Randall Family Cleaning Schedule

I have never felt as wifely as I felt while making this cleaning schedule, what has happened to my spontaneous, adventurous life of just cleaning all willy nilly!?! As part of my New Year’s resolutions I decided to make a cleaning schedule as well as a schedule for buying food storage items (a later post). 

Some times when I look at my messy house and all that I need to get done it feels impossible, but once I put it into a schedule like this it feels much more possible! And of course making the schedule gave me the opportunity to make it cute!

Easy & Fresh Homemade Salsa

My favorite snack of all time is chips and salsa! Everytime I go to the grocery store I buy at least two different kinds to try! Over the summer I became a little obsessed with finding the perfect homemade salsa recipe. And I learned that it is impossible to nail down the perfect amount of ingredients! Vegetable are not constant, sometimes they have more or less flavor and sometime they are bigger or smaller, sometimes jalapeños are a lot more spicy, or sometimes they aren't spicy at all!

I do think I figured out a somewhat foolproof way of making your salsa perfect every time. The trick is to go slow, start with just a few ingredients at a time. 

I always start with a can of diced tomatoes as well as one roma tomato. I like to use both diced and fresh because it tastes fresh but creamy that way. I then add about a quarter onion, and a quarter jalapeño as well as a clove of garlic. I then use my handy dandy cuisinart to blend it all together. I like my salsa really smooth without a lot of chunky vegetables. After I process it I taste it! I like to taste test it before adding the lime and cilantro because you can really taste the levels of the other vegetables.

This is where it gets tricky, I can't tell you how much of the other things I add again because everytime it's different. I use tomatoes to tone down the heat, jalapeño for more heat and garlic and onion to amp up the flavor. After I get the right balance I add a handful of cilantro and a spritz of lime. I then process again and test again and add more cilantro and lime as needed. 

I know it sounds like a long process but the end result is totally worth it!!!

Twine Letter!!

This post is long overdue! In October, Brad went to Orlando for a work conference and sadly I wasn't able to join him this time. So while he was gone I went up to Logan to visit my mom and sisters and we had an all day CRAFTERNOON! We spent way too much money on supplies and we went a little crazy. One of my favorite things we made was the twine letter to hang on the door!

It was so easy (a little time consuming) and we were so happy with how they turned out. My mom made one as well and later on I helped my mother-in-law and two sisters-in-law make some as well. We got the letters at Hobby Lobby because that is the only place we could find the really big ones locally. We then just used hot glue and jute and bought a ready made embellishment! 

All you have to do is wrap the twine around the letter, in a few places you have to get a little creative but it is pretty self explanatory! 

We also made it so that the embellishments could be removed so you could change them for the season or holiday! This is the one my very talented mother-in-law made! I love how she styled it for Christmas!!

If you have any other questions about this project just let me know!!

She Loves Me Costume Design

I am excited to finally post about She Loves Me, that I designed the costumes for this fall. It was such a great experience and I am excited to share my designs!

She Loves Me is set in Budapest in the 1930's. The story is based off of familiar stories like Shop Around the Corner, and The Parfumerie, the same stories that the popular film You've Got Mail is based off of. 

I was lucky enough to work with an awesome production team and as a team we worked together to create a cohesive show with some fantastic design elements. My approach with the costume design was to help the audience feel the change in season. The show starts in the summer time and moves to autumn, and winter before the end of the show. I used color, texture and style to express the different seasons.

Below are my final renderings as well as some production photos from each season!

SUMMER

 

AUTUMN

WINTER

The cast was so fun and so amazing to work with and I had an awesome crew of help in the costume studio to help me get all of this done in time! We had one month from the day it was cast to our first dress rehearsal which is crazy turn around time but WE DID IT!!! I am so grateful I had the opportunity to design this show and I learned so much from the experience.

10 Freezer Meals

Next week I go back for my final year of school! WOOHOO!!! Whenever school starts my work and school schedules end up taking over my life! Brad also already has a super crazy busy schedule with the business, bishopric and his teaching schedule starting again in September. 

We are so grateful and happy to be involved in so many cool things but we definitely feel the effects of such crazy schedules mostly when it comes to our meals! We usually get home and then realize we haven't even thought about what we are going to eat! In preparation for this crazy time Brad and I have put together a monthly menu with three meals each week that we are going to try to prepare, in between we plan to use our freezer meals and leftovers!

I did a lot of research before shopping and preparing these meals and I learned a few very important things!

• Don't try to tackle 40+ freezer meals your first time. Try 5-10 meals first, when you feel like your recipes were successful, then try to take on more!

• Try to find recipes that use a lot of similar ingredients, it cuts down your budget to be able to buy in bulk and it's a little less confusing and time consuming.

• That being said, make sure you try recipes you and your family will actually want to eat, it will save you no time if no one wants to eat the finished product!

• From what I have read it works much better to just take the extra couple of minutes to make the pasta or rice fresh when you prepare the meal, (lasagna excluded) most cooked pasta just ends up mushy after it has been frozen.

• If you freeze the meals laying down first, once they are frozen you can line them up in your freezer like books on a bookshelf.

Now that you have heard my rant on freezer meals, here are the recipes I used! I doubled each of the recipes so each one made two freezer meals.

DISCLAIMER: I have used all of the recipes before but never in a freezer meal, according to my research all the ingredients should unthaw and cook just fine but I will post an update after we try a couple of them.

UPDATE: We have now officially tried all of these recipes, our favorite was the beef stroganoff, no changes need to be made to that one. We also really liked the bbq chicken but we recommend just doing the chicken and cooking veggies or potatoes on the side. The beef stew is really great as well but the peppers tend to get a little mushy after being frozen and cooked so I would recommend just leaving those out. The man pleasing chicken was definitely MAN pleasing, Brad liked it a lot more than me, just not my taste. And the orange chicken was good but just missing soothing that I couldn't put my finger on! Good luck!

Freezer Meal Recipes

BBQ Chicken

2 Cups Potatoes

2 Cups Red & Green Peppers

1 Cup Carrots

2 Cups Onion

2 T Flour

1.5 lbs Chicken

2 Cloves Garlic,

Salt, Pepper, Seasonings

Thaw, dump bag plus BBQ sauce into crock pot and cook on low 6-8 hours

Orange Chicken

2 Cups Carrots

2 Cups Bell Peppers

1 lb Cubed Chicken

3 Cloves Garlic

Salt, Pepper, Seasonings

8 oz Orange Juice Concentrate

Thaw, cook on low in crock pot for 4-6 hours, serve on rice

Man Pleasing Chicken

2 Cups Red & Green Bell Peppers

1 Cup Carrots

2 Cups Onion

2 T Flour

2 lbs Chicken Thighs

2 Cloves Garlic

Salt, Pepper, Seasonings

Thaw, add bag + 3/4 cup of Dijon Mustard, 1/4 cup Maple Syrup, and 1 T Apple Cider Vinegar into a glass dish, cover with tinfoil and cook at 450 until done. Serve w/ Rice or Pasta.

Beef Stroganoff

3 lb Chuck Roast, cubed

1 Yellow Onion

1 Green Pepper

1 T Worcestershire Sauce

1 1/2 Beef Broth

1 T Ketchup

1/3 C Flour

6-7 T Apple Juice or Water

1/2 C Sour Cream

Salt, Pepper, Garlic, Seasonings

Thaw, cook for 7-9 hours on low or 4-5 hours on high, Stir in sour cream right before serving, serve over pasta, rice or potatoes.

Beef Stew

3 lbs steak or roast, cubed

4 C Red Potatoes

2 Envelopes Beef Stew Mix

1 Envelope onion soup mix

2 8oz Cans Tomato Sauce

2 T Brown Sugar

2 C Carrots

1 C Onions

1 C Peppers

Beef Bouillon

Salt, Pepper, Seasoning

Thaw, add water cook on low 6-8 hours, season to taste.

Girls Camp!!

This is a post with not very many pictures, because most of the time I was at camp I was running around like a chicken with no head. Camp was such a great experience! I am the 2nd counselor in the YW presidency as well as the camp director for our ward, both very big but very fun callings. Camp this year was stake camp and it was held at Brighton Meadows up Parley's Canyon. The theme was Coming Unto Christ by B.U.G.S (becoming unified gospel sisters). Each ward was assigned one of the personal progress values and a bug. We were Virtue which is gold and our bug was a caterpillar. I had a hay day with our assignment!

We only got rained on one of the four days we were up there so that was a huge blessing! The girls favorite activities were canoeing, the zip line, friendship bracelets, painting rocks, shopping at the "flea market," camp songs, and human knots.

It was a blast to be up there with the girls and I felt like we really grew closer, which as their leader is the one thing I really hoped would happen!

DIY Canvas Sign

It has been a few weeks since I have been able to post anything! Summertime always gets so crazy with all the camping, swimming, running and road trips we love to take. In the past few weeks I have participated in my first Ragnar Relay Race as well as my first half marathon in Morgan Valley, both alongside my husband and both awesome experiences!

Some where in between all the madness I found the time to make a little canvas sign for one of my bookshelves. I made one in February for Valentines Day and I was long overdue for a summertime sign.

It was super easy and I did it all in about 1 hours time (would have been less but the paint had to dry). All I used was a 12 X 12 canvas, acrylic paint and sharpies.

I painted the canvas all one color then I just eyeballed my pattern but you could always use a stencil as well.

Super easy and it adds a nice touch!