mani monday

Happy Halloween Week!

I hope everyone had a fantastic and festive weekend, because we sure did!
It was awesome! We went to a pumpkin patch, drank apple cider, carved pumpkins, and ate tons of pulled pork!

I'm continuing my Halloween themed nails this week with a bit of a hodge-podge of designs.

Remember last week I told you The Man had a great idea I wanted to try? Well, I tested it out on two fingers but I'm not sure about it...

They're x-ray nails! Get it? They're my bones!
In reality it would only be the nub of the bone but I thought that it wouldn't come across at all without a little more of it.  What do you think? Should I try it with just the tip of the finger bone?

The other four in the photo above are drippy blood nails, but my favorite are the bloody teeth nails!

I love how they came out!

I'll admit that everything together is a little weird but I just had too many ideas to pick one (also the teeth took a while and I was getting tired:) ).

doodle day

Whenever I have a free moment I try to doodle, whether it's using a pen, pencil, paint or pixlr.  So I thought I'd start a new weekly post called "doodle day" where I post one of my drawings, cute, funny, strange or otherwise.

Today's doodle was drawn with pen and pixlr:

mani monday

Boo!!

It's Spooky Spooky time! I haven't done any Halloweeney things yet but I'm hoping to get some pumpkin patching in next Saturday!

To celebrate the month of ghouls and goblins, I've been painting my nails in Halloween themes. This week I went with googly eyes!

Some are bloodshot eyes and some are a lovely piercing blue.  The Man has this fantastic idea for Halloween nails, that I'm hoping to do for next week, but I'm having a hard time coming up with a way to paint them where they come across as the right thing...we'll see!

So, have you already carved pumpkins and put your costume together?

kalie's bride kit

It's been almost a month since Kalie's wedding, and, unfortunately, with all it's craziness I was unable to take any photos, so there's not much to show you until her photographer sends over the real-deal photos.  But in the mean time I can show you Kalie's Bride Kit.

A year ago when my friend Maria got married I found this cute idea and ran with it.  So when my best friend in the whole wide world got married I knew I had to make one for her too.

Kalie's wedding "colors" were navy blue, burlap, and white lace, so I decided to paint the box Navy and for the writing I used a white paint pen.

Just like before I used the ol' graphite transfer method to get an outline of the design and lettering on the top of the box (otherwise it would look like a gift from a child...my handwriting is terrible!).

This time I decided not to wrap all the items in the kit individually.  I think it's more fun to open the box and be instantly presented with all your little gifts. I attached the "descriptions" with navy blue washi tape and a ribbon for the bobby pins, and lined the box with white tissue paper so everything didn't roll around when the box was closed (and going through airport security).

So here is what was inside Kalie's Bride Kit:

"Emergency Bun Repair" - Bobby Pins
"For Minty-Fresh Smooches" - Mini Box of Altoids
"To Calm Your Wedding Day Jitters" - A Tiny Bottle of Wild Turkey Bourbon
"To Dry Your Tears...Or Mine...Or Your Moms" - Polka Dot Tissues
"To Get You In The Mood" - Green M&M's
"No Babies!" - Trojan Condoms
"For the Morning After" - Advil

It was so much fun to put together, and the best part is that you can make it unique to any bride you know.

Have a Great Weekend!!!

mani monday

My first request for nail art was probably the strangest request I'll ever receive (you can take that as a challenge if you'd like).

My wonderfully talented friend Caroline came over on Saturday and had something crystalline in mind.  Lately she has been researching kidney stones, gall stones and other crystals made in the body, trying to find the beauty in the unusual (or grotesque to some).

So to Google we went, where we found our inspiration in some calcium oxalate kidney stones.  Here's a link if you want to look at it, but if that stuff makes you a little squeamish than just scroll down and enjoy the nail art!

 Strange and beautiful.

portland: a city of food

It's been 2 weeks since we got back from our trip to Portland, and I already miss it.

It was a wonderful, and at times very stressful, trip.  The first few days were spent preparing for Kalie's wedding, but after Saturday it was all about relaxing and eating fantastic food!

Seriously the only photos I have of the trip are either of food or my cats, so here are the places we ate...

Sunday morning we woke up and drove out to Montavilla to eat breakfast at RedWood, a new restaurant that just opened in January. It was pretty delicious but it was nothing compared to Country Cat, which is only a half block away.

The best part of breakfast was, hands down, the Oatmeal waffles we ordered for the table.

I'm pretty sure that they were deep fried.  They had the perfect crunch and the most delicious flavor.

Monday we woke up with the intention of going to ____ for breakfast.  But after waiting outside for 20 minutes with no one to tell us how much longer it would take we decided to ditch that plan and head over to Helser's on Alberta.

My favorite part of the meal was the Scotch Egg I ordered on the side.

I Love Scotch Eggs!! It's like the perfect breakfast all wrapped up and deep fried.  Just add a dab of mustard and you're good to go!

After Helser's we headed down to Sellwood to meander around some antique stores and we stopped into Jade Bistro to grab a cup of tea.

The food looked so delicious that, even though we had just finished breakfast, The Man ordered a barbecue pork bao.

We didn't have time to go back for a real meal, but it's definitely on the list for next time we visit.

Our last full day in town we had our traditional Fat City Cafe breakfast, and it was perfect, as usual.

After pancakes, sausage, and chicken fried steak. We headed to Wieden and Kennedy to visit our awesome new friend Krystin.  I haven't been in side WK since I was 12 years old so it was great to get a little tour of the place. 

The entire building is filled with beautiful architecture, but what's really cool about Wieden & Kennedy are the unusual installations and various art pieces they choose to display within their office. 

Like the above photo. This is the Nest.  Completed in 2006, The Nest is a permanent installation by Patrick Dougherty.  It serves as creative meeting space, and from what I'm told it's also the interview space.  Inside The Nest is a large felt "sofa" and "pillows" created by Ja Felt to look like boulders.

Below is an installation created by the students of 12, an experimental school at Wieden & Kennedy.  The graphic is spelled out using over 100,000 clear pushpins, and if you look closely you can see the one red pushpin among the rest, a little metaphor if you will.

 As always our trip was too short, and I can't wait until I get to go back home again.

mani monday

This weekend, for the first time ever, I painted someone else's nails!

As I said in my burger post, our friend Briana came to visit this past weekend.  She loves owls, and I've always wanted to paint owl nails but it seemed wrong to paint them on anyone but her. So when she came to town I thought it was the perfect opportunity to give it a try.

And let me tell you, it is sooooo much easier to paint nails when they're not your own!

It was so much fun, and also a bit of a challenge, since her nails are a lot shorter than mine.
I can't wait to do more! Next time I'll challenge myself by letting the the person whose nails I paint choose the design they want as opposed to me choosing it for them.

(we had a bunch of fun taking pictures at The Bean while she was in town)

So what do you want? Lay it on me!

makin' patties: the science of the perfect burger

A little over 2 years ago I got The Man a few attachments for our Kitchenaid Stand Mixer for his birthday. He received the Meat Grinder and Food Slicer attachments, they were placed in a cabinet, still packed up in their boxes, where they sat until.... Last Weekend!

The Man finally broke out the Meat Grinder and we made our own ground beef! It was so much fun that we decided to conduct an experiment...

THE BURGER EXPERIMENT 

Question: What cut of meat or combinations of meat cuts will produce the best tasting burger?

Hypothesis:

The Morning Man: Short Ribs burger would win, due to it's fat content

Ms. Lazybones: I don't know, can we eat burgers now??

Variables:

• Top Sirloin
• Chuck
• Short Ribs

Constants:

• Size
• Tempurature
• Cook Time

Experiment: 

We ground each cut separately and made 1/3 cup patties of each cut by itself, and combinations of Chuck and Sirloin, Ribs and Sirloin, and Chuck and Ribs.

We cooked them all at the same time and tried them one by one.

Here were our findings:

• Top Sirloin: 
• Taste- a bit bland and very dry
• Texture- crumbly and dry dry dry

• Chuck: 
• Taste- great juicy flavor
• Texture- too irregular, occasional gristle/fat

• Short Rib: 
• Taste- like butta', tons of flavor
• Texture- the "silver skin" (which also made it very difficult to put through the grinder) was almost crunchy, the texture is too distracting to enjoy the flavor

• Chuck & Top Sirloin: 
• Taste- great meat flavor, great aftertaste, but just a tad dry
• Texture- spot on! perfect burger texture

• Short Rib & Top Sirloin: 
• Taste- less flavorful than the short rib on its own, the top sirloin sucks it dry
• Texture- very good, more of a true "burger" texture, more homogenous

• Chuck & Short Rib: 
• Taste- on the sweeter side, good amount of juiciness
• Texture- bad crunch, too much gristle and silver skin

Conclusion:
Chuck & Top Sirloin Wins All The Way! And in a 2 to 1 ratio as opposed to 1 to 1 it's even better since the extra chuck is able to combat the dryness of the top sirloin.
Scientifically speaking it was Delicious! Juicy! So Flavorful! Perfect Texture! Yum Yum Yum!

It was so easy and clean up was a breeze, and we will be using our results to make delicious burgers this weekend while our friend Briana is in town!!!



P.S. Using the grinder was really simple!!  We made sure to freeze all the parts before we used it (if it gets too hot it can cook the meat), and cut the meats into cubes so they easily fit in the grinder.