Living Room 2.0

Last week we mentioned that we were going to redo our living room, so we wanted to share an update with you! Once again the house looks like a small war was fought in it with small paths dug through the knee deep wreckage. Holes line the walls and a fine layer of rubble covers the floor. What a mess. However, there IS progress! Lets look at what we started with! Living room 0.5:

This is the living room back in early 2009 after we've taken down the wall paper and painted

Swiss Chard Pizza

Lets face it, Swiss Chard is pretty. Purples and yellows mixing with and accenting the green leaf helps to add a bit of color to our garden. Surprisingly it also adds quite a bit of flavor to one of our more unique pizzas too. Eric was a little hesitant at first, as he is more of a pizza purist (he believes that pepperoni is really the only topping a good pizza needs). How did he actually react? 3 slices later he just couldn't eat any more, so he had another for good measure. With that said, we're finally gearing up for house 2.0: making our house a full blown grown up person's house. Kind of a scary thought, that whole growing up thing but something thats got to happen at some point. It will actually be fun to give the whole house an overhaul, which should be finished just in time for our desire to change something else all over again.

Printable Recipe

Kale Pesto

Kale has flown well under the radar for quite some time now, not really making waves or getting much face time in the American consciousness. Not until home gardening and the desire for local or home grown food started to take off the last couple of years. Rooftop gardeners and backyard horticulturists quickly came to discover Kale as one of the most nutritional, easy to grow super-foods on earth. Its harder to grow weeds than to grow Kale, which actually thrives when it gets a touch of frost. A terrific winter food, Kale brings so many nutrients that in WWII Kale was pushed hard as a way to make up for nutrients otherwise lost to rationing. In fact, during this time the British had a warship named the HMS Kale, named after none other than the River Kale in Scotland that may or may not have anything to do with the plant. This is Eric trying to come up with some completely trivial, utterly useless fact and falling flat on his face but now you know something new about a boat that got sunk and has nothing to do with the most amazing pesto we've ever made. Thats right, the most amazing. Usually, pesto is pesto is pesto. Sometimes it comes out extra special, sometimes it doesn't come out quite right but most of the time its tasty and expected. This one though, not only stood out, but brought us back for thirds. Ok fourths. Okay, we licked our bowls THEN licked the pots. Don't tell anyone though ok? 

Printable Recipe

Home and Garden: Garden Growing

So when Eric sat down to over-engineer the garden beds he was focused on two things: the maximum garden space possible while being able to reach everything and building boxes that would withstand the apocalypse. One hammered thumb and two years later the boxes are done, filled with dirt and fenced in. Eric's job was done and Charisse took over. After a great deal of reading and research she decided to go with the square foot method of gardening, which is a pretty darn cool way to grow a ton of stuff. She dug around the internet and found a great online resource to help plan your garden out. It's free and printable and a pretty awesome tool for the planing stage and adaptable to your box dimensions (in one foot increments), an important tool when you under-estimate the size of your garden beds. After the planting and watering and yelling at the bugs to get out (doesn't work) we're ready for the great reveal! As you can see from the pictures, the garden is four boxes that are eight feet by four feet by one foot high. We built a picket fence to keep the dog out (and had to add some chain link fencing in other areas where the dog found her way in), one day this will be painted white. We also have a morning glory growing over the arbor, which should be very pretty when it takes over and starts blooming. Hit the jump for more pictures, and the list of what we have growing!