Peasy Pinterest Recipe

I made a Pinterest recipe for my family! And it was so Easy Peasy. It's so great to actually use a few of the couple thousand pins on my boards. Yeah - I have almost 3,000 pins right now on my 36 boards. Slightly out of control? Maybe. Definitely necessary? Oh absolutely.

So I made Oven Baked Chicken Fajitas, with cheesy skillet corn and Spanish rice. And since I'm too lazy to copy down the whole fajita recipe again into this blog post, please visit the link I've included... :)

They turned out so amazingly good. I'm not trying to toot my own horn or anything (OK so maybe I am a little bit), but that stuff was delicious! I think it turned out exactly how I wanted it, except I made it non-spicy for my non-spicy-liking-family. If I could have added in some more spiciness, it would have been exceptional. Maybe next time I'll just sneak some red pepper flakes in there, just for fun. (Except my family reads this blog, so now they know the secret...)

The cheesy skillet corn however was a variation of my own from a recipe I found, so I will actually share that. Although it's super duper easy, so it's not exactly a "recipe," but more "guidelines."

Saute diced onions and diced yellow squash in some olive oil in a large skillet. Once the onions and squash start to brown and become more transparent, add in 2 cans of sweet, yellow corn, and half a can of diced (drained) tomatoes. Spice it all up with chili powder, cumin, garlic powder, salt and pepper. Once it's all hot, serve it up and sprinkle a healthy dose of shredded Mexican cheese on top! So yum.

And then I took the easy route with the Spanish rice, and made some out of the little baggies. I think the brand was Knorst? Anywho, it was BOGO at Publix, so obviously it was calling my name at just $1.49 for enough to feed my 4-fam, and still have leftovers. Score!

This was also one of the easiest meals ever to make, since you just dice up the peppers, onions & chicken and then throw it in a dish with some spices to bake. Easy Peasy. And then the same with the corn dish - some simple dicing, and then some simple stirring is all it takes to create a great tasting meal. I'd recommend this Pinterest recipe and my other side dishes for sure!

So if yall like Mexican inspired meals at home, try this stuff out, and then of course let me know how it goes!
Happy Fiesta Eating! :)

Packed Full of Fun

Rock the Universe, well - Rocks. Duh. The weekend is always Packed Full of Fun. It's a non-stop weekend full of fun and crazy and TONS of people, and concerts and eating and roller coasters. And I love it.

We get to go to both Islands of Adventure and Universal Studios and it's a blast. This is the 8th year I've gone to Rock the Universe! And I'm still not tired of it yet. Its such an awesome weekend, and I always enjoying taking my youth group down there! No matter how many times I go to the parks, the rides are always fun and exhilarating and makes me so excited!

We spent about 7 hours at Universal on Friday night, and then about 16 hours at both parks on Saturday! It was definitely a long day, but it was totally worth it. The only concert that we actually stood at and "attended" was tobyMac, which was amazing. I've seen him probably about 15 times, and this time I think was one of the best! He's awesome, and I'll always love his music. Some of the others we heard around the park were Tenth Avenue North, Family Force 5, Newsboys, Switchfoot and Reliant K. So much awesomeness.

Also, we didn't lose any kids! Or have any injuries or health issues. Thank the Lord for those blessings!

Unfortunately, I didn't take as many pictures this year as I would have liked to, but here are a few...

On a side note - I was on the verge of getting sick, and it happened a little bit more over the crazy, exhausting weekend. So today I stayed home from work and rested. I'm feeling so much better now, and will be back to my regular schedule tomorrow. But today was great just watching some movies, and a couple episodes of Say Yes to the Dress, while painting my nails. I needed this mental and physical health day, and I'm feeling much better now! Thank the Lord for restful recovery days.

Pasta Paradise

During lunch the other day, Jeff and I watched part of an extremely mouth-watering show on the Travel Network, called Pasta Paradise. Holy moly - talk about torturous! Seeing all the yummiest looking pastas, and I'm just over here eating a turkey sandwich on a hot dog bun because we didn't have enough bread, and some BBQ Fritos. Oh the torture...

So even though I've never been to any of these places, I'm kind of doing a restaurant review, based solely on a short TV show. Here's some of the yummiest restaurants they showed while I was watching...

1. Bricco - in Boston, Massachusetts. The owner of this restaurant also owns ten other places around Boston, and all of them are Italian! And on top of that, he owns a little shop where a sweet little old lady HAND MAKES all of the pastas, all 50 different varieties! Whoa that's a lot of options, and a LOT of yumminess. Everything at this restaurant looked seriously delicious.

2. S'mac - in New York City, New York. Where all the best restaurants seem to congregate... (This was by far my favorite of the few that I saw, and the one I would most likely visit in real life.) Their specialty is mac-n-cheese, and only mac-n-cheese. But it comes in 12 different varieties! And they all look sooo good. You can get the original version with cheddar and american cheese, or you can branch out into something a little less traditional like Masala or Mediterranean. YUM. Or you can get a sampler with 8 of the 12 in a sectioned-off skillet. This would be my choice, with a friend to share it with of course... My eyes were bugging out of my head at the yumminess, when Jeff casually turned around and said, "Uh, so when do you wanna visit NYC?" I was like "Immediately. Let's go immediately." 

3. Marino - Hollywood, California. Once again, this place looks amazing and delicious. And I mean really, it's an Italian restaurant, that serves a ton of pasta, so what's not to love really? This one's a little pricier, but it's in LA, and I'm just positive that my wallet would go into immediate shock there, so why not just splurge a bit anyways?

Then there were others on the show that I didn't get to see before my lunch hour was over. I'm quite confident however that all of these were sure to look and taste just as wonderful and delicious as the rest of them. Click on their names below to check out the others as well...

Patsy's Pizza // Filomena Ristorante // La Dolce Vita // Lasagna Restaurant

Writing about this now and drooling over all of the pictures, I'm of course hungry, and would kill for some of that tempting mac-n-cheese. Why, oh why can't pasta be a health food and make me skinnier, instead of plumper? That's not kosher with me. Can someone work on changing that, please?! And thank you :)

Happy Friday, and happy pasta eating! 

(All pictures in this post were found through Google Images, none of them are my own.)

Praiseworthy

Hey guys, guess what? I'm starting a "series." A lot of "popular" bloggers have certain days that they do certain things. One that I follow does "5 Fave Friday," another one that I actually participate in is "Mani Monday." Well, I will be doing my own, and it will be "Thoughtful Thursdays." I don't always post deep, meaningful things, but I want to do it more often. So every Thursday I'll be sharing some scripture and some thoughts that are just a little bit more important than my usual randomness. But really, it's the scripture that's the most important.

Made this simple little deal with PicMonkey, of course :)

So last night in youth Chad brought us another good lesson. This time it was on temptations. Dun, dun dunnn... always such a weighty and difficult topic, but hopefully the kids listened, heard the Holy Spirit within the message, and will be able to apply (or at the very least remember) some of the things we talked about. Temptations are impossible to avoid, just like those trials we face that I talked about last week. Both trials and temptations will always come our way. The tricky part is how we choose to handle those things.

For Christians the topic of "gray areas" is often one that is avoided, because it's just so...well gray. It's too confusing and the lines are usually so blurry. And it gets even more muddled throughout different denominations within Christianity. Here's the thing - it shouldn't be that difficult. A simple scripture will help you determine if a certain situation is appropriate or not...

"Finally brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable - if anything is excellent or praiseworthy - think about such things." --Philippians 4:8

If anything we do isn't PRAISEWORTHY, then it probably shouldn't be done. Wow. That's a serious claim, right? And let's not pretend that I live like this all the time. Wouldn't it be great if I could say that I only ever do things that bring praise to our Savior?! Well that would definitely be a lie - which wouldn't be praiseworthy.

There are so many times I mess up and sin, and give into temptation, but luckily for me (and ALL of us), we have a loving and merciful Father who will forgive us every single time, if all we do is simply repent and ask. What an amazing thing! So whenever we do give into temptations (because let's face it - we're ugly, sinful humans so it's bound to happen quite regularly), our gracious Lord forgives us.

But in the meantime, committing this scripture to memory, and recalling it in times of temptations and gray areas, may just help us make the right decision, rather than giving into that temptation and sinning.

Short cut to remember this long list -- If it aint praiseworthy, don't do it. Maybe I'll try to make that a motto for myself or something. Or maybe for our whole youth group? I will also be working on memorizing that list though, which will be the second one towards my goal of six before my birthday. Yay scripture verses!

So, what do yall think of my new series, Thoughtful Thursdays?! :)

Edited to add -- this will now be a link-up from now on! Hopefully I'll actually get a few other blogger ladies to join in with me, and make this a regular thing! I'm adding the linky tool to this one, just to see if the code works out...

Pigskin, Popcorn & Portraits

I really don't feel  quite like doing a big long post with a ton of writing and words, so I'll do a quick one to sum up my long Labor Day weekend.

Friday night = impromptu date night at TGI Friday's (shared a meal to save room for popcorn of course) and seeing "Moonrise Kingdom." Overall, we both enjoyed the movie, but it's certainly not for everyone. But I really like those artsy/indie films! So I do think I'd like to own it though when the time comes!

Saturday morning = my friend Heather did end up taking my pictures! Here's a few of my favorites for you :) Get used to seeing these, because I'll be using them all over the place for quite a while! (The second one is my absolute favorite!)

Saturday afternoon/night = lunch with my parents, then some quick errands around town with the boyfriend. We scrambled last minute finding some tickets to the FSU game, but lucked out and got 2 for $20 from a friend of his families! Yay! Then we went to the tailgate of some of his co-workers, and man, do they ever know how to tailgate! Sooo much food! And tons of people and kids, and tents and TV's with a satellite. They were serious man. But we had a good time, and FSU won big time (69-3) so of course it was fun!

Sunday = teaching 3rd grade Sunday school with my sister while my parents were out of town; big family lunch with Jeff's family since his aunt and uncle were here from out of town; then some shopping! A new DSW recently opened here, so I got some new gold sandals, because my old ones desperately needed to be retired and replaced. Then we had dinner at Chili's with some friends, and hung out with them that night watching movies. And of course made plans to go to the beach together on Monday for Labor Day!

Monday = beach day at St. George Island with friends and a little one!

At the end of the weekend, we were of course exhausted. But it was worth it, because it was fun! But then again, weekends always are!! Next up - ROCK THE UNIVERSE this weekend in Orlando with my youth group! Always so much fun, and I'm so very excited about it!!