Friday, May 30, 2014

Blueberry cheesecake stuffed strawberries with chocolate drizzle

It's getting on strawberry season here in South Eastern Ontario and strawberries are going on sale in every grocery store! So I figured why not give this delicious recipe a facelift? The recipe I based this on is here! But I decided to change it up a bit plus I always have leftover cheesecake because I don't cut out as much of the strawberry, that part is yummy too :) So here are my ingredients: 

Vanilla, confectioners sugar, cream cheese, strawberries and graham crumbs. 
I used 76% chocolate chips for the drizzle because that's what I had in the cupboard but as my boyfriend says, "milk chocolate is the best, you should use that next time," so I guess it's up to your personal preference. You could even use white chocolate but my personal taste is dark :) Oh no, where's the jam? Trust me, I used jam, mommy made blueberry jam!

So I started out by mixing the entire package of cream cheese with 1 teaspoon of vanilla with the beaters. Then I added 1 Tablespoon of blueberry jam. You can put more or less jam depending on how flavourful your jam is. Mine was pretty flavourful and not super sweet. If your jam is also sweet make sure you add the confectioners sugar a bit at a time and taste it so you don't over sweeten it! 

Once this mixture is ready to rock spoon it into a regular lunch bag:
You can do this now or later but you'll need to cut off the corner so you can pipe it. Before cutting the tip I recommend working the cream cheese because mine was still pretty cold and I busted a leak out the side that needed taping because I had to squeeze so hard :S Ooops! 


Next you're going to want to prepare your strawberries. Hold the knife at about a 45 degree angle and slice around the stem:


You'll notice as you cut that there's a bit of a hollow in the center of the strawberry, this is where your cheesecake will go:

Once the strawberries are ready pour some graham crumbs into a bowl for dipping after you've piped in the cheesecake:



Grab your lunch bag and fill those strawberries! Now they don't need to look all that pretty because you're just going to mash them into the graham crumbs which should flatten the tops nicely.



I always have leftovers so I just tape up the cut corner and toss it in the freezer. The filling is always handy to have on hand in case you need to whip up something to bring to a social event last minute!


Once you have all your strawberries filled and dipped you're ready to start the chocolate. 



There's about a quarter cup of chocolate here, not that I measured or skimped in any way, this is chocolate we're talking about here. Feel free to use more, worst case you have more to lick out of the bowl after you're done drizzling.  
I heated mine in the microwave, a double boiler or a metal mixing bowl over a pot with an inch of water would have worked perfectly as well. If you do it in the mic make sure you heat at intervals of 20 to 30 seconds, the sugar heats pretty quickly and the edges will burn while the center is still unheated if you let it go too long. After each interval mix it up, here's how mine looked after the first interval:


After the chocolate is melted take your spoon and drizzle it over your perfection!


And then of course devour it :) 
What other variations would you like? Would you like a healthier version? Keep an eye out because that's my next plan :D 


Ingredients in the raw:
1 pkg cream cheese
1 T blueberry jam
1 t vanilla
1/4 c confectioners sugar
1 pint strawberries
1/4 c dark chocolate

Monday, May 26, 2014

Flooring Part 3!

DISCLAIMER: I am not a contractor, we just are handy people that like to do things ourselves. Always verify your instructions and info with a secondary source.

In case you missed it you should check out flooring part 2 so you can see our demolition :) In that post we ripped up the ugly vinyl tiles and the plywood they were glued to then screwed the underlay to the studs because the nails were just making life too squeaky!

So the new floors. Despite my awesome pinterest find we will not be doing the 1$/sqft flooring, instead it will be the free$/sqft thanks to the kindness of my father-out-law.

Everything we need to do some flooring, a compressor, hardwood, building paper, and beer. Shotgun, not needed. 

Here are the most of the tools we used (minus the mitre saw):

 Prybar to remove old crap, chisels to take up the trim a bit, hammer in multiple places, air powered nail & staple gun and drill
Table saw for ripping and cutting in


But first we cleaned up and took all the old flooring and other random garbage we had to the dump in my lovely little truck!



And of course the boyfriend said we won't have the minimum weight load but my leaf springs said otherwise..

In case you're not sure what you're looking at here these are my rear leaf springs, the straight metal bar at the bottom is typically curved upwards so as to absorb shock in the box through the wheels. It's flat. This is not good. 


But it's all gone now along with some other reno garbage that'd been kicking around the basement forever. So now we vacuum the hallway and lay some flooring paper:

Flooring paper with and without a great dane passing. Make sure if you have any seams that you overlap the paper by about 4 in because this acts as your vapour barrier, also staple every 8~10 in along the edges. I also put staples throughout the centre to keep it secure from slipping/moving around. 

Then my boyfriend got to try his new table saw, YAY! And the flooring begins :) Sadly the jumbo compressor we bought has a leak so we used the little compressor for the nailer/staplers. I guess instructions would be handy eh?

In the hallway we want the boards to be 1/2 in off the walls ideally to allow for expansion and contraction as the house heats and cools. Since the hall is a little narrower there's less movement so you can sometimes get away with a smaller gap. If you don't have a nice gap on each side you'll need to rip the boards so that you have even width boards on each side and a gap. Engineered hardwood doesn't need as big a gap on top of it being a hall so we had less, probably closer to 1/4 in. So for the first row you make a line with your chalk string parallel to whatever you're lining up with. The first row is nailed down through the top at the edges and stapled on the tongue.

From there you don't need to rip any boards, just chop them to length and using the stapler (not a hand powered staple gun, these won't have enough power to drive the staple in far enough so that it doesn't interfere with the tongue and groove) and staple in the nook of the tongue:

This is the closest I could line up the staple to be in the nook of the tongue. Make sure you keep the staples at least a few inches from the ends and put no less than 2 staples per board and this one is again somewhere around 8 in but you don't need to get super anal about it, you don't want them so close the tongue starts to split off. 

Once the boyfriend finished with the door ways it was video game time so I proceeded to lay the straight rows right up till the stapler hit the wall:


From here we first used the drill to pre-drill finishing nail holes in the nook of the tongue but the last two rows were too close to the wall for the drill in the nook and we drilled through the top of the board and nailed finishing nails. Those will be filled/hidden later :) 

And voila! Finished hall flooring:





Next weekend we may pick up some trim, we need enough for the entire house, luckily the bathroom is already the same as what we're buying, yay! I'm also going to see about building new intake covers because the ones we have are rough to say the least, they appear to be original to this 1950s bungalow. We also bought some wood with routered edges on two adjacent sides that will serve as floor transition covers for the bathroom and kitchen because as you can see it looks gross:





Have you ever laid hard wood? What colour do you like?


Obligatory cute bum pic:








Saturday, May 24, 2014

Fitness On A Sunday

So when I got on this blogging kick I said I was training to be stronger and fit and to complete the tough mudder this summer! So initially I kicked butt doing spin twice a week and rip once a week but then I started to not feel so awesome which rolled into laziness to downright lack of effort.

New plan! I think I was overwhelming myself because I wanted to do more but I was already hitting the gym thrice per week so I've decided to consolidate my workouts. I'm going to do twice a week a strength training (ST) and cardio. This past week I did rip then went for a bike ride with my boyfriend and today I did spin then I did three rounds of the beginner bodyweight workout with some variations :)

My variations, for some of my squats I added a weight, can't remember how much, maybe 25 lbs? Then I picked up to tens for my lunges. Pushups were standards, plank though I did one round of shoulder taps and one round of spider man crunches!

Then I came home to this delicious brekkie!
Beer + waffles + nutella + romantic flowers + some tools.... ok tools weren't part of the breakfast! 

I know this is not the best post workout brekkie but I was craving it something fierce! And I wanted some carbs in me before I start laying the hardwood in the hall today while the boyfriend is off helping someone chop down some trees :S

What do you crave post working out? How do you like to structure your workouts? 

This is from the Nia Shanks website which is pretty darn awesome if you ask me :) 


Friday, May 16, 2014

Flooring stage 2 (unfortunately you missed stage 1...)

So for some time now my boyfriend has had his pretty rough looking beige carpets in his house minus the two bedrooms. Now being an allergy sufferer and living in the abode of said boyfriend I'm sure you can understand my desire to rid this house of the carpet! Plus the dog was always at certain spots which made me wonder...

So at Easter weekend the carpets came up and my mom was kind enough to deliver it to her municipal waste disposal centre using up one of her free large item waste disposal opportunities, yay! I didn't take many photos because we procrastinated and left it till Easter Sunday and it had to be done before we left for Easter lunch\dinner. What I have is this:



So much to our surprise everything was hardwood underneath except the hall which looked like this:


So after some price checking and discussion we decided to replace all of the hardwood and the hall with new hardwood.

Pros:
1) don't need to match with expensive 1 3/4" for the hall
2) don't need to deal with sanding, staining and varnishing the floors, can be a weekend job to install with some familial assistance!

Cons:
1) new hardwood is flipping costly! ~800 sqft @ 3$ a sqft = 2800 plus taxes. Damn.

So the plan goes forward but we first need to save some dineros. Now the floor is acceptable and we have area rugs to cover the parts that aren't but the hallnis not. So I found on Pinterest 1$ a sqft hardwood. Seriously? So we went to home depot to do some investigating on our 1$/sqft hall when we saw my father-out-law headingout! We propose our plan and he identified some flaws like the lack of tongue and groove in our strips and countered with enough hardwood to do the hall with what he had left over from a job! Sold. Boyfriend, not so sold until he found that to make it as nice as we'd like it would not be 1$/sqft...

So we ripped up the vinyl tiles and wood it was glued to!!!


This is what we're left with: 

What we're left with is boards that my boyfriend is screwing to the joists to reduce the bane of his life, creaks! See how we both won? I got rid of my alkergy nuissance and he gets rid of his creaky nuissance?


Next is the installation of the new stuff :-)

What kind of surprises have you found when you pulled up flooring? Have you ever pulled up flooring? 

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Farm Share Life!

I don't really have a whole lot of content on this topic yet but I'm plum excited and it's getting closer :) Mid-June we're going to get some maple syrup and our farm share in an organic farm will start to roll in. Once a week we'll go pick up a box full of fruits and veggies along with a fresh baked spelt loaf, mmmmm! The place we're going with this year is called Fat Chance Farmstead:


I'll be sure to post pictures of our first box come June :) 

Are you part of a farm share this year? Have you done one before? 

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Meat Muffins! Deliciousness in Cute Little Muffin Shape :)

I like meatloaf, but as an adult I was always apprehensive about making it myself. It takes almost an hour to cook, it's a lot of beef, and when you look up a recipe they always use fillers like bread crumbs and crackers and yuck! So I guess when it came down to it I wasn't crazy about a lump of meat but rather the ketchup I doused it with..



 I got a recipe from someone I worked with in Calgary and of course it was a really delicious recipe!  But after only making it once I lost it... but I remembered some of the ingredients.



Now I could tinkered with the ingredients here and there but again, the large mass of meat takes ages to bake... *sigh* Until one day I had found a genius Pinterest idea! Make your meat loaf in muffin tins! So I put those ingredients together:

There's only 1 lb of beef in the photos but you'll need two for this recipe :)


And tossed it in the muffin tin:



It cooked so fast, it was a dream :) And now I can have meat loaf much faster! Plus it freezes great with some parchment on top to keep it closed up. And now for the recipe! Feel free to tinker with these ingredients, it's not a touchy recipe, and nothing but the garlic is so strong that if you add more it will overpower the recipe.

Ingredients (Yields around 24 muffins):
2 T Ketchup
1 t No Salt Seasoning (Costco Kirkland Brand Spice Mix)
1/4 t Salt
1 t Parsley
2 cloves garlic pressed
1/2 small onion (any colour)
2 large carrots (grated)
3 small potatoes (grated)
1 c grated cheese (any kind)
2 lb lean ground beef

Combine in a bowl, mix it up with your hands and press blobs into a non-stick muffin tin. You may want to Crisco/pam/coconut oil your non-non-stick pan but consider the grade of your beef and how much oils are already in the meat that will secrete.

Cook for about 30 minutes at 350 F or until your meat thermometer reads around 165 F in the center of a puck.

Another note, if you freeze it make sure it's completely thawed before cooking, the boyfriend learned the hard way that cooking partially defrosted meatloaf leads to the outside burning by the time the center is cooked and you're left with shrivelled up little pucks. I'll save you the visual on that one. You're welcome.

And Voila! The finished product, enjoy!


What do you put in your meatloaf? 


Not very good at keeping up at this....

So it's been a while since post #1 and to say a lot has changed is an understatement.

First: My Blog

My initial intent was to make this blog about fitness because last summer that felt like the biggest thing in my life. Things change and as much as I want to be fit I am excited about and want to share other things too :) So you'll see things here ranging from crafts, beer brewing, renovation projects, fitness and just whatevers going!

Second: My Body

I initially lost weight with paleo eating but it was driving me insane. I was perpetually in this deprivation and binge cycle with the forbidden fruits of certain foods and in the end put all the weight back on, grew back out of my goal shorts and peaked at 180 lbs. To be clear I don't think I'm obese or have this crazy notion I should look sickly thin like Twiggy or anything but I do want to be healthy and fit. I want to have children and I want my body to be a healthy incubator for my offspring. I also want to be healthy for me so I can do what I want when I want be it climb a mountain or dig a hole.

My focus has shifted. Instead of being thin I started with working on being fit. I joined a gym in January going 2 or 3 times a week doing ten minutes of jogging warmup then The Beginnger's Bodyweight Workout. This served me well for about a month. Then my friend joined and she stepped up my game :) We did spin Monday and Friday mornings and rip Wednesday evenings. I just ate whatever I wanted with the addition of a protein shake per day, mmmm :)

Third: My Food

I don't do paleo anymore. Some things stuck like little to no dairy, but I never was big on dairy to begin with unless it came in the form of frozen with sugar added and chocolate blended in.
So if I don't do paleo what do I do? I basically eat whatever I want. Revolutionary I know! I bought a book called "The Thin Woman's Brain: Re-wiring Your Brain For Permanent Weight Loss" and I read it. 
All I can say is it revolutionized my thinking. I'll write another post later about how I'm implementing her plan :) 


So that's all for now, keep your eyes out for the car seat cover I'm crocheting, more details about my brain re-wiring and I'll make a post about my and my boyfriends foray into beer making :) 

What are you doing to get healthy and stay that way?