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Homemade Flour Tortillas

I never really ate tortillas much as a kid. I never really liked the taste of the store-bought ones. When we had taco nights, I would just mix up all my taco toppings and pick them up with tortilla chips and skip the flour tortilla.

Last summer when I was shopping at our local grocery store in New Orleans, I noticed that our grocery store sold homemade tortillas in the bakery section. I bought some and after trying those, I changed my opinion on flour tortillas. They were really tasty! Then of course, it occurred to me that I could make them at home myself and they would be even better! So I tried that. Now, I am officially addicted to homemade flour tortillas. Seriously. We’ve made them three times in the last few weeks. (and this recipe makes 12 and there are just 2 of us!)

You should definitely try this recipe! These are amazing!

homemade flour tortillas

makes 12 tortillas, recipe from fearless homemaker, (originally adapted from mexican made easy, as seen on kitchen meets girl)

ingredients

3 1/2 cups all purpose flour (or you can use part whole wheat if you want to make them slightly healthier)
3/4 cup shortening (i used vegetable shortening)
2 teaspoons salt
1 cup lukewarm water

directions

In a large bowl, blend the flour and shortening until the mixture resembles fine meal.

In a small bowl, mix the salt and the water until the salt has dissolved. Using the dough hook attachment of a stand mixer, add water/salt mixture to the flour mixture, mixing until the liquid is incorporated. Mix for 2 to 3 minutes, or until smooth. If you don’t have a stand mixer, stir the liquid into the flour mixture with a wooden spoon, then knead by hand.

Divide the dough into 12 equally-sized pieces and roll each into a ball. Coat each ball with a thin coat of flour.

Roll each ball into a thin 8 inch round, as thin as you can get ‘em — this keeps them soft and pliable once they’re cooked. After you roll them out, you can take an 8” salad plate, turn it upside down on top of the circles, and cut off any excess around the edges. Voila! Perfect circles. Or if you don’t care if they are perfect or not, just leave them as is.

Cook each round in a heavy non-stick pan over medium-high heat, flipping once, until puffed and golden on both sides, about 3-5 minutes per tortilla. Or if you have a flat electric griddle, that works perfectly and you can cook 2 at a time.

Careful not to cook them too long or they will get crunchy and will break when you try to stuff them. (Although they will still taste delicious)

Here are step-by-step photos of the process as well:

Flour and shortening,

plus salt water equals dough.

Tear dough into 12 mounds,

then roll those into balls.

Coat dough balls and rolling pin in flour,

then roll into circles.

Set up the kitchen, assembly- line style, with plates for raw and cooked dough.

Let dough cook several minutes per side,

then flip to the other side. Dough will bubble up. It seems that in our case, ones made with part whole wheat flour bubbled up more.

Then before you know it, you have a kitchen full of delicious tortillas!

Great for breakfast burritos, normal burritos, quesadillas, covered in honey and cinnamon, or even just to snack on. (all of which I have made with these, by the way. I told you I was addicted!)

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DIY Mason Jar Soap Dispenser

Say hello to our lovely new blue mason jar soap dispenser!

After making our DIY Liquid Soap, I decided that our kitchen could use a new soap dispenser to hold our soap in. Our old one was looking pretty raggedy.

Gross, right? I have no idea why the glass was getting all rusty. The whole top part had broken apart and was just all disgusting looking. I saved the actual dispenser pump part for my new soap dispenser, but threw out/recycled the rest of this old mess.

Instead I brought out this beauty. (and excuse the flour mess all over the counter. We had just made homemade tortillas. yum!)

The actual jar is an antique blue mason jar, but I used a newer lid, so I didn’t destroy anything antique. I think this lid was actually one from my sister’s canned tomatoes she gave us last summer.

For the soap dispenser part of this project, I just cleaned up and re-used the pump from my old soap dispenser. However, if you don’t have an old one to re-use, I’ve heard that you can find just the pump parts online or perhaps look at a thrift store for an old one you could re-purpose.

The opening I needed in my jar lid was roughly the size of a dime, so I used a dime to draw a circle on the lid of my jar.

Then Drew drilled a hole through the center of the marked circle.

Then he used sidecuts to cut the opening a little wider.

He used the drill bit again to slightly shave off the sharpest parts of the edges as well. It isn’t the prettiest opening, but it doesn’t really matter since this part gets covered up anyway. If you have a bigger round bit for your drill that would actually work better, but we didn’t, so we were making due with what we had.

Superglue your pump onto your mason jar lid, let it dry, then fill with soap and you are done!

One tip for the superglue process though: don’t let anyone do this step that isn’t a perfectionist. Drew did this step when I wasn’t supervising and approving and he somehow got superglue all over the top of the jar and it turns slightly white and is really noticeable. (as seen below) So make sure you are careful when you apply your superglue so that it doesn’t show in the end!

Other than that, it looks really great in our kitchen:

I love that the blue jar goes well with the blue colors in the print above the sink area. 🙂

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DIY Liquid Soap (from a bar of soap)

A couple weeks ago, Drew and I tried making our own liquid soap. It turned out really well! You can make a whole lot of liquid soap (almost two orange juice containers full!) out of any bar of soap! A much better deal for the money!

Here is what you need:

-cheese grater
-funnel
-2 Tablespoons liquid glycerin (found in the band-aid aisle) (may have to adjust this if using larger bar of soap)
-1 bar of soap (mine was 5 oz, but you can also use 8 oz)
-10 cups of water (16 cups if using 8 oz bar of soap)
-1 teaspoon vitamin E ointment (optional — I just added this because it is good for your skin)

Directions:

1. Grate your bar of soap.

2. Fill large pot with water, add soap shavings, add glycerin, and vitamin E.

3. Heat all ingredients until dissolved. It will basically just look like soapy water.

4. Let cool overnight, or at least 12 hours or so. Then you end up with this:

5. Then take a hand mixer (or an immersion blender would really work better) and mix it all up.

6. Use a funnel to pour into plastic storage containers. I used leftover Simply Orange and Simply Lemonade plastic jugs.

We’ve been using it for several weeks now and I really like it. I love the smell of the Dr. Bronners Citrus Orange bar soap we used! The consistency turned out just right and it is a lot of soap for the price of one bar of soap!

I’d like to try this for body wash next! 🙂

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Healthy Chocolate Chip Cookies

Yes, you read that right. Healthy Chocolate Chip Cookies. Healthy as in, no sugar, definitely no nasty sugar substitutes, no flour, no eggs and no butter. You can make these completely vegan and also gluten free.

Really. Plus they taste really awesome. You can eat a few and not even feel guilty. You should try it. 🙂

Ingredients:

3 large, ripe bananas, well mashed (about 1 1/2 cups)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup coconut oil, barely warm – so it isn’t solid (or alternately, olive oil or grapeseed oil)
2 cups rolled oats
2/3 cup almond meal
1/3 cup coconut, finely shredded & unsweetened
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon fine grain sea salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
6 – 7 ounces chocolate chips or dark chocolate bar chopped

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a large bowl combine the bananas, vanilla extract, and coconut oil. Set aside. In another bowl whisk together the oats, almond meal, shredded coconut, cinnamon, salt, and baking powder. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and stir until combined. Fold in the chocolate chunks/chips. Scoop dough with a cookie scoop or drop in dollops onto a cookie sheet, an inch apart. Bake for about 13-15 minutes, watching closely. They might be done a bit sooner depending on your oven and the size of your cookies.

Notes:

If you want to make these completely gluten free, make sure that you buy gluten free oats– that weren’t processed along with flour products. I used milk chocolate chips, but if you want to make them completely vegan, use chocolate without milk in it. I bought almond flour at the grocery store in the organic aisle, but if you can make your own almond meal by pulsing almonds in a food processor until they are the texture of sand – but be really careful and don’t go too far or you’ll end up with almond butter.

Oh, and definitely make sure that your bananas are very ripe. I got so excited about these cookies that the first time I made them I went to the store, got bananas, and made them that night while the bananas were still a tiny bit yellow-green. Yeah, don’t do that. Since the bananas are the sweetener, they will taste nasty if the bananas aren’t sweet enough. Now every time I make them I wait until the bananas are really overripe–almost completely black on the outside–that will give you the sweetest cookies.

original recipe from here.

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Living Room Gallery Wall

After showing you my crocheted blanket the other day on the couch in our living room, it reminded me that I never posted about our living room gallery wall that I finished right before school started again at the end of the summer. Even though in that post I didn’t show any pictures that showed the gallery frames, the living room actually looks more like this:

Excuse the messiness, i.e. Drew’s flip-flops, airplane wings, the broom that I’m pretty sure he used to sweep the outside sidewalk and then brought back inside and set in the living room, etc. Lets focus on the frames.

Anyway, obviously the wall up above the couch looked quite bare beforehand, as shown here:

I really liked the idea of doing a gallery wall with several 8×10 or so pictures in each matching frame.  I really liked this print collection from Little Brown Pen (the same place that I got my Rose Window Print) but the collection is $150 and that is without frames. I didn’t really want to spend that much and I wanted the photographs to be a little more personal anyway. New Orleans is famous for architecture, so I figured what better way to highlight pretty architectural elements from New Orleans than in our living room?

First, I wanted to look into frames to see how much they were going to cost. We have an 11×14 white frame matted to an 8×10 in our bedroom that I like that was $18 at Target. (It came with the frame and mat together and looks similar to this one, in white). I thought those would look nice in the living room, but also kind-of pricey for several frames. (around $150 just in frames for the wall)

While out and about running errands one day, we decided to stop in at Michael’s and see what they had. Low and behold, they happened to have white 10×13 frames matted down to 8x10s. They were a tiny bit smaller than what I had originally wanted and the frames weren’t as sleek, but they were also on sale. I can’t remember how much they were originally, but they were on sale for $4.99 and they had enough in stock for the 8 or 10 that we wanted for the wall. Since that would get us right around $50 for all the frames for the wall instead of $150 like the ones at Target, we jumped on it.

We ended up getting 10 since we weren’t really sure of the arrangement yet and how many would look best. At that price, we didn’t want to not get enough and have to come back and get more after the sale had ended. We got to the check out and actually ended up getting an additional discount since the cart we picked had a coupon laying in it.

All in all, we got each frame for $3.74 + tax. Our total for all ten frames? $40.67. Pretty good shopping day.

I used some newsprint to cut out squares the size of our frames and taped them to the wall until I liked the positioning. Then we marked the nail holes right on the paper and nailed through them, taking the paper down after we had the nails for the frames up. Here are really bad pictures of that process. It was nighttime and dark outside. I should have turned the overhead light on for better pictures, but oh well.

I made the terrible decision to complete this project in the middle of the New Orleans summer, which meant that then I had to spend hours walking around the Garden District taking pictures of houses and fences in 100+ degree weather. That wasn’t perhaps the most enjoyable part of the process, but it did result in some pretty pictures. I took a ton, then narrowed it down to my favorites and then decided which 8 looked best together. I printed them each as an 8×10 at Sam’s Club. (They have the cheapest, quick printing prices)

After cleaning the frames and putting the pictures inside, I was left with this:

I do like the result–especially for under $50. I do slightly wish that the frames were a little bigger, but I can always switch them out later if I find another good deal. Eventually, I want to change some of the pictures and include more of the unique, colorful New Orleans architecture like shotgun houses and blue front porches as well.

Here are the shots I ended up choosing for the frames:

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Comparison is the thief of Joy

Consider this a letter to myself of sorts. I’m writing it on here in case there is anyone else out there that struggles with this problem (and I would say we all do to an extent) and to remind myself to remember this: comparison is the thief of joy.

I follow and read a lot of blogs. I am constantly pinning pretty things that people have made and decorated or whatever on Pinterest. I am an art student and I’m constantly surrounded by people in the art building with amazing art skills. This list could go on and on. Anyway, I think these things are great and can provide lots of great ideas and inspiration. Pinterest and blogs are great places for decor ideas, finding great recipes, tips and tricks for DIY stuff, etc… I find myself constantly inspired by things that I see and read.

However, they can also work in the wrong direction if you aren’t careful. Reading blogs of people that have beautiful houses with time and money to decorate them nicely, have lots of amazing friends that they can invite over for dinner parties, my favorite fabric designers and their amazing new fabric collections, and all the other million great things that people out there are doing. It can make you start to get a little bit jealous of things or talents that other people have.

I would love to have a pretty farmhouse out in the country with the time and money to renovate and decorate it. I would love to have land to garden, grow vegetables, have chickens and other animals, to be able to compost and live off the land. I would love to have time to do all kinds of great DIY projects, to paint beautiful paintings and sew lots of beautiful things. I would love to design amazing fabric collections and make patterns and use my love of interior design to create beautiful quilt market booths to show off my latest designs. I wish I had a big group of close friends that I could invite over for movies, or game nights, to be able to cook for and have dinner parties. Again, these things could go on and on and on.

I find myself sometimes falling past the point of inspiration and end up in the realm of comparison. Which is a really dangerous place to be. Comparing myself too closely to other people makes it super easy to overlook all the great talents and blessings that I have in my life. It robs me of joy. Instead of being happy with my life, my talents, the things I have, the place I’m at in life, I end up finding myself unhappy and ready to be in a different place. Which isn’t a good thing.

When I really step back and forget about all the other people out there that might cook better than me, paint better than me, decorate, blog, sew, craft or whatever else better than me and just focus on myself, I can actually see that I have a lot of great qualities. I might not be the most amazing chef, but I can budget for food, shop for what I need within that budget, and still cook delicious and healthy meals for me and Drew that sustain and nourish our bodies. I might not have an unlimited budget or the time to constantly be shopping for home decor items for my house, but our little home and the things in it make me smile when I come home. I might not be the most amazing artist, seamstress, or designer at this point in my life, but if I stop to think about the people that do those things that I look up to, they are generally quite a bit older than me and have a whole lot more experience! I may not have a ton of friends to invite over for dinner parties at my house in New Orleans, but I have close friends spread out all over the world and one really best friend that I have the amazing opportunity to come home to and have dinner parties with every night, whom I also get to marry in just 4 short months.

My life really is blessed. I have a lot of creativity and talents that I’m very thankful for. I have an amazing family and friends in many different places. I’ve had many great opportunities so far and I’ve got more time to do other things in life, but for now I’m here in this incredibly unique city going to a great university, which is an opportunity that not everyone gets to have. I might not have my own pretty house in the country, but at this point in my life, that would be too much for me to handle. I love our charming little apartment and it fits our lives right now perfectly. In all honestly, I love where my life is now. Living here, learning new things in school everyday, planning our wedding, figuring our lives out together, etc. I’m very blessed and when I forget about all those other comparisons, I find joy.

image from here. 

 

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Inspiration * Layered Curtains

Do you ever have one of those days where you see one little thing and all of a sudden you want to paint/draw/sew/knit/crochet/bake/redecorate, etc? Yeah, well that is totally me on a daily basis. I love being inspired by things and surrounded by pretty things that encourage me to be creative. Today, my inspiration comes from this picture I stumbled upon on Pinterest:

Isn’t it absolutely gorgeous! I love pretty much everything about the room in this picture, but I especially LOVE those curtains! Why did it never occur to me to layer lovely fabrics together to create stunning window treatments!? (especially amazing colors and patterns such as those seen here!) If you know me well, you know I love fabric! I love the texture, the patterns, the colors, the softness it adds to a room. So why should you limit yourself by only choosing one fabric to add loveliness to the windows in a room?

I can’t wait to add multiple layers of beautiful fabric patterns to the windows in my house! 🙂

image found here. 

 

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Crocheted Blanket Finished!

When I shared my crocheted blanket with you a couple weeks ago, it looked like this:

It was 8×12 squares and about 3×5 feet. Now, it looks like this:

It is now 12×14 squares and roughly 5 1/2 x 6 feet. I’m so happy to have it finished and have all the little threads woven in. (That part took forever!) The final blanket is really big actually. It fits all the way across our three cushioned couch. Drew and I can easily sit at different ends of the couch and still both cover up with it.

I really love the addition of the border! It makes it so much prettier! It also helped to align and pull the squares more evenly and straighten them out. The border also adds a nice ripple/lace effect. My mom and I used the same soft white color as I had used around the colored circles on the row of double crochets in the border, then switched to a cream color for the row of single crochets in the border, then went back to the soft white for the chain stitch loops on the edge of the border. I love the slight variation in the colors there.

So pretty! Now I need to get some different pillows and artwork for our living room to balance out this beautiful pop of color! 🙂

I love having pieces in our home that have so much love woven into them! This blanket is not only pretty, but sentimental as well, considering my mom and I both worked on it so hard for weeks over break, watching movies and television shows in front of the fireplace in my childhood home. I’m happy it now gets to live in my New Orleans home and remind me of those memories.

For more information on how I made this blanket, check out the original post with directions, here. 🙂

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Happy 2012!! :)

I love the refreshed feeling every new year brings. It is always the perfect time for reflection on the past year and hopes and dreams for all to come in the new year.

The past year has been great for me! I’ve expanded this blog, gotten my first real apartment, spent time decorating, crafting and DIYing things for my home, continued to be better about being healthy (making sure to take my vitamins every day, going to Pilates classes every week, eating fresher and more organic, spending more time outside in the fresh air, getting in a better sleep schedule, spending time daily in prayer and bible study, trying to manage stress better, etc…), been planning my wedding, and lots of other great things. Last January, I started my 20 Before Twenty list and it is nice to look back and see that I addressed everything on my list, completing almost all of the things, and modifying others.

I don’t have a specific list of things that I want to accomplish in 2012, mostly because big things are already going to happen in 2012. Drew and I are getting married this year! The wedding is now only a few months away! It is so exciting and kind-of still unbelievable at the same time! I’m sure I’ll be crazy busy the next few months with school and wedding planning! Drew also graduates this year as well! (just a couple weeks before the wedding!) This semester he only has two remaining classes to take and he will be working full time as well. With my credits at school, I’m already listed as a senior as well, so that means graduation for me is not too far off either! I’m excited for his graduation, our wedding, honeymoon and getting to grow in our relationship through marriage. I’m so happy to be building a life and home together with my soon-to-be husband!

My goals for 2012 are simple really. I have to get all my wedding planning done, and I hope to do so as stress-free as possible. I really want to enjoy every step of this process! I want to enjoy picking out things and enjoy this as part of life and not just as a to-do step for the wedding. It is a lot more stressful to plan a wedding while I’m still in school, so I hope to continue to develop a good balance between school and life. I want to work on building up a successful and happy marriage and hope to work out all the extra things in life that a marriage brings in a stress-free way. (being financially independent, paying extra bills like home, car and health insurance, etc…) Mostly I just want to work on remembering to enjoy life. It is easy to get wrapped up in school and see this time as just a stepping stone to get to a career or another part of life. I want to really remember to live each day and try not to worry and stress out so much about what the future might bring. I want to simply live life and enjoy every moment of it. 🙂

These are the first pictures of me taken in 2012, spending a lovely evening on a double date with my soon-to-be husband and my best friend and her soon-to-be husband, enjoying life:

Happy 2012! 🙂

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Crocheted Blanket

I hope you all had wonderful holidays! I definitely have been busy the past few weeks! Visiting with family, taking my nieces to get pictures taken with Santa, shopping with my sisters for Christmas presents, baking cookies with my mom (these are my favorite holiday cookies!), celebrating Hanukkah and remembering our Savior’s Jewish roots, celebrating Christmas and remembering the night of our dear Savior’s birth, giving gifts, relaxing and wedding planning as well!

A while ago, I stumbled across this picture on the internet and decided that I wanted to start crocheting a blanket like this one over my Christmas break:

My friend, Tonya, and I used to knit and crochet all the time in middle school. We made tons of scarves and baby blankets, but I hadn’t ever made a large blanket like this. Luckily, my mom is super crafty and knows how to do all kinds of sewing things, so she refreshed my memory on my crochet stitches and read the pattern for me and showed me how to do it. It is really easy once you get the hang of it!

I ended up going to Walmart the day before Christmas Eve and bought 18 colors of yarn to work with. I seriously left the store with three huge bags full of yarn. ($50 worth!) I ended up wrapping them up for a Christmas present to me from my parents (they usually have us pick out things we want, wrap them and open them on Christmas) and then on Christmas Eve when we opened gifts, I looked like this:

My mom and I both started working on it that night and have been crocheting constantly for the past few days and have a pretty much finished blanket already!

We made lots and lots of circles before we started connecting them together.

We also tried to make sure that no two circles were alike so we spent a lot of time comparing the ones we were working on with the ones already done. We tried to make sure that we made the same number of centers out of each color and the same with the middle rows and outsides so that all colors would be well represented in the end.

It was harder than you would think to try to determine what circles to put next to each other to balance out the blanket!

We aren’t completely done, I still want to add a few more rows to make it a little bigger, and I have to go back in and thread in the tails of yarn, but so far we have this: (it is roughly 3×5 feet)

I think this blanket would also be really pretty made a little smaller for a baby blanket. It would also be pretty in a different color scheme as well.

I love the way the colors look together and I love the shapes. They look like little flowers. I also love the little star design that is made in the connecting corners between the colors (in the white part).

These are the colors of yarn that I used. The large white one on top is the connecting color. As you can see, the blanket is in the background, so this is how much yarn I had leftover after making a blanket this big. I still plan on making it bigger, so in the end I’ll use more of each kind than shown here, but you could easily make more than one blanket out of the yarn  bought for this project. I bought two of the super jumbo white one on top and we used all of one and a little bit of the one pictured here.

To make it, I used these directions, with a size H crochet needle. That blog also shows pictures that might be helpful if you haven’t crocheted much before. To sum up her words, this is pretty much how you do it:

ch = chain, st = stitch, ss = slip stitch, dc = double crochet.

Start: make 5 ch, join with ss into a ring.

1st round: 4ch (=1dc,1ch), 1dc + 1ch 11 times. Join with ss in 3rd ch. 12 dc.

2nd round: Start in one of the ch spaces. 3 ch (= 1dc), 1dc, 1ch, *2dc, 1ch* in the remaining ch spaces. Join with ss in 3rd ch. 12 groups of 2 dc.

3rd round: Start in one of the ch spaces. 3 ch (= 1dc), 2dc in ch space, 1ch, *3dc, 1ch* in the remaining ch spaces. Join with ss in 3rd ch. 12 groups of 3 dc.

4th round: Start in one of the ch spaces. 4ch (= 1 tr), 1tr, 3ch, 2tr, (=1st corner), *1ch, (2dc,1ch,2dc) in next ch space, 1ch, (2dc,1ch,2dc) in next ch space, 1ch, (2tr, 3ch, 2tr) (=2nd corner)**, repeat * to ** 2 times, 1ch, (2dc, 1ch, 2dc) inthe next two ch spaces, 1ch. Join with ss to 4th ch.

I used the assembly line method so I made a lot of circles before I started the 4th round and then joined them like this:

Start in a corner. Crochet 2tr, 1ch,next ch through the corner of the other square, 1ch, 2tr. (The first corner is done). Side: 1ch,(2dc, 1ch through 1ch on other square, 2dc), 1ch (2dc, 1ch through 1ch on other square, 2dc), 1ch. Next corner (where you will join square to the square to the right and the one above): 2tr, 1ch, 1ch through corner of square to the right, 1 ch through corner of the square above, 2 tr. Do the next side as the first. In the next corner you crochet 1 ch through the corner of the square above. Finish the round as in pattern.

Final Border:  One row of dc first. On dc in every dc and one dc in every ch space. 5 dc in the corners. One row of sc in every dc of last round. make one extra sc in the corners. One row of loops: Start with one sc, chain 4, skip two sc on last round – all the way round.

Here, is some more info on the lady’s blanket who wrote the directions above and more info on what the final border looks like. She calls her blanket, “Flowers in the Snow.”

Happy Crocheting! 🙂

P.S. My mom and I were both crocheting pretty fast the whole time, have previous experience crocheting, and we seriously worked on it all day long and late into the night almost every day over the past few days, so unless you have unlimited amounts of time to give to it all at once, I wouldn’t expect to finish yours so quickly! I thought it would take me months to do when I first decided to do it. I can’t believe we got so much done already! 🙂

*****UPDATE*****

See the blanket completely done in this post, here. 

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