Recipe - Squash with Noodles

So...trash day for me is Thursday which means Wednesday evening I'm always cleaning out the fridge and deciding what goes, what stays. It also usually means I'm throwing random stuff together for dinner from leftover bits and pieces prior to the final clean out. Sometimes the concoctions are good, sometimes not so much.

Today was one of the good concoction days...I took a partial onion, a few green onions, and a couple summer squash, marinated them for awhile and then stir-fried everything. I finished the dish off with some already prepared noodles and a splash more of the dipping sauce I'd used as a marinade.

Some of the ingredients I used...

And the final dish...

I love it when a a few thrown together ingredients turn out to be a tasty dinner!!!

Brrrrr!!!

Stay warm everybody!!! Hot chocolate with some Peppermint Schnapps is definitely in my future sometime today :-)

Recipe - Baked Crab Rangoon Pizza

I seem to have a love-hate relationship with cooking. I'll spend a few weeks trying lots of recipes and thoroughly enjoying the time in the kitchen. Then I'll get sick of it and live on frozen/easy food for awhile. Then lather.rinse.repeat the whole cycle :-)

I guess I'm amping up for another round of cooking because this past weekend I tried out a recipe I found on Pillsbury's website for Baked Crab Rangoon Pizza. It was tasty and there's only a couple tweaks I'd make in future preparations. The original recipe can be found here.

I always like to follow the original recipe as close as I can the first time I fix it. That seems to make it easier to keep track of any tweaks I'd like to make. Of course, this is providing the first time around turns out tasty enough to warrant making a second time!

I made the following tweaks/substitutions :

• I used imitation crab meat (8 oz.), not real. I always have some in the fridge and never have canned crab meat in the cabinet. 
• I skipped the cornmeal step.
• I used light cream cheese and light mayo.

I would keep those same tweaks and add the following changes the next time I make this pizza:

• Increase the cream cheese a bit...maybe go from 4 oz. to 6 oz. The topping mixture seemed a bit skimpy when I was spreading it to the edges of the pizza. Maybe add an additional tablespoon or so of mayo as well.
• Decrease the green pepper to 1/4 cup and increase the green onions.
• Finely, finely, finely chop the green pepper.
• Mix it up ahead of time and let it set in the fridge so the flavors can develop.

I fixed this as a main dish, but I think it would be great cut up in small squares and served as an appetizer too!

Finally, here's a picture of the finished dish.Yum Yum!

Baby Cards

In my life it seems like there's always someone having a baby....I am surrounded by a lot of fertile people! I always like to make cards for special occasions and welcoming a new addition to the family is at the top of my card making list. I'm currently on a self-imposed crafty spending freeze for 6 months so I shopped my stash to create these two cards. The card stock and patterned paper are from Close to my Heart (Precious Paisleys), the flowers are by Prima, and the stamp is by Stamping Bella (BabyFellaBella).

P.S. This is my first time trying to upload a picture to my blog, so fingers-crossed that it works!

What's in a Name???

I chose the semi-generic name Jenny's Journaling because I've always liked the idea of having a blog where I wasn't limited in the topics I posted about. Oh, and alliteration is always a good thing too :-)

I guess if I were to label this blog, I would call it a lifestyle blog (though, that sounds kinda pretentious to me). I'll post about crafty stuff, recipes I've tried, Pinterest things I've tried, and whatever else pops into my mind. Basically, a little bit of this and a little bit of that!

Happy New Year!

Well, it's 2014 and I think I created this blog sometime in 2012. I think it's long overdue that I actually do something with it! The beginning of a new year seems like a great time to get started and blogging at least once a week should be a doable goal for me. Watch out blog world, here I come!!!