Stuffed courgettes

Back along I did a recipe for herb crusted stuffed courgettes. This is a fabulous variation I found on pinterest and you can find the link to the original here. I have to say I prefer this version!!! I tweaked it slightly from the original as I have no curry powder in the house! Can you tell its an Indian house??? Instead I added a pinch of turmeric, a some finely chopped green chillies (I can't cook without chilli!), some finely chopped garlic and a pinch of garam masala. 

Here they are ready for the oven!

Just look at these little lovelies!

Paired up with some cumin and rosemary potatoes - they made for a perfect meal :)

DIY fairy princess wand

I sat surrounded by all my craft stuff after ages today and it felt so good!!! Little Miss J has to dress up like a princess  for a charity fundraiser they're doing at nursery.  Now I don't have a princess outfit for her but I do have a fairy outfit with wings so she's going as a fairy princess.  Since no self-respecting fairy can go without a wand, I set about to fashion her one from stuff I had lying around the house.  It had to be pink to match her dress and of course there had to be glitter!!!  The rest of it was a piece of cardboard for the star, some pink paper, a bubble wand that she no longer plays with, some kitchen foil and some mod podge.

I love how it turned out! Thrifty DIY rocks!

I'm still here!

I have sinned so much at blogging recently.....its not because I haven't wanted to - I've just  had way too much going on and very little time to do it all!

Sometimes I think I've got too much going on.  I've been involved in learning soul healing recently and that has been taking up quite a lot of time and commitment.  And although I want to do it all, I can't - so some things take precedence over others and for a minute, crafting has taken a bit of a back seat. 

Hopefully I will have enough time on my hands to get back in full swing soon!! Now that fall is in the air - I'm hoping to try out some new autumn  recipes and get into some festive crafting with little miss J

Crostini with goats cheese & red onion marmalade

I really really like goats cheese and back along we ate an appetizer at a restaurant that had some grilled goats cheese served with red onion marmalade. The flavour combination just explodes in your mouth.  So it was but the obvious choice to try and replicate it at home and I found the perfect recipe here.

I didn't have a baguette around so I used ciabatta, but if you are trying this I think a baguette would work much better as the ciabatta is far too thick.  Also, I didn't have any mustard cress around, so I just topped mine with a little coriander.

Give this one a go - you won't be disappointed! :)

Tin can redo

This is my first attempt at using Mod Podge.  Decided to repurpose some tin cans that I had.  They didn't turn out too bad.

And worked out as a perfect container for these Egg Carton flowers that we created some time ago.

Lemon cheesecake

I absolutely adore cheesecake and this is my favourite recipe for it. You can find the recipe here on the Good Food Channel.

The only change I have made is that I only used 150 ml of sour cream for the topping instead of the specified 250 ml. I also used light cream cheese and I realized only when I was assimilating the ingredients for the topping that I had no stem ginger in the cupboard! Duh! So it ended up being just a lemon cheesecake instead!

If you've never made cheesecake, this is a good one to start with as it is a foolproof recipe! I hope you enjoy it as much as I did :)

DIY Notice Board

My friend Ro, who blogs over at Jellyhead's Finished Projects wanted to make our friend, Claire at work a birthday present.  We are both into crafting and wanted to create something from scratch.  Claire is well liked by her clients and receives loads of thank you cards, so we decided to give her a board she could pin them all up on!

Ro's hubby kindly got us a piece of plywood from his workplace.  I then used some lovely material that my brother had bought me from Thailand ages ago (it was just sat in my stash  - I guess this was its purpose!!) and used Fabri - Tac to glue it down to the back of the board.

Ro then added some pegs she found in the craft section.  She also used normal clothes pegs, but these seemed too big so she ended up with more of these little ones. 

And ta da - this is what we came up with.  We were really happy with the result.