it will be so nice to have a book of all our adventures.  Thanks to April’s suggestion, I’ve been using the Booksmart program from Blurb and it’s fantastic!  In the past I’ve used iphoto and mypublisher for making photo books.  While these programs are quick and simple, they don’t let you use your own creativity to build a book.  Instead, you have to choose from a certain theme and insert photos into templates.  What I love about Booksmart is the freedom to pick from lots of themes, fonts, backgrounds, and colors.  Plus, within each theme you can alter the position of the photos and design your own layout- I love it!!  The only quirk I’ve found is that I don’t know how to tilt a photo.  The only photo layout options are vertical or horizontal, a little tilt would be nice.

For dinner tonight we tried the Peanut Sesame Noodles from Smitten Kitchen – which has a plethora of yummy recipes.  It was pretty tasty.  I’ve made a few peanut noodle salads in my day, and my favorite is a simple peanut sauce, similar to the Smitten Kitchen recipe, whole-wheat noodles, shredded carrots, cilantro, scallions and crushed peanuts.

The newest obsession in our house: Loose-leaf tea.

There’s a Dutch tea that we recently bought called Lekker Slaapen (literally translates to: good sleeps).  It has an herb called valerian root that knocks you out.  It’s great for a Sunday night, when you can’t seem to get to sleep at a decent hour.

Jason made his famous Oatmeal Blueberry Buttermilk pancakes last weekend. YUM!  Okay, they are actually from a New York Times recipe, but who’s checking?  For a little extra protein he substitutes a 1/2 cup of flour for a 1/2 cup of wheat germ.

I just came across these cute pencils from Paper Pastries.

I’ve been cooking like a mad-woman lately.  I’ll post some new pics shortly.

After talking to Kara about having a craft area/room in our houses, I started looking into some possible designs.  Oh man, I can’t wait!

One of my favorite things to do is spend an evening at home with my hubby playing Carcassonne.  I know it sounds really geeky, but we’re obsessed with this game.  It takes lots of strategy and every game has a different result.  If you haven’t played before, do it soon!  The game really gets interesting with more players.  With 2 people it’s some great competition, but with 4-5 players, it’s more about strategy.      I’m a nerd.

I had to take a picture of my breakfast the other day because it looked so cute in the bowl.  Mango, blueberries, plain yogurt (sweetened with Agave nectar) and granola.  De-lish!

We made some caprese sandwiches the other night that were delicious.  Ripe tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella, fresh basil, sea salt, cracked pepper, olive oil and balsam vinaigrette all placed onto some warm bread.  Yum!

Since reading Eating Animals, I’ve really slowed down on eating eggs.   Jonathan Foer talks a lot about the harsh living conditions for chickens that produce almost 99% of the eggs in our grocery stores worldwide.  He also discusses the ways in which “free-range” and “organic” can be used to trick the consumer.

So, I’ve been thinking that it would be fun to have our own chicken coop in the backyard.  How nice would it be to have fresh eggs in the morning?  Plus they’d be coming from  healthy, free range chickens that have their own space outdoors.  Omlet USA has some really cute hen houses!