Oh! And the perfect place to enjoy my homemade stock...

....surrounded by perfectly striped walls, drum shades, distressed dresser and the beautiful chairs!  Found this beautiful image over at House of Turquoise (doesn't Erin have the BEST taste?!), shot by Shanna LeRoy and designed by Ashley Russel.  Divine!

Easy Homemade Chicken Stock

Last week I decided that I would try my hand at homemade chicken stock to use in my Thanksgiving recipes.  I've watched plenty of chefs on the Food Network make it and thought I'd give it a whirl.  The result - savory delicousness that I'm still swooning over!

The easy part?  I used a leftover roasted chicken from my local grocery store!  The fiance and I ate most of the breast of said roaster, so following dinner I used the rest of the meat left on the bones, as follows:

Leftover Roasted Chicken
handful of black peppercorns
handful of kosher salt
1 bay leaf
sprig of fresh thyme
1 whole brown onion, quartered
couple of whole cloves of garlic
couple of carrots, large diced
1 celery stalk, large diced

I threw all of the ingredients in a large pot of water, brought it to a boil and then turned it down to a low simmer for 2 hours and that was it!  I know most recipes call for cooking it for way longer than 2 hours, but it was bedtime, so I tasted it and thought it was delish, so I pronounced it done!  Since I was tired, I placed the whole pot in the fridge to cool overnight, strained it the next morning and placed in small containers to freeze.

Now I'm on the search for soup recipes to utilize my stash of stock.  Any suggestions?

photo via countless calories

Make it Work Monday

Oh, how I longed for the weekend to continue this morning, but, alas, it has concluded and the workweek is here.  So to use the phrase coined by the fabulous Tim Gunn, I'm going to just "make it work."  Since I am a natural procrastinator, I've decided that the only way to make the week fly by is to be as productive as possible, and there are meetings to attend, clients to be seen, and lunches to be taken and before I know it, next weekend will be upon us.

To kick off the week, I attempted the messy ponytail featured in the photo above.  Is is just me, or does this messy look require more work than expected?  I thought this would be effortless, but after 4 attempts I did manage a good facsimile.  The work was worth it, I think!

Happy Monday!

photo via this is glamorous blog

Nice to meet you!

My mom always said, if you don't have something nice to day, don't say anything at all.  I think I have a lot of nice things to say, and I'll share them here. 

Nice to meet you.  Come back soon!

photo of my beloved bichon-poo, Teddy, by Mark Francis