Blog UPGRADE!

Friends! Hello! I have missed you. 🙂

I’ve been a busy bee jetting from Iowa to Chicago to New York and back again so I’m a bit behind on the old blog here, but I’m popping in for a second to let you know I’ve added a search function to the sidebar! If you’re looking for something in particular, just search away and see what you come up with. I can’t guarantee you’ll find what you want but a little browsing, a little window shopping if you will, never hurt anyone. 🙂

I have brownies and cookies and grilled veggie goodness coming at ya real soon. Stay tuned!

Blog UPGRADE!

Hey all!

I’m very slowly but surly upgrading my blog to make it more reader-friendly and fun. I added a new feature in the right hand column….you can now SUBSCRIBE to Milk & Honey right here from the home page! Isn’t that great? I think so too! So glad I finally figured out how to do this as I’ve had readers ask in the past. Told you…Computer Smartz. I don’t gots them. 🙂

There are two links there. You can subscribe in your reader of choice (google, yahoo, etc.) OR you can enter your email address and get all my updates right in your inbox! Awesome! So now you never have to miss a post! 🙂

Thanks again to everyone for reading! I’ve only been blogging for about a year and half and I’m so excited to see how much it’s grown in such a short time. I have a lot of fun sharing recipes and stories with all of you. So THANK YOU, THANK YOU for sticking around. There’s much more to come! But for now,  Christmas shopping is calling my name.

Happy Saturday! 🙂

Ch-Ch-Changes

This blog needs a makeover. Bad. If Stacey and Clinton from What Not to Wear were here, they’d be massacring this blog’s lack of style in the 360 degree mirror. 🙂

I’d like to change up the look, which is, of course, a massive undertaking. And considering I have ZERO computer ability (really, I’m lucky I figured out how to put a picture in my posts. Ha.) you’ll need to bear with me while I figure it out. Before I dive into all that. I need to do some reorganization, clean up and make sure I have all the information I want on my page.

First on the reorganization/clean up list is to fix the categories list. Somewhere in the last year and a couple months, I got really lazy when it came to tagging my entries. Oops. Stuff was all over the place. I had a brownie recipe tagged as just “cookies.” Um, yeah. That’s pretty inaccurate. Ha. If you clicked on a tag, it’s very unlikely you would find everything that should be there. Not cool.

I’ve come to the conclusion that less is more when it comes to tags. A huge list of every single possible ingredient you have ever cooked with is distracting. What I did was keep it simple and narrow down the categories to make them more broad. I picked out one item that best categorizes the recipe (example: Cookies) and then added one other main ingredient in the recipe (example: chocolate, fruit, peanut butter). I think this just makes everything easier for everyone. I have removed most of the more specific ingredients and made them broader (example, I tagged everything apple, banana, blueberry as simpley fruit.) It’s pretty obvious, that if I’m looking for a blueberry recipe I can click on fruit and find it there. 🙂

In all honesty, if you are looking for something specific, you are much better off navigating the Recipes tab at the top of the page. Every recipe I make is added there, with a quick clicky link to get to the post. They are arranged by category and in alphabetical order. Easy-peasy. See, the thing is, even though every recipe is tagged, you may find that clicking the tag doesn’t help you. At all. Two reasons. 1. I never title my posts with the name of the recipe. Ha. Sorry, you gotta look for that. And 2. It’s very unlikely you’ll have any clue what the recipe actually is from the first couple sentences that are shown when you click a link to a tag. 🙂 I have to tell my story first.

What can I say? I’m a rotten, mean food blogger…making you read my pointless dribble before you get to the food. I can actually hear the masses shouting “SHUT UP, WINDBAG, AND GET TO THE DAMN RECIPE ALREADY!”

I can very safely say, that with all the changes I have planned, THAT (the pointless dribble, that is) is the one thing that WILL NOT change. Take or leave it, my friends.

I hope you’ll take it. 🙂

A Little Birdy Told Me…Tweet, Tweet, Tweet!

Eric’s new favorite commercial is the Hulu.com one with Dennis Leary. He’s loves the bliggity-blog/facey-space/tweety-page part. It seriously makes him laugh for like five minutes. He usually walks into the living room finds me on the couch with my purple blankie (hee hee) and asks me if I’m on my bliggity-blog, my facey-space, or my tweety-page.

Well, up until about 48 hours ago, I only had 2/3rds of the aforementioned time wasting technologies. I decided to jump on board with Twitter! I’m still learning – as I tend to be not so savvy with such things and totally behind the times when it comes to the latest and greatest so bear with me while I learn.

When I told Eric, who refuses to even jump on board and create a Facebook account, that I joined Twitter, he rolled his eyes and promptly gave me a new nickname. Yup, you guessed it – YouTwitFace – courtesy of his comedic idol Conan O’Brien. LOL. Thanks, honey!

You can follow my tweets here on my blog in the right hand column. See what’s up in (and out of) my kitchen!

Oh, and since I have officially made it to my one year Blogiversary (awww…happy anniversary, blog!) and I am going to start adding a “one year ago” link to my posts to relive some of my faves from the last year, so be looking for that too!

On that note – One Year Ago: Pineapple Strawberry Bars

Enjoy and Happy Tweeting! 🙂

I’m Ready for my Close Up

I’ve been wanting to make myself a little DIY light box for a while but I’ve been putting it off. Two reasons – 1. I am lazy. 2. I wanted Eric to do it for me because he is a mechanical engineer and thus very skilled at all sorts of building and fixing things and whatnot. He is a precise and analytical artist, measuring twice and cutting once. I’m more of an….abstract type artist. That usually leads to mistakes (whoops…wasn’t supposed to cut there…) and cursing ($@#*!) on projects such as this. Heh…

Eric has been way, way, way too busy lately to be worrying about constructing me a light box. He’s this.close to FINALLY being done with his MBA…two years in the making. I’m so very proud of him. Just one last push here. He hasn’t had much time for anything else but school and work as of late, so I wasn’t about to get on his case about something to improve my silly little blog. Plus, even if he did have a couple hours free to do something he enjoyed, I don’t think this project would be really high on his priority list when there are motorcycles to rebuild and lawn mowers to tinker with and cars that need oil changes. If I wanted a light box, I was going to have to tackle it myself.

One of the things that had me (and Eric) slightly concerned was having to store a big clunky box somewhere. We are very anti-clutter. We don’t like things sitting around. We’ve FINALLY cleared a whole bunch of crap out of our extra bedrooms and the basement that’s been sitting in there since we moved in nearly 4 years ago. Ahhhh…so liberating. We are about three months into our anti-crap campaign, and so far it’s working out great!! I’m not about to start RE-collecting crap and throwing it in there….but I really really REALLY wanted a light box…. A real blogger’s dilemma if ever there was one….hmmmmm….

Then….along came the solution to all my problems! Well, maybe not ALL my problems. I’m still not sure what to do about that pesky itching and burning (LOL. OMG…so totally kidding. Seriously, just joking around!!) Anyway, I spotted the plans for a COLLAPSIBLE light box that involved cutting notches into form core and then fitting them together to make the box. I spotted it over at Things Alauna Makes who saw it at Drawings in Motion! Collapsible?? Um, that’s pretty much EXACTLY what I was looking for! Big thanks to both of these awesome bloggers for the easy to follow instructions and tips.

I purchased the foam core (4 pieces total) from Hobby Lobby and the clampy lights and 60 watt daylight lightbulbs from Menards. It doesn’t cost much at all…20 or 25 bucks  of so. Not too shabby. I really got into this project tonight….think this kid:

so I didn’t take and pics of my steps. I forgot. Please check out the blogs linked above for step by step instructions and pictures. It’s far from perfect….there are for sure some pretty gnarly looking exacto knife slips here and there, but I think it will work. I had the most fun hunting around the house trying to find things to put in there to try it out. See, there cupoards are bare as I haven’t been to the store yet this weekend, so I didn’t really have anything fresh and colorful to put in there. I had to improvise. Here are some (somewhat improved) photos using my new setup. I’m still working on the best placement of the lights. It will take a bit of practice. Please note that I still used a photo editing software to clean them up a bit more. I use Google Picasa. It’s pretty basic, but it’s a free download and it’s easy to use. I recommend it! 🙂

Ooooo….purrrrrty. 🙂

The only thing I have in the house  that even remotely resembles fresh procduce…LEMONS! It’s 11:00 p.m. and it appears I have failed miserably at eating the rainbow today. Well, wait…that’s not entirely true…I’ve eaten things pasta, cheese and chocolate-colored. That counts, right?  Mmmm…

Speaking of pasta:

Aw, come on! Who spilled the pasta? Sheesh!

The persice and analytical artist at work: Eric made this rose for me out of sheet metal. It was the first flower he ever gave me…and it will last forever. Just like us! ::insert collective awwwwww here:: Seriously though…pretty neat, eh? I love my copper rose…it is one of my most cherished possesions. Le sigh…he’s so good…

And finally….pop the top on the Champagne of Beers to celebrate all this hard work. I can’t believe we actually have High Life TALLBOYS in our fridge. Heh. I’m totally collecting the cans and making windchimes out of them….it’s the only appropriate thing to do with empty cans of cheap beer. LOL. When I met Eric (at dollar High Life/Lite bottle night at Brother’s, ironically enough) he used to LIVE the High Life….his beer of choice. Not so much anymore. Now people like to bring it to him as a joke. We can’t get rid of it!

High Life anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Blog UPGRADE!

I’m in the process of making some changes to my blog to make it more user-friendly and organized. Over the next couple weeks, I’ll be posting Blog UPGRADE posts to announce my changes. I have gotten a bit lazy on keeping this organized so I’m hoping these changes will help.

As my first upgrade, I added a Recipes tab at the top of the page. As I add new recipes to my blog, I will add them to the master list. This is an easy way to check out everything that’s in the blog by category. I just think it may be a bit easier to really see everything that’s available instead of clicking around a whole bunch of tags and categories.

Speaking of tags and categories, mine are a pile of crap, useless and horribly disorganized – right now. That will be my next change…updating and organzing the category bar to the right. Stay tuned! 🙂