Three For Thursday

Happy Thursday! Here today with three cards to share and a fabulous recipe for you to try.

First up is my card for the CASology cue card FRIEND. I made this for a friend that I don't see very often but think of often. 

I heat embossed the FRIENDS from Wet Paint in black and added small scattered hearts in some of my favorite bright colors. I left lots of white space so the hearts were not overwhelming. The white card panel is mounted on black cardstock to give nice contrast to the colorful hearts. 

I'm playing along with the Tag You're It! challenge for the first time. Figure if I play along with every challenge I'll build a good stash of gift tags.

I was inspired by the gold in Heather's beautiful tag and the scribbled circles under her cluster of flowers.  My tag features a favorite color combination - gold and teal (Hawaiian Shores & Aqua Mist). I used some gold Washi tag for the bottom of the tag and stamped gold circle scribbles to anchor my balloon. I scattered the stars on the tag to go along with the stars in the balloon. Finished it off with some Hawaiian Shores ribbon. 

I also used the tag reinforcer circle die at the top - never used it before but just realized the die came with one of my tag dies. It was beginning to annoy me how the hole at the top would always rip when I used ribbon. 

My last card to share uses this week's Make It Monday - Three Panel Card challenge. Thanks Ashley for the easy directions and measurements. Super easy! Got a head start on my end of year teacher thank you cards. 

I stayed away with traditional 'school' colors, the primary colors but opted for bright fun colors like teal and orange. I used one of the edgers die for the flap and stamped a bunch of different THANKS from the Thanks All Ways set. The bottom flap has the dotted lines from Ombre Builders (my FAVE stamp from that set). Love how the orange twine finishes it off. 

For the inside I used the sentiment from Wonderful Words:Teacher leaving lots of room for my daughter and I to write a personal note in there. 

I created a pocket cut out of Summer Sunrise on the bottom panel to hold the gift card and stamped some flip flops in Summer Sunrise for a tone-on-tone look and the sentiment (both from Flipping Out) in Hawaiian Shores to stand out. Can you tell that Hawaiian Shores is one of my favorite colors?? 

Also going to start sharing some recipes here on my blog. One of my New Year resolutions is to cook more and to cook outside the box. I'm going to be trying a lot of new recipes this year since I've got a gazillion food related pins on Pinterest and a hundred ripped out recipes from magazines that I'm determined to tackle this year. I'm a foodie - love to eat, love exotic ingredients, and watch all sorts of cooking shows - but finding it tough to balance cooking for practicality (we all gotta eat right?!) and cooking for fun. So I'll be sharing my successes here - both the quick & easy meals as well as the fancier complicated ones that I may try. 

Last night's dinner was a complete success. I made Slow-Cooked Salmon, Chickpeas, and Greens from Bon Appetit magazine. It was so delicious and even the kids loved it. Well, 2 out of 3 because the 3rd hates salmon so there's no preparation could make her love it.  The chickpeas were creamy and the fried capers....yum. Kinda like popcorn when you can't stop eating them. The slow roasted part threw me a little as I am used to cooking either fast or at a high temp and I was doubtful that 30 min at 250 degrees would result in anything good. But wow, the salmon was moist and perfectly cooked. The recipe is a little complicated as there are four distinct components to be cooked/assembled before the whole thing is put in the oven but definitely was worth the effort. 

I used kale instead of mustard greens and I doubled the recipe because we are big eaters and also love leftovers for lunch the next day. 

Thanks for hanging till the end of this extra long blog post. I appreciate you stopping by and hope you are having a great week.