• Dinner,  Paleo

    From Scratch Marinara Sauce

    Tomatoes are being harvested faster than I can use them up. My refrigerator was stocked with my homemade salsa and I needed another way to make use of the abundance of tomatoes coming my way, so I went looking for an easy marinara  sauce. While I pride myself on cooking from scratch, the one thing I never really tried to make from scratch was pasta sauce. The stuff you buy at the store tastes fine enough and if you read your labels, you can find pre-made organic sauce without sugar or or other unwanted ingredients. It worked for me, but last year I tried making my first ever attempt at…

  • Dinner

    Zucchini Noodle Lasagna

    It’s the middle of summer and if you’ve planted Zucchini in your garden, I’m sure you have all the zucchini you can harvest. You have more than enough. You are giving it away as fast as you can pick it. You can’t possibly manage to whip up another loaf of zucchini bread and for sure the others in your household can no longer eat one more bite of it…so what do you do with all of your excess? You make this grain free/guilt free version of an old favorite!  I’ll admit that traditional lasagna is amazing, but for someone like myself, the pasta/cheese combo can leave you incredibly bloated. One summer…

  • Remodeled Kitchen
    Before and After,  Home Tour,  Kitchen,  Remodel

    Kitchen Remodel Before and After

    Our kitchen remodel was not the typical situation where a construction team was hired and the job was completed in a few months. We took our sweet time, about 18 months to be exact. The majority of the time was spent researching ideas and troubleshooting ways to make our ideas come to fruition. We hit several road blocks along the way, but we were very determined to try every avenue needed to make it work. Our adventure began when we discovered our dishwasher was broken sometime in March of 2012. After pulling the dishwasher out, we learned it had been leaking behind the cabinets and under the floor, clear into…

  • design details from our kitchen make over
    Before and After,  DIY Tutorials,  Kitchen,  Money Saving Tips,  Remodel

    Adding Decorative Details Without Breaking the Bank

    For years (maybe even decades) I have drooled over kitchen magazines. The designs that really made my heart sing were were the ones that featured lots and lots of finishing details. I love classical Roman architecture, so anything with pillars, corbels, detailed molding and carved trims make me very happy. I’m the opposite of a minimalist. I like details and lots of them…but guess what? Details are really expensive, especially in the kitchen. For instance, the corbels offered by the company that made our cabinets were going to cost $300…each. Well, you can’t have just one corbel holding up a counter, so we were looking at $600 just for one…