Happy Sunday!

In my never-ending search for healthy recipes I stumbled upon RHONY Bethenny Frankel's website.  I have always been a fan of hers.  Her lack of filter is great and she always ends up saying whatever she is thinking.  I cannot wait for her show, Bethenny Ever After, season premiere next Monday, February 28th.  It cannot come soon enough.

Anyway, I am a fan of hers on facebook and one of her latest recipes popped up on my newsfeed.  This led me to her website where I found a number of delicious sounding healthy option recipes.  This Low Fat Creamy Mushroom Pasta sounds great and I cannot wait to try it.  My only concern is the whole wheat pasta.  I have been experimenting with whole wheat pasta recently, and while the taste is great, the consistency is a little off.  My whole wheat pasta wont bend once it is cooked.  It stays stick straight making it very hard to get on your fork and eat.

Does anyone have any recommendations for a whole wheat linguine or fettucini that still bends and curls like regular pasta?  Thanks Bethenny for the recipe!  I will let you all know how I feel about this one once I have made it.  In the mean time, any whole wheat pasta recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Sorry today's post has been so random, but I'm almost done.  I promise.  My last little bit for today is my slight frustration in the fact that I cannot purchase Bethenny Frankel's Skinnygirl Margarita here in North Carolina.  Bummer!!  I have really been wanting to try this low calorie alternative, but my only option is to order Skinnygirl Margarita from New York and have it shipped.  For a soon to be college graduate trying to save her money, this is not a promising option.  Someone please send some Skinnygirl to the South!

Hump Day

You know what sucks about Wednesdays?
Top Chef.

That's all I have to say about that.

Super Bowl Snacks and Home-Made Party Hats

Super Bowl... Great success!  There was great food, great people, a great game and thanks to some inspiration from one of my favorite blogs, Aunt Peaches, the fun also included some great home-made party hats!  But we'll get to those a little later!

I have such a nice boyfriend who willingly 

participates in all of my silly ideas.  

Ahhhh the food!!  All of last week I was anxiously awaiting the day of the Super Bowl for the simple fact that I was a great excuse to fill the house with junk food!  With the diet plan that I have been on, junk food has been strictly prohibited.  An excuse for  taco dip, chicken wings, and cornbread were joyfully welcomed!  I did manage to include some healthy options on the menu as well.  Cauliflower crust pizza and a healthy black bean and ground turkey chili.  Now the cauliflower pizza might sound super gross, I know, but it was actually very good!  I was so pleased with the outcome that I will share! 

Cauliflower Power Pizza (This is the name I have given the recipe)

Ingredients Needed:  

• head of cauliflower
• 2 eggs
• 2 cup package of FF mozzarella
• low carb marinara sauce
• 1/2 lb. ground turkey
• mushrooms
• bell pepper
• (any other veggies you want, I added some diced onions)
• olive oil
• italian Seasoning
• garlic Salt

What to do! 

- preheat oven to 450

- cut up head of cauliflower into smaller pieces and put into a food processor

- make at least 2 cups of processed cauliflower

- cook on stovetop in saucepan with olive oil and garlic salt for at least 10 minutes (make sure not to cook on too high of heat; you don't want to fry the cauliflower)

- combine cooked cauliflower, both eggs and 1 cup of the FF mozzarella in a separate bowl

- spray cookie sheet with pam and spread the mixture over the pan

- bake for 15-20 minutes edges do get very brown but crust should look overall golden

- while baking the crust, brown the ground turkey with italian seasoning and garlic salt

- Take crust out and assemble pizza with sauce, veggies, meat, and 1 cup of FF mozzarella

-Broil until cheese is melted

- and Voila!

The pizza tastes great and you can't even taste the cauliflower.  I did have a  problem with the crust wanting to stick to the pan and not getting crunchy enough, but I think if I make the recipe again, I might try and make the pizza more like a casserole in individual ramekins.  This way I can allow the crust to cook longer in the dish without worrying about having to try and get it off of the bottom of the pan.  It was an overall success.  

The party hats, however, were the hit of the party!  My papaw was so tickled with his hat that he took it into work the next day to show all of the guys.  He couldn't stop texting me and telling me how good my chili and cornbread were and how everyone he told or showed his party hat to loved it. 

I pulled inspiration for the hats here.  Obviously Aunt Peaches' party hats are much fancier and prettier than my Super Bowl hats, but the concept is the same.  

I decided to use already sparkly party hats purchased from the dollar store in team colors.  I then asked for all of my party guests to rsvp with which team they would be rooting for and went to work finding pictures online of football players from each team and pictures of my guests' faces.  I cut out the faces and football players and replaced the players' heads with the faces of my party guests.  After glueing the newly formed players to the hats i simply added a pom pom ball to the top of each party hat.  :)!

An Unexpected Treat

Today was a super yucky no fun day. Until… while wondering around from store to store shopping in the rain, I headed into Target.  Now I normally have very mixed feelings about Target.  While the merchandise is usually of higher quality than what one would find at say a Walmart, the prices are sometimes a little steep.  But never the less, aimlessly shopping in Target is so fun!  Where Target really takes the cake for me, and today helped turn my no good very bad day into a so fun very good day, is the $1 special section.  The goodies that one can stumble upon here are endless.  Sometimes the selection is not that great with plastic farm animals being one of the better choices, but sometimes treasures can be found.  Now this is not to put down the farm animals, I actually plan to use them in one of my future crafts (be sure to look for it soon).  Bottom line, you never know what you are going to get.  That’s the fun.  It’s almost like a treasure hunt.  Today was a good-find day!  Hooray! This was just the treat I needed to make me smile on this otherwise miserable, cold, rainy day.  

My so cute, new $1 note cards from Target.  I know you must be jealous.  I can't wait to write my friend Anna a letter tomorrow so I can send her one of these little beauties!

A Diet Cheater's Pancake Paradise

Yesterday’s adventure was an experiment in a breakfast classic.  Pancakes.  Let me preface this with the fact that my mom is on a new crazy health food diet, which I have ended up, half willingly, participating in.  

However, when I get a hankering for something tasty, there is usually little that can stand in the way of me obliging my taste buds.  For sure, this diet did not stand a chance against my desire for a stack of pancakes that has been growing over the last week.  This is where the need for an experimental pancake came in.

(Side note: Evidently pancakes are thought to date back to prehistoric caveman times when the cave people mixed carb-rich seed flours with protein-rich liquids like milk, and then cooked the combo.  They obviously missed out on the Aunt Jemima Maple Syrup memo, but still.  How can some new-age diet fight a tradition as deeply rooted in human history as the pancake? Easy. It can’t.)

So once I reduced myself to being the diet cheater that I am, I began looking for a way to ease the guilt, and what I came up with was not only nutritious, but incredibly delicious!  So I obviously must share the secret to this success.

1)    Begin by gathering the ingredients listed on the back of the Bisquick box.

2)    I decided to make a half batch, so I adjusted accordingly.  You may do as you please.

3)    This is where it gets funky.  Substitute part of the required Bisquick mix with a pack of Maple and Brown Sugar High Fiber Quaker Oatmeal.

4)    Next add blueberries to the batter. (The biggest juiciest ones you can find.) 

5)    Put those puppies on the griddle and flip away.

Tip:  This is very important! And according to my mother, everyone knows this. But never use Pam on a calphalon griddle.  I found this out the hard way yesterday when I RUINED my mother’s $70 griddle.  Needless to say she was/is a little less than pleased with me.  While this was definitely a little bit of a damper on the success of my new “healthy” recipe, I can’t let it completely ruin my excitement.

The oatmeal pack not only added 40% of my daily needed fiber, which is pretty awesome within itself, but it also added a brown sugary mapley taste to the batter. Yum!  These oatmeal blueberry pancakes provided me with a tasty, fiberful (yes I know this is not a real word, but it fits well here), and antioxidant rich breakfast.  It left my taste buds singing and my guilty conscience silenced.  I recommend this to other dieters feeling a little naughty.

Welcome!

I never imagined that I would be the girl to write a blog, however, I often find thoughts and ideas rushing around my head itching to escape and to be created.  My stepfather and I call these busy thoughts the squirrels running around in our heads.  Appropriate for the title of my blog, I know.  And better yet, my squirrels have been running on turbo speed recently.  I have endless ideas of who I want to be when I grow up, what I hope to accomplish, where I want to live, what I find inspiring, what books I want to read, what I want to make for breakfast tomorrow morning and what DIY project I will take on next.  I am about to graduate from college at the end of this spring.  This blog will follow me in my quirky and fun quarter-life crisis as I begin this scary transition into adulthood.  It will also follow my exploration of all things culinary and DIY related.  This will be my place to reflect on my life, relish in my successes, laugh at my flops, share my dreams, and be creative.  I hope you will join me for this journey.  It promises to be a rocky and be-jeweled road.