My chef husband has been at it again. Another great dinner. Another satisfied customer wife.

Tonight on the menu we had an amazing Grilled Salmon with Goat Cheese paired with an awesome Southwest Quinoa Salad.

Here’s how he did it…

Grilled Salmon with Goat Cheese

Prepare your salmon fillets by dusting each side with seafood seasoning (Chef Kev prefers Old Bay seasoning) and salt and pepper. Next you take some roasted garlic goat cheese and mix it with chopped fresh dill. Spread a layer of your goat cheese mix on top of your salmon and sprinkle it with brown sugar.

To cook, place on a BBQ heated to medium high. Place salmon on the grill with the goat cheese side up. Cook on direct heat for a few minutes until the underside has a grilling seal on bottom. Turn off direct heat and finish cooking with indirect heat inside the BBQ.  Cook until desired doneness and the brown sugar has caramalized. Plate and finish with fresh squeezed lemon and salt and pepper.

So was it good? D.E.L.I.S.H!

Southwest Quinoa Salad

Cook the quinoa according the the package instructions. For ours it was 1/2 cup quinoa to 1 cup stock or water. Chef Kev recomends chicken stock as it adds great flavour. Bring to a boil for 5 minutes and then simmer on low for 15 minutes. Once cooked the quinoa is light and fluffy. Cool in a bowl placed inside another bowl filled with ice water. Let stand.

Add to the quinoa: one can of rinsed black beans, one can of rinsed sweet corn (or one cob grilled corn kernels). Chopped fresh cilantro, minced shallot, minced jalepeno and diced yellow peppers.

For the vinaigrette Chef Kev mixed olive oil, sesame oil, white wine vinegar, fresh squeezed lime. red pepper flakes and honey. Toss salad with vinaigrette and add salt and pepper to season.

Another winner. Chef Kev I thank you.

And another win – both salmon and quinoa are ridiculously healthy for you.

Great. Now I’m hungry.

My name is Elaine and I’m addicted to Christmas. No seriously.

Okay, so I’m not crazy-put-your-stuff-out-in-October-crazy but I do LOVE the holiday season. I love the warmth, the tradition, the coziness, the shimmering lights, the hustle, the quietness, the FEELING. I love Christmas.

I also love crafting and making things and that is how my little annual tradition of Christmas Craft Night was born. The concept was to get some girls together, drink some wine, chat, enjoy each others company and make a Christmas craft! And it took off. Big time. So now it has become an annual tradition that my friends say they love. And I love hosting it. Love it. The best compliment I received was from a friend who told me that the craft night was, for her, the sign that the Christmas season had begun. She looks forward to it every year to kick off the season and get her in the Christmas spirit. Wow.

So how I start is, I pick a craft that seems doable in a few hours. The point of Christmas Craft Night is that every girl leaves with a completed craft. I always host it right at the beginning of December so that the ladies can enjoy that years craft for the whole month.

After I choose the craft I do a trial run to make sure that it’s doable in an evening and work out any glitches. Then I design an invitation to send out that features what the craft will look like. In earlier years I’d include a list of supplies for the ladies to bring but now I just pick up the supplies myself (to save them running around and take advantage of bulk deals) and then just charge a fee that covers their potion of the supplies. I aim to always keep it under $20.

Here is what last years invitation looked like:

As you may recall from my deck post I had some big things in mind for our little back deck area. I really wanted to create that ‘outdoor room’ feeling so have a bunch of little projects up my sleeve on my ‘to do list’ that I can’t wait to share with you all!

First up was my pink chandelier and next on my hit list was some camoflauge for this fugly cement wall. We can’t really remove it unless we want to entertain our neighbours back yard on our deck if you know what I’m sayin’. As you can see, it has a tendency to get kind of grimey and could only be described as ‘pretty’ if pretty was a secret word for ‘redonculous eyesore of a stupid cement wall that we are stuck with’. And those are my nice words. I present you with Exhibit A taken from an earlier post…

So, fast forward until a month or so ago when my office was doing some botanical rejigging (technical term). In other words, they were sprucin’ up the joint and were getting rid of some old planters. They had a ton of these and put an email out to staff that they were selling them for $10 a pop. Great deal! I went to take a photo on my phone to email my hubby and tell him of my great plan and when I got back to my desk to send said email I got the ‘ol “all planters now accounted for” email. What!? Early bird what? Insert sulk here. Insert me forgetting about this master plan until a later day.

That later day came when my coworker mentioned that she had gotten two of the planters but had decided they weren’t going to work for her. What’s that you say? Why YES I’d love to take them off your hands. And that is how this stack came to be on our deck.

Now, don’t be alarmed. I am not a She-man who can magically turn over 100lb clay pots with as much ease as Snooki downs a beer (no, I don’t watch the show but it’s common knowledge that that’s got to be lightning fast isn’t it)? But rather these are fakeo terra cotta. They are really just feather light resin.

My plan for these pots was to spray them gloss black. I loved the shape (hated the colour) and thought they’d add a nice graphic punch while giving me a vessel to plant something TO HIDE THAT FREAKIN’ EYESORE OF A WALL! Sorry for yelling at you. I get passionate about dirty cement walls.

So, the first step was to clean the pots so that I started with a nice surface to spray. I actually power washed the deck and wall this past long weekend so I invited the pots to the spray party as well. Guess how quickly a power washer takes grime off a fake terra cotta pot. Hint: see Snooki comment above.

I used a high gloss black spray paint that was suitable for plastics and outdoor use. Each pot took one can each – about 5 coats. Multiple light coats will give you the best result and help to avoid any drips. Since the spray paint dries quickly between each coat it only took a few hours to do. Here is what it looked like after the first round of spraying.

Once they were both sprayed it was time to add some filler! I wanted something that would grow A) fast B) full and C) tall. Since I wanted to camoflauge the cement, this was key. I was thinking bamboo but after discussing it with my neighbourhood garden centre they suggested I go with some grasses as they met all my criteria as well as offered a nice texture. And the grasses cost less! Bonus. So I picked out some nice grasses that promised to grow to 42′ and also some ‘rainbow grass’ because it looks so great. There is a chance that the original grass may choke out the rainbow grass as it grows (supposedly quickly) but if so I can easily transplant it to my garden. For now though I like the texture it offers. One grass is light and airy and will grow up and over (like a big weeping willow) and the rainbow grass is straighter and thicker. I’ll update you all with some pictures as it grows!

But for now, back to planting and a tip! A good idea to keep your planter light and manageable (to move easily when full) is to fill the bottom with styrofoam, empty milk jugs or 2 litre pop bottles. What they do is take up space at the bottom allowing you to fill with one half the amount of dirt you would otherwise need to! No problem if you have a gardener/pool boy to move them for you but let’s be honest, I don’t have a pool. So styrofoam and an empty laundry detregent jug for me it is.

Once I had that taken care of I added my dirt and grasses and she was all done! Oh, but don’t forget to water generously as you should always do when you transplant or newly plant something. Doing so helps your new plant take root.

I can’t wait to watch these grasses grow! Come on grass… RACE. $10 to the fastest growing grass. NOW GO!

And here are the pair of them. What do you think?

The outdoor room is coming together and taking shape! … Should I invite Snooki over for a beer on the deck? Nah.

Raise your hands if you wanted to be like Molly Ringwald when you were little! Did you want to be uber cool and moody, yet aloof and misunderstood? Did you wonder what she saw in Andrew McCarthy? Am I typing with my inside voice again? umm… sorry ’bout that.

Okay, on to todays post. Mentioned here in my deck post I hinted at doing some big things on the deck! This past long weekend (Happy Canada Day eh) I was busy working on some of my little projects and plan to share them with you over the next week or two.

First up was my charming little candle chandelier. A birthday gift from the hubs back about six years ago, it had seen better days. Not too bad (used loosely) from afar…

but she hid a dirty rusty little secret. A close up for you…

Mama needs some new mascara. oy.

So, never one to leave a good chandelier out to rust (okay, so I am one to do that, did you SEE those pics) I set out to correct my bad.

In search of some new sandpaper I came across these new sandpaper ‘sponges’ which I liked for this job as I wanted to get into the crevices while maintainng a good grip on my paper. Using regular sandpaper sheets can be cumbersome for a job like this. And result – they worked great.

Here Molly is mid-sand (Yes, I just named my chandelier after an 80’s teeny bopper idol – so what?)

One she was all sanded I started the fun part – spraying! This is the part where you feign surprise about the colour.

Molly took about 367 8 coats to completely cover. The key to a nice spray paint finish is LIGHT coats to avoid the drippy droopy look. No one likes a drippy chandelier. Another tip is to make sure to turn her over and get in all the nooks and crannys for a really solid, smooth coating. The finish is really up to you but for something sparkly like this, a gloss finish is most appropriate.

And, now she looks like THIS…

Ain’t she PRETTY!?

I’m in love. My husband on the other hand exclaimd “PINK!?” Yes, Duckie Kev, pink.

My little boy loves his hats. And he also loves Thomas and Friends but that’s neither here nor there. My little boy also loves to do things himself now that he’s a ‘big boy’ (two), so when I came across these letters for $1 each (!!!) at Michaels a little light bulb went off in my head.

Why not make him his own little place to hang his hats – and coats!?

These letters came in white with the hooks attached but since they were living in the bargain bin they’d become quite scuffed and had yellowed a bit too. So I gave them a good spray with some white paint that I had on hand and they were as good as new again (well, they actually were new to begin with but now they looked newer than that even).

They also came with a little hook on the back to hang them but since the letters were cheap to begin with, the hooks were kind of wonky and not very well hidden on the back. In other words if I were to hang them that way you’d see nails and the tops of the hanger. Not very toddler friendly at all! Also knowing a kids tendency to yank things at eye level I came up with a good solution on how to hang (and consequently re-hang when yanked down) the letters.

You can see the hole left behind from where I removed the old hanger. Then I used (my favourite) “Command Picture Hanging Hooks“. These things rock and I use them for everything. I especially love how they don’t damage the wall, and of course are reposition-able.

Once I had all the letters hung this is what I was left with! Chace loves it and hangs his jackets up all the time. He also sits on the stairs, points and squeals ‘hat!’ at every given opportunity. Success!

I love to scrapbook. I’m not sure if it’s the visual part of me, the creative part of me, the sentimental part of me or the social part of me… but I do know that I like it. And so does Chace, my two year old boy. He regularly points to the albums and says “Mommy yook” (translation – Can we take a look at your exquisite album creations Mother dearest”)

Now some of you might have raised an eyebrow at two parts of that – the ‘social’ comment as well as the whole ‘scrap booking’ love declaration. Let me address those.

You’re thinking social? yes, social. I got into scrap booking because some of the lovely lady friends I inherited when I started dating my hubby (yay for my husband’s buddies having great women) love to scrap. I was skeptical at first (see next note) but wanted to get to know them better and go away with them to their retreats so I decided to start an album. From there I was hooked. It was creative, fun and boy, had it come a loooong way.

Which brings me to my next point. For any of you who have the same 1990’s impression of what scrap booking was that I did, throw it out with your solid colour construction paper triangles. Today’s supplies are so amazingly different and BETTER so therefore, is the result you can achieve. Creativity at it’s finest my friends. Very rewarding. And to document the ones and moments that you love – pricelessly awesome.

If you still don’t believe me, check out Becky Higgins (the genius behind “Project Life“) and Ali Edwards. Too amazing women who are pioneers in the field of scrap booking. Their stuff is ah-maze-ing.

This post was sparked initially due to a call for entires on Becky’s blog. I’ve entered a few of my layouts so wish me luck!

Below are a few snippets of some of my recent layouts. Enjoy!