Homemade Larabars!

I am kind of obsessed with Larabars.  But they are way too expensive.  More than a dollar for one bar?  No thanks.  With the help of the bulk food section of my grocery store, I've set out to make my own Larabars.  I Googled the proportions and off I went.  It seems like in general you want 50% of your bars to be dates, with the other 50% comprising of whatever flavor you are striving for.  1 cup of "stuff" should make roughly 3 bars.

My first flavor I tried to duplicate was peanut butter and jelly, which are my all time favorite Larabars.  My recipe (this made 5 bars, but if I made them a little thinner this easily could have been 6):
1 cup dates
1/2 cup peanuts
1/2 cup raisins (I wanted cherries, but they were sold out of dried cherries)
1 spoonful of creamy peanut butter
Pinch of kosher salt

The uncut product

Using my food processor, I mixed the dates, raisins, peanut butter, and salt until it formed a sticky ball, which I then transferred to a piece of plastic wrap.  I then chopped up the peanuts in the food processor, and added those to the plastic wrap.  I folded the plastic wrap over and smushed everything together, then flattened it out.  The result looked surprisingly like Larabars!

I then just cut up the mixture, individually wrapped them in plastic wrap and refrigerated them.  They taste....like Larabars!  These turned out fairly peanutty, so I think next time I might cut back on the amount of peanuts, but still pretty darn good. 

I also bought some dried mango and papaya, so tropical bars are next!

Spotty nails

The inspiration

Found this one on Reddit and thought it would be a fun and easy one to try.

Straight forward enough, right?  The only problem is that I have no dotting tools!  I ended up using a toothpick, a Nintendo DS stylus, and a screw.  Ingenuity at work!

Here's how mine turned out.  Fancy!  Colors used: Wet n' Wild Wild Shine Metallica, Confetti Belle of the Ball, Zoya Noel, Spoiled Toad-ally Amazing, and Spoiled Jewelry Heist. 

My First Glam Bag

So this isn't DIY, exactly, unless learning how to apply shiny powder without looking ridiculous counts.  BUT!  I got my very first Glam Bag today, which is a service that costs $10/month for a bag full of beauty samples and some full sized products.  It is very similar to Birchbox, which I used to subscribe to.  I began getting frustrated with Birchbox after getting some lame samples (coasters, really?).  I also noticed that the boxes were coming later and later in the month, and many of the samples were tiny.  So I switched.  On to Glam Bag!

 

First of all, everything comes each month in a little makeup bag.  This month's bag was pink with hearts for a Valentine's feel.  I use makeup bags quite a bit to store and organize makeup, so I like the idea of getting a new one each month.  

This month's bag also contained:

• X Out Shine Control (an oil free, matte moisturizer)
• NYX Roll on Shimmer in Almond
• Premier Dead Sea Cinderella Mask - this actually came with two little samples, one of the mask and one little thing of eye cream.
• Freeman Facial Mask Sachets in Goji Berry
• Two squares of Ghirardelli chocolate
• and...a $100 gift certificate to NuMe Professional Styling Tools and Hair Extensions.  I checked, and there seem to be zero strings attached to this certificate.  There is no minimum purchase.  Granted, some of their products are on the expensive end, but there are things less than $100 in their online store.

 

One thing I really like is that there were several coupons for full sized products.  The Cinderella mask came with a 50% off coupon code and there was also a coupon for a free gift from XOut.  It's a nice way to reward subscribers, and does make me more likely to purchase products in the future.

The sample sizes are also fairly generous.  These two are basically full sized.  So far, I'm left with a good impression of Glam Bag and it seems like $10 well spent for a little gift to myself each month.

Pantry Turkey Chili

The best thing about experimenting with recipes is that I am gradually becoming more confident in my abilities to cook without a recipe.  I haven't been to the grocery store in several weeks, so tonight I decided to throw together a chili with what I had on hand, and it turned out great, in part because of my willingness to go big with spices.   So here's my recipe!  Warning, many amounts are approximate.  The best part of cooking is playing around with ingredients some.

Pantry Turkey Chili

Ingredients:
1 lb ground turkey
3 cans beans - whatever you have!  I had two cans of pinto beans and one of red beans.
1 red pepper
1 onion, diced
2 garlic cloves, diced
2 cans diced tomato
1 can tomato paste
1 can green chilis
1 cup chicken broth
1 Tbsp chili powder
1 Tbsp cumin
1-2 tsp white pepper, to taste
2 tsp paprika
1 tsp ground mustard
1 Tbsp powdered garlic
1 Tbsp powdered onion
Salt & pepper to taste

Directions:
1.[Optional] Char your red pepper.  This isn't totally necessary, but it adds a bit of depth of flavor.  You can do this directly on your gas burner, or by popping it into the oven under your broiler for a couple of minutes.  Once your pepper is charred, let it cool slightly, remove the charred skin, de-seed and dice.

2. Saute your onion and garlic with a tiny bit of cooking oil of your choice.  If you plan on cooking your chili for several hours, you can actually skip this step, as it will cook in the chili.  Put your onions in your chili pot.

3. Cook your ground turkey in the same pan.  Season with the chili powder and salt & pepper to taste.  Drain grease and add to onions.

4.  Add all of the other ingredients to chili pot; make sure you drain your beans well.  If you prefer a thicker chili, reduce the amount of chicken broth by half.

5.  Cook on high until your chili begins to gently boil.  Reduce heat and cover.  Let the chili simmer for at least a half an hour, stirring occasionally.  The longer it cooks, the better it will taste!

6. Nom with corn chips.

Valentine's Nails!

The inspiration: Valentine's Nails from CherrySue, Doin' the Do

The inspiration!

This manicure was done totally with paper clips, which I love.  I do not always have the money to invest in fancy nail tools, so I really like it when I find household items that can be used to create pretty nails.

The best part?  It actually works!

It took a little bit of playing around to get the hearts to look right, but once I got the hang of it, they ended up looking pretty good.  The curved part of a paper clip really is the perfect shape for creating hearts.

Nail polish used: Wet 'n' Wild Crystalic (blue base), Wet 'n' Wild Candy-licious (pink dots), Essie A-list (red hearts). I tried some yellow hearts (Sugarray Yellow), but they didn't show up well on the blue, so I covered them up although you can still kind of see some of the yellow in this picture.   I did my thumb and pinkie as statement nails with a base of Wet 'n' Wild Candylicious with two coats of Revlon Sparkling.

I also smudged my ring finger nail while taking this picture, but hey, documenting the imperfections is part of this blog too!

Clean Nail Tips

The inspiration, via http://whitebison.wordpress.com

I've been putting a lot of work into learning how to make super clean lines when doing nail tips.  Recently, I've decided to use binder hole reinforcers to keep things straight and clean.  I got the idea from all the blogs suggesting use of the reinforcers for half moon manis.  I've never had good luck using just tape for tape manicures, and I was hoping using the reinforcers would keep things a little simpler.


The results:

First attempt (top), using Zoya Austine and Zoya Freja. 

Second attempt (bottom), using Confetti Belle of the Ball and Confetti Purple Reigns. 

Overall, this technique seems to work in theory, but it certainly isn't as simple as it looks.  First, your base color absolutely needs to be dry.  I would recommend letting it dry for at least 20 minutes.  Second, I recommend first sticking the reinforcer to the skin on your hand before sticking it to your nail, which makes it slightly less sticky and less likely to pull your polish off.

The tricky part is getting the sticker to lay totally flat.  As you can tell from my pictures, if the sticker is even slightly sticking up, it results in lumps and bumps.  But I do think this is totally doable for the average person, with some practice.

Cookie Dough Cheesecake

The inspiration: Philadelphia 3-Step Cookie Dough Cheesecake from "A Thought Chronicle."

The inspiration.

I was looking for a recipe to make for my husband's birthday.  James doesn't particularly care for cake because he hates frosting, but he tends to like cheesecake and cookie dough is his favorite ice cream flavor.  This isn't a particularly daunting looking recipe, and has a bit of a semi-homemade feel to it because of the use of pre-made cookie dough.  But I wondered if it would actually look as nice as the picture.  Could I really get that cookie crust? 

Well....

Yeah, sort of.  I thought I followed the instructions fairly well, but I didn't put the cookie dough close enough together on the crust, so it was like a bunch of cookies just sitting there rather than an actual crust of cookies.







And the taste?  Overall pretty decent, but it was super super rich, especially with the huge chunks of cookie dough in t here.  This is the kind of dessert that tastes really good for one slice, but then you have a whole cheesecake that you can't handle eating.