Shrimp Primivera

Our friend Paul (who will be officiating our wedding) came to visit awhile ago and I brought out an old favourite recipe that I found here on fatsecret.com. http://www.fatsecret.com/recipes/shrimp-primavera/Default.aspx

It's called Shrimp Primavera and it's simple but so delicious. We had purchased a delicious hefenweizen cheddar bread. It had a crispy crust that reminded me of a croissant and a heavier, very flavourful bread inside. I want some right now actually, but it didn't last that long in this apartment. Paul brought a lovely, fruity white wine that went quite nicely with it. This was the first time that I had used my new Moleskine Recipe Journal too. I <3 it :)

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Ingredients

• 12 oz salad shrimp
• 1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
• 3/4 cup light parmesan alfredo past sauce
• 1 oz whole grain spaghetti
• 4 tsp reduced fat parmesan style grated cheese
• 24 spears medium asparagus
• 6 medium carrots
• 4 cloves garlic

The recipe says this serves 5. I had 3 over and Changed a few things. I used regular ground up parmesan because it was a lot cheaper and easier to find and i had some left over from last time. I also used 4 carrots and 24 spears small asparagus as that's all the supermarket had. Might have added a bit more sauce too ^_^. Ooh I also added mushrooms as well! About 5 chopped up. I add them when I add the other veggies.

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Instructions

1. Cook whole grain spaghetti as package directs; drain.

2. Trim and cut Asparagus into 1" pieces, Peel and chop carrots into slices about 1/4 inch thick. Measure 3 cups of precooked Salad Shrimp (frozen) and set to side.

3. Spray large skillet/wok with non-stick spray, add extra lean olive oil, bring to high heat, add carrots.

4. Grate garlic cloves into skillet/wok. Add asparagus and cook for 5 minutes.

5. Add frozen precooked shrimp to skillet/wok until shrimp is heated through.

6. Add pasta sauce and heat until warm.

7. Add reduced fat parmesan cheese, salt and pepper to taste.

8. Place pasta in bowl and top with shrimp mixture.

I hope you try this and that you love it! Let me know if you do in the comments :)

Fascinators

I've finished all of the bridemaids fascinators! This means I can get on to making my veil and reception hat, two things that i have been avoiding because I'm afraid to mess them up! Anywho I think that these 4 were a good warm up anyway :)

Summertime

Playing with the Macro setting on the way home from dog walking 

Admiring the moon from my balcony

I might do these individually as you can see much more detail upcloe

Car shells

Typical Daisy view :)

Flags of of the russian Sailing Ship Pallada

A seagull shows a float plane how flying is done

Love the colour of this flower

I'm a sucker for sunsets

Everyone loves the symphony splash

Pickle boats at the inner harbour

I have also updated my SPCA photo blog as well. You can check that out here:

Shoes

So, the shoes that I wanted for my wedding (red sequin hightops) proved impossible to find even with the internet to help me, so I decided to go dressy and the shoes i ended up deciding on came in the mail today:

They're even nicer than i thought they would be and even the box they came in was lovely. I love them!
In other news I went for a second opinion about getting contacts for the day of the wedding and even though my eyes are too bad to get an exact match it looks like i might have a decent pair for the day of. Hizaaa!!!

Ooh I also got my assorted 10 embellishment buttons to use on my bridesmaids fascinators. Now to wait for the feathers to give them the final touch. I feel like such a 'do it yourself' wannabe! Good times. Almost two months to go. Geez!

My first "how to" video

I decided to make fascinators for my bridesmaids to wear. I decided to make a video to document it for any other people who are craft challenged like me. I still need to find some sort of shiny embellishment (i'll look on etsy) but other than that i'm pleased with how they came out!

Here is the video, let me know what you think!

http://youtu.be/FyXOlYhRTBc

Next on my list is the birdcage veil!

**It now says that it is copyright infringement because of the use of the song but it should be viewable in Canada and the US. Go fig.

Also, in non wedding related news....

I made spaghetti and meatball cupcakes for trevors last day!

Nothing says "I'll miss you! Don't forget me!" like sending your friend to their new home with diabetes. 

I got the instructions off of this website:

http://www.kitchendaily.com/creative-cupcaking/

Invites finished

With 3 months left to the wedding (oy-vey) we have finally finished the invites for the most part and sent the majority of them out. We've gotten some great feedback already which makes me really happy :)

On the inside of the card we have a R.S.V.P postcard that i designed and corner punched. On the back next to the guests names we have two options for guests to choose from:

-will be at the wedding, possibly dancing the robot on oct 1st.

or

-is not able to attend in which case this postcard will self destruct in 10,9,8,7,6....

 I adhered  the postcard to the card with one little square sticky so that it's easy to remove. Then i hand wrote in white pen surrounding it "I am a R.S.V.P postcard. Fill me out and mail me back please".

The bottom of the card is just the information for where to come for the wedding with an additional "Fancy hats are encouraged". I LOVE hats. And it seems to be a good compromise for me and André since i wanted it to be a costume party for the guests and he wasn't into the idea lol.

We also included a ghetto photocopied map as our ceremony location is a little random. I used the sticker that i showed in a previous post on the address labels. All in all i'm really happy with the invites and André is as well :)

Other than that I bought some feathers to make my bridesmaids their fascinators and some for my veil as well although i don't know exactly what i want to do yet. Ooh i also got my birdcage veil supply from etsy today! It was really cheap and came super fast! now i just need to work some crafty magic. I hope that it turns out okay! 

Stickers!

So i got the stickers that will seal the wedding invitation envelopes. They're not as red as i was hoping they would be but  i think that they are quite nice!

The Wish Tree

Instead of doing a guest book we're doing a wish tree. I think that it is a tradition that was popular and may have started in Japan. 

André is trying to get the metal workers at his job to make us a tree. If  that doesn't work i'm just as happy spray painting some willow branches to be honest. 

I once again checked out Etsy to find what i needed for the individual tags. Guests will write down their well wishes for us on the tags provided and then hang them on the tree for us to enjoy. The shop that I got the cut outs and bakers twine is called Ready2QuiltShop.

Gifts for my attendants

I got my maid of honour an engraved gold clover charm because she wears the same golden necklace every day and i wanted something that she would end up wearing more than once.  I got myself a star. I found the rest of my attendants gifts on etsy! The shop is called Mykonos.

Everything came well packaged and it was a very friendly shop to deal with! I'm not sure which girl will get which necklace but I really like the leaves for a fall theme! They were super cheap too :D Cuz I'm classy like that.

From the same store I also bought the 4 of them each a brooch that has a vintage look to go on either their dresses or their shrugs if we get them. 

So that's the bridesmaids mostly taken care of. The bridesmaids dresses are black and i'm pretty much letting them pick them out themselves. We have two so far which are fantastic and we got for a steal as well!

We'll probably do red shoes as well although i don't think i'll hold anyone to that as reds are so hard to match. I'm definitely getting red for me though :D 

André doesn't have any ideas as to what he wants to get for his side of the wedding party but he'll come up with something.

The Invitation

So I finally got down to making the main part of the wedding invitation. The concept changed a bit over the few months but it came down to this main design. It took me two tries to get the silk screen for this right (it's the only way that i could do the white on red image) and even then it's far from perfect but i decided to count my losses and pull the prints for the invitations anyway. 

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This was the concept design

A close up of the finished product. I actually have purchased a corner rounding cut out since then but i'm not sure if i will end up using it on the main thing as i didn't successfully manage to get them all centred but I will probably end up using it on the RSVP postcard that i still need to finish designing or the wedding info sheet or both. 

I did around 100 cards. There are definitely about 10 that I did before i had hinges to use with the screen (that made it a million times nicer and easier to do) that are really poor but once we finalize the guest list if we still need those 10 invites i will just touch them out by hand. 

The cards used are by cardblanks. About $32 for 10 not including envelopes. As red is my favourite colour I was pretty picky about these lol. The white ink is actually a silkscreening fabric ink from speedball. I did these using the photo emulsion method. 

Found a deal on envelopes at michaels. 50 white envelopes and cards for $5! Amazing! I decided to cheap out on the envelopes because they're just going to get ripped open anyway. André decides to use the cards for the RSVP postcards or the Thankyou notes so we'll see! In the end I'm just glad I finally did it. I hope that people like them!

Cupcakes for the man child inside all of us

This isn't really a recipe. It's super simple and there are many variations but i thought i would post it regardless incase someone hadn't tried this idea yet. You never know right?
I made cupcakes to bring to work for valentines day (and a few days later for my manchilds birthday) and decided I wanted a little more than just the usual solid cake cupcake. Here is my solution that is stupidly simple but was very delicious and popular.

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First, make some cupcakes. I like to take the ghetto lazy approach and use a boxed mix, and to make it extra ghetto, whatever one is cheapest.

Next choose a filling. I decided since this was an experiment to just play it safe so I bought some jello chocolate pudding. It ended up being delicious but i feel like if i had really wanted to make it pop i would have put something different in it like whipped cream with custard and strawberry or something. As long as it fits through a cake decorating tip of whatever you use to fill these than it will do.

To fill the cupcake i filled up a icing bag with the pudding but i feel like if you didn't have one of these you could just use a ziplock bag and cut off one of the corners. I used to do that all the time when i was icing things.

I used a regular icing tip. I chose the one with the largest opening since i wanted to make sure that the pudding could get through. In retrospect i think i may have let the pudding set too much and it  made filling the cupcakes a tiny bit more difficult than it had to be. But seeing as this is so easy that didn't really make for hard times :D

The rest is super fast you just stick your icing tip into the top middle of each cupcake and fill it up with pudding. I liked how you could feel the cupcake inflate. You just have to be careful not to overdue it because i found that it was harder to cover them in icing later when there was pudding on the top. 

And then of course you finish them off by decorating as lazily and us uninspired as you can because you left making your valentines (or birthday whichever is the case) cupcakes far too long and you have stayed up too late making them.

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I made my manchild a special lunch for his birthday and as is tradition drew on the lunch bag for him. If you are a fan of adam hughes then you might recognize this horrible butchering of one of his beautiful drawings. Is was late okay?