Spalfredo!

Yes, Spalfredo. My new roomie was making spaghetti and I wondered if it would be tasty to use half spaghetti sauce and half alfredo sauce. It was awesome!

Brown your meat, drain, then add back to the pan with half alfredo sauce and half spaghetti sauce. Heat 'till it's warm and everything else is ready.

Tastes better than it looks, promise.

Now you can either be all fancy and make it pretty by pouring some over your noodles...

Or you can just straight up mix it all together like you don't care.

*Hint* That's what I did ^_^

It was spalfredo in more than one way cuz we didn't have enough spaghetti noodles so it was half fettuccine and half spaghetti noodles. Hee, but it was good =D

Moral: Delicious!

We Interrupt Your Normally Scheduled Program for a Short Announcement

So while in the middle of making something else (I can't remember what) I remembered that a couple of my friends didn't know how I cut my tomatoes so evenly for tacos and stuff. 'Dis is for them, gonna be a bit short though. (How long can a tutorial be about cubing tomatoes anyways?)

Tomato!!!

Getting the tomato is the hardest part, really.

Slice off the stem part. Next slice it evenly almost to the bottom, but not quite.

If you cut it all the way through you are gonna hafta do it the old fasioned way.

Now rotate the tomato 90 degrees and do it again.

Try to keep them even.

Now turn the tomato on its side so that the uncut part is facing your non-dominate hand. Then with your dominate hand slice in even strokes all the way through.

Tada! Tomato cubes.

After you slice off all of the cubes you can just cut up the part that's left however you want to. This saves a lot of time and effort. Saves on headaches as well. Enjoy ^_^

Makin' a Sammich

So one of the things you have missed in my absence is the fact that I can now make bread. Granted it's in a bread machine, but that's not the point. If I make quick bread it's done in an hour, but the texture isn't that great. It seems fine 'till you try the normal bread which takes 3 hours to make, that one is awesome and fluffy. The machine makes it to where you don't hafta knead it and all that so I'm happy. The bread goes well with honey and butter, but one thing it's really good at, is sammiches.

Yeah, look at that numminess. 

Here, lemme blow it up for you.

Yeah, you know you want some.

Hmm, let's try this

So, my laptop is sick, Mom's comp is sick, but I have a new friend. With a long story involving friends and things going out of business, I have acquired a "new" comp. And by new I mean really old, but functional. Le sigh, it still means that all of my pics are on my broken little baby, but I figured I could try to start again. (Depressing, I know) I've been working on a few things since we last talked, but since my comp's been down, I haven't taken too many pics. I have taken some though...come to think of it, some of my old pics might still be on the camera, this will take investigating, let's see what I've got saved on it.


Holy crap! You guys have missed so much! Including my first knitted socks...

These were Mom's birthday present.

And my dabbling in wood carving...

Sick right?

My first baby blanket...

Turned out better than I thought it would.

A few recipes...

Made more than this but am lacking pics.

Me playing with my hair...

Really hard taking a pic of your own hair.

And bunches of frogs...

Bunches and bunches of frogs.

These plus more will be turned into entries, just lucky that they were saved on the camera, bunches more on my baby, but these'll do for now.

Broken Friends

My laptop is sick. She's got a broken charging port so I haven't been able to post in a while. I'm on my mom's comp right now to let you know. I might be able to make a post from here, but I doubt it, her's is kinda sick too. Hope you all are well and I hope to see you around soon.

Apple Sandwich? Yes please.

This one was done some time last year. I told you I've been taking pics, just haven't had time to post them. ^_^

We had an apple laying around that was gonna go bad (sad thing is, this is the last time I've had fruit. I miss you fruit) so I decided to experiment. Apples and peanut butter go together really well and I've heard that butter does awesome things to peanut butter so let's go.

I lightly buttered the bread and cut up the apple. Your apple should look better than this, ours was gonna go bad remember? I toasted the bread, then added peanut butter. One thing I was stupid and forgot was that butter is slippery so putting the peanut butter on top of it was funny. Also, if you add a little sprinkle of salt to the apples they are nummy.

 Voila, tasty meal for two.

Yes, it's a bit strange, but experimenting keeps things interesting. ^_^ Besides the butter this is probably a really healthy snack. Enjoy.

Moral: This was fun. Not super, oh my God amazing! But I would do it again. I'd probably omit the butter though

Trip from HELL!

So I'ma make this quick, hopefully. Been forgetting to post this and I figured I would before I forgot. So, my friend got an awesome gift from her mother for Christmas, two tickets to see Bon Jovi live in Atlanta. (cue squeeing here) The problem was not seeing Bon Jovi, the problem was getting there. So I'm told it'll take like 4 or 5 hours to get there. She has money on a Walmart gift card for gas, we've got snacks, let's go!

I couldn't sleep the night before, Mobile has this weird thing where it gets hotter at night. Something about the heat being absorbed into the pavement and releasing when the sun goes down. I dunno. Do all cities have this? I live in the country so I don't have the phenomena. I can't sleep when I'm hot so I'm still up at 4am. (I don't know what time I actually went to bed, all I know is that it was daylight) We've gotta get to the airport for a rental car at around 6 or 7, we oversleep and get up around 9. I would have slept a lot longer due to 4am being awakeness. We get to the airport and park a good bit aways, not too far, but still a good walk. I'm draggin' pretty harshly, half awake, barely conscious and we get to the counter to realize that my friend didn't bring some of the stuff she needed. I think she needed a pay stub and a utility bill. We are going to have to go all the way back to her place. Blah. We stop at Panera (never been there) for bagels and I get this awesome cinnamon bagel thing with cream cheese that was absolutely fantastic. Go get one...I'll wait. So when we get back to the car we find her water bill and since her work is across the street from Panera we go there for a pay stub. Woot! We didn't have to go all the way back ^_^ After I drive her car and follow her back to her house, we load up and we're off!

I manage to catch 30 to 45 mins worth of sleep on the way up but I notice that time is passing a little quicker than it should. The concert is at 7:30 and we just don't seem to be making good time at all. It's like 6 or so and we aren't in Atlanta yet. We have another problem though, our car is running on fumes. We look everywhere for a Walmart to get gas but can't find one. We cue up a map on her phone to look for a Murphy's (Walmart brand gas) and spend a good while circling a part of town until we figure out that in little bitty print the place the phone is pointing us to is Murphy's Sports Bar. We figure we've got enough gas to get us to Atlanta, we'd get gas after the show was over. She uses her debit card at a little place for 10 bucks of gas and we're off again.

We make it there but the place that we paid 20 bucks for is almost completely full. We had to park on the very top floor of the parking deck. We walk several blocks to get there, up and down little hills and stairs. We finally get there and decide to use the restroom before we go in. It's 7:30. I hear a Bon Jovi song playing and I figure they must be playing a tape or something before the band goes in. Then I stop dead in my tracks and realize that, yes, the concert starts at 7:30 and it was indeed 7:30...back in Alabama. It's 8:30 here and we've missed an hour of the concert! How could we have forgotten about the time change?!

We finally make it to our seats to realize that someone else is in them. We have to go and get an usher to get the people out of our seats and the people that had to move spent the rest of the concert being douchebags to us and the people that helped us. Our seats were under an overhang so we couldn't see the tv screen and we were a pretty good bit away so it was kinda hard to see. I am uncomfortable around groups of people and the place was absolutely stacked, plus there was no room to stand straight cuz we were so close together. There were two chicks in front of us that were either drunk or insane. They couldn't decide if they were trying to be disco or 80s or what, they even did the disco finger point. The whole time they were dancing like they had lost their minds, or never had one to begin with.

It was AWESOME! For the next 3 or 4 hours (can't remember which) it was Bon Jovi! Right there! Now that I've seen him live no matter what song of theirs I hear I can imagine it live and it just makes it that much cooler. Freaking amazing. I've never been to a concert and for this to be my first, and possibly only, is really special.

So once the concert is over all of the time pressure is gone and we hang around until the place empties. My friend wanted to get a t-shirt but the little gas station we went to right before we got there screwed something up with her card and it had a temporary hold on it, boo. We also didn't get any pictures because in the rules it said that no cameras were allowed. We didn't wanna have to walk all the way back to the car if they found a camera on us so we just didn't bring one. They didn't even check us for one and there were flashes going off all over the place. Asses, all of them.

Thus begins our search for gas again. Every gas station we run into is for a different brand of gas, it's like Murphy's doesn't exist here or something. We finally find a Walmart with a gas station, but surprise, it's closed. It's after midnight by now and it seems like everywhere is closed. We go into the Walmart cuz my friend has a stroke of brilliance, what if we could buy a visa gift card with our Walmart gift card? It worked! We picked up a visa gift card and an Ihop gift card so we could get some food.

Gas achieved we spend the rest of the trip looking for an Ihop. We know of one in my hometown but are really hoping for one closer. The only one we find is closed...figures. Our last choice is the one in my town. Do remember that I have had almost no sleep and this is around hour 15 since we started this drive. We are both worn ragged and drag ourselves inside. It's so bad that I prop my head up with the menu so I don't fall asleep and hit my head on the table. She orders coffee (coffee puts me to sleep so I passed on that) After a really good breakfast (I think it was good, it was 1am and I think I was sleepwalking by now) we set off again, it's still an hour until we get to my house. We arrive at 2am, we say hi to Mom, and crash. We just absolutely died, I don't think I even moved the whole night. So that was my 16 hour trip from hell.

As a bonus bit of info, my friend is a ginormous fan of Bon Jovi and has everything they have ever put out. From the time we left Mobile to when we got to Tuscaloosa, all 16 hours (which includes the concert) nothing was played except Bon Jovi. And to make it funnier, there weren't even that many songs that played twice. 16 HOURS!!!

As another bonus bit of info, once my friend got back home she looked up the playlist to find out what we had missed in that hour that we were late. We walked in halfway through the first song ^_^ I don't know what they were doing for an hour but we didn't miss any songs, yay!



I found an older Bon Jovi concert picture from google but it can give you an idea of about what we saw.

Now picture it a little further away with an over hang taking up the top part of the pic, a wall/beam taking up the left hand side and a shit ton of people on the right and that's about what we saw. I don't know what tour or place this is but it's from the same side and about the same angle we were at. They were shitty seats but it was still absolutely amazing. Even with the 16 hours of hell I loved it.

My Month Away

So, I've been in Mobile, Alabama for a month and I just got back. Figured I'd share some of my experiences while there.

Apparently Mardi Gras was invented in Mobile or something, even though it is really big in New Orleans, it's home is Mobile. So, the friend I was staying with picked up a king cake at the store and brought it home. It's a pretty cake, round with icing and loads of sugar sprinkles in the Mardi Gras colors. Inside it was cinnamon with strawberry filling (it is important you remember that strawberry part) She goes off to work and I decide I'm gonna have a piece of cake for breakfast (nutritious I know :) ) I'm all not paying attention, checking messages, watching stuff and I look down to find this on my plate...

 WHY?!

Why does my cake have a bloody baby corpse in it? Did my cake give birth? What the hell man?!

Apparently it's got something to do with Mardi Gras, lemme go see if I can find why there was a dead baby in my cake. Here's a New Orleans site explaining the King Cake. Makes a bit more sense now but still, you guys coulda found a better way, honestly.

So after my traumatizing cake experience we went to Books-a-Million where my friend bought me an awesome magnet.

What is that wonderful bracelet? It's a row counter! Yes, my friend is a fantastic jewelry maker and she made me a sliding bead row counter. How cool is that? I love it mightily. 

When I was packing to go to Mobile I packed Valentine's colors of yarn and crochet thread, just in case I decided to make something for my friends. It starts getting closer to the day and I happen to remember that I have a tatting pattern for hearts that I got on my last visit to Hobby Lobby. (I love those free little tear away things, don't you?) I dig through my crafty bag and resurface with red and white crochet thread, a tatting needle, a pattern, and I get to work.

Shut up, I'm still new at tatting.

The white thread was made of a different material than the red and didn't lend itself to tatting very well. I tried starching them to make them a bit stiffer, but it didn't work. I think the red one came out better because the thread actually worked with me instead of doing it's own thing (Yeah I'm looking at you, white thread *glare*) My other friend (I have two down there, hence the two hearts) showed his mom my wool-eater blanket because she's a crocheter too. She loved it and gave me yarn to work on it. She also asked me to make her a baby blanket and gave me yarn for that as well. I don't have pics of it yet, I'll prolley do a post on it later. I love yarn, it's one of the quickest ways to my heart, plus she was super nice, love the whole family. Anyways, I can't see anything else when looking at the white heart since the guy I gave it to told me it looks like a monkey. Le sigh, my tatting needs work.

I previously made a purse for my friend...I don't think I ever posted it. Weird. Dragon Egg Purse

The colors are much prettier in person.

She loved it but I noticed that she had trouble finding her cards and money in it in a hurry. So I figured I would make her a little wallet to match for her birthday. But then, in glorious yarn crafter fashion, I figured, why not make her a wristlet to hold her phone and cards to match her purse? Only I'd use a double zero (00) hook to make it small and start with an oval the size needed to fit her phone. And while I'm at it why don't I just now realize that I have 2 days to finish it and can only work on it while she's asleep or at work?  Dragon Egg Wristlet

Brilliant, really.

And while I was at it I'd go on and make her a card holder too since I had a whole day left till her birthday >_>  Card Holder ITR

I crocheted this in the round for a reason. I had plans on using the random stripe generator (very cool btw) but then I noticed that with all of the blue in the Oceana yarn that you wouldn't be able to tell very well where the stripes were. If it were done in the round with random stripes the front and back would match. I still made stripes but kept it simple. I actually made this a little too small but I figured that, with use over time, it would stretch a bit. Still made with a double zero hook to keep the stitches tight. (Almost a little too tight when it came time to weave in ends. I broke a needle while doing that.)

Dang, I should have taken a pic of the purse that started all of this while I was there. I made her a purse with blueberry banana yarn once and it made me get back into crocheting. You aren't missing much though. 

I also finished the scarfy thing while there. Return of the Scarf 

That's the friend I was staying with in the pics. 

It was a funny thing when I turned around and looked at the couch I was sleeping on during all of this.

 Don't see what's so funny?

How about now?

Yeah, that's where I was sleeping and it was slowly being eaten by yarn. I then had to stop and wonder if I had a problem with this. That wasn't the only bag of yarn btw and my little pink bag just holds all of my tools, and if it's small enough, my current project. (the baby blanket is in it now)

While making the wristlet and wallet I became paranoid that I was gonna run out of Oceana (that's the pretty purple and blue variegated yarn) When my friend wanted me to make her the purse she bought me two skeins of the blue and two of the Oceana. I made the purse, the wristlet, the wallet and this...

Ms. Glynda's Purse

(That a good sized purse btw, it is in no way small)

I had one small ball left of Oceana but I hadn't even used a full skein of the blue yet. How does that happen? I've still got a little bit of blue plus a full untouched skein left. Have I discovered an immortal yarn that never runs out??

My other friend also made me a hand of Clow Cards while I was there.

And since they are so cool you get closeups :D

They are from an anime named Cardcaptor Sakura

The one's face down belong to my scarfy friend, I just showed them so you can see what the backs looked like. I like ice and water, can you tell? Also, The Dark is darker cuz it's from a different batch. It was from his personal collection so I feel all special.

(I really should get their permission to use their names cuz this friend and other friend thing is confusing)

I watched my friend (see?) play a video game called Trinity Universe. One of the hidden characters' name is Recit and he gets made fun of by Prinnies because no one wants their receipt. 

So for the whole time I was down there any time someone asked any of our group if they wanted a receipt we were obligated to say yes.

Let's see...what else happened while I was down there? I tried several red wines, so far I'm not a fan. Maybe I just haven't found the right one but I haven't liked them so far. The one I found the best was called Layer Cake

(Image from Google)

What I did like was that I got some mango rum. I have a bottle all to myself now ^_^ 

(Image still from Google)

*Happy dance* By the way, this stuff is really good in apple juice, just sayin'. And yes, I am of legal drinking age :P You might remember me talking about this stuff in my previous post, Boozin'. So happy I now have some. I missed my family, friends, and kitties, but it was great to see my other friends and hang out. I'm gonna write about the ending to the trip (which included my first ever concert) later cuz I think this one is long enough now. See ya laters peeps.

Egg Drop Chicken Noodle Soup

So, I've shared success, failure, and now I'm sharing a meh. This one I did way back when I still had chicken noodle soup, before I found my awesome soup ->  Cheap Chicken Noodle Made Awesome

I absolutly love egg drop soup so I'm always on the lookout for some way to make it. I decided that since it is chicken broth like stuff that I would try and experiment with chicken noodle soup.

Voila, cheap chicken noodle soup.

I added water and brought it to a low boil. Added scrambled eggs and lightly swirled it around then took it off of the heat. At the end it looked like this...

I cooked the egg a little too long, my bad.

It wasn't good, it wasn't bad. It was okay.

Moral: Meh, prolley won't do this again.

Return of the Scarf!

Soooo, while staying with a friend I brought the 2 needle scarf I was working on ages ago.

New Needles

I was just using it for practice cuz I'm new at this knitting thing and don't know what I'm doing half the time ^_^ Plus when I cast on I accidentally made too many stitches so it's way too wide. But my friend liked it so much she wanted me to finish it. So I thought I'd share with you the final product. She didn't want it blocked so it's a little wonky, just warning you.

It's not crooked, it's just how she's holding it.

If it were blocked it would have spread out the stitches but this way it spreads when you want it to. Like where she's holding it at the sides the stitches are open but if she doesn't want them to be open, for warmth or something I guess, they don't have to be. One weird side effect of it being so wide is that it can be used for more than just a scarf.

So my friends, we have a fashion show! Here's a scarf.

So stylin' ^_^

 A hooded scarfy thing.

And a shawl.

This is what the stitches look like when open. So yeah, the scarf is finally done. Woot!

Pizza Failure

So I figured since I shared a success story with the soup I'd share a failure as well. I did this a while back so wish me luck on remembering everything ^_^

I took a Totinos and wanted to try heating it up on the stove. Sprayed the pan and added a bit of cheese to the pizza.

This is back when I had cheese. I miss you cheese T_T

I only added it on half cuz I was planning on folding it in half. Problem is the bottom got done faster than the top. I put the top on the skillet to try and circulate the air or something like that. Went to flip it and...

Failure. Complete and absolute failure. Maybe if it was cooked on a lower setting, maybe if I wasn't a dumbass and actually cooked it the way it was supposed to be cooked, maybe then it would have turned out ok.

Moral: Not gonna happen again

Cheap Chicken Noodle Made Awesome

Been a while huh? I've been having some medical issues going on and been a little distracted. I have taken pics of stuff I swear, I just never seem to find the time to put them up. I'll try to do better. Going out of town for a month and I've got a few pics on my comp so I'll see what I can do. Anyways, good news and bad news for this post. Good news: I found a way to make that really cheap and blah store brand chicken noodle soup taste awesome. Bad news: I'm out of chicken noodle soup cuz I've made this a couple of times T_T It's just so tasty, I can't help it! So let's get started shall I?

This all started cuz we had garlic left over from Christmas and I was trying to think up ways to use it. I'm not a big cooker cuz I hate cleaning up, and I know there are probably tons of ways for people to use garlic.

I folded a piece of lunch meat in half and then rolled it up.

You can use whatever you want, I'm just broke and this is all we had.

Then I sliced it into rounds and cut those in half (you can chop up your meat any way you like, I just find this faster and easier) Then I chopped up two cloves of garlic.

After that I heated up a bit of butter on medium heat and when it was melted I added the garlic (butter burns, be careful. If you need to, add a bit of olive oil or something) Stirred until it started smelling really good and I thought it would be a good time to add the ham.

 I know when it's time to add the soup cuz the ham starts jumping. I'm serious, that ham is after you and you need to drown it. Added the soup and half a can or so of water, up to you how much you add really. Added 1 bay leaf, a dash or two of black pepper and Italian seasoning and a few shakes of this stuff...

I can't think of what it's called right now. It's some kind of peppers in vinegar. The label has been worn off forever ago cuz we just refill it with vinegar when it gets low. Speaking of which, looks like it needs some now. Anyways...

Here's another thing up to you. Leave it on medium and it will boil eventually. When you think the bay leaf and garlic have had time to infuse to the rest of the soup and the little garlic pieces are transparent and mushy it's time to take it off. 

I actually cooked mine a little too long and some of the water cooked out. I had to wait for my batteries to recharge just a bit so I could take the final few pictures. Oops. Anyways, this soup is great I love it, I'm just gonna be sad when I'm out of garlic.

Moral: Garlic = Bad breath but numminess.