marvelous monday: the horned melon

Posted on April 16, 2012 by dallaswoodburn

Happy Monday!

I stopped at the grocery store on the way home from school to pick up some fruit & veggies for the week. In the display of tropical and exotic fruits, I came across a yellow spiky fruit I had never seen before.

Here’s what it looks like from the outside:

When I got home, I jumped on Google and soon discovered that this strange spiky fruit is called the horned melon, also known as the kiwano melon. It is native to Africa, but is also now grown in California, Chile, Australia, and New Zealand, too. It is apparently rich in Vitamin C and fiber. The skin is edible, but most people eat it by cutting it open and slurping up the pulpy insides. So that’s what I did:

Surprisingly, the horned melon reminded me most of a cucumber in its taste. The little seeds inside are safe to eat but are pretty much tasteless. The jelly texture is interesting. It’s a messy fruit, though — it’s hard not to get some on your face and clothes, so be sure you have some napkins on hand if you try the horned melon!

I think it’s so fun to try new foods — it makes me more aware of what a big, wide world we live in. Fruits that are natural and familiar to us are exciting and exotic to people living in other places. If I lived in Africa, the horned melon might be my breakfast every day! What are some of your favorite exotic foods?

Have a great week!
Dallas ❤

blueberry / blackberry / raspberry muffins

Posted on April 13, 2012 by dallaswoodburn

Have you ever bought some delicious-looking berries at the grocery store … only to get home, bite into them and discover they’re sour or mushy or tasteless? {sad face} It’s always so disappointing.

I bought some blackberries this week and they were extremely tart. I hate to waste food, so didn’t like the option of throwing them out. I figured I would just suffer through the sourness. But then I had an idea: baking fruit is a great way to bring out its sweetness!

So I made these delicious blackberry muffins. {yum}

I think this recipe would work great for all kinds of berry varieties — blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, or a mixture. Hope you enjoy! ❤

Very Berry Muffins

-1/3 cup butter or margarine
-2 eggs
-1/2 cup sugar
-1/2 cup milk
-1 & 1/2 cups flour
-1/2 tsp. baking soda
-1 tsp baking powder
-1/2 tsp. salt
-1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
-1/2 tsp. cinnamon
-berries of your choice variety & amount {I used a few handfuls of blackberries}

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Soften butter {I microwaved mine for 20 seconds} and cream butter through sugar. Add eggs and beat well.

3. In a separate bowl, sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.

4. Add about half of the flour mixture to the butter mixture. Beat well. Then add the milk and beat well, and finally stir in the rest of the flour mixture.

5. Mix in vanilla extract and cinnamon.

6. Rinse the berries and add them to the batter. I like to mix them in enough that they are beginning to come apart a little.

6. Spoon the mixture into a greased muffin tin.

7. Bake for about 20 minutes, until they are beautifully golden and a fork inserted in the middle comes out clean.

Hooray! The blackberries have been magically sweetened!

Perfect on-the-go breakfast, afternoon coffee-break snack, or homemade-with-love surprise for someone special.

Hope you have a delicious and lovely day! Happy Friday!

Dallas ❤

necklace organization

Posted on April 11, 2012 by dallaswoodburn

Hi everyone, and welcome to the new blog readers who are joining us — thanks for taking the time to stop by!

I have a quick and easy project to share today that tackles a problem I’ve been trying to find a good solution to for quite a while, ever since I outgrew my little-girl jewelry box back in middle school: how to organize my many necklaces.

Necklaces are my jewelry of choice. I don’t have my ears pierced, and I have a couple rubber bracelets that I wear every day (a Livestrong support bracelet and a bracelet for my brother Greg’s nonprofit organization Give Running) so I don’t tend to wear many new bracelets. Necklaces are a way for me to change up my outfit and style, and each necklace I have is a special reminder of a place I’ve traveled or a person I love who gave it to me.

I tried jewelry boxes, but the chains of my necklaces got hopelessly tangled. I tried a small jewelry tree, but some of my necklaces are too long and got clumped up at the bottom.

Then I got an idea: why not hang them on the wall?

The best part of all? It could not be easier, faster, or cheaper!

All you need is one package of these adorable plastic hooks — I got mine at Target for less than $4. I love these because they come in a variety of sizes and are removable, so they won’t damage your walls if you ever want to take them down.

My first step was to organize my necklaces by length — I planned for one longer chain and two shorter ones. Next, I attached the hooks to the wall using the special adhesive that was included. After waiting fifteen minutes, I just hung the necklaces on the hooks, and viola: my new-and-improved “jewelry box” that doubles as pretty wall decoration in my bedroom!

Organization task of the day: complete. I’m looking forward to sharing a great recipe with you in these next few days — stay tuned!

Hope your week is going wonderfully!

More soon,
Dallas ❤
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Cost: $4.00
Time: 5 minutes

marvelous monday

Posted on April 9, 2012 by dallaswoodburn

Who likes Mondays? Nobody. Poor Monday, always getting blamed for grumpy moods and work boredom. Poor Monday is the ultimate scapegoat for everything {blah} in our lives.

I am not saying I look forward to Mondays. Like everyone, I sometimes get the where-did-the-weekend-disappear-to? Sunday-evening blues. But the other day I realized something: if I spend every week dreading Monday and slugging through Monday just trying to get through the day, that means I’ll be spending 1/7th of my life in a state of yucky, grumpy, get-me-out-of-here dread. And that’s just not how I want to spend my time.

So I was thinking back to when I was in elementary school, and we had adjectives associated with all the days of the week, cute alliterative names like: Super Sunday, Stupendous Saturday, Fantastic Friday, Thrilling Thursday, Wonderful Wednesday, Terrific Tuesday, Marvelous Monday.

How does that sound? Marvelous Monday.

I kinda like it.

The thing is, back in elementary school, Mondays *were* marvelous. I don’t remember dreading Mondays then. Weekends were great, of course, but school was fun, too. I think a large part of it was that even school had a sense of excitement and discovery about it. Every day, even Mondays, were filled with the possibility of surprises. Magic was around every corner. Back then, even the most everyday incidents would be cause for celebration: ice cream for someone’s birthday, a trip to a new restaurant, a note from your best friend passed secretively during class, a new game on the playground, a gopher discovered behind the kickball backstop…

I think it’s about time to bring some of that everyday magic back. Especially to poor Monday.

From now on, instead of moaning about Monday, I am going to try to make each Monday particularly marvelous. Maybe I’ll try something new, do a random act of kindness or gratitude, act spontaneously, bring out my inner 12-year-old. Any and all marvelous things will be chronicled here, of course!

Tonight is the Literary Awards at my university, and Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Hours, is the keynote speaker. I won an award for a short story I wrote, so I got a free ticket to hear Cunningham speak — and to a banquet beforehand. Free three-course meal? Sounds pretty marvelous to me!

Happy Monday, everyone~
Dallas ❤

greeting cards & stationary

Posted on April 8, 2012 by dallaswoodburn

Happy Easter, everyone! I woke up this morning feeling much better {thank you antibiotics!} but am still planning to have a low-key day in. Since I’m still getting over my cold/bronchitis, I picked a relaxing and easy organizational task to do today. I did it all while lounging in my jammies on my couch, watching the latest episode of The Voice on Hulu {go Jordis! you rock!}

I already confessed my love for tea. I also have an unabashed love of greeting cards and pretty stationary. My good friends know to keep me away from Hallmark and Papyrus stores — I’m on self-imposed probation. Even though I have a ton of stationary already, I can never walk out of one of those stores empty-handed. There are just so many beautiful and cute and lovely cards! I am the type of person who has a birthday card picked out for someone two years in advance, saving it and saving it because it is just so perfect for them and what they mean to me.

If anything, I’ve gotten even *more* into stationary the past couple years, since I moved to Indiana from California. Being far away from many of my friends and family has fueled my love of sending old-fashioned S.W.A.K. letters and cards through the mail. Birthdays, anniversaries, minor holidays, missing you, thinking of you, just saying hi — any and all occasions are opportunities to pop a little note in the mail to let my loved ones know how much I love them.

The problem: I had so many various cards for various occasions that it was difficult to remember what I had — and where I’d put it. Cards accumulated in the drawers of my desk, wedged on my bookshelves, stacked on the end table. I knew I needed a system to get my stationary organized {and keep it that way!}

So, last week as I was browsing the dollar section at Target, I came across this cute file folder.

Perfect! I grabbed it and brought it home, where it’s spent the past week sitting on my kitchen table, waiting for me to do something with it.

Today was that day. My first step was getting all my cards & stationary together in one pile, and then sorting them into different categories. Next, I used these categories to write out labels for each section of the file folder.

My final categories are:

-Birthday/Anniversary
-Friends/Thinking of you
-Get Well/Sympathy
-Thank you
-Gramps {I send a lot of cards to my grandpa, who lives alone and loves getting mail, so I made a special section just for him!}

Then all I had to do was place each card into its designated slot! And, viola — an organized, compact stationary folder!

Now I know exactly what I have, what cards I need, and where to find everything. Which means I can concentrate my energies on tracking down every last one of the amazing greeting cards designed by Taylor Swift {I love her stationary almost as much as I love her music!} Like isn’t this one adorable?

Have a beautiful & blessed day,
Dallas ❤
———————————————
Cost: $1.00
Time: 15 minutes

quotes to inspire you

Posted on April 7, 2012 by dallaswoodburn

I’m feeling under the weather today (went to the doctor and got antibiotics for bronchitis so hopefully I’ll be up and at ’em again soon!) but I wanted to share this post with you from I’m an Organizing Junkie that I found SUPER inspiring! Laura held a 29-Day Organizational Challenge in the month of February (I was unfortunately a little late jumping on the bandwagon, but better late than never!) and in this post she compiled advice from dozens of participants on what helped them get organized and not give up.

One of my favorites is this nugget from @12one7: “One day at a time, one task at a time. Stay focused on the task at hand and don’t worry about what’s next on the list until it comes up. You can handle clearing off one shelf today. It’s easy and just one shelf. You can handle anything if you just break it down into smaller tasks and take it a day at a time. And don’t stress about other areas of the house until you’ve completely finished the one you’re working on!”

I couldn’t agree more! You can read the entire advice-filled post here.

Now I’m gonna curl up on the couch, watch some Degrassi: The Next Generation, and drink boatloads of tea!

Till next time,
Dallas ❤

tilapia w/pineapple salsa {yum!}

Posted on April 5, 2012 by dallaswoodburn

I really enjoy cooking, and I’m always looking for healthy, quick and easy recipes to make when I get home from a tiring day of teaching. I made this tonight for the first time and it is definitely a keeper! The sweetness of the pineapple complemented the fish so nicely. This recipe was perfect for these warm summer days we’ve been having in Indiana lately!

Best of all: it couldn’t have been easier! All I had to do was pop the fish in the oven for fifteen minutes, and while it was baking I chopped up some pineapple, tomatoes, and cilantro for the salsa.

Here’s the recipe:

1 cup diced fresh pineapple

1/3 cup diced Roma tomatoes

2 tbsp. chopped fresh cilantro

1 tbsp. fresh lime juice

1 lb tilapia fillets

1 tbsp. olive oil

Chili powder & garlic powder

1. Drizzle some olive oil into a glass baking pan to thinly coat the bottom. Place the tilapia fillets in the pan. Brush fillets with olive oil, and sprinkle with chili powder and garlic powder to taste. Bake in a 350 degree oven for 15 minutes or so. When the tilapia is done, it should flake easily with a fork.

2. For pineapple salsa: in a medium bowl, combine pineapple, tomatoes, cilantro and lime juice, and mix well. Refrigerate until ready to serve.

3. When fish is done, top with pineapple salsa and remaining lime juice, if desired. Viola! An easy, healthy, delicious dinner!

—————————————-

Cost: $10.00

Time: 20 minutes

my love for tea

Posted on April 3, 2012 by dallaswoodburn

I am a major tea addict.

Major.

See what I mean? I must have twenty boxes of tea cluttering up an entire shelf in my kitchen cupboard. Black tea, green tea, herbal tea. Half-empty boxes, plastic bags, canisters. I’d practically start an avalanche of boxes anytime I opened my cupboard to brew myself a cup. Tea is something that makes me feel happy and centered, but it was beginning to be stressful — the opposite of what I want!

So, today I went to Target and bought two small stackable containers with snap-on lids. They were less than $3 each. I am using one for black tea, and the other for green & herbal tea. I emptied out my various half-empty boxes and placed the individual tea bags into two neat rows in each container.

Now not only do I have a LOT more room in my cupboard, I also have a better idea of what kind of teas I have! Never again will I reach into a box for my favorite ginger green tea and find nothing but emptiness! YAY!