Don’t you love it when great ideas come out of nowhere?! I was sitting in my living room, drinking a cup of water, and thought, “Gee, I wish there was a way for this cup of water to be DIY, super cute, and cold.” And then, BOOM! I can’t believe no one else but me has ever thought of this idea before: frozen water cubes!

Now these are a little time consuming, but totally worth it!

———-APRIL FOOLS!!———-
You didn’t think this was serious, right?? Good. I know you guys are too smart to fall for my crap. This is probably one of my favorite days of the year, because I loooove pulling pranks on people.

As you’ve noticed, I’ve been pretty absent on here. My last post, was from last year! Well, a lot of good things have been happening, but unfortunately, those good things cost money; “blogging” comes way after “pay bills,” and “save up for wedding,” on my to-do list. Not to mention our current apartment sucks as far as any kind of quality photo studio. The lighting comes in at weird angles all times of the day… and unless I want to move my couch and set up a table, every time I want to take pictures of spaghetti, blogging has just become a real chore.

Oh, did I say wedding? Yep, Mike (I think this is the first time I’ve ever used his name on here,) proposed on February 28th! We spent a fantastic night out, ate the most deeelicious dinner at Osteria Mozza, and when we got home, he surprised me! So we’ve been eating mainly pasta/rice/ramen and chicken for the past few months to try and set extra money aside for wedding stuffs.

BUT: We’re moving at the end of April, (which, for any of you folks playing along at home, will be the 7th time in six years, that I’ve moved while living in California,) but this will be a good move! Moving will allow us to put even more wedding-money aside, and also, I’ll be able to put “blogging” back at the top of my to-do list. Yay!

Have a great, shenanigan-filled April Fools’ Day, everyone!

Giftmas is almost here!! This is our teeny, tiny tree this year. That little fella, to the left, is Gerald the Giftmas Porcupine; we’ve had him for a few years now. He spreads Giftmas joy to good girls and boys; he shoots his prickly quills at the naughty ones.

Last year, I heard about The Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap but too late, so I signed up to be alerted for it this year. Who doesn’t love getting packages in the mail? Especially when those packages are COOKIES. So I decided to go with one of my favorite flavors: maple pecan. And because I couldn’t just do maple pecan, I added sweet toffee bits.

I have to confess, I use “pancake syrup” on my waffles and pancakes, but when it comes to anything else (cookies, ice cream, cakes, etc) I love the flavor of the real stuff. Do NOT, under ANY circumstance, use “pancake syrup” in these cookies. If you do, I’ll send Gerald after you.

After I signed up, I was given three addresses where I needed to send my cookies, and a date to send them by. I sent my cookies out to Maivy from Maivy’s Musings, Julie from Peanut Butter Fingers, and Jessica from Little House Big Heart. It was a little nerve-wracking at times. What if my cookies break during shipping? Why haven’t I received any cookies yet?? WHAT IF NO ONE LIKES MY COOKIES??? Oy.

I received cookies from Betsy from BetsyLife, Teri from The Freshman Cook, and Diana from Diana’s Dream Sweets.

If you’re interested in joining the cookie swap next year, you can sign up here, and they’ll email you next year when it starts all over again! Also, don’t worry if you’re vegan/gluten-sensitive/nut allergy/etc, they will be sure to match you up with compatible swappers. (Heads up: You need to have a food blog in order to participate!)

Every week, I plan out our weekly meals so that when we go grocery shopping, we buy exactly what we need. We were eating healthy, I was so proud of us; I thought we were doing AWESOME…

…until I looked through our spending and saw that we spend ~$150 A WEEK on groceries.

Well fuck.

Right now, on our budget, we need to be spending $100 or less. But really, is this even possible? Recently, I’ve seen some blogs try a Whole Foods challenge, of only spending $100 and being able to buy enough food for 1 week. Challenge accepted.

>>Can we eat HEALTHY for breakfast, lunch, and dinner spending only $100 or less at Whole Foods?<<

Game plan:
Instead of going in with a pre-made list of ingredients for the week, we were going to go in with NO plan. We created our entire week of meals based on what was on sale, or what seemed like a good price. We also will take the time to do the math to see what was cheaper (i.e. a 5lb bag of onions vs buying loose onions).

Stop 1:
The BF suggested the first place we explore was the meat counter. Since that’s the most expensive part of the shopping trip, we’d get a sense of what kind of dinners we wanted to have that week so we’d have some kind of general plan for veggies/grains/etc. We decided to go with ground beef and two small-ish whole chickens. I figured with the ground beef, I could make chili; with the chickens, I could just roast them. (Important to note: while the meat counter was the first place we visited, we waited until the end of our shopping trip to actually put the meat in our cart. You don’t want to walk around the store with chicken in your basket for 30 mins. Gross.)

Stop 2:
After having a plan for our dinners that week, we moved on to the produce section. We spent a good 20 minutes poking around, mostly to see what was on sale, and what we needed to buy for dinners/snacks for lunch. I ended up with: a container of fresh salsa, a few onions, 1 bunch of celery, a container of baby cucumbers, 5 carrots, 2 heads of garlic, 1 bunch of broccoli, green beans, 4 pears (for snacks,) 1 orange (for roasted chicken,) tomatoes (for sandwiches,) and 4 of these little cups of tomatoes (for salad,):

I love love lovvveee tomatoes! These were on sale for $1.25/each (originally $2.50/each)!

Also, the nice guy working in the produce department offered to slice up some pears for us, so we could choose which variety we wanted. (There were probably five or six different kinds.) Sweet customer service.

We love grapes. But this bunch of grapes cost over $4. …Needless to say, we didn’t get any grapes.

Stop 3:
Now we started into the other aisles for canned goods, dry goods, and anything else we needed for the week. For the chili, I needed black beans, diced tomatoes, and stock. We also picked up some granola bars and applesauce (for snacks,) a bottle of ketchup, and for sandwiches we got some lunch meat.

Here’s what our week looked like at the end of our experiment:

1. Breakfast: I know, we’re terrible at eating breakfast. Well to be honest, the BF never eats breakfast, unless it’s on the weekend; 8 am is too early for him to feel hungry. As for me, I need to cut-out sweet breakfasts, so a bowl of cereal, or oatmeal, is out of the question. However, something healthy like egg whites and veggies, would have put us over budget.
2. Weekend food: Sunday lunch and dinner, and Saturday dinner didn’t count toward the budget.
3. Random snacks: As you can see, most of my lunches during the week were “random snacks.” These were things like almonds, or popcorn, and it’s important to note that we had those in our pantry/fridge already, and weren’t purchased on this trip. I had 2 (out of the 4) pears as well. My sandwich on Tuesday was tuna, which was also already in our pantry. I only bought enough lunch meat for sandwiches for Mike’s work lunches (it was $13 just for the lunch meat for his sandwiches – 3 slices of meat per sandwich. 15 slices total).

A few other notes about our experience:

1. I’ve been trying to eliminate all pastas/breads/rice because the last time my glucose level was tested, it was a wee bit on the higher-end. So I’ve eliminated all sweet breakfasts (dear god, send help,) but, to have veggies every day for breakfast and night for dinner, is EXPENSIVE. (An extra $10-15 to our total.)
2. One cannot, I repeat, cannot, be a picky eater when trying to achieve this. You need to be flexible and willing to eat ANY kind of veggie/meat/fruit/etc that is on sale.
3. Sandwich items (spinach, sliced cheese, sliced bread,) tuna, and side dish items like rice, were things we already had in our pantry or fridge. Had we bought those items, we would’ve went well over our budget by another $20-25.
4. It did force us to open up and explore. We looked at produce we normally would’ve walked away from, and we even tried new varieties of pears.
5. Another positive was, everything we purchased was organic… which, is good, right?

Bottom line?:
This experiment failed. Our total came right under $100, but we got nothing for breakfasts, and only enough food for 1 of us to each lunch throughout the week. Whole Foods, for us, is too expensive. But I think we’ll try another version of this experiment. Next time? I’ll explore buying all of our veggies/fruits from the farmers market, and everything else from a local grocery store. I’ll report back with those findings and our weekly meal plan as well. I’m determined to find something that works, and wont leave us eating ramen for every meal.

Fine print: Whole Foods has no idea who I am. They didn’t contact me at all. I did this by myself. WOW LOOK AT THAT.

This year, I think I’ll share with you, some random weird/fun facts about myself. Here we go!

• “Space” terrifies me. Have you seen the movie Melancholia? If you haven’t seen that movie, I’ll give you another example: The other day, the BF showed me a picture that represented what our sky would look like if Jupiter was as close to Earth as our moon, and I started screaming. It’s the only thing that truly terrifies me. If you’d like to see the picture I’m talking about, it can be seen here.
• I don’t believe in “ghosts,” “psychics,” or “mediums.”
• I never-ever-ever-ever wanted to have kids, until the first time my niece smiled at me; my heart melted completely. Now the BF and I have been talking about the possibilities of having our own!
• I’m a total nerd. I love video games, comic books, and every weekend my friends and I get together to play Dungeons & Dragons.
• I’ve been battling depression and anxiety issues for 10 years now. Instead of pills, I rely other methods, (like exercise and therapy,) to use in my battle against depression.*
• I’ve got synesthesia, which is just a fancy way of saying that I see colors with letters and numbers. I am aware that this text is black, however my mind makes a word, for example: SALAD, look red, or the letter H look brown. Months of the year/days of the week also have certain colors, and I have very visual layouts of those as well (they look like sidewalks that wrap around each other).
• The BF and I don’t have a “song,” but we have a book: Stardust by Neil Gaiman.
• My favorite superhero is Aquaman. He doesn’t get enough credit if ya ask me…
• I’m a feminist.
• I hate bananas because when I was a kid, I ate too many of those banana flavored circus peanut candies and threw up everywhere.
• Even though my site is called “Savory Notes” I love sugar and sweets more. I live for sugar. Sweet tooth? No, more like sweet SOUL. I’ve dropped $50 at a candy shoppe before, and I’ll likely do it again. Don’t judge me!!

*If you’re feeling sadder-than-usual, I IMPLORE you to just take a simple trip to your doctor’s office and take the first step into helping yourself. Also, if anyone in your life calls you LAZY because of your depression, dispose of him/her. Negativity is depression fodder; you don’t need people around you who will be helping your depression, you need people who are going to help you.

——

I couldn’t leave this post without a good recipe to go along with it. You may remember awhile back I had a post about DRY Soda infused black rice. I still love DRY Soda, and tried a few of their other flavors to come up with this drink… and because I love gin. If you don’t like gin, meh… use vodka or silver rum.

It’s summery and refreshing, not really the first thing anyone thinks of when they think of “autumn,” but why not have a little mental summer break before the crazy holiday season begins?

*Disclosure: DRY Soda sent me coupons that allowed me to try a bunch of their flavors. Yum!

In September, my sister and niece flew down from Canada for a visit, and in October: My parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary!! 50 YEARS. 5-0.

My mom was a rebellious middle child, and my dad was a bad boy; it was only natural that they would end up together.

I love the stories my mom tells me about their early days:

• Like the time my grandpa told my dad to get a haircut before he could take my mom out on a date.
• Or the time my dad’s car broke down on the way to picking up my mom for prom. He eventually made it, and they got there just in time for the last dance.
• Or the time they were in a fight and my mom called my dad a SNAKE. *gasp* Oh heavens!

This is the only job my dad is allowed to do in the kitchen: mash the potatoes.

I love them both so much. I wish I could have been home to celebrate with them. Unfortunately, neither my sister nor I could afford to fly to NY to celebrate. So we spent a lot of time trying to think of something special to do… and then we found it!

Have you guys heard of Blurb? It’s a site that helps you make books: Hardcover or softcover, filled with drawings, text, photos, you name it!* And since my parents haven’t been able to see my niece in over a year, my sister and I decided to put together a beautiful hardcover book with new pictures of her.

Twenty crisp and colorful pages of this silly, beautiful girl. Blurb was affordable, fantastic quality, and something my parents will cherish forever. I strongly urge you to visit Blurb to see the wonderful and thoughtful creations you can make.

The day my mom got it in the mail, she called me and told me she almost cried. (“Almost” means she definitely did cry.)

I think I’ve talked about this before, but my dad has a MAJOR sweet tooth; and there’s no doubt that I take after him. Fall seems like the only time of year where it’s perfectly acceptable to dive into sugar. But I wanted to make something more than just ordinary caramel corn. So not only does this caramel corn have spices, but it’s SPICY.

Let’s start with the spice blend:

[[*Disclosure: I paid for my own Blurb book, and have loved Blurb for quite some time. We are only RECENTLY affiliated with Blurb. The banner to the right of the site will give us a commission (~15%) when you click-through the link and make a purchase.]]

They say:“…bubble gum esters and noble hop aroma.” “…bright and malty.”

I say: Light and clean, a bit of freshness as well, and kind of citrus/floral scented, (I’m wondering if it was the bubble gum esters I was smelling and had a hard time pinning down a specific fragrance.) Although I just can’t seem to get over the bitterness of some beers, hence the birth of the Brew Face, this left a bitter bite at the end.

Brew Face!

Lately I’ve noticed a lot of mac ‘n cheese boxes at the grocery store have a FUN NEW FLAVOR: “Grilled cheese.”

What makes grilled cheese, taste like grilled cheese (besides artificial flavorings)?

I’ve done grilled cheese sandwiches before. Coated the bread in crushed cheese crackers, and slathering a sweet layer of jam in the middle, but that’s fancy pants. The basic flavors of grilled cheese are: toasted, buttered bread and simple gooey cheese.

It’s really simple to replicate this flavor, and I don’t know why I’ve never done it before… to get that brown toasted flavor, we’ll be using browned butter in our sauce, and buttered, crushed pieces of toast for the topping.

You’ll be so surprised how much this taste like grilled cheese, and it’s all thanks to the browned butter. I don’t feel that I have to mention this, but just for shits and giggles, this is pasta+milk+cheese, aka: fat+fat+fat. So how about we go easy on the portion size, or we split some with a friend? It’s cool to indulge once in a while, but let’s keep this recipe a once-in-a-while type of food. Deal?

>>(What is Brew 52? Go back and read about it here.)<<

They say (taken from BeerAdvocate.com): “…hazelnut and spicy espresso.” “Medium body. Medium carbonation.” “Smells of coffee, no sweetness detected.”

I say: In the bottle, this porter smells like chocolate milk. It’s sweetly scented, dark, and chocolaty. It does have strong, roasty espresso notes, and upon further drinking I got a hint of penny/coppery finish on the tongue. I think this particular brew was limited edition, but if you can find it, it’s worth a try for something decadent and dark.

Brew Face!:

Nothing too impressive here. Didn’t really strike the Brew Face to happen.