Mission Deception: Huge Success

Tad-Da! I made these last night:

Usually I have no idea what I am doing in the kitchen. Coming from a family whose life revolves around food (my grandfather, Dad and now Sean are/were all restauranteurs and my mom can whip up just about anything from scratch by memory) I really had no interest in cooking or baking because food was always around.

I have made quite a few of the recipes from Deceptively Delicious over the last few weeks and overall I have to say they have been a huge success! The lasagna (hidden sweet potato and cauliflowers), the beef stew (hidden broccoli), and the chicken fingers (hidden sweet potato again) are all D.E.L.I.C.I.O.U.S.! Last night I made chocolate cupcakes with cream cheese icing (hidden cauliflower and avocado) and they are extremely yummy, and you cannot even taste a hint of the veggies. The recipes are easy and fun to make for all us beginners out there.

The purees took about 2 hours to prepare one evening but I have them pre-packaged in 1/2 cup servings in the freezer. This made enough to do about 9 or 10 meals so you really only have to do all the prep work once every few weeks.

All in all, I can't wait to try more of the recipes and would recommend it to anyone out there looking to eat a little bit healthier.

Yard Sale Success

We definitely had a great morning out at all our sales! We only had time to hit about 10 sales around the West end of the city, but in the older neighborhoods we really found some gems. I am not going to share everything just yet, but these we a couple of my favorite finds. I will remember to bring my blackberry with us next time so I can google artists when I find paintings I like. I saw this painting hanging on a fence (it is oil on canvas) and immediately we both fell in love. Once we got home and googled the artist's name we discovered that he is actually fairly well know and this little $85 painting is probably worth closer to $1000!!! Crazy.
Since the wood frame is original to the painting and even has stamp and name plate of the Boston art gallery it hung in when it was first purchased I just cannot bring myself to paint or distress it in any way. But it is kind of dirty and dingy, which I like~

My smallest, and favorite purchase was this plain looking hinged box. It was sitting on a table with nothing special but I decided I needed to look and see what was housed in there...


To my delight it is a complete set of antique children's stamps. In both upper and lower case as well as all numbers and even fractions LOL! One thing that made it so endearing was the original owner actually burnt her name and the year into the lid (can you see it amongst all those stamps on the lid?). At $15, I HAD to have it!

I also grabbed 3 beautiful antique chairs that I will be sharing once they receive the full blown makeover they deserve!

Saturday Summer plans

I am really looking forward to doing a lot of garage sale-ing (I'm pretty sure I just made that word up...) this summer. I kind of like being up early and first on the scene to scoop up all the best treasures! Tomorrow is going to be my first "official" garage sale day. Wren is going to be spending the morning with her Grandma and Sean has been gracious enough to come along with his pick-up truck to collect all the goodies incase I find anything big!

Hope everyone has fun plans for this weekend too~