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Updated Portfolio



With the push of a husband, I have updated my online portfolio. I added some of my recent photography, some of which my readers have never seen! Mainly because it's pretty abstract and centering a post around it would be too wishy-washy. I also added my wedding and engagement pictures, since I edited all of them. Please take a look!


to my portfolio...



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Hiking... Then A Gnome.







We went hiking. Around the back of Mt. Timpanogos. The only disappointing thing was the dirt bikes shattering the silence every 20 minutes, smelling like NOT happy flowers and trees. Here's more pictures from our Canon EOS 60D!






pretty stuff.




human beans.



gnome goes places.


We keep seeing this gnome everywhere we go. Oh well. 
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Tom Kha Gai Soup Recipe



One of the most delicious food experiences in this life is Tom Kha Gai, a thai soup made of chicken (Gai) cooked (Tom) in coconut milk which has been infused with galangal (Kha), lemongrass, and kaffir lime leaves. Galangal and kaffir lime leaves are hard to come by, so I use thai paste (which has all those ingredients) I found in the "asian" aisle of my grocery store. Also, I cooked my chicken alone on the stove prior to adding it to the soup because using a crock-pot to cook this soup can sometimes warrant rubbery chicken, which I like to avoid. This recipe can be pretty daunting the first time you make it, but once you stock all the ingredients its very easy. 


Traditional Tom Kha Gai is very complex in flavor and tastes so good because the flavors are perfectly balanced. I haven't tried to get it perfect, but each time I make it I get a slightly different and delicious flavor. This post is a great in depth look at the traditional way to make the soup, and is a good read if you want to understand why you would ever add fish sauce and lemongrass to coconut milk.

Crock Pot Tom Kha Gai 

1 chicken stock   2 coconut milk   3 lime juice   4 ground ginger   5 lemongrass   6 mushrooms  
7 red and green thai curry paste   8 fish sauce   9 cilantro   10 chicken



Ingredients


  • 2-3 cups chicken stock
  • 3 Kaffir lime leaves (or about 2 teaspoons each of the green and red thai curry paste I used)
  • 1-2 stalks of lemongrass, cut into inch pieces and bruise to release flavor 
  • 2-3 pieces of fresh galangal (I used about 3 teaspoons of my ground fresh ginger)
  • 2 tablespoons of fish sauce (NOT OPTIONAL)
  • 2 tablespoons fresh lime juice (I used juice from a lime-shaped container)
  • 1-2 thai chili peppers (this is also in the red curry paste I use, so I don't add anything extra for that. You could use cayenne pepper, but I don't like how hot that makes this soup, and it's not a great flavor)
----------------------
  • 1 cup (or more) sliced mushrooms
  • 2 cans coconut milk
  • 2 pounds chicken breasts, sliced into bite-size strips or pieces 
  • 2-3 tablespoons cilantro (as garnish before eating)


Directions


1. Put the first section of ingredients in crock pot on high and bring to a simmer.

red and green thai curry paste
lemongrass
mmm, fish sauce!


2. Let simmer alone at least fifteen minutes to enhance flavors.
3. Add mushrooms and coconut milk and bring back up to a simmer.

mushrooms
coconut milk


4. While simmering, cook chicken pieces on stove with a little curry paste (this step is optional, but in a crock pot the chicken can become rubbery; in a pan the sugars caramelize instead of boil away).

chicken cooked with red thai curry paste


5. Put crock pot on low for 4+ hours or on high for 1-2 hours (if you didn't cook the chicken in a pan make sure to check if it's cooked through before eating). 

cooking on high

6. Garnish with cilantro before eating and enjoy! 
This recipe makes about 4-6 servings.



I get the ingredients for this soup every time I shop for groceries. In fact, I ate this while writing this post! Have you tried this recipe before? If so, what do you do differently? If not, will you  try it now?






NEXT POST: Pictures from a hike in which we brought a gnome and saw pretty things.


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New DSLR Camera: Canon EOS 60D




I have a new toy! Actually I don't even consider it a toy. It's a really freaking expensive piece of professional equipment. It's the second most expensive thing I own after my car. It's a Canon EOS 60D and it's wonderful. Here's a few of our first pictures:


i walked around.






gnome goes places.



real human beans.




That last guy there is my husband. He's my favorite subject because I like the challenge of getting his real smile to show itself. 

Here is the listing for my exact camera:


NEXT POST: Tom Kah Gai soup recipe + pictures!




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Fresh New Design


It was about time for something different. The internet needs more simple, beautiful designs. A design change also gets the ball rolling with what I'm going to be posting about soon. Just a bit more planning and I'll finally reveal it! Go ahead, click around the site. Tell me how you like it.
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Easiest Free Money I Know Of


  • I have explored many options of making easy money online.
  • The best site I've found is SwagBucks!
  • I've gotten $35 so far!
  • I've done literally nothing outside of my normal internet surfing. 


I'm going to share my favorite way of making free money online. For a while there I went kind of crazy with making money online. I'd spend hours on Mturk (which isn't bad if you've got a ton of time on your hands), InboxDollars, and Mypoints. These are all great if you never procrastinate reading your email and can devote hours to meaningless tasks online. But the best way to earn money is through SwagBucks. Seriously. ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS SEARCH. You set Swagbucks as your default search engine and the more you search the more chances you have at randomly winning "bucks". Instead of saying "google it", my husband and I say "swag it". Here's all the $5 gift cards for Amazon I've gotten in the seven months I've been using them.
And I've got another one I haven't used yet. That's $30 so far. And I haven't even been on my computer for the past couple months. Around Christmas I used this to buy gifts! Also you can do a lot of other things through their website, like cash in old electronics for bucks. I completed a free trial of Netflix and got paid around 1200 bucks. An amazon $5 gift card (which is the best deal for the bucks) costs 450 bucks. So I got paid $10 and was closer to the next gift card, just for trying Netflix. The thrill of randomly winning bucks is fun too! My husband and I excitedly always tell each other when we win. One time I won 51! Yippy! Anyways, here it is again: Swagbucks.com.
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Nine Things

I have probably made more than this recently, but I walked around and took pictures of nine things I've made since I haven't been posting.


  1. Snow globe made from bird toy, baby food jar, water, and glitter. 
  2. Not yet completed! But it would still be beautiful left this way. Collage of bright colored magazine scraps. 
  3. Framed art I made from an old dictionary page, covered with tracing paper, stamped with the words "clarere, audere, gaudere" which is Latin for "be bright, be daring, be joyful". Also I used a peacock feather from my wedding and a vintage brass heart knickknack I got from TinyThingsAreCute.com.
  4. Lamp made from a wine glass and string LED lights from IKEA.
  5. A large bright blue key painted from boring bronze-splotchy color. 
  6. My betta fishy, Larkspur, has his own little name announcement for all who sit near to watch him. 
  7. My first perfected version of a little bag made from the end of an envelope. 
  8. One of the stamps I carved using erasers from the dollar store and a Speedball carver.
  9. A shrinky-dink pendant for a necklace.
Perhaps I should elaborate on the stamp carving in another post... 
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Quick Birdie

A quick little post about a cute little project I did recently. I got the cardboard birdie for a dollar at Micheal's, and used old dictionary pages, scrapbook paper, and binder hole reinforcement stickers (also from Micheal's) and ModPodged them all on!
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Four Things On My Windowsill

Hello world! I haven't posted in a while. I have been busy working! One of the best things that has happened recently is my upgrade from blackberry storm to HTC Thunderbolt. Finally I have a powerful smartphone! I'm writing from it now.
My windowsill is the display case of my house. I keep my favorite beautiful things there. And all of them are important to me.
The first of just four of these things is a papercraft I downloaded from paperkraft.net. He has aspects of Russian nesting dolls which I love. The second object is a plaster owl my mom made and sent to me. The third is an antique owl trinkets my mom got me, sitting on top of a cube I painted in my favorite colors and labeled with different random things you can do at any time. Sometimes this cube dictates my day if I can't decide what to start doing. The last thing is a fabric owl my mom sewed and sent to me. By this point you'll know we obviously love owls.
The picture was created by, in my opinion, THE BEST camera app for Android,  CameraZOOMFX.

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Chickpea Snackers

    Hello world! Remember me? Last time we spoke, I was not married. But now I am! I plan on uploading some pictures to showcase the best parts of my home-made wedding. I am currently still working on editing about 900 of our wedding pictures. It's a huge task, but I was lucky to have such a great photographer.
    Today I made a snack. I rarely make these because they don't easily fit into our budget. But this snack is very cheap and healthy (AND FREAKING EASY). They are kind of like corn nuts. I had my husband stir the chickpeas around every ten minutes while they were baking, but a few came out not so crispy. I'll try 50 minutes next time, along with some onion powder.

Here's the little things while they were cooling.

         ...I wonder if they sell giant cans of chickpeas???

      And now it is my bed time. I'll be back!


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