Easy and Delicious Pot Roast Stew

Ingredients:
- 2 lbs roast beef
- 2-3 potatoes, cut
- 1 onion cut in large pieces
- 1/2 of a small bag of baby carrots
- 3-4 celery stalks, cut
- 1 box beef broth
- Red pepper flakes (adds some extra taste, don't add to much!)
- 1 Knorr vegetable soup mix (in the soup aisle, on the top shelf)
- Seasons of preference (we use Trader Joe's 21 seasonings and a bit of garlic salt)

Directions:
Place roast beef in crock pot and cover in veggies. Add beef broth and make sure all the meat and veggies are covered, you can add water if needed. I have a 5 quart Crock Pot and don't have to add any water, but you might depending on your cut of meat and the size of your slow cooker. Then add all your seasonings and mix it up. Let cook on high 3-4 hours, or low 4-6 hours. Once meat is fully cooked, we take it out and shred it and put it back in the pot.

This is one of my favorite meals, it's so perfect in cold weather. It's warm and yummy, and is a good hearty meal. It's perfect to put on Sunday morning and have it ready after church and football. We always pair is with buttered bread. It's so simple and makes me feel all cozy and nostalgic for childhood on the inside. I've had lots of pot roast in my day, but the combination of using broth and the Knorr seasonings makes such a huge difference in flavor. This recipe has a ton of flavor and is one of the easiest things I've ever made in my life. We've made it a ton these last few months, even using pork roasts instead of beef- which was also yummy! 

Fall Beauty Inspiration

Although it's barely chilly in the morning and the weather isn't cooperating with my fall wardrobe (still dying to wear my new beanie!), fall makeup can still be worn. Ha ha Mother Nature, I pulled one over on ya! Neiner neiner neiner! Back to being adult-ish.

With the cool mornings, I've been yearning for deep wine and rich gold hues and have been checking out Pinterest for some inspiration. I love the warm looks of the season with deep berry lips and wine hued shadow. I also love the flip side of the bronzes and nude (I'm always down for nude, regardless of the season). Here are some of my recent pins of looks I want to try and copy.

Aren't these looks gorgeous? I can't even pick a favorite, I'm fond of them each. My makeup for work has been the same lately (check out my Every Day Face post to see what I use) and I'm dying to switch it up. I've been digging through some of my makeup and found a few items to hold me over, but I found some products that are perfect for these looks.

Here are some products to re-create the looks on your own (and they're totally on my beauty list I keep on my phone to check out at Target/Ulta)!

Revlon Wine Not // NYX Copenhagen // Revlon Black Cherry

NYX Terra Cotta // MAC Love Joy

NYX Cabana Boy // MAC Keepsakes - Beige Eyes // NYX Prima Donna

Lucky for me, I think I'll be swinging by an Ulta in the next couple of days. I've been dying to check out the holiday MAC line too. They make the best stuff and I just want to add all of it to cart and check out. Back in college, I used to do that without batting a lash. Now, I have a mortgage payment and toddler hair bows to buy. Priorities my friends. Maybe I'll add an item or two to my Christmas list... 

What are some of your favorite fall looks? Do you change your makeup routine at all with the seasons? 

Recipe Review: Biscuit Chicken Pot Pie

In no way am I a chef of any kind. Yes, I cook/bake, but it's rare. Matt gets home before me and loves to cook (just like his dad!) so he usually cooks around these parts. On days I'm off work or am off before him, I'll cook a few of my tried and true recipes. When on Pinterest, I saw this pin and had to try it for myself. We love chicken pot pie and this sounded easy and delicious!

(Their picture is so much prettier than mine!)

The original recipe is from Six Sisters' Stuff and I'm so glad they shared it because it was a big hit in our house! Here is their recipe, straight from their site:

Easy Biscuit Chicken Pot Pie
Prep time: 15 mins Cook time: 15 mins Total time: 30 mins
Serves: 8

Ingredients
2 Tablespoons vegetable oil
1 onion, chopped fine
½ cup of chopped carrots
½ cup of chopped broccoli
½ cup of chopped cauliflower
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
½ cup of all-purpose flour
1½ cups milk
2 cups of low-sodium chicken broth
1 regular size can of cream of chicken soup
½ teaspoon dried thyme
2 cups (about 1 pound) of cooked, shredded chicken
¾ cup frozen peas, thawed
1 refrigerated package of Pilsbury Grands Biscuits (8 biscuits)

Instructions
-Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
-In a large pan heat your oil on medium-high heat. Once the oil is hot, saute the onions, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, and peas until tender, about 5-7 minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Transfer cooked vegetables to a bowl with the chicken; set aside.
-Reduce the heat to medium and add the butter to the same pot. When melted, stir in the flour and cook, stirring constantly for 1 minute. Whisk in the milk, chicken broth, cream of chicken soup and thyme. Allow the sauce to come to a simmer and let it simmer for 1 minute to thicken. Season with salt and pepper.
-Turn off the heat and transfer the vegetables and chicken to the pot, stirring until the filling is well-combined. -If the filling is too thick, stir in some extra chicken broth milk.
-Pour the filling into a 13x9-inch baking dish and bake for 18 minutes. Remove the dish from the oven (keeping the oven on and door closed) and top the filling with 8 biscuits (yes, raw biscuits). Return the baking dish to the oven and bake for an additional 10-12 minutes, until the biscuits are golden brown and the filling is bubbly. Cool for 5 minutes before serving.

Here are the changes/suggestion I made to the recipe:
- For the chicken, I put two frozen chicken breasts in a crock pot on low and covered it with 16 ounces of chicken broth. Since I used a large crock pot, I also had to add some water to make sure the chicken was entirely covered. A rotisserie chicken would be perfect to use as well!
- I skipped the cauliflower and plan on trying celery and corn with the next round
- For my recipe, I only used half of an onion and I sauteed the onion and carrots (I chopped them in to small pieces) first and longer before adding the other vegetables to make sure they were soft
-I'll definitely use more broccoli and carrots in the next batch. I didn't think there was enough to my liking with only 1/2 cup
- In the comments on their post, someone commented about making the biscuits separately and putting a biscuit in a bowl and pouring the mixture on top. I think it would all turn out the same, but wanted to share that idea too.
- The recipe says it takes 15 minutes to prep and 15 minutes to cook and that is entirely not true. I think it took me about 45 minutes from start to finish (once the chicken was already cooked).
- There is no way it serves 8 people, more like 4-5

Mmmmmm this was such a delicious dinner, I can't wait to have it for my lunch! I'll definitely be making it again and again. Matt said it was one of the best things I've ever made and he had 3 helpings! Ellie liked it too and it was really simple to make. It was a lot of fun to make and I liked that it was from "scratch" (minus the biscuits of course!). It makes me so happy when I try something and it turns out just as I imagined and Matt enjoys it. Maybe I'll do more in the kitchen!

....Let's not hold our breath on that one........

What are some of your favorite cold weather recipes?

House to Home: Master Bedroom

Since moving into our first house in March, I've been searching high and low for bedroom furniture. I absolutely hate our bedroom right now. The search has been on and we've decided to re-do the room next year with our tax return. Our biggest obstacle we've had is finding furniture we like! We looked at so many different retailers and everything was ho-hum or out of our budget. I've thought about just having what we like made even. I've bought a few items (3 things) for our room when it finally gets a make-over, but I've been dreaming of our perfect room for a while now and it's to the point that it's eating me up and I wanted to share some inspiration with you guys for what I have in mind.

Here's some of my Pinterest inspirations I've found:

What I picture for our bedroom is soft, neutral colors. Grays, white, and cream, and I'm thinking a bedding mix of white, gray, and navy? All through college I had an all white bed and I loved sleeping on what looked and felt like a giant cloud. In the Pottery Barn catalog, they had a bed with white sheets, a navy blanket, and a big comforter and I fell in love with it. I'm also wanting to paint our walls a white gray color. I want our room to be relaxing and bright, with a touch of rich textures.

A Natural Wood Dresser //  A Mirrored Nightstand // A Tufted Headboard 

Bed Bench // Mirrored Frame 

Here are some of the items I've found recently online, but I'm hesitant to buy Target furniture. When looking at the display items at the store, some of them are well made and others are pretty cheap. Since we're buying all new furniture, I want to invest money in items that will last years and years. I bought that mirrored frame already and I'm saving it to put a picture of Matt and I in it from our family pictures we're having taken next month. I also love the look of mix matched side tables and I love mirrored ones, but I think it would be so hard to keep clean. Especially with Ellie's little finger prints everywhere!

What bedroom looks to you like? Where do you like to get bedroom furniture?

Summer Hair Inspiration

One of my favorite activities in the whole world is happening soon- getting my hair done! Holy hair Batman, I haven't been able to get into see my hair girl Nikki since she's so busy doing weddings, photo shoots, etc. I can't wait to see her! As always, I have a million different things I want to do to my hair. Dye it darker, go blonder, do a mix, cut it shorter, cut layers, keep it blunt, and so on. Lucky for me, Nikki is bomb and I can walk in and say "do what you want" and she always does a great job and somehow knows exactly what change I'm looking for. I've been trolling Pinterest and Instagram and here are some of my favorites I'll be drawing inspiration from.

What are some of your favorite hair trends for summer? Are you making any changes to your hair before fall creeps up on us?

Be sure to enter my Tiny Tags giveaway and enjoy 15% off your purchase through 07/31 using LLP14!

House to Home: Living Room

Matt and I are back shopping for a home. We looked for almost a year without any luck and once we found out we were expecting, we looked harder, but after a few months we decided to move into an apartment and hold off on buying a home as we adjusted to having a new baby. Now that we've settled into our family life it's time to get a move on.

I'm so excited to find a home to raise Ellie and her future siblings in, it won't be our forever home (by a long shot), but our first real home. Every place we look at I try and picture how I want to decorate it to make it feel welcoming and cozy. A place that we love to spend time at and people love to come and visit us. Of course, it's not just how it's decorated that makes it a home, but the love we fill it with, but shopping to furnish a house can be a lot of fun.

And yes, you read that right. We need to furnish an entire home. Anytime Matt and I have lived on our own (we didn't live with each other until after we were married), we were living with roommates who already had furniture so neither of us have ever had to make any big kid purchases like that. Since buying a home is such a large purchase, there's no way we will be able to just buy all new furniture to fill every room, so we are going to focus on the rooms that matter the most, such as the living room!

I've been trolling Pinterest (follow me here!) and found tons of inspiration for our dream home.  Pinterest can seriously suck you in for hours. It's awesome and a total time suck at the same time. What I've been drawn to most is soft colors with pops of white. I love how a neutral palette provides the opportunity for a pop of color, and how easy neutrals are to transition into seasons with a swap of pillow covers and throws. I also realize, that having a lot of light colors is ridiculous with a growing brood (I am in no way preggers right now, but want to eventually have more children) that will inevitably color on it and wedge Lord knows what kind of food into the fabric. Here are some of my favorite pins.

After looking at my pins, I'm really leaning towards a color palette of greys, blues, silver, and ivory. I like that the blue can be swapped out easily for mint, peach, pink, purple, aqua, and yellow and create a new feel and breathe new life into the room.

What are your favorite places to shop for furniture? We need basically everything and I'm up for any and all suggestions! What pieces are important to you in decorating? Any advice on furniture buying?

Spice Up Your Life- Delish Recipe!

So we all know around here that I'm a one trick pony when it comes to cooking good food. Salmon is my specialty! Now I can cook other things that are edible and good, but fish is my dish. If you come over for dinner that's what I'll make you. It's quick, easy, and I always get compliments on it. However, once you've had my fish I can't invite you over for dinner anymore because it's kind of embarrassing to always serve the same thing. I mean, I cook fish all different kinds of ways, but still, salmon EVERY TIME? So I took to Pinterest to find a good chicken dish for the hubs and any future dinner guests. I found this pin for Honey-Lime Chicken Skewers from Kitchen Meets Girl and tried it right away.

Here's what you need, directly from her site:

• 3 tablespoons soy sauce
• 2 tablespoons honey
• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
• juice of one lime
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 1-2 teaspoon Siracha
• red pepper flakes, to taste (I left this out of my dish only because we didn't have any)
• 2 tablespoon cilantro
• 1 pound skinless, boneless chicken breasts (I used two frozen chicken breasts)

This is with fish- more on that below

Now, Ashley made hers into kabobs that look amazing in the picture, but I hate kabobs. I feel like the meat always gets dried out. So I mixed together the ingredients into a square dish and plopped my thawed chicken breasts in. Then I cut up some red, yellow, and orange peppers for fun and added that to it. I let the food marinade on each side for one hour. The above ingredients did not make enough for my chicken to be completely covered in my dish so that's why I had to flip them. I did an hour marinade on each side because I had the time, but I think 30 minutes would also work.

Then I put the entire mixture into a pan with the lid on the stovetop set to Medium. The chicken cooked really fast and I flipped them over at around 7 minutes. With the lid on, all the moisture was held inside and the meat was so juicy! Matt and I absolutely loved this dish! He even asked me to make the marinade for his hunting trip next week. It was delicious and so tasty, the peppers were an amazing addition! I'm not a big chicken person so to have a good marinade under my belt will help spice up plain boring chicken.

Since we loved the marinade so much, I had to try it on salmon right (first pic above)? Well, it was okay. It's so dang good on chicken I thought it would be good on everything. Salmon has enough flavor by itself, the marinade didn't compliment it very well. Hey, I tried it right? Now you know too.

So if you're bored with chicken, I couldn't recommend this enough- it is so dang good! I've made it each week since I first tried the recipe. Yummmmmy!

What are some of your favorite Pinterest recipes? Isn't is the best when they turn out well?

My Go-To Recipes + Must-Reads

So we all know that I'm not a big cook, anything I do cook I try to always document and post about it because I consider it a small miracle. Here, I share 3 of my favorite recipes, ones I've made over and over again and have shared the recipes with guests- that's my sign that they're just as delicious to others as they are to me!

Here are some of my favorite recipes and links to past posts about them.

Dessert/Breakfast: Sopapilla Cheesecake 

(post and recipe here)

I got this recipe from a friend and made it the following weekend, where I shared the recipe with three people at the party. So in one week, the recipe was shared a total of 4 times! That's a winner in any book. It's so delicious, easy to make, and is great like I said for breakfast (with berries) or dessert (berries and ice cream).

Drinks: Starbucks Passion Iced Tea

Regardless of the time of year, I'm a sucker for a good lemonade. This drink is one of my favorites and I make it at home and at work all the time.
Ingredients: 
Tazo Passion Tea bags (you can buy the individual bags for a single glass or the pitcher bags for home)
Simply Lemonade (I'm sure any lemonade would work, but this one is my favorite)

Optional: 
Sweetener (the hubs and I bought the sweetener straight from Starbucks, but I usually make it without)

Directions:
 Depending on whether or not you're making the individual/pitcher size, bring half of the amount water needed to boil and let tea bag seep. The longer you let it sit, the stronger the flavor.
(I also use all cold water and let it seep when I'm being lazy, still tastes great)
Once the tea is ready, add the remaining half of water to it cold.
Mix in lemonade- I usually add a 1/3 of lemonade to whatever size my drink holder is.
Ex: 12 oz glass = 8 oz tea and 4 oz of lemonade.
Sweeten to taste.
There's no real science behind it, although I'm sure Starbucks has one, I just kind of mix it to my liking. You make enjoy it with more/less lemonade. I think the Simply Lemonade is sweet enough on its own too that no sweetener is needed.

Dinner: Spicy Mustard Salmon

If I'm being honest, when it comes to a really good dinner, I'm a one trick pony. Yes I can make a few things, but the one thing I can make that's delicious is salmon. Any seafood really, but salmon especially. 

Ingredients:

Thawed salmon

Spicy Mustard

Honey

Lemon

Soy Sauce

Directions: 

For each salmon steak, I drizzle the above ingredients and let it marinade for at least 30 minutes. You can put all the salmon together in a cake pan to marinade or marinade them in a zip lock depending on how many you're making. There's no science to the amounts I use, just make sure that both sides of the fish get doused in everything. 

Put salmon in cold oven, set temperature to 350 and bake 20 minutes. Keep the lemon wedges/halves and cook them along side of the salmon for extra flavor.

Anytime we've had people over for dinner this is what I serve and it's always been a big hit. It's super simple and the flavors mix together giving it an awesome flavor. I like to serve it with a salad and veggies (usually asparagus and peppers).

What are some of your favorite recipes? 

 

Question of the month from Kristen: "What's your go-to recipe? Drink, dinner, dessert, whatever..."

• Alison*Elle - Alison is giving white denim another go this season
• Beautygirl24 - Target did it again - Noelle found the perfect Summer wedges from the Sam & Libby collection.
• Ella Pretty - Ella's got a brand new bag!
• Love, Lipstick & Pearls - Kristen is all ready for baby's arrival and shared her nursery with us.
• Schnelle Couture - Danielle talks makeup and highlights where to save and where to splurge.
• Sequins and Stilettos - Skylette has finally found her perfect striped skirt!
• The Currently Obsessed - Mehreen organized Makeup drawers.