Pages, Pucks and Pantry

Guess Where We Were?

Ah. Maze. Ing.

Hockey - Sharks/Blues Game 5

And Again...

5th Wedding Anniversary

We became Mr. and Mrs. L five years ago today.

Photo taken on our honeymoon. Sunset in Tahiti.

Hockey - Sharks/Blues Game 4

Even it up boys!

Hockey - Sharks/Blues Game 3

My Pinterest Boards - Part 1

Please check out the I PIN THEREFORE I AM post here as this is the second in a series about me and Pinterest.

I did wait quite a  while before setting up my boards on Pinterest. I was a bit intimidated and didn't want to start pinning things to boards until I figured out exactly what boards I wanted to set up. I went through my hobbies, the foods I ate, anything I could think of that I might want to pin and created boards. Like a lot of folks, I got cute when I named my Pinterest boards. Not such a good idea.

My boards are arranged by "type" (all food boards together, all scrapbook related boards together) on my main Pinterest site. The Pinterest drop down menu lists everything alphabetically...which means "I Seafood I Eat It" is filed by the "I" on the drop down menu while I file it under "S" for seafood. Only makes a difference to the one pinning which would be me. And some of the creative names don't necessarily mean anything to anyone but me. So my one hint to anyone starting out and setting up boards on Pinterest, is to check out many different pinners to see what boards they may have and make as many boards as you can! And if you want folks to be able to find things on your board, don't get cutesy, tell them exactly what it is you're pinning.

NOTE: If I make a new board (say split Halloween into three boards) and you followed the original Halloween board, it will not automatically have you following those spin off boards...you'll have to know that there is a new board and follow it too.

NOTE: I am slowing dividing my "holiday" boards into decorations and food. Halloween will be also include costumes.

NOTE: You can now choose what photo you want to be on the cover of your boards. You can change this daily, weekly, or leave it be. I change mine periodically. In a perfect world, the cover of the Get In My Closet board would have the cover of the next outfit I plan on buying. The cover of the Pasta My Heart board would have the next dish I plan on making for dinner. I don't live in a perfect world.

For those interested in my boards, what they contain, why I pin to them, here is a quick rundown (but don't be surprised if they change in the next month as I try to diversify my boards). Hopefully it might help anyone trying to set up boards of their own. I arrange my boards in kind of an order on my Pinterest page, that way if I'm trying to find scrapbooking stuff, all the boards that deal with scrapbooking are near each other. All food boards are together, scrapbooking together, hockey together, holidays together, clothing together etc. Of course I do have some boards that are stand alone...they either are in the top row of my boards (things that are near and dear to my heart) or at the end of all my boards (things that don't really go together). Here, in alphabetical order, are my current boards (the first half of the gazzillion I have, the next half will come later):

ADVENTURES IN DRINK: A mixture of alcoholic drinks, summer floats, milkshakes, coffee, tea, hot chocolate recipes and sayings that pertain to drinking of any sort. Don't be surprised to find bottles of tequila pictured. This board will probably get divided into alcoholic and non alcoholic drinks at some point.

ANIMAL KINGDOM: Because gosh darn, animals are so cute! And it's much better to look at pictures of them being cute than having to clean up their poop.

ARE WE THERE YET?: Incredible photos of places I'd love to visit in my lifetime that don't show the expensive cost of flying there, finding a decent hotel room without bedbugs, getting taken for a ride by some unscrupulous taxi driver, nor killing my feet trying to walk around the entire area to see everything in the one day I'm actually there. Still, places I'd like to visit.

BACON-EVERYTHINGS BETTER WITH: Because it's bacon!

BEACHY KEEN: No I do not have a beach house, nor do I ever plan on buying one. Nor is my current home in any way shape or form "beachy". But I do have one small bathroom that is kinda beach colored with some shell decorations here and there so of course there has to be an entire Pinterest board devoted to that small bathroom I may or may not ever get around to decorating "beachy".

BEEF - IT'S WHATS FOR DINNER: I thought about separating this out by types of beef (hamburger, roasts etc), but at this time, I'm just gonna leave it as is with everything beef included.

BEEN TO GO AGAIN: Basically just places I've been to that I want to go back and visit again. I need to be careful that I don't pin a thousand photos of Bora Bora as I wish I was there daily. I will not be pinning that place near the boarder where we got sick and feared for our lives as I'm trying to erase that from my memory.

BREAKFAST: All things breakfast or brunch that includes pancakes, eggs, toasts and pretty much anything that you'd eat in the morning. Except bacon...because it has it's own board. And pizza...because I'm too old to eat leftover pizza for breakfast any more so I don't. Honest. Well not on a regular basis anyway so you won't find it here.

CARD ENVY: All things about scrapbooking your own cards and using Copic markers. I really should pin Copic stuff into their own board as I own an obscene amount of Copic pens...which I bought to make cards...which I rarely do...thus devoting a whole Pinterest board to cards that I will probably never make. It's a vicious circle but I'm hoping it squashes the guilt from buying more Copic markers.

CATAHOLIC: Because cats are IT. And because it's much safer to Pin cats that it is to rescue yet another cat and become that cat lady people are always talking about.

CHRISTMAS and CHRISTMAS-FOOD: Still migrating the food out of the basic Christmas board which will just be decorations. This board also contains all things snow and winter. I promise to stop pinning food that is served in the shape of Christmas trees.

CLOSETS WORTHY OF CARRIE BRADSHAW: Because every girl deserves a huge closet so they can see all the clothes that they have and plenty of space for all those shoes and purses and a special jewelry cabinet and a space to hang your dogs clothes because if you had a closet that big you'd have a cute little doggy that you would need to dress for every occasion.

COLORTASTIC: Color combinations I might want to paint rooms with, scrapbook with, or just use for inspiration. Amazingly colorful photos (that have usually been photo-shopped) of things are also pinned here. This is just a basic color inspiration board.

COMPLETED PINS-FOOD: Yes I actually do cook or create from the pins I've pinned, though I seriously doubt this pin happy cook will ever get through even an iota of the stuff I've pinned. But if I've cooked it and found the pin on Pinterest, I'll post it here along with comments. That's if I liked said dish. If the item completely sucked it will probably just disappear from my boards hopefully never to be seen again.

COOKIES, CANDIES, BROWNIES OH MY: I thought I was being so smart by separating these desserts from my regular dessert board. Oh fool me. I will eventually separate out all three to their own individual boards...I may even have to make a separate board just for marshmallows.

CREATING SPACES: Pins of scrap or craft rooms or items that I wish to get ideas from. Either that or this board was just made as a reminder that I really really need to get my scrap room organized.

DAY OF THE DEAD: Currently empty as I need to migrate Day Of The Dead stuff from my Halloween boards into this board.

DESSERT IS MY DOWNFALL: This is one of the two boards that drive me crazy. I had no idea that I would be pinning so many desserts considering how rarely I make them. But bloggers out there seem to find great joy in cooking and then pinning their concoctions that I drool over so my dessert board is overloaded. I figured I'd put anything that wasn't in the Cookies, Candies, Brownies or Let Them Eat Cake/Cupcakes board into this dessert board. I now need this separated into a board for Pies, one for Ice Cream, one for anything S'mores (there really seems to be a plethora of desserts that you can make taste like S'mores!) and one for Nutella (which seems to be a favorite of mine). I was also thinking I need to make one for fruit desserts. Never ending. Peruse this board at your own risk.

DREAMY DRESSES: Somewhere inside me is a 1950's Grace Kelly in the movie Rear Window. There is a body inside me that can pull off a Badgley Mischka gown. There is an attitude inside me that can wear an Alexander McQueen couture dress without fear. And somewhere there is a pocketbook that can afford all these expensive dreamy dresses. So I dream.

EASTER AND SPRING: All things Easter and Spring though this will be divided at some point for decorations and food.

EATS FOR ME: Pretty much a catch all for food or food related pins I had no idea what to do with.

EATS TO START THE FEAST: Appetizers. Contains salads too. Finger foods. Soups have their own board. Lots of fried stuff for some reason.

FISH FOOD: Probably will be the least populated food board, but anything made with fishies.

FOOD ON THE SIDE:  What was supposed to be simply veggies and salads really needs to be divided into Salads; Potatoes; Rice and Grains, Breads, among others. I had no idea that I'd find so many side dishes so interesting. I'm a complete idiot for not realizing my love of potatoes would quickly get out of hand.

FOR MY HOME: Sort of a catch all for home items that don't fit in the Bedroom, Bathroom, Kitchen etc boards. Also contains photos of houses with twenty rooms, twenty two bathrooms, 65,000 square feet of living space that I wish I could afford. So there would be a place for you to stay when you visit. And so I'd have room to buy all the things I pin to the For My Home board.

GET IN MY CLOSET: Well yes I would love to wear all the clothes I pin to this board. Of course they more than likely would only fit and be appropriate for my 20 year old self...so no I will never fit into about 90% of the outfits I've pinned, but that's not the point. I do get inspiration from this board, as much as I do from reading Vogue or InStyle. It may be the color combination or the shape of a skirt etc. I know you are looking at my butt and saying that clothing item I pinned will never work on my body, but in my mind, at some point, maybe it will. Don't judge, we all have dreams.

HALLOWEEN IS MY FAVORITE HOLIDAY; HALLOWEEN-COSTUMES, CLOTHES AND MAKEUP; HALLOWEEN FOOD: My favorite holiday and if you've read my blog over the years, you know that I go Halloween crazy during October. These boards will absolutely be my inspiration for my annual Halloween countdown and I love love love that I have a place to keep all the great ideas I come across. Currently migrating items to the correct boards.

I BLEED TEAL: A mixture of all things hockey, San Jose Sharks, sharks in general and my favorite hockey color-teal. Though a teal bowl might not seem hockey related, I remember the days when finding anything in my hockey teams color was difficult. Please note: Just because I pin a hockey related item that might have, say, a Detroit Red Wings logo on it in no way shape or form means I root for said team, only that the item would be awesome should it contain a San Jose Sharks logo. I would probably be tarred and feathered should I own and display Red Wings stuff.

I SEAFOOD I EAT IT:  Ah yes, me trying to be cute while naming this board. You find it alphabetically under seafood in the food section of my boards. All things shrimp, crab, and lobster though I admit lobster dishes are woefully underrepresented on food blogs.

ICE CREAM AND SORBET: I own several different types of ice cream making machines. I need to use them. I now have recipes. Which really isn't an excuse because I own entire cookbooks dealing with making ice cream. I've always had recipes. But I now have pins. So ice cream making machines must be dug out of their hiding place in the garage and put to use this summer. Because there are recipes that need to be pinned to the Completed Pins board. It's a challenge now.

That concludes Part 1 of my Pinterest boards rundown and the fact that Mrs. L has way to much time on her hands and spends time she should be cooking pinning recipes and such on Pinterest. The addiction continues in Part 2, coming to a theater near you. Or this blog depending on what I find out there to pin....

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hockey - Sharks/Blues Game 2

Hockey - Sharks/Blues Game 1

The Quest Begins

I Pin Therefore I Am

Hi, my name is Mrs. L and I'm addicted to Pinterest.

Of course it's not my fault. Because though I say I'm addicted to Pinterest, I'm actually addicted to recipes. Which made me addicted to Pinterest. It's a vicious circle, I know. Pinterest is just a way for me to easily keep track of the recipes I want to make while also sharing them with friends...or complete strangers.

I had planned on starting a "Cooking with Pinterest" series on April 1st. But then I figured you would all think it was some sort of April Fools joke.  Though I had most of the posts written all I really needed to do was some spell checking, adding some links and cleaning up a bit of the talkies. So I started to finish that chore when, gees this shouldn't be too hard to figure out, I got lost looking at stuff on Pinterest. It was there that I found my post about Pinterest...well, not my post, but the post I was attempting to write about my addiction, Pinterest and how to use it. Only Taste and Tell had done a much better job with much better photos. So I went back to the drawing board, scrapped most of what I was going to say and kinda started over. (You can read Taste and Tell's 12 Things to Avoid When Pinning here. Full disclosure, I'm a huge fan of Deborahs food blog and pretty much pin anything she makes!).

The next few days of posts are pretty much me centric...cuz what you really need to do to understand how to properly pin on Pinterest is check out Taste and Tells post here. I will divulge some of my rantings and ravings though, mostly because it was already written and I hate to waste the writing time. And I really am cooking things I've found on Pinterest (or pinned from the various blogs I follow) so that will be coming up soon too.

The thing is I've been doing my own version of Pinterest for a long time with much less success. Which is why I was so completely taken by Pinterest once I started to use it. So, let me first explain why I'm so addicted.

I collect recipes. When they are in cookbooks, said cookbooks are easy to organize in bookcases. When they are in magazines, they are easy to stack on the floor (for example all Gourmet magazines, lined up, chronologically-lacking floor space you will find them all boxed up in the garage). If they are recipes pulled out of a magazine, they are put in binders by type of food (or would be if I was Martha Stewart which, because I'm not, those pages are basically piled in boxes). But keeping track of recipes that I find online on blogs or manufactures websites? That gets a bit tricky.

At first, I started bookmarking on my computer, all the recipes I found that I thought looked interesting. That started pretty much once I figured how to bookmark things oh so many years ago. In a short time I had a very long list of bookmarked recipes with no way to figure out which one was which. Then I tried putting the bookmarks on my computer in folders by foods. That lasted about a year before again, way way to many bookmarks. Somewhere along the line I was actually writing the web links into a memo book...yeah, that didn't last long either. I then, in a very OCD moment, concocted an excel file, divided it into different foods groups, made columns for the recipe title, what blog it came from, the date of the post and then the url (warned you it was a bit OCD). Since that filled up quickly I ended up with an excel file for each year. So I now have many different excel folders by year, full of recipes by type. Up until Pinterest, that's how I organized recipes I found on blogs or the interwebs.

But it was still hard to really find a recipe. If I wanted to make that noodle dish that had some shrimp and barbecued pork in it, was it under shrimp? Pork? Noodles? And then I would have to go through all the shrimp dishes, hoping that the name of the dish was something like Shrimp and Pork and Noodle Dish. If the name of the dish didn't jump out at me, well then I had to click on a gazillion urls, hoping to find that specific dish that I was looking for. And of course go through each year's excel file unless I could remember what year I had found the recipe. Which of course was never the first excel file I would look through.

Pinterest is a way to bookmark the recipes I'm enamored with and organize them quite easily. Pinterest also lets me organize these recipes by using photos of the dish, instead of the recipe name or the sometimes completely worthless web link. I found that it's much easier for me to look at a photo and remember a recipe and be intrigued enough to try the recipe out than it was just by looking at the name of said recipe (probably why I relate to cookbooks with photos).

Pinterest is just like having a bunch of cork idea boards (bulletin boards) on the walls of your kitchen. You come across a recipe in a magazine for Strawberry Shortcake on a Stick. You cut it out and take a thumbtack (or pushpin) and pin it to the cork board you have designated for food. You might have a separate bulletin board up where you tack up photos of kitchens remodels you'd love to do, or a board where you tack up photos of places you'd like to visit someday. Pinterest just does all that on the computer for you so that your kitchen has more room for all those gadgets you seem to pick up at Sur La Table.

So for me, having a place where I can "bookmark" all these recipes I want to try is like the best organizational gift ever. Now if I'm trying to find that stupid recipe that has shrimp and pork and noodles I can quickly scan the photos on any of the boards that I think I might have pinned it and find the recipe*. If I want to make a chicken dish this weekend, I can scan the photos of the recipes I've "pinned" to my Poultry board and see which recipe fits the bill. And I, along with most "pinners" don't just use Pinterest for recipes. Homeschoolers use it to pin interesting projects to do with their kids. Women getting married might have different boards for dresses they might want to try along with different invitations they've found on the net they might use. I have a friend who collects batman images because he's such a fan, a friend who pins books she wants to read, one who pins scrapbook layouts to use as sketches, and even the friend who pins hot guys that she hopes to meet some day. You can pretty much pin whatever strikes your fancy.

Pinterest is a virtual bulletin board, where you can keep all the ideas that make you laugh, ideas that inspire you or feed your creativity, in one place and Pinterest lets you share all those ideas with friends and strangers. Your favorite blog (be it food or something else) might have a link to their pins, so next time your surfing around, you can find some awesome ideas by checking their Pinterest boards.

You can check out my Pinterest boards here. (and yes, I need to figure out how to get that Pinterest link in the sidelines on my own blog!). I do plan on a few more posts explaining my boards, why and how I pin and what I'm cooking from Pinterest in the next couple of days.

But more importantly, to learn how to use Pinterest correctly, please check out Taste and Tells post here. To learn more about Pinterest in general go here. Need an invitation, just let me know.

Now excuse me while I go see if there are any new ideas to pin on my friends Pinterest boards!

 *As an FYI, that recipe is called Singapore Rice Noodles and can be found here.

 

Free Ice Cream

It's Ben & Jerry's Free Cone Day. Around the world, Scoop Shops are opening their doors from noon to 8:00 pm, to serve up a free scoop of your favorite flavor. Please check with your local Ben & Jerry's for more info!

Get em while they're hot...er, cold!