I’ve been in a mild state of panic ever since arriving at the new house.  It’s huge and nice and everything I imagined BUT the kitchen has VERY little storage space.  I’m freaking out and trying to figure out what to do.  I came from a kitchen that had 26 cupboards and 9 drawers.  This kitchen has 8 cupboards and 3 drawers. I know that if I lived in New York, this would be a ton of space.  I don’t live in New York and I don’t know how anything is going to fit!

I thought I’d show you the space constraints and tell you my ideas and see if anyone has any clever ideas.

So remember my cute kitchen?

Well, it doesn’t have much space.

First there’s the open shelf…Lucy has claimed it as her own:

She put all of that there.  I don’t foresee being able to use the shelf for anything.

Next up we have my one, yes one, large drawer:

There are 2 other small drawers in the entire kitchen:

I have this cupboard:

That thankfully rolls out:

Then there’s the cupboards on the other side of the stove.

Cupboard and drawer by the sink (sorry for the blur):

A little ledge above the sink:

A lazy susan (that I’d like to keep my kitchen appliances in-food gets lost):

And my last 3 cupboards:

Dishes will go here:

Interesting shelf that doesn’t fit many non-perishable items (unless they are in cans):

While I was doing the dishes tonight, I decided to record a video (on my phone) so that you could get a feel for how limited I am. (it’s about 4 minutes long)

And you get to hear my voice (and my bird scream). 

Our thoughts are that we will put a pot rack/shelf, like this:

  (source)

on the wall, in between the fridge and sink (above the awesome new trash can). I’ll then use the roll out cupboard for things like mixing bowls, glass storage containers, breakable things as I can get a non-damaging child lock (like the one on the kitchen sink) for this cupboard.

If you watched the video, you know that I’m planning on using my upstairs closet as a pantry which will free up the lazy susan for larger appliances.

Where do I put my spices?  Where do I put my cooking utensils?  Where do I put my kitchen towels and pot holders?  ACK!

Thoughts? Ideas? HELP?

It’s POM Summer Menu Series time again! 

This week I was charged with making a cocktail and I instantly knew what I wanted to make-a Pomegranate Mojito or what I lovingly named it, a POMijito!

Ingredients:

-3 large mint leaves
-2 TBSP of sugar
-Juice of 2 limes
-1 jigger of Rum
-1 jigger of POM Wonderful
-Ice
-Splash of 7-Up

Instructions:

-Muddle together the mint and 1 TBSP of sugar-just enough to get the oils of the mint on the sugar-no need to pulverize it (it’s tempting!)

-Add the mint/sugar mixture to a glass.

-Add remaining sugar, rum, lime juice, and POM Wonderful to the glass and stir well.

-Add ice and top off with 7-Up (or Sprite or Sierra Mist). Garnish with mint (optional).

-Enjoy!

My sister claims to be a Mojito expert and even did a blind taste testing with multiple friends of 7-Up vs. simple syrup and 7-Up won hands down.  I DECLARE that my sister *IS* a Mojito expert.  This was awesome.  It was very refreshing and just the thing for a 4th of July BBQ-which is exactly what we had.

You can check out all the other lovely ladies that are participating in the POM Summer Menu Series:

Danica’s Daily
Fitness and Spice
Kitchen Confidante

Next week, I’ll be making a POMerific salad!

We decided to have everyone who has been hosting us over for a BBQ.

I made a Carne Asada feast!  With limited kitchen supplies it surprisingly turned out really well!  The girls liked it!

Here’s the gluten and dairy free version:

-Bed of lettuce
-Carne Asada
-Rice
– Black Beans
-Salsa
–Tapatio
-Un-pictured yummy guacamole, courtesy of the wonderful Aunt Megan!

The others had flour tortillas, cheese, and sour cream. 

Our $25 grill from Craigslist, did it’s job!

After dinner, the boys moved my $15 Craigslist desk (can you tell we’re LOVING Craigslist?) into my office.  It was heavy!!!

Dropping it:

Getting it up the step!

Well, maybe…

It made it!

I LOVE my old school, metal desk-it’s exactly what I wanted.  I just need to get some Goo Gone (oh wait, I have a gallon sitting in San Francisco) to clean it well.

While the guys moved the desk, Lu, Megan, and I played “cheese” (taking pictures of Lu while she tries to put the lens cap on my camera).

Another wonderful day in Boise!

Blueberry oatmeal with farmer’s market raspberries and strawberries.  Topped with my sister’s GF banana bread and almond butter. 

Yesterday was the epitome of a perfect day for me.  I met my sister and we walked down to the farmer’s market and got some great local produce.  After shopping, we ran into a parade.  I didn’t have my camera but it was cool!  The bagpipers and old fire engines were the highlight.  (Crappy phone pictures)

A random parade is not something I would have found in San Mateo!  After the parade we took the girls to the park where they had a blast! (I was so bummed I forgot my camera).

In the afternoon, we went over to my old college roommate (and good friend) Megan’s house for a BBQ.  I’ve written about Megan and Luke before. I am so excited that Megan and Luke live here!  And?  Luke and Shaun will be working together.  How awesome is that?  Shaun starts work on Tuesday and I imagine that we’ll be seeing a lot of Megan and Luke. YAY!

They had set up a table out in their backyard, in the shade.

With beautiful flowers from their garden.

And yummy appetizers!

Lu had a great time running around the backyard.

Dinner was served!

Chicken, steak, fish, grilled veggies and rice salad. YOM.

After dinner Lu went for a swing in the hammock.

Lucy LOVED Aunt Megan.  Lu is pretty shy and takes time to warm up to people.  NOT MEGAN.  She was like Megan’s shadow and couldn’t get enough of her.  Megan is a teacher and is going to be a great Mommy (around Christmas!).

Megan had picked up some fireworks for Lu and we were unsure how she’d react.  What do you think she thought of them?

She kept asking for “Mo! Mo! Mo!”  It was very sweet. 

At the end of the night, Lu christened Megan and Luke’s new tub-they just got a fantastic bathroom remodel and Lu had a popsicle that got all over.

Before we left, Lu gave Aunt Megan a huge hug.

We’ve made the right decision 😉

~~~~~

Yes, that is a plastic bowl and a spoon of Lucy’s up there in the first picture of my morning oatmeal.  Our stuff isn’t here :(.  It was supposed to be here by July 2nd at the latest but it is now sitting in San Francisco.  They can’t find a driver.  I didn’t even know that that was a possibility.  When they schedule a move, shouldn’t the driver be scheduled too?  Mayflower is paying us $125 everyday that our stuff isn’t here and they don’t seem too concerned.  They’ve basically told us that our stuff will get here when it gets here.  So, we wait.  I’m not very happy with Mayflower right now.

BUT

We haven’t let it slow us down.  My sister let us borrow 2 arm chairs and a table with 4 chairs.  We bought a picnic table for outside and we’re having a good time “camping out”.  I was wondering today if we really even needed our 5,000 pounds of stuff?  We do, of course, but it hasn’t been that bad. We have each other, family, and friends-it’s all we really need.

The movers still haven’t arrived with all of our stuff so I’m living on a very limited pantry.  Last night I made a delicious glaze for chicken with what I had on hand-it was so easy and yummy that I thought I’d share.

Ingredients:

-3 TBSP honey
-2 TBSP olive oil
-1/2 cup balsamic vinegar

Instructions:

-Mix ingredients together in a zip top bag and add your protein.  Make sure protein is well covered with the glaze.

-Marinate for as long as you’d like.  I only let my sit for about 15 minutes and it was still incredibly flavorful.

-Throw it on the grill!

YOM!

As you saw yesterday our house went up for sale on Friday.

We had our first open house on Sunday and it went really well. About 25 groups came in to look at it, meaning that about 50 people saw it.  There seemed to be a lot of interest and numerous people asked for a disclosure packet.  The broker’s tour is today and we’ll know more information after that.  I’m eagerly awaiting the call about how that goes!

The overall feeling of most everyone that walked into our unit was that they didn’t expect it to be so nice.  We put A TON of work into our house.  When we moved in, it was straight out of 1978.  White tile with brown grout, original vinyl flooring, brown cabinets….we even had a brown ROTARY phone in the kitchen!  Insane. We completely remodeled the kitchen, put in wood flooring (it was carpet), remodeled the guest bathroom, and painted almost every room.

What do you think? I apologize for the not so great quality of the pictures-they are from my realtors website.  I really should ask her for the originals.

Kitchen:

Living Room/Dining Area:

Living Room:

Master Bedroom:

Master Closet/Changing Area/Bathroom:

Lu’s Bedroom:

Bathroom 2:

It was a good house.  I’m proud of what we did with it and I hope we find a buyer who will love it as much as we did.

I’m going to try and recap the last week of my life.  I feel like a month has gone by!

We started last week with Lu and Mommy going to Vietnamese for a little date.  Lu decided that she loves everything Vietnamese!

My brother-in-law and nephew left.  And then we said goodbye at daycare :(  It was very emotional.  I gave each of Lucy’s main teachers a keychain with her picture and all her teachers got thank you cards and giftcards to Starbucks.  They cried, I cried, it was the worst part of moving :(.

On Friday, the movers came and made short order of our house!

And as you can see, the For Sale sign went up on our house!

We then hit the road! Shaun in his Element with the bird and tons of boxes and me with Lucy, the kitty, and tons of boxes.  We left the Bay Area around 3:45 and didn’t get to our overnight stop until 12:45. NINE hours in the car.  Everyone did great, although Lu woke up around 11:45 PM and didn’t go back to sleep until about 1:30 AM.  Here she is at 12:45 in the hotel room:

That next morning we slept in until about 9:45, got breakfast and then hit the road.  The desserts desert of Nevada are surprisingly beautiful!

As was Oregon!

And then we hit Idaho!

Those are pictures taken with my camera as I was driving.  It was pretty desolate and a VERY straight road.  It was gorgeous but a bit tedious.  Lu wasn’t such a happy camper.  She did pretty well but had about a 45 minute crying streak before we got to the ONLY town to stop in (there was literally nothing for hundreds of miles).  And then she cried a bit right as we were driving into Boise.  She promptly fell asleep (for the first time of the day) right as we hit Boise city limits.

We left Winnemucca at 10:30 and got to Boise around 4:30.  Minus one hour for the time change and it was 5 hours in the car.  MUCH more manageable than the 9 hours the night before.

We were finally home!

I walked into the house to find this:

and this:

and this:

Courtesy of my Mom and sister.  It was a nice way to be welcomed home.  My brother-in-law also mowed the lawn for us and his mom (who lives here) planted us 3 planters full of beautiful flowers.  I thought I had taken pictures but evidently not.  I’ll get to that 😉

Oh and of course my sister left the infamous bears!

These bears are so not my thing and so my sister torments me with them whenever she can.  I’ve come to embrace them 😉

We have an empty house, with just the essentials-food, a pack n’ play for Lu, and a blow up bed for Shaun and I and THAT’S it.

We’ve been spending a lot of time at my sister’s and having picnics on the balcony.

Our stuff should be here by Friday and I can’t wait!!!

We arrived in Boise on Saturday (long post about that to follow!) and man does it feel like summer here!  It has yet to feel like summer in the Bay Area so the heat and sun were a welcome change.  It was in the 80s on Saturday, the 90s on Sunday, and it’s rumored that we’ll hit 100 today!  No worries, it’s supposed to cool down to the 80s by mid-week and stay there for awhile.

POM Wonderful contacted me last month to see if I’d like to contribute to their POM Summer Menu Series.  Y’all know how much I love pomegranates-I wrote an homage to them back in November! I gladly accepted even with all the moving madness.  So for the next month, you’ll be seeing a POMegranate inspired recipe once a week.

This week I was asked to make a dessert. Last night, we headed over to my sister’s for dinner and I had plans to make a granita. It’s cherry lime flavored as an ode to my old favorite Sonic Cherry Limeade slush that I now think tastes awful.  Super easy, no fuss, cool, and healthy-perfect for my moving madness! This is way better than a Sonic Cherry Limeade slush-hands down!

You only need four ingredients.

Ingredients:

-16 ounces POM Wonderful pomegranate cherry juice

-1/4 cup honey
-1/4 cup lime juice
-3 TBSP vodka (this only serves to keep the mixture from freezing solid-no real alcoholic content. Alternately, you can use no vodka but will need to place the frozen mixture in a food processor.)

Instructions:

-Mix pomegranate juice with honey in a small saucepan over medium heat to combine.

-While that’s cooking, squeeze the limes.

-Whisk the juice mixture numerous times. When you start, you can feel the honey on the bottom of the pan.  You know it’s done when there is no longer any resistance from the honey.

-Whisk in the lime juice and vodka and add to a shallow pan.

-Place the pan in the freezer.

-Go play.

-After an hour, use a fork to break up the ice mixture.

-Place it back in the freezer.

-Go play for another hour.

-Mix it up again.

I had to put this down in my brother-in-law’s man cave freezer-hence the cooler in the above picture. 

-Go enjoy dinner and watching the cousins giggle hysterically and kiss each other unprompted (and know that you 100% made the right decision moving to Boise).

-After about another hour, your granita will be done.  Mix it up a final time.

-Scoop it into pretty serving bowls.  Garnish with lime and mint (optional) and enjoy!

-Seriously YOM.  Shaun rated it a 3.5 out of 5 (high praise for a dessert from him) and my sister rated this a 5.  She LOVED it, as did I.  She thought that it would be delicious with a thin mint or a chocolate wafer cookie for those of you out there with no gluten allergies.  I may pair it with a square of good dark chocolate next time.

I would make this again in a heartbeat. It’s perfect for warm summer evenings-very refreshing and cool.  It was thousands of times better (and better for you!) than a cherry limeade slush.

YOM!

One of the things that is so great about having a blog, is all the amazing people that you get to meet.  I met up with 2 in the past 4 days.

Lynn of The Actor’s Diet was in the Bay Area for a shoot and it turns out that she was staying only 10 minutes away.  We arranged to meet for drinks late Friday night and it was FABULOUS!

It was like reconnecting with an old friend.  We could have spent the whole night talking but cut our night “short” at midnight as Lynn had lines to memorize and I had guests to entertain.

Today, I drove over to Jill’s house for lunch and to meet the sweet Isabella. We met once before about a month before Isabella made her debut.  I’m so glad I was able to make it work to actually meet Isabella.  We went to Jill’s Whole Foods (the biggest and best one I have ever seen) and had a nummy lunch.

How cute is she?

She was in a dress!

A dark (but sweet!) picture.

How amazing is she?!?!?!

This weekend we took my BIL and nephew to the California Academy of Sciences.  If you’re ever in the Bay Area I HIGHLY recommend visiting this museum.  It’s amazing.

Lu LOVED touching the stuff in the tide pools.

There were awesome Jellyfish (I love Jellyfish).

This was a big round tank and Shaun wanted me to take a picture THROUGH the tank.

My BIL has his eyes closed but this is a cute (but dark) picture of us.

There were awesome “fishies!”

Alien froggies:

Snakes:

An albino alligator (Yes this guy is real):

And a low water garden on the roof!  The roof is the garden.

Here are skylights into the rain forest:

It was a nice way to spend our last Sunday in the area and Father’s Day.

I hope you had a great Father’s Day!

A friend from my Mommy board who lives in Kansas is in the area visiting her family.  We met up at the mall yesterday and had so much fun.

Mel and I met while pregnant on Baby Center and our group of girls always talked about Starbucks, Target, and Sonic Burger.  We just so happened to go to a mall that had a Target, a Starbucks and a Sonic Burger.  Kismet!

We met at Target, got some Starbucks, and then went and played.

Lu and Emme!

The four of us (kind of).  A better one of Emme:

A super silly one of Lu:

I finished the trip with a Cherry Limeade Slush.

I used to LOVE these things and I was so excited to have a splurge BUT this was utterly disgusting.  It was so sweet and just tasted of syrup.  I drank about a fourth of it and had to stop.