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Creamy Tortilla Soup
This creamy soup is an all time favorite at my house. I typically use all fresh ingredients/dried beans when I have time, but you can easily trade those for canned if you are in a hurry. With Thanksgiving coming up, keep this recipe in mind for turkey leftovers (instead of chicken). Ingredients 2lbs Chicken breast 2 tablespoons Butter 1 Onion – diced 6 Cloves diced garlic 2 Jalapeños (optional) 2 Red Peppers 1 Tablespoon Cumin 1 Tablespoon Chili Powder Salt & Pepper 6 cups chicken stock 1 can Red Kidney Beans (drained and rinsed well) substitute any beans you like, I prefer to use dried beans to control the salt,…
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Lakehouse Bathroom Reno
While renovating our lakehouse, we decided to tackle the bathroom. For this blog, I will only go into the shower project because it was quite a bit of work with many steps. In the pic below, you can see the 70’s style plastic shower enclosure. This room always had a funky smell no matter what we did, when we ripped this out we finally found out why. There was stagnant water behind and inside of the hollow shower enclosure. It was a huge relief to get that ripped out! Step 1 We started by removing the walls and then the shower itself. Step 2 Allign drain to…
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Jackfruit Cheese Cake
I had tried jackfruit in various canned and pre-packaged dishes but had not ever considered buying a fresh jackfruit. When I saw one at the store, I had to buy it! It weighed nearly 20 lbs. and was a little intimidating. Mine cost $1.20 per pound, so it was roughly a $25 investment. After a little research, I discovered that my jackfruit was ripe and ready to be eaten. Most of the canned varieties are young fruit that takes on the marinade/seasoning you add to it, so better for vegan/vegetarian savory dishes. Here you can see what the inside looks like, seeds, fruit pods, and the flesh that doesn’t get…
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Kitchen Backsplash
On my trip home to see my parents this summer, I offered to install backsplash for my mom’s kitchen. This project is a perfect example of a room transformation on a small budget and in just two days. My parents’ house is a beautiful 100 year old home that they have put a lot of work into over the years. In the kitchen, there wasn’t any backsplash which makes cleaning and keeping a stain free wall quite tough. Here are the before pics: As you can see, the kitchen was pretty much a blank canvas with regards to choosing an accent feature. The counters and walls are a similar…
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Adding a Mudroom
Here is the front view of the recently renovated exterior, which I’ve blogged about in Lakehouse Exterior post. In this post, I will show what we did to the inside. Before we added our mudroom, I had no idea how much it would add to our home. From the exterior, it added curb appeal and character to the house and inside it added a laundry area, bench with storage, additional storage and a way we could open up the kitchen area by sinking the refrigerator into part of the mudroom. Here you can see the outside wall of the old house, which we removed the old siding and insulation. Then…
