For the Face

 Sooo… Making this a joint-blog for Rob and me is not panning out so well, as you can see!  Oh well, I mention him a lot, so I guess that is the role he will play on this blog.  With that being said, let's talk about make-up!  (Fun fact: I worked part-time at Origins toward the end of high school.)  I'm definitely no expert, but after trying several foundations over the years I have found the best foundation (for me) and have been using it for a few years.

I swear by Lacome's Teint Miracle foundation. (I've also got my sister and mom hooked on it.) This is a medium coverage foundation, and leaves your skin glowing. It's known for "reflecting skin's natural light," and has SPF 15.

I recently added a primer to my make-up routine, which makes quite a difference. I use Lancome's La Base Pro primer.  I apply it with a brush before my foundation (which I also use a brush to apply), and the primer gives me a smooth base surface, and helps my make-up stay on longer.  What foundations or primers do you love?

Snow Daze

Snow days mean…. lots of baking, reading, board games, movies (finally watched Argo), cleaning neglected items (like make-up brushes), and pretty views (even if the view from our apartment is the highway, ha)

Kansas City got around a foot of snow yesterday, so nearly the whole city got a snow day yesterday, and this lucky teacher got another one today!  Today, though, needs to be a bit more productive than yesterday...

Pantry Stuffed Peppers

I am always looking for creative, healthy, and EASY dinner ideas.  Our regular weekly rotation often consists of tacos, breakfast for dinner, some kind of soup, a simple pasta dish, a baked chicken dish, and I always attempt to try about one new recipe a week.  This week I finally made stuffed peppers, a dish I have been meaning to try forever.  I looked at a handful of recipes for them online, and created my own…  The very best thing about this dish is you can browse your fridge and pantry, and use pretty much whatever you have…  Aside from what I listed in the ingredients below, other ideas are rice, onions, jalapenos, cilantro, Rotel, etc.

Pantry Stuffed Peppers

• 2 green peppers (red and yellow work too)
• ~2 Tbsp olive oil (or olive oil spray)
• taco seasoning (Try this homemade one we love.)
• ground beef (a 1/2 lb would be plenty)- If Rob would approve I'd use ground turkey, but he prefers beef
• 1 can of black beans (drained)- I used about 1/2 of a regular-sized can
• 1 can of corn
• 1 can of seasoned dice tomatoes (drained)- I used about 1/2 of a regular sized can
• 1 small can of green chiles
• Low-fat shredded cheddar cheese
• Light sour cream (to add at very end)

1. Pre-heat oven to 375 degrees.
2. Fry the hamburger, drain, then add in taco seasoning.  (I've been making my own lately to avoid all the bad chemicals in store-bought seasoning.)
3. In the meantime, cut your peppers in half and de-seed them.  Place peppers, empty bowl-side up, and drizzle the pepper with olive oil and place on a baking sheet (still bowl-side up.)  Bake the peppers for about 10 minutes, until they start to feel slightly soft.
4. Once the taco-seasoned hamburger is pretty much finished, add in corn, black beans, tomatoes, and green chiles to soften for about 5-8 minutes.
5. Take your peppers out of the oven and generously fill them with the hamburger/veggie mix.  Sprinkle cheese on each stuffed pepper, and put in oven for about 8 minutes.  Add sour cream before eating!

Stuffed peppers are definitely making their way into our dinner rotation!  YUMMM!

Valentine's Day Cooking Class

Why am I so bad about keeping up a blog?!  Fortunately, I have a 3-day weekend, so I will get back in gear with blogging and plan some posts ahead of time on my day off.  Aside from working on my blog on Monday, I also plan to put together a recipe binder.  I use cookbooks and Pinterest for recipes, but I'd like to be able to consolidate our favorite recipes to one spot.  I also get Real Simple and Cooking Light magazines monthly, so I'd like to cut out recipes from those sources and get them organized in a binder.  How do you organize your recipes?  Do you use a binder?  What suggestions do you have for setting it up?

Some new recipes that are definitely making their way into the binder are the ones we learned about and ate at our cooking class this past week.  For Valentine's Day, instead of dinner out or gifts, Rob and I decided to take a cooking class taught by one of my favorite bloggers, Jenny Steffens Hobick at a local cooking store.  (My mom and I both love Jenny's adorable lifestyle and cooking blog, and it was such a treat meeting her!)  The menu at the class consisted of spinach salad with a hot bacon dressing, garlic bread, lemon cream shrimp scampi linguine, slow-roasted beef tenderloin, and baked chocolate brownie pudding- YUM!  (I believe all these recipes are on her blog.)  We both really enjoyed the class, and I'm hoping a couples cooking class can be a new Valentine's Day tradition for us!

House Hunters

Recently Rob and I have started house hunting! We have really liked our apartment, but we would like to buy a home by summertime. (You can only live in a one-bedroom apartment with minimal closet space and storage for so long…) Now that we have started looking, it makes pinning home inspiration photos all the more fun!  I thought I'd share with you some of my favorite home inspiration photos I've pinned…

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Can you tell I really like white, blue, and all things neutral?

Wedding Wednesday: Mutual Weirdness

Because we all know true love and mutual weirdness are synonymous…

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Tried and True Read Alouds

My most cherished time of the day in my classroom has always been read aloud time. Most days, I try to take out a fifteen minute chunk to read a novel to my class, where they can grow in their auditory comprehension skills and just enjoy. I have gotten in the habit of reading the same books every year, and a few of my all-time favorite read alouds are Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume, Witches by Roald Dahl, Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson, and we just finished up The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Katie DiCamillo.  Recently, we started a new (to me) novel called Out of My Mind by Sharon M. Draper.  I hear wonderful things about this book, and am excited about adding it into my reading rotation (if we love it.)  If you know a fourth grader or you just love children's literature, I'd recommend all of these fabulous books.  My two very favorites are The Witches and The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. Happy reading!!!