Princess Salad

All because I had bacon to use up...

I made the most amazing salad today. Seriously good, seriously superfood, seriously delicious! It wasn't fat free but it was gorgeous and fairly healthy. Here's what's in it:

1/4 bag of salad leaves (including baby spinach and rocket)

2 small vine tomatoes, quartered

An avocado, roughly chopped

3 rashers (I know, I know) of smoked streaky bacon, fried till crispy

Half a pomegranate

Lashings of Waitrose Mango and Chilli salad dressing

A taste sensation, full of salty, sweet, crunchy, spicy, smooshy yumminess.

The chic of it!

Continuing my theme of clearing out and getting to grips with 2014, this week I'm delighting in the changes I've made to our home recently. Don't get too excited, nothing major has changed, just a few little things here and there that make me smile as I walk around.

Christmas left me feeling claustrophobic. Even though our festive decorations were minimal they got in the way of proper cleaning, and I felt like we were being suffocated by all the things we hoarded throughout 2013. A little project I did last year (see here) made me want to replace bog-standard living room art with something more bespoke. It gave me the opportunity to make use of the space with something fresher, more unique, and hopefully more chic. I wanted to have detail and feeling within clean lines, so I bought some "Ribba" frames from Ikea in pure white, and filled them with images from our own photo collection. I've also streamlined our photo frame collection within the living room and changed everything to either dark brown or white photo frame (except the silver one which sits on the silver fire place). Co-ordination and simplicity all the way.


The rest of the house was a little more well thought out, so not much has changed, but I've made little steps in the right direction by getting rid of mounds of paperwork and generally having a ruthless chuck out of things we've been holding onto "just in case" - like magazines I might want to read again (but never have...).

Cheesy broccoli pasta bake

I had broccoli to use up, so this is what I made!

Half a head of broccoli
Handful of wholewheat pasta
Large knob of butter (about 1cm by 3cm by 4cm)
2 tablespoons of plain flour
1/2 teaspoon mustard powder
Milk
Parmesan and cheddar to taste
Parsley breadcrumbs (I froze what I had leftover from my herby crust salmon earlier in the month - just finely crumbed bread with salt, pepper and parsley)
Small onion, finely chopped
Salt and pepper to taste

1. I boiled the pasta in a large pan and and mid-way through cooking I added the broccoli, which I'd chopped into small florets
2. Make a cheese sauce by melting the butter, adding the flour and mustard powder to form a paste, slowly adding milk until it's the right consistency (thick and smooth) and then adding grated cheese in. At the end I added the onion - that's why it's important it's finely chopped, it doesn't get much heat exposure!
3. Then I added the sauce to the drained pasta and broccoli, gave it a good stir, popped the majority of it into a small pie dish (seriously, how cute?!) and ate the rest out of the pan like the greedy pig I am.
4. I sprinkled a layer of breadcrumbs on top and popped it in the oven at 180 degrees (fan) for 15 minutes

Serve it up with some clean and springy leaves. I was impressed how tasty this was given how few ingredients there were, and at least now there's broccoli in my tum and not going beige in the fridge! I don't know how but broccoli always tastes nicer when it's been baked a while!

Clothes hoarding overhaul

The last post I wrote offered a little intro to my desire to spring clean (a little early but hey...) and this will be similar - but this time it's a clothing rant!

I was flicking through Pinterest the other day and found a little gem of a tip* about storing your t-shirts so you can see them better (the premise being you will know what you've got and wear them more), and this was the final straw for me to take action.

I love the power of clothes. They can project an image that you control; want to pretend you're not nervous? Wear a sharp suit and feel strong. Want to be the real you? Wear boots with a pretty dress (well that's the real me anyway). And of course... you can hide the 400g Toblerone you boshed last week with a comfy t-shirt and a promise to yourself to go for a long walk.

My mum bought me "Parisian Chic" by Ines de la Fressange for Christmas, and reading how the chic French ladies dress made me want to up my game and out my wardrobe disasters. What's left has been folded very neatly and put into sections to make items easier to find, and to make more things visible - folding and laying one item on top of the other means you never get to see what's at the bottom of the pile, whereas this Pinterest trick of laying them stacked horizontally means you can see the full glory of your drawers. I've implemented this fold on tops (the two photos at the top of this post), trousers (who knew I had so many jogging bottoms!), stretchy skirts, stretchy dresses, hoodies and knitwear (as you can see in the photo below).

It's made it so much easier to put washing away, and makes me want to do it immediately instead of just popping it on the spare bed and pretending I'll put it away later in the week.

The whole reorganisation and minor chuck-out have made me feel so much fresher, and as though I am  less likely to be suffocated by my greed in the night. My next post will be about how I've done a refresh on the rest of the house!

*I am heartbroken that I can't find the original Pin I found, the lady whose blog it was on was so lovely and had written a beautiful piece about using this trick herself.

Labelling and organising toiletries

My best friend has inspired me to get on the laptop and put together a blog post, after I excitedly told her my label maker has arrived and I'd immediately set about labelling my toiletries.

Yeah, that's right, I've labelled my toiletries. Not, as you might imagine, with the names of what they are (overkill?) but with their purchase dates. This is a long story so buckle in and join me for the ride...

Our bathroom has a lot of storage. How much of it does my husband get? Ooh, I'd say less than 10%. Of the 7 cupboards available, he has access to half of one. The rest are medicines, travel cosmetic bags and toothbrush holders, a small amount of bathroom cleaning equipment, storage for things we've bought on BOGOF or in bulk, "ladies items" and a whole heck of a lot of my "lotions and potions" as he's aptly named them.

I simply don't get through things. I am a sucker for a new product and want to try new things all the time - I'm far more interested in skin care than make up and as a result I had (at the start of 2014) 8 body lotions on the go. Imagine this multiplied by the number of other skin care related things you can imagine (facial wash, hand cream etc) and you start to get the picture. One of the major down sides of this addiction is the utter waste it creates. Not only a waste of space, but a waste of money if you think that:
a) I never give anything long enough to work / see results
b) I never finish things before they go off

One of my non-resolutions for this year (I'm calling any new routines "Getting a Grip in 2014" rather than resolutions) was to use things up before buying more*. Not only has Christmas left a massive dent in my bank account, but it's also time to get rid of some of the clutter in our home that makes what's a fairly large house feel claustrophobic (more posts about that next week!).

During my first week back at work post-Christmas I decided to work my way through the cupboard one by one, applying each lotion daily until it was gone, then move on to the next one. Yesterday I finished my tub of Clinique Deep Comfort body butter (which I've worked out I bought in April 2012). It's really quite disgusting how long I let these things sit around for. Currently retailing for £24 a tub (though I got mine in Bicester Village so it would have been about £18) it would be a waste to not use it. I must have had about £14-worth left. Next I'm moving onto the Elemis Tranquil Touch body cream which I was given in August
2012 (I reckon there's only one leg's worth left now).

I've labelled everything else I can find worth labelling and found out when I obtained/started using them (easy for December items, my overfull inbox helped with order dates for other items). I'm going to work through them in date order, before I have to send them off to the landfill site for Stig Of The Dump to get silky with.

Oh here's my lovely label maker (Dymo LetraTag LT-100H) and the first thing I used it on... oops!

*Let me tell you - this is killing me because I want to order Embryolisse from Space NK like it's going out of fashion!